Embracing Leadership by Turning Points

GATEWAY STUDY OF

LEADERSHIP

TURNING

POINTS

SCHOOL OF

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Embracing Leadership

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 Discovering Opportunities

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

Embracing Leadership

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

Kathleen Matthews, Ph.D. Head of the Table

2. George McLendon, Ph.D. 5 Choices & Consequences 3.

Daniel Carson, Ph.D. A Lone Wolf

Cindy Farach-Carson, Ph.D. Passion in Your Area of Expertise

Eugene Levy, Ph.D. Find Your Passion

Pablo Yepes, Ph.D. The Impact of Academia

K. Beth Beason-Abmayr, Ph.D. Gender Equality?

8. 9.

Weiwei Zhong, Ph.D. Teaching to Learn

Thomas Killian, Ph.D. Going the Extra Mile

10.

Daniel Carson, Ph.D. A Precursor to Success

11.

Brendan Hassett, Ph.D. Rules of the Road

12.

Janet Braam, Ph.D. Collaboration vs. Competition

13.

Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. Outlets Outside Your Field

14.

Ken Whitmire, Ph.D. The Role of Academia

15.

Cindy Farach-Carson, Ph.D. Creating A Similar Vision

16.

Gustavo Scuseria, Ph.D. Scientific Leadership

17.

Thomas Killian, Ph.D. Lead By Example

18.

Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Teaching & Freedom

19.

Haldre Rogers, Ph.D. Scientists as Advocates

20.

Stephen Bradshaw, Ph.D. The Core of Academic Success

21.

Ken Whitmire, Ph.D. Products or People

About the Contributors Acknowledgements

57 63

TURNING POINTS ONE

Head of the Table Kathleen Matthews, Ph.D. Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

If you show people a table, and thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a person at one head of the table and no one at the other head, and everyone is male, and then ask whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the leader? The answer is the guy at the end of the table. If the group is all women, the answer is the woman at the head of the table is the leader. If the group is a mix of men and women at the table and a man is at the head of the table, the man is identified the leader. If the group is a mix of men and women at the table and a woman is at the head of the table, 50% of the time the woman is identified as the leader, but 50% of the time a man at a different position at the table is the identified leader. And that holds true for answers from men and women. A woman at Hunter College (City University of New York) named Virginia Valian has done a lot of work developing the concept 1

of “schema” — the ideas that we carry in our heads. Women are often unaware that we are as culpable for stereotypical responses as men. We, in some ways, have as low expectations for women’s advancement and women’s leadership as men do. And there are women who actively try to keep other women from “making it.” So the impediments that women face are complicated and are not just due to what the “guys” are doing. As a society we have set up systems that, and I read something recently (I think in the New York Times) by a female attorney who had studied a legal concept that has to do with women in places where women have no rights: Women cannot have property, when a woman marries all the property is the man’s, and it seemed to be a way of keeping women managed. This arrangement has existed for a long time, and we still have vestiges of that — think about that fact the when women “got the vote” wasn’t that long ago. So there’s long history that I think has hold of us in ways that we don’t always know, recognize, or appreciate. We are still not entirely clear, even in our own society, about what a woman’s rights entail and where do we have control and responsibility for our well-being. That’s 2

just sort of to keep clear in our own minds that if women are not advancing, it is the responsibility of everybody. If we’re women and we’re silent about what’s happening, or we don’t own the ways in which we ourselves may impede women, then we’re not owning the reality.

TURNING POINTS TWO

Choices & Consequences George McLendon, Ph.D. Provost, Rice University

What I know from my experience at Duke, Princeton, and Rice is that the university actually doesn’t set agendas, other than “we’d like to be really really good,” because our ability to do things at the highest level provides models and opportunities for you to be part of working at the highest possible level. One of my main roles is a convening role. So, if I say “well I think the university should pay more attention to energy research,” people will go “thanks for your input.” If I ask a whole bunch of people what should the university pay attention to, and 80 percent say energy research, then I can say, “Hey, I’ve talked to 100 people. 80 of 100 say we should pay more attention to energy research, let’s see what it would be like to pay more attention to energy research.” Then you convene faculty groups and they figure out what they can do and why they are or aren’t excited 5

about this. They set their own direction and agenda, and you just try to help them do that. There’s nothing militaristic about the university…there are no generals to tell people what to do. I think that it’s a little bit backwards. Now there are places where part of my job, part of President Leebron’s job is to ask people, “have you thought about this, and if you have, can you explain it to me?” For example, there appears to be a real possibility that various educational technologies will significantly enhance the way that you might learn something. Some of those technologies may be important, and then the role of the president or me is to engage all of our colleagues and say, “Are we doing this? And if not, why aren’t we?” Because our real job is to help our students maximize their potential. If they’re not maximizing their potential with this, then we need to figure out how to help them. It’s not saying, “you have to do x, y, or z,” it’s more asking, “Are we doing what we’re doing, the best way it can be done? If not, how can we be doing it better than what we are doing. That’s our guiding role for what we do. 6

