Discovering Opportunities by Turning Points

GATEWAY STUDY OF

LEADERSHIP

TURNING

POINTS

SCHOOL OF

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Discovering Opportunities

Turning Points Series Discover nuggets of unconventional wisdom through the excerpts of student interviews with Rice University faculty. Copyright 2013 Rice University. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the School of Social Sciences at Rice University. Requests for permission should be directed to ipek@rice.edu.

Other books in the 2012-2013 series II Natural Sciences: Choosing Academia Cultivating Mentors Developing Skills Embracing Leadership

Books in the 2011-2012 series I Social Sciences: Choosing Academia Finding Inspiration Fostering Curiosity Sparking Enthusiasm Overcoming Obstacles

Rice University School of Social Sciences

Gateway Study of Leadership TURNING POINTS

{series II | 2012 - 2013} Natural Sciences

Discovering Opportunities

Gateway School of Social Sciences Rice University 6100 Main Street Houston, Texas 77005-1827 U.S.A.

Turning Points Series PRODUCERS

Ipek Martinez, Alex Wyatt, Vinita Israni REVIEWERS AND EDITORS

Bo Kim, Leslie Nguyen, Nathan Joo, Hira Baig, Nitin Agrawal CONTRIBUTORS

The Turning Points, Series II is made possible from excerpts of faculty interviews conducted by 2012-2013 Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL) fellows, GSL codirectors and other Gateway students. 2012-2013 GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP FELLOWS Daniel Cohen (co-director), Amol Utrankar (co-director), Nitin Agrawal, Hira Baig, Cynthia Bau, Sang Hee (Steven) Cho, Colleen Fugate, Rujia Jiang, Nathan Joo, Bo Kim, Haley McCann, Yoonjin Min, Trent Navran, Leslie Nguyen, Arik Patino, Rohan Shah, Andrew Ta, Sallyann Zhou.

A NOTE FROM THE GATEWAY DIRECTOR

The 2012-2013 Turning Points series shares excerpts from student interviews with the School of Natural Sciences faculty to bring a slice of life experiences to view for the Rice University community and beyond. In the fall of 2011, the School of Social Sciences Gateway program initiated Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL), which brought undergraduate fellows together to organize and lead interviews with the Rice School of Social Sciences faculty to discover career journeys and inspiration behind research endeavors, plus additional focus on their thoughts regarding role of academia in society. These candid conversations revealed many thought provoking life experiences and interesting stories and some had an essence of a â&#x20AC;&#x153;turning pointâ&#x20AC;? regarding the decisions involved in attending college, selecting majors, pursuing advanced degrees, encountering mentors, finding inspiration for research topics, and developing a refreshing new approach to handle

criticism in order to build knowledge and propel ahead. A collection of those excerpts formed the Series I of the Turning Points booklets. In 2012-2013 academic year, the GSL fellows organized and conducted interviews with the Rice School of Natural Sciences faculty exploring their initial interest in science, career decisions and additional focus on leadership in academia. The participating faculty members shared experiences and thoughts on role of collaborative nature of research in sciences, working with mentors, developing a variety of skills along the way, discovering of opportunities and ultimately embracing leadership roles when necessary. We gathered few excerpts from these conversations to share as the GSL Turning Points Series II, in five booklets titled: Choosing Academia, Cultivating Mentors, Developing Skills, Discovering Opportunities, Embracing Leadership. Ipek Martinez

CONTENTS

Cindy Farach-Carson, Ph.D. Don’t Be Afraid

2. Ken Whitmire, Ph.D.. 3 Fostering Curiosity by Asking Questions 3.

Stephen Bradshaw, Ph.D. A Fascinating Field

Angel Martí, Ph.D. The Importance of Personal Relationships

Matthew Baring, Ph.D. Spinoff Effect

Brendan Hassett, Ph.D. Intellectual Curiosity

K. Beth Beason-Abmayr, Ph.D. Uncertainty is Okay

8. 9. 10.

Han Pu, Ph.D. Practical Applications

Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. The Value of Working Hard

Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. An Environment of Collaboration

11.

David Caprette, Ph.D. Confidence and Competence

12.

Alma Novotny, Ph.D. Two Woman Quota

13.

Janet Braam, Ph.D. Life: An Incredible Phenomenon

14.

Scott Solomon, Ph.D. What Do You Think About in the Shower?

15.

Stephen Bradshaw, Ph.D. Tackling Problems

16.

Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. Making the Right Decision

17.

Matthew Baring, Ph.D. Conferences: Community Exchange

18.

Thomas Killian, Ph.D. A Communal Activity

19.

Angel MartĂ, Ph.D. An Unsolved Problem

20.

Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Failed Experiments and Unexpected Results

21.

Stephen Bradshaw, Ph.D. Validation from Enthusiasm

About the Contributors Acknowledgements

53 59

TURNING POINTS ONE

Don’t Be Afraid Cindy Farach-Carson, Ph.D. Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

I went to a meeting of the endocrine society early in my career and literally my poster was next to a famous researcher who was in a similar area but a very senior scientist. He was there manning the poster and he and I started chatting and I think we both changed each other’s research directions for decades, just by the collaboration that started from there. I would have never thought about doing the kinds of things that he does, he studied intestines and I studied bones, but we decided to cross-fertilize and it turned into a really interesting thing. If somebody opens the door for you, walk through it. That sounds like a trite thing, but it’s true. For example, in that circumstance, don’t just sit in awe of this person and not follow-up. I think the reality is that it wasn’t just that we were next to 1

each other and had a conversation. It’s that after the meeting we followed up. And so follow-up on those opportunities when they arise and don’t feel too embarrassed or shy. At that time, I was a lowly assistant professor and he was a very famous person in the field, but don’t be afraid to follow-up. Because, you know now I’m in his shoes, now I’m sort of like him, and I love it when young people come up and talk to me and follow-up. So don’t be afraid.

TURNING POINTS TWO

Fostering Curiosity by Asking Questions Ken Whitmire, Ph.D. Professor, Chemistry, Rice University

“How do you get people to be curious about something?” In one sense, it’s not possible to generate curiosity unless somebody wants to be curious. You can’t force somebody to think about something that they don’t want to think about. But, I think one strategy is simply to continually to ask people questions. So in the classes I teach, I ask people what they think about a topic. It’s not just, “Here’s this equation—can you plug in numbers and get an answer? Can you do a calculation? Can you get numbers and data?” But actually, what does this mean? What are the implications for your life? Certainly when we try to design the laboratory courses that go along with the lecture courses, we try to think of things that would be appealing 3

for students, that would get them intrigued, and that would say that this is what modern chemistry is like. It’s not an easy thing necessarily. If people are taking classes because they’re required to, they may not be as interested. At the same time, I think when you find people who are, say in my discipline, going to be chemistry majors, a lot of times they’re chemistry majors because they got hooked on something by seeing a chemistry demonstration or doing something really neat in the laboratory. I think hands-on experience is important for getting people excited about something. The problem is just the limitations that you have. In one sense, it would be nice to go back to the old, thousand-yearago university model where a professor was there because they had knowledge and students applied to be a student of this person because they knew a lot of material. What happened was you worked with somebody and there wasn’t the sense of formal coursework. It was more organic. And you think, what would be an ideal situation? Could you do that today? Could I just take an undergraduate and have them work in my lab for four years and at the end of it, have them have enough training that they can actually go out and be a functioning chemist in society?

TURNING POINTS THREE

A Fascinating Field Stephen Bradshaw, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

I do research in a fascinating field, I do the physics of the sun, and in particular, the sunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s outer atmosphere, which is a region of gas that has temperatures in the millions of degrees and is a really fascinating plasma physics environment. Plasmas are really really hot gases. So, for me the motivation is easy, this field fascinates me, and I want to learn more about it. And I have great colleagues. We talk to each other a lot about the sun and bounce ideas off of each other. Having people that you enjoy working with, you want to work with, and make progress with is a big part of sustaining that interest. If it was a field of science where everyone hated each other or it was continually combative, it would be just draining and wearing and people would just not want to be involved, whereas, because the people 5

working in my field are largely a really nice bunch of people who I like hanging out with socially as well as working with, it makes working less of a job and just fun and I enjoy the experience.

TURNING POINTS FOUR

The Importance of Relationships Angel Martí, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Chemistry, Rice University

Personal relationships are very, very important. It doesn’t matter where you go or what you do, part of your success is defined by how good you are, and part of your success is defined by the people that you know, the people that are willing to help you. You can be talented and smart, but if people don’t know about that talent, if people don’t know what things you can do, then this is not going to help your cause. You need support, you need to know people—I always tell my students in my Inorganic Chemistry class: go to your professors, talk to your professors, go to their office hours. Try to ask them things, even if you know them, in order to meet and get to know your professors. Because at some point, you will be asking them to write you a recommendation letter, and what do you want that letter to say? This 7