TURNING POINTS THREE

A Lone Wolf Daniel Carson, Ph.D. Dean, School of Natural Sciences, Rice University

The concept of being a successful scientist being synonymous with being an independent investigator is hammered into us from the earliest stages of our training. When our students apply for fellowships, one of the things we are asked to speak to in almost every grant application is to assess the applicant’s potential to become an independent investigator. In the same vein, I don’t recall ever being asked to assess a student’s potential as a collaborative investigator. These practices perpetuate a “lonewolf” mentality that persists as many scientists progress in their careers. One major step in progression to becoming a senior investigator is being asked to lead large projects that involve groups or teams of people, including multiple investigators from various departments of the same or different institutions. These are really large grants and 7

are usually focused around a particular research problem. In assuming this type of leadership role you must be able to flip your “lone-wolf” switch to one that reads “I am the ultimate collaborator capable of bringing large groups of investigators together and motivating them to work as a team.” As you might expect, success, in this regard, can be quite variable given that we are not really trained to be team players, but must become so to lead these teams effectively. One thing that helps along the way is serving as a mentor for undergraduate or graduate students, postdoctoral fellows or even other faculty. To do this well requires a focus on their best interests. There is another transition for those making the jump from professor to department chair. The focus continues to move farther away from you and much more on those around you and the bigger picture of the department. Some do not do this well and become overly consumed by the department losing the personal focus needed to continue to be a successful researcher. In other cases, some view the department and its resources as an extension of 8

themselves and overly serve their personal interests. As a department chair, you usually have to put your ego by the door. Faculty members need to engage their chairs to influence departmental and programmatic directions. Department chairs must engage their faculty not only as individuals, but also as a group in addition to their dean to accomplish goals. Deans largely work through the Provost, President, other deans as well as department chairs to affect larger order missions of the university. Nonetheless, in these intermediary roles of chair and dean you must filter and prioritize matters being pressed by those in your administrative chain of command. Sometimes this means disagreeing with those you represent. It also means making investments and sometimes taking risks to achieve large gains. As discussed above, risk also entails the chance of failure and sometimes we do fail. Finding the right balance of risk or â&#x20AC;&#x153;boldnessâ&#x20AC;? is mart of the job. In leadership roles, you must learn to identify other effective leaders that can engender confidence and garner support to help advance worthy academic or scholarly efforts. I personally find this to be a tricky business. Finding dynamic personalities 9

who want to do the job is not enough if they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fairly represent the views of their constituencies, particularly when they disagree. The need to find talented, altruistic individuals in a lone wolf culture is an ongoing challenge. I think weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re successful most of the time since these individuals tend to stand out. At Rice, we are blessed with many.

TURNING POINTS FOUR

Passion in Your Area of Expertise Cindy Farach-Carson, Ph.D. Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

I reached a point in my career when I just wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t satisfied with publishing another paper, getting another grant, or you know even mentoring another grad student, as much as I love to do that. I just didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feel the same sense of satisfaction that I did before. And so I decided to move into a more, not administrative, I hate the word administrator, but more of a leadership role, taking an initiative where what I would be able to do is try to bring together teams of people to take on really big problems. Big problems: cancer, regenerative medicine, traumatic brain injury, which is one of our latest ones that actually involves your school as well. Lots of things that we can do that are big, big problems that affect people and families and everybody that you know 11

and think really big and realize that “no I can’t solve that problem, but we can.” To find the right people, work with the right people, break down the barriers that keep people from working together, be very persistent because you have to keep chipping away. Those barriers, a lot of them are very deeply entrenched, but keep hammering at it until you can get a team that can really take on a project.

TURNING POINTS FIVE

Find Your Passion Eugene Levy, Ph.D. Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

For the time that I’ve been at Rice, there has been a lot of conversation about developing leaders among students. I don’t know how to do that. I’m not even sure you can do that because I think that, to a very large extent, leadership is something that some people have more capacity for than others. On the other hand, I think more people have the capacity than frequently get to exercise it. In any event, I think leadership skills are best learned in doing, rather than from some set of guidelines and rules. The best is for institutions to provide opportunities for leaders to develop. From my perspective the most important thing you can do as a student is to find your passion. You may have none, in which case you’ll find some other guide for your life. But if you have a passion, 13

find it and nurture it. There may be more than one passion. I’ve had lots of opportunity to give advice to students. When I was a department head (earlier in my career, before Rice) I especially talked to a lot of advice-seeking students who were considering coming to graduate school in my department, who hadn’t decided where to go, who hadn’t decided what specialty to pursue, or whether they should enroll in graduate school at all. I would frequently tell such uncertain student that if they felt they could do something else, then they should go do that. That they should not enroll in our program unless they had a fire in their belly and wouldn’t sleep unless they pursued a career in scientific research, and that was the only thing you want to do. I told them that academic research is hard, and there are easier ways to make a living. That they needed to find their own motivation. If they were not driven by their own motivations, then they should find their motivation and go do that. I think the most important thing a student is find their passion. Maybe they will eventually find that their passion also includes leadership. I haven’t entirely agreed 14

with some of my colleagues on the idea that leadership, per se, needs to be a preoccupation for an undergraduate. There are opportunities to lead if one is attracted to that. Go do some of that. I was president of some student organizations when I was an undergraduate. I probably got something out of that. But I had no notion as an undergraduate that I wanted to occupy any kind of leadership positions professionally; that was not part of my passion; that wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t on my mind at all. I wanted to do scientific research, I wanted to spend my time with physics, I wanted to learn how the world worked, and I wanted to contribute something to that. But leadership was the farthest thing from my mind at that time; it never crossed my mind.

TURNING POINTS SIX

The Impact of Academia Pablo Yepes, Ph.D. Senior Faculty Fellow, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

You get into a field, because you find it attractive. At times, you can be very excited because you found something new and interesting in your research and you think it can have an important impact on your research field. However, the day-to-day is not always exciting. Like in any human activity, perseverance is key. When I started our current effort in medical physics, the initial goal was “Let’s come up with an ultra-fast technique to calculate radiation dose for proton therapy”. At the time, we did not have any clear idea of how that was going to be achieved. Then, reviewing literature, we found a possible solution. When we verified that our idea was going to work, we were very excited. Then the harder work of 17

making that idea a practical reality started, as the proverb says the â&#x20AC;&#x153;devil is in the detailsâ&#x20AC;?. During those more difficult times, one gets motivated by keeping the end in mind. At the practical level, it helps to have specific goals and deadlines. Concerning the impact of academia, there is no doubt that society looks at academia for guidance. For example, when there are elections, the media goes to sociology departments, when there are economic issues journalists talked to professors in the business schools, when there is an tsunami the geology professors are consulted, etc. It looks to me that academia plays an important role of leadership as a depository of knowledge. That university leadership itself is as important as all the technical and scientific research carried out on campuses around the globe.

TURNING POINTS SEVEN

Gender Equality? K. Beth Beason-Abmayr, Ph.D. Lecturer, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

I remember when I was interviewing for graduate school there were some places I interviewed where there wasn’t a single female faculty in the department, and I thought, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to go here…” so I ended up not going there; I chose a school where there were female faculty. It’s changing, but I think it will take a long time, and I don’t know if it will ever be completely equal. But at least it is moving in the right direction, at least in our department (Biochemistry and Cell Biology). I know our previous Dean was female, our current Department Chair is female, and we have several female faculty in our department. I know the same is true in the Bioengineering Department, I know several female faculty over there. The trend is 19

definitely changing, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just not there all the way yet. But it is really interesting that you ask about that because in my classes I have noticed that in the past couple of years there has been a shift in the ratio of students. I often have more female students than I do males, especially in my introductory labs. In a class of sixteen students, three-quarters of them or more will be females and in the advanced labs, it is either 50/50 or slightly more females. So, at least in the fields of science and engineering, it seems like there are women pursuing these degrees and they are staying with it, whereas they used to drop out. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s encouraging.

TURNING POINTS EIGHT

Teaching to Learn Weiwei Zhong, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

I think academia has the role of preparing people for their future careers. You’re teaching a person how to learn things. It’s not like a professional school where you teach them a specific skill so they can use the skill to find a job. Here you teach them how to learn new things so that they are prepared for a variety of positions. I think that’s the role. So it’s crucial to have academia. For example, if undergraduate students come to my lab, after a couple of years, they’ll learn how to come up with new research ideas, how to design experiments to test these ideas, and how to carry out the experiments. They are trained to be objective, thoughtful, and open-minded. Then they are ready to do all kinds of research. They can study worms, they can study humans, they can do research in any field. Even if it is a field that is new to them, 21