student took my class, had this grade in my class, and I don’t know too much about him because he never came to my office. What you want is to leave a good impression, and for the professors that will be writing your letters, get to know them, participate in class, do your homework. It’s logical, it makes sense, but people don’t do it. And it’s the same thing when you are a postdoc or when you’re a professor. For more than you think that you are an isolated individual, it doesn’t matter how good your proposals are, it doesn’t matter how good your papers are, if your peers know you, you are likely to do better—I have heard this name before, or I have heard this guy giving this talk at this place, or I have heard from my colleagues in this area. Then, when they read your papers, they read them differently, probably with a more open mind. If they have never heard of you, is likely they start reading it, and they ask themselves, well, this is nice, but who is this guy? I suppose that this is why is it harder to get funding and your papers published at the very beginning. So, doing great science, is in part how good you are, how good is the science that you do, and part how well people know you and the things you do. 8

TURNING POINTS FIVE

Spinoff Effect Matthew Baring, Ph.D. Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

A part of research that benefits one is an appreciation of the world, and the universe around us. That appreciation provides the ability to sort of stand back and say “the bottom line isn’t everything”. If you’re tied to the bottom line then you make your decisions and the way you appraise issues and learning accordingly; how you approach a particular problem becomes contingent upon “the bottom line”. We don’t do that in research. We’re looking at greater truths, and know they’re out there. Sometimes you find that you study something and then there’ll be a spinoff effect. This may yield a huge benefit to society. Obviously, from the physics perspective, the laser is a classic example of that, but that’s not the only one. We’ve had them periodically throughout science since the age of enlightenment.

TURNING POINTS SIX

Intellectual Curiosity Brendan Hassett, Ph.D. Professor, Mathematics, Rice University

I enjoyed reading about mathematics and physics from a pretty early stage. Even in middle school I was reading popular books about math and physics and learning about relativity, the history of mathematics, etc. This was on my radar for a long time. Around my junior or senior year I took it more seriously. That was the first time where I actually started reading technical mathematics and physics outside of class: like Feynman’s lectures on physics and books on calculus of variations. I started learning things autonomously at that stage. I did a few math contests in high school and middle school. I didn’t really do that well in them and so that wasn’t my path to academic mathematics. Learning things that interested me was how I got involved. How do people select what field they are going to 11

go into? They feel that these questions are important and exciting and that’s the main selection filter - you have to think that spending eight hours a day trying to solve a math problem is a good use of your time. Most people don’t feel that way and they don’t become pure mathematicians. Many people who are very mathematically talented may use mathematics, but they’re not trying to produce new mathematical work. A relatively small number feel motivated by intrinsic beauty and difficulty of problems in pure mathematics. The way to maintain this over time is to be interacting with the community of people who feel that these things are important. Being isolated from other people who work on similar problems makes it difficult to maintain one’s enthusiasm.

TURNING POINTS SEVEN

Uncertainty is Okay K. Beth Beason-Abmayr, Ph.D. Lecturer, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

One thing I tell my students is it is OK not to know exactly what you want to do when you graduate. And that is important because I don’t remember anyone telling me that, and I was quite stressed because I really had no idea what I wanted to do after college. It is okay to have doubts even when it feels like you are pursuing the right path, and that’s where you want to be and you’re happy--it’s still ok to have doubts. It’s also okay to change your mind at some point and decide to do something different. And I also tell them to always keep growing and to always keep learning, and as long as you keep learning, you are going to keep growing, and to not ever think, “Okay, I know all that I need to know and there is nothing more I need to know”. There is always something new you can learn. Even now, if I 13

had to do it again, would I do the exact same thing? I don’t know. But I am okay with that. I am happy where I am right now, and even if I got to the same point where I am right now, if I did it again, I don’t know if I would take the exact same route. One of the reasons I am very happy teaching and why I went that route as opposed to having my own research lab and training grad students or undergrads is because I never could find one thing that I thought, “Wow, I can spend the rest of my life studying this! And asking questions about this”. There too many topics that I found interesting. And not just in the field I got my advanced degree in. I’m still interested in microbiology, cardiovascular physiology and cancer biology. I was interested in multiple areas and could never pick one area of focus. But the neat thing about teaching is we do all different kinds of activities. We have several different kinds of labs, they have different focuses, there are different levels of students. I teach freshman up through seniors, so it’s diverse. Feeling uncertain during my graduate training bothered me for a long time. I had friends who knew when they came to grad school what they wanted to study and when they finished they knew 14

where they wanted to go and exactly what they were going to work on but I didn’t. So that would be my advice – don’t feel bad if you feel unsure or are interested in many different things because that’s okay.