and they may not know how to do something at the beginning, they know how to figure it out. They know how to learn to become an expert. So we train students to learn how to learn in academia. You only get this kind of training in academia. It’s very difficult to learn it otherwise. I think you have to work hard, and have fun at the same time. Don’t worry too much about competition. Take research for example, when I’m studying a problem, I just want to know the answer. If someone finds the answer ahead of me, that’s fine, now I know the answer. It doesn’t have to be me who discovered it. If it’s me, I feel happier since I solved it. If someone did it for me, that’s fine too. That being said, I do want to be good at what I do. When I do something, I make sure that I’m very efficient. I want to spend some time to optimize my approach first. There’s a Chinese saying which is that “if you want to be a good soldier, first sharpen your sword.” That’s the same, I want to make sure the approach is optimized before I actually go ahead and do it. That would be my strategy, to be more efficient. 22

TURNING POINTS NINE

Going the Extra Mile Thomas Killian, Ph.D. Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

When I became the department chair, I spent a lot of time talking to the previous chair about the workings of the department and where the various challenges are and different things that have worked for building consensus within the department and moving forward. I’ve spent a lot of time being involved in many different organizations and committees around campus so I’ve seen a lot of examples of people in very challenging situations and how they were or weren’t able to bring people along and accomplish the things that they wanted to do. I’d say that’s probably the biggest source of my guidance for me, just trying to be aware of what other people are doing and how it works and trying to apply those lessons. There were times, as chair of a certain committee 23

where your first step is to get people to serve on that committee. When I asked somebody to give up their time, I do very simple things. I find it much more powerful to go to someone in person and talk to them and explain to them that this is what I want to do and this is why it is important and I need your help. I find that effective, much more effective than sending out an email asking for volunteers, or even just sending out an email to somebody saying will you help me. Going that extra mile to show that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important enough to me that I took the time to come and talk to you, for example, really helps me get people involved. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a pretty hands-on guy, even with all the different things Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m doing here, and so on those committees I was leading, I was willing to always be doing as much work, at least, as everybody else. I never asked of anyone else any more than I was willing to do myself.

TURNING POINTS TEN

A Precursor to Success Daniel Carson, Ph.D. Dean, School of Natural Sciences, Rice University

You often learn how to lead from failure.

Everyone

doesn’t win all or even most of the time. There are very few leaders that haven’t lost important efforts. Some outstanding leaders are ones who failed at one endeavor and then tried new things. If you don’t fail, you are not trying. Always winning usually means you are staying in the “safe-zone”. An outstanding hitter in baseball bats a .300 average. This means that highly successful individual failed 7 out of 10 times they tried. In the U.S. Civil War there are examples of generals who played it safe and accomplished little or even prolonged the tragedy of the war by their conservative actions. They didn’t lose anything, but they never won much either and couldn’t bring about the desired conclusion because they were afraid to fail. It took a guy on the Union side like Ulysses Grant, who wasn’t afraid to fail 25

because he had already failed in a great many things. Nonetheless, he learned from that that sometimes you just have to push your way through. Every experience, positive or negative, in your professional or personal life is an opportunity to learn and improve your chances for success in the future.

TURNING POINTS ELEVEN

Rules of the Road Brendan Hassett, Ph.D. Professor, Mathematics, Rice University

You see your mentors acting in positions of authority and those become templates that one uses when you have to make decisions. My thesis advisor was director of graduate studies at Harvard when I was a graduate student and subsequently he was the department chair, so I got to hear how he thought about and dealt with issues: how he dealt with problems at his students, how he made admissions decisions and policy decisions as department chair. As you hear people discuss these things over lunch or dinner at conferences you get some sense of how to approach them. Of course the circumstances are very different. The way the departments operate are very different. The constraints are different. But you still develop some intuition. I also have collaborators that have had significant administrative responsibilities. One of my mentors in Boston was a professor at 27

Brandeis. He moved to Berkeley and he directed the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley and more recently oversaw a foundation that supports a lot of mathematical research. And one of my other collaborators was chair at NYU and now he is the current director of a major foundation. Having these people as part of my mathematical network. For most of the kind of administrative issues that I face, I have people to talk to. This network of people who have similar administrative responsibilities is helpful. In terms of lessons, managing academia is almost an oxymoron. The working environment in academic departments is unusual, because most of the people who work here have jobs for life, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re tenured, and so the things that you hear from professional management experts about how to deal with managing a workplace, the rules of the road, are so different that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s difficult to apply them without making adjustments or modifications. You really have to find ways of aligning the interests of the institution with the interests of individual faculty and that basically requires constant communication 28

both up, to help the institution understand whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s necessary for us to be successful, both as a teaching operation and as a research department, and also with my colleagues on the priorities of the administration, what are the things that are causing the deans and provost to lose sleep at night. Functionally a department chair is a middle manager and so communication is probably the most important aspect of my job. Another important thing is to make myself available so that people low on the totem pole, students or new instructors, can express concerns if there are things that are bothering them. Being in the right place at the right time is crucial so that if they have a concern they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to make an appointment with me to talk about it: they can find me sitting in the lunch room or having a cup of tea. Making myself accessible to people is important for me as a management tool.