TURNING POINTS EIGHT

Practical Applications Han Pu, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

My research is in basic science, and compared to more applied side of science, of physics, the impact may not be that immediate. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m content with myself doing these discoveries in the fundamental properties of atoms and molecules and maybe someday people can make something useful in a practical way based on these discoveries, but that is really not my motivation. In terms of the field, I think to a large degree, our whole department, most of the areas in our department, is these basic type sciences. I have two colleagues doing experimental work in my area of cold atomic physics so I talk to them a lot and we, the theory and experiment, are really interlocking with each other. So sometimes I help them to interpret their experiment, or their measurement. And sometimes their experiment 17

motivates me to do research in a particular direction. My own particular research activity focuses on basic research, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s actually already has some practical applications. For instance, people can use these ultra-cold atoms to do some precise measurement to measure gravitational constant. And these things are quite useful, for instance, the oil industry in Houston, actually one of my post-docs and also one of my recent graduate students, they went to work with oil companies. From the practical point of view, if you can measure the gravitational constant very accurately, you will be able to know where gas lies underneath the ground, so maybe thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oil or another mine beneath that too, to detect.

TURNING POINTS NINE

The Value of Working Hard Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

The biggest lesson I learned as an undergraduate was that being intelligent is nice, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nothing compared to working hard. Working hard is so much more important than intelligence. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d rather hire someone that works hard over someone smarter who doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t work hard. Natural born intelligence is not enough. When you work hard good things happen.

TURNING POINTS TEN

An Environment of Collaboration Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Earth Science, Rice University

My curiosity is primarily fostered by interacting with people that are at the fringe of my knowledge. I am in the Earth Science department but I work a lot with people in chemical engineering and civil engineering and trying to see where there are natural or slight overlaps with our research interests. And through working with them, I hear about questions and topics that I’m unaware of and I can start reading papers and learn more about them. When I read papers, I always ask myself what’s missing from this study, what can make it better, what can make it stronger and so that’s sort of the curiosity of that - that self-driven part - to always strive to think about what can make something stronger and more valuable to society. So by reading and working with people outside of my field is how I can help expand 21

my field. In terms of natural science and engineering, there are already very strong interactions and there are some strong interactions between the Baker Institute and political sciences/ social sciences. I think at Rice we are fortunate to have a powerful environment for research and education and they’re highly linked. Undergraduate students get involved in research and explore things outside of their discipline, and this helps cross bridges. I’m getting students from non-science classes taking my science classes because they’re interested in it and they’re learning about it in the news and they want to know more. I think Rice fosters that, partly because of the size of the university. I went two public universities. Sometimes it was five miles to go from one building to another building to talk to somebody and learn about something and that’s just an impediment. It’s a barrier that you don’t want to cross, but when it’s only 100 meters to talk to somebody from the Baker Institute about geopolitics, it just happens naturally. Or you bump into them at the coffee shop and you can talk about it. So I think Rice is in a unique place 22

in that we have a very powerful research and training system, and they also have a size thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s amenable for people to interact at informal and formal levels.

TURNING POINTS ELEVEN

Confidence and Competence David Caprette, Ph.D. Lecturer, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

I want my students to become very confident and competent in the areas they pursue, because with confidence you can accomplish quite a bit. For example, in non-majors biology, I want my students to become scientifically literate. They are music majors, economic majors, what-have-you, and this is the only biology they are going to get in college. If I do it right, they will leave here with some understanding of how science works, and the next time some politician stands up and speaks utter nonsense, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re going to recognize it. That is one of my most important goals. In that respect, I think that my teaching makes an impact or at least I would like to think that my teaching has an impact. For another example, among my neuroscience students are a great many pre-meds. Whether or not they are going 25

to medical school, students can still be interested in doing basic research, or perhaps research into a related clinical field such as neurology. Developing a broad information base, experience, knowledge of the experimental strategies, etc. instead of just learning things by rote, makes a big difference. The more you can do, the more capable you are and the more opportunities are available to you. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why I want my students to achieve their maximum potential in class, and I contribute what I can. I also hope that they take that knowledge, take my bits of wisdom such as they are, and spread them around.

TURNING POINTS TWELVE

Two Woman Quota Alma Novotny, Ph.D. Lecturer, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

The things that you see today are the result of forces in motion and not such explicit discrimination. When I applied to college, Cornell University had an explicit quota of two women, and two women only, in its veterinary program. It was in the catalogue. They were taking two women and no more. Even when I was in graduate school with a very supportive major professor, the atmosphere was an eye-rolling experience in terms of how women were often referred to. Not so much officially, but you know, the general atmosphere. My roommate, when she got married, had her credit card cancelled. She had a job. She had a very good record with a credit card. Her husband was a student at the time. He had no income, so at that point her credit accessibility was based on her husbandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s income, and she lost 27

her card. Today, of course, they practically beg you to take cards. The worse credit rating, the better, because then they can get more interest money out of you. In some sense, I suspect that the difference in credit access to women is as much a matter of bank greed than it is of changes in attitude towards women, but these days there is no bank in the world who would cancel a credit card on somebody who had been paying on it for a reason like that. There were these very strange things. Women couldn’t run the marathon in the Olympics. I remember writing letters to the Olympic advisory committee as part of a program to give woman just a chance to run a marathon. Some of these things; the overall effect of it can drag you down, and I’m hoping you guys have a more optimistic approach. You will not find raising kids easy, but you wouldn’t have found it easy if you were staying at home as a mom either. Raising children takes effort, but I’m hoping you have an easier time being taken seriously when you’re doing something that way. I’m not sure I’m leading the way on that, but that’s my hope for you guys when you come through, male and female, that you’ll always be a contributing member of society, that people 28

will take you seriously, and that youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll take your own abilities seriously.

TURNING POINTS THIRTEEN

Life: An Incredible Phenomenon Janet Braam, Ph.D. Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

I love biology because Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m fascinated with life, how it works. Life is an incredible phenomenon. And so what I do everyday is try to uncover a little more insight into how life works. My general area of research is plant biology. I study plants, in part, because they are very different from animals, and by taking a different approach using diverse organisms, one can shed light on fundamental aspects of life. In particular, my lab studies how plants perceive environmental stimuli and alter their physiology to become more resistant to different kinds of stresses. In addition to providing some fundamental insights into how cells work, this research may also help in agricultural productivity. If we fully understand plants we may be able to reduce negative impacts 31

of the natural environment by lessening the need to develop additional land for agricultural use. Research can also bring one into unexpected or unplanned subject areas. Because of some basic findings in plant biology research, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been led into new areas, including a project designed to discover new antibiotics. We are also applying some of the basic findings in plant cell biology to cancer cells.

TURNING POINTS FOURTEEN

What Do You Think About in the Shower? Scott Solomon, Ph.D. Lecturer, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Rice University

My Ph.D. advisor told me something interesting one day early on, just sort of general advice. We were talking about figuring out what you wanted to do with your life and what kind of research to do, and he said that it’s important to think about it consciously, but it’s also important to identify what you think about subconsciously, what are you drawn to, what are you attracted to? He said, figure out what it is you think about when you’re in the shower. In other words, what do you think about when you’re not trying to think about what you want to do? He was saying this in the context of what kind of research questions you’re interested in, but I think it’s true for everything. What kinds of things are you naturally drawn to? What kinds of things are you 33

naturally thinking about? I found that throughout grad school and into my post doc, oftentimes when I was reading a paper or doing something in the field, I would often be thinking about, how would I teach that? How would I teach that in a class? How would I help students with this idea? So that got me thinking that maybe teaching is the right thing for me. This job seemed perfect-- being at Rice, being at a great place that we knew weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to be a part of, and having wonderful students to be able to work with, which makes a big difference, and teaching the subject matter that is right up my alley-- exactly the kind of classes that I was excited about teaching. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a great department, I have great colleagues, so it was basically the perfect opportunity for me.

TURNING POINTS FIFTEEN

Tackling Problems Stephen Bradshaw, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

When I picked my research area, I thought, ‘Hey, there’s a gap, I’m going to fill it myself.’ Now it turns out the reason why no one else was doing this research was because it’s an extremely difficult problem to solve. But I jumped in anyway. Now, I made some progress; I did a few things that, even looking back now, were worthwhile. I did this about six years ago. I made a bit of progress then, but now I’m an older, wiser, more experienced physicist, I understand why it’s a difficult problem, but I also have more and better ideas on how to go about tackling it. So now I have this benefit of hindsight experience and more knowledge. It’s a problem that I’m still working on. I mean, I didn’t spend all my time doing it, because as a physicists, as a professor, you need to be productive, and you need to publish, 35

so there are other research projects I work on, that I got regular publications from, but I still have this project I’m working on and I return to it from time to time when I have a new idea, and now because of this experience that I’ve had and the lessons I’ve learned from it I’m actually making more progress. Over the past year, I figured out some new things and I’ve actually worked out better approaches that I didn’t believe would bear fruit originally. So, when something fails the first time, you don’t necessarily give up and never do it again. You can put it to one side and wait until there’s a better time. One of the issues was that I needed a more powerful computer to do this problem, and now, six years later, we have more powerful computers, which means now I can try more sophisticated approaches that I couldn’t six years ago.

TURNING POINTS SIXTEEN

Making the Right Decision Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Earth Science, Rice University

One of the biggest obstacles Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve had regarding my academic path was in my first year of graduate school, I was pretty sure that I wanted to go into research academics and be a professor at a university, and my graduate school advisor was pretty sure that I was going to end up working for a major oil company. We had lots of battles about what my true career goals would be and how I was going to achieve those goals, and at times it was frustrating. I was fairly certain that academics was where I wanted to go, and his experience was that most students he had worked with had gone on to work for energy companies, so he was expecting that of me. We had heated discussions about it, but at the end, to overcome that hardship, was I sat back and realized that I was excluding one job opportunity, which was working for an energy company, and I had no 37

exposure to it. So what I did was decide to try it out. I went and did an internship with Exxon at the time, before they became ExxonMobil, and learned about the energy company environment and what they contribute to society. I had a really good internship experience, but I learned that academics was where I really wanted to be. I wanted to work with students and I wanted to do research. I guess I overcame it by trying out what I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to do, and then making sure that I was making the right decision.

TURNING POINTS SEVENTEEN

Conferences: Community Exchange Matthew Baring, Ph.D. Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

If you have a career long enough, you suddenly realize that you go about things in a certain way, with certain presumptions that all seem totally reasonable at the time, and then a new piece of data comes off the conveyer belt out of the pipeline, and you’re like, “Okay, the way we were looking at things was not right, in the light of this new data, so we have to reinvent the wheel.” And those junctures are groundbreaking, they’re watershed moments of light, and they’re not taken just individually, they’re taken as a community. One of the moments that was very telling one, a very personal to me was back in 1997 when I was at a conference in Europe, and there was a prominent Italian experimentalist who was high up on the team 39

for an Italian X-ray mission. At this conference, he presented an X-ray image of a gamma-ray burst. I was one of a handful of people who just absolutely jumped on this when we saw it: he didn’t seem to fully appreciate what he had. Gamma-ray bursts are very hard to image, or they were at the time, and one of the paradigms that we’ve had with gamma ray bursts is that their interpretation had changed from being galactic neutron stars to being distant cosmological objects. But in order to be really able to comprehend them, we needed to do what we call good localization, and that is find where they are in the sky to a precision of about a tenth of degree or less. This was the moment where we said, “Hey, you realize you can get gamma ray burst localizations to the level that we can probe them with optical observatories.” It was about four of us who converged on this speaker, and it helped change everything. They thought about it, they went back to Italy and this helped alter the agenda of that mission. Its principle contribution to astrophysics afterwards was its ability to find localizations that led to the first measurements of redshifts of gamma-ray bursts. So that’s a watershed moment, and it’s not like we did 40

it, we were just part of the process. The community, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what conferences are for, community exchange. It is wonderful to think about.

TURNING POINTS EIGHTEEN

A Communal Activity Thomas Killian, Ph.D. Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

Considering some of my professional high and lows, the lowest point was probably maybe midway through my graduate career. We had been working on this really long-term goal. I was really the second or third generation of grad students to work on this goal of trying to cool atoms down so cold that they went through a phase transition to this new state of matter, something called a boseEinstein condensate. Nobody had ever done this before, but it was clear that it was a big race to do this. We appeared to be in the lead for a long time, but then a new technology came along that was much more favorable for doing it and they caught up and through the middle of my career they got there first. So in a sense, it was very depressing, but I think that I learned a lot from it. If you look back on it, our work had contributed tremendously to 43

what they were able to do. They took a lot of lessons we learned and then combined it with new things to be able to get there. So it gave me appreciation for how science is really a communal activity. You stand on the shoulders of those who come before. So eventually we came around to being excited for science that this had happened. And that’s really what you need to dwell on; not thinking about the fact that you lost. Certainly, one of my most exciting moments was just a couple years later, when we also got it to work. It was still a very exciting thing because our system was very different. We learned a lot of new things and the community was incredibly excited about it. There was a tremendous outpouring of joy and support and appreciation. So that was a very exciting thing that reinforced the sense that we’re a community and we’re all contributing. That was very reinforcing, that thrill of the chase and of dealing with the agony of defeat and then the joy of success. It really makes what you do incredibly stimulating.

TURNING POINTS NINETEEN

An Unsolved Problem Angel Martí, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Chemistry, Rice University

When you are applying for a faculty position, one of the things you have to do is prepare a proposal where you explain the things that you would like to do — sort of like a grant proposal, but instead of sending it to an organization like NIH or NSF, you send it to the universities. Then you explain the kind of research that you will be bringing to the university. The universities look very closely at these, because they want people that will be a good match for the faculty, for the department, and for the university. When I thought of what an interesting problem will be – what are the unsolved problems out there? I thought, Alzheimer’s is an unsolved problem, but the first thing that also came to my mind was, well, I have never done research on Alzheimer’s— never. But it was a good opportunity because it 45

was exactly what my mentor taught me, you know, you focus on the problem and you use whatever techniques you have to use. So even when I didn’t have the techniques to do that kind of research, then I decided it was a good time to learn them. I came here, I recruited some students, and then we started working. Tried to figure out the things that people have done, and the things that people have never thought of, or they haven’t done. And we started doing research on that. At the beginning, it was cumbersome, because at some point, you had to develop a scholarship in an area in which you have never worked. But on the other hand, then that’s the thing—you develop a scholarship and some knowledge in an area that you didn’t have, and now you have all this knowledge in other areas that you can now apply to this problem. Generally people that work in Alzheimer’s are biologists, medicine doctors, or people from a very specific discipline, and with a completely different culture than a chemist. So I thought that I could bring a different point of view, different strategies, different and fresh ideas, and it has worked well until now.

To do great science, you have to be creative, and accept risks. Sometimes you have to do things that you think that they might not work, or there’s very little chance of success. Sometimes you have to be willing to do things that other people are not willing to do. Like, uncommon reactions,—I’m saying in terms of a chemist— unconventional thinking, and sometimes, just do things that you thought that will obviously not work, you will be surprised. But on top of all that, I think that the most important thing is: you have to be professional, and you have to be— how do I say it?—honorable. So you have to have high levels of ethics in your research, and you have to communicate that to your students as well.

TURNING POINTS TWENTY

Failed Experiments and Unexpected Results Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

You learn a lot in being wrong and I often like it when experiments don’t work the way I expect them to work. As my postdoctoral mentor used to say, failed experiments are just unexpected results. Because that means there’s something new to learn. I look at the failures as opportunities to learn new science. And that’s what gets me excited. I may feel bad that I couldn’t get something to work. But at the same time, I see it as a major opportunity to do something new. I have never been afraid of failure. Failure can be disappointing, but I wasn’t really afraid of it. I have a friend that has a saying about failure in science: “what’s the worst thing that can happen? It’s not like 49

you’re going to die!” So I always try to remind myself: What’s the worst that can happen? I might not get tenure or I might not get the grant or I might not get my paper published. But those are all small things in the scheme of life.

TURNING POINTS TWENTY ONE

Validation from Enthusiasm Stephen Bradshaw, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

Do what interests you. I mean, let’s say you are a student coming to a PhD, for example, if you are not wildly enthusiastic about the area that you are planning on working on and the field that you are planning to go into at the start, then you won’t get through your PhD, because there will be some pretty dark times, there will be times when you hate it, when things are going wrong, and you’re wondering what you’re going to do next, and how are you going to get it to work, and what everything means, and you don’t understand anything about what’s going on and you just want to do something else. It’s your initial enthusiasm that’s going to count at those times, so, if you’re not really into it in the beginning, then you’re going to make life a lot more difficult for yourself. I mean, it’s worth it in the end, but getting 51

through some of those more difficult times is really tough. I would say, only go into something that you are really, really enthusiastic about doing and there is enough enthusiasm to carry through the times when things are not going so well. And, be tenacious, because you are going to work on problems. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the other thing. As I said, successful academics are enthusiastic about what they do, and they are tenacious, I think thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what sets them apart.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Dr. Matthew Baring is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University. His primary research interests involve theoretical high energy astrophysics, gamma-ray bursts, soft gamma repeaters, pulsars, supernova remnants, active galactic nuclei, cosmic rays, shock acceleration theory, QED radiation processes, plasma physics mechanisms, and hadronic interactions. Dr. Baring earned his B.Sc. (Honours) from the University of Melbourne in 1983, and received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Astrophysics in 1989 from the University of Cambridge. Dr. K. Beth Beason-Abmayr is Lecturer and Laboratory Coordinator in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. Dr. Beason-Abmayr earned her B.S. in Microbiology from Auburn University in 1990 and her Ph.D. in Physiology & Biophysics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1996. Dr. Matthew Bennett is Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. His research involves synthetic biology and the dynamics of gene regulation - from small-scale interactions such as transcription and translation, to the large-scale dynamics of gene regulatory networks. Dr. Bennett received a B.S. in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006. Dr. Janet Braam is Chair and Professor of Biochemistry

and Cell Biology at Rice University. Her primary research interests involve environmental stress responses in plants, the role of the circadian clock and epigenetic regulation in plant defense, autophagy regulation, and chloroplast biogenesis and maintenance. After receiving her B.S. from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale in Zoology in 1980, Dr. Braam received her Ph.D. from the SloanKettering Division of the Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Molecular Biology and Virology in 1985 and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Stephen Bradshaw is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the William V. Vietti Junior Chair of Space Physics at Rice University.His primary research interests involve astrophysics of the sun, plasma physics, and numerical modeling. Dr. Bradshaw earned his M.Phys. (1st class honors) in Physics with Planetary and Space Physics from Aberystwyth University in 2000, and his Ph.D. in Solar astrophysics from Cambridge University in 2004. Dr. David Caprette is Lecturer in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. Dr. Caprette’s research interests include teaching and assessment. He completed his Ph. D. in 1982 at Cleveland State University. Dr. Brandon Dugan is Associate Professor of Earth Science at Rice University. His research interests involve hydrogeology, marine geology, and sediment mechanics. Dr. Dugan earned a bachelor’s degree in geological engineering from University Minnesota in 1997 and a Ph.D. in geosciences from Penn State University in 2003. Additionally, he completed a Mendenhall post-doctoral

fellowship with the U.S. Geological Survey. Dr. Cindy Farach-Carson is Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University and Vice Provost for Translational Bioscience. Her primary research interests involve the role of extracellular matrix in the progression of cancer following metastasis from primary sites, such as prostate or breast, to bone. Dr. Farach-Carson received her B.S. in Biology at University of South Carolina in 1978 and her Ph.D. Biochemistry from the Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University in 1982. Dr. Brendan Hassett is Chair and Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. His primary research interest involves mathematical research in the field of algebraic geometry. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Yale University followed by his M.A. and Ph.D from Harvard in 1994 and 1996, respectively. Dr. Thomas Killian is Chair and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University. His research is primarily focused on atomic physics, plasma physics, and biophysics. Dr. Thomas Killian received his Artium Baccalaureus (A.B.) degree in physics from Harvard College in 1991 and went on to Cambridge University where he received his Master of Philosophy in Physical Chemistry in 1993 as a Marshall Scholar. He completed his Ph.D in Physics in 1999 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Angel Martí is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Bioengineering at Rice University. Dr. Martí’s primary research interests involve the design and synthesis of multifunctional molecular constructs for the treatment

and diagnosis of amyloid forming diseases. He received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Puerto Rico in 1999, and his Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Puerto Rice in 2004. Additionally, Dr. MartĂ was a postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University from 2004 to 2008. Dr. Alma Novotny is a Lecturer in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. She earned the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2012. Dr. Novotny earned her B.Sc. from Duke University in 1968 and her Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1972. Dr. Han Pu is an Associate Professor in Physics and Astronomy at Rice University. His research focuses on theoretical atomic, molecular, and optical physics. Dr. Pu received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Rochester in 1999. Dr. Scott Solomon is Lecturer and Laboratory Coordinator in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice University. His primary research interests involve molecular systematics, biogeography, phytogeography, biodiversity, and tropical ecology. Dr. Solomon earned his B.S. in Cell and Structural Biology at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign in 2000 and his Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at The University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Dr. Ken Whitmire is Professor of Chemistry and Associate Dean for academic affairs for the Wiess School of Natural Sciences at Rice University. His research interests involve synthetic, structural and mechanistic inorganic and

organometallic chemistry. Dr. Whitmire earned his B.S. in Chemistry from Roanoke College in 1977, M.S. and PhD in Chemistry from Northwestern University in 1982, and served as NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at Cambridge University in England between 1981-82.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to all Rice University School of Natural Sciences faculty who made this project possible by sharing their career experiences and educational life stories with the Gateway students through one-on-one interviews. Much appreciation goes to School of Natural Sciences Dean Daniel Carson and his staff, especially Ms. Pamela Jones for the continual support, and School of Social Sciences Dean Lyn Ragsdale for her counsel and encouragement, and Alex Wyatt for embracing the overall Turning Points project and developing the web presence at http://turningpoints.rice.edu. Our heartfelt gratitude to the Gateway Associates and supporters of the Gateway programs for making projects like this possible. Many thanks also to the current and past Turning Points team and Gateway Study of Leadership fellows for the tremendous amount of time and effort in bringing this series to life.