TURNING POINTS TWELVE

Collaboration vs. Competition Janet Braam, Ph.D. Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

As a student, I was drawn to science because I thought oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s success could be measured objectively. I thought all I had to do was figure out how nature worked, that it was me against the secrets of nature, and if I could figure things out, then I will be successful. My success would not be based on what other people thought; it would be purely objective. Well, I was very wrong. Science is much more of a social endeavor than I had anticipated. Science is done by people, and we are social beings. Science is a lot about competition, but on the better side, there is also a lot of cooperation and collaboration. A piece of advice to my younger self would be to work more with people, find more collaborators, do things together with people because interdisciplinary collaboration is a powerful way to enhance your 31

impact. You canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do it all on your own. And you shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to. You should work with other people, find people with whom you have to have complementary skills, and together you can do even more.

TURNING POINTS THIRTEEN

Outlets Outside Your Field Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Earth Science, Rice University

The important thing that didn’t come up and I probably could have addressed is where does my creativity come from, where does my innovation come from. Was it embedded in one of your earlier questions? I think an important part of being a successful researcher or a successful employee of any type or a pure teaching professor or a research professor or somebody who does teaching and research is having an outlet outside of your field. So, having recreation activities, having things that are not 100% related to your research where you can take a break from everything and cleanse your mind and come back with a fresh idea. If you’re only focusing one thing all the time, you can become too focused, and you might miss things on the periphery. But if you have some sort of activity where you can cleanse your mind - whether it’s hiking in the mountains or 33

swimming or doing triathlons or something like that, for me itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s running - where you can just get away from it all, forget about work, forget about research for a while, and then come back with a fresh, reinvigorated mind, I think thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really really important in being successful in any career.

TURNING POINTS FOURTEEN

The Role of Academia Ken Whitmire, Ph.D. Professor, Chemistry, Rice University

I think the primary role of academia is education, but I think it’s education broadly defined. There are a number of people not familiar with academia who would say that it means faculty teaching classes and students going to the classes and learning material from faculty members. I think it’s a larger role in that undergraduate and graduate research is also an educational process because essentially, what you’re doing is teaching people how to ask questions, how to devise ways in which to get data to answer those questions, how to think, how to put all of that together, and how to create a plan for tackling a certain problem. So I view all of that—the courses that I teach as well as the research that I conduct—as fitting into this giant educational picture. But I also think mentoring students, like going to lunch in the colleges, is part of that educational process, because 35

you have an opportunity to talk to people and get them to think about things that they would not have thought about otherwise.

TURNING POINTS FIFTEEN

Creating A Similar Vision Cindy Farach-Carson, Ph.D. Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

When you are privileged to work with the kinds of brilliant faculty and students and staff that we have at a place like Rice, these folks are not typically followers, and they don’t necessarily want you to lead them anywhere, and they don’t necessarily think they need to do anything differently than they’ve been doing and they don’t necessarily buy into your vision. All you can do is try to persuade folks and keep them roughly pointed in the same direction by creating a similar vision of what success might mean. To use the example of traumatic brain injury, which is one of the current projects we’re working on, it encompasses every single part of this campus, all the way from athletics to music to cognitive science to natural science to engineering. To take on a problem like that, you have to span the whole 37

breadth of what the university has to offer. But those people live in different cultures, each school has itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own culture, reward systems are different. You have to paint a picture of what the problem is and let each person see how they can contribute to that, and not try to force a one-size fits all.

TURNING POINTS SIXTEEN

Scientific Leadership Gustavo Scuseria, Ph.D. Professor, Chemistry, Rice University

In the United States part of the technological leadership is rooted in its scientific base. If you look throughout history and ask, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Why have Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, any others have such great success here and not in another country?â&#x20AC;? It is because in the United States there exists the scientific base and research universities where people have full freedom to pursue, what we do, and at the same time be in contact with students so that you can also transmit this knowledge. That is a great system and I think it is fundamental for the progress of civilization and humanity. Universities will metamorphose and change as a function of time. It seems at times that in academia we work in ways that are very odd to the rest of society, but things will change, and we will do more 39

things online, maybe tenure will go away, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know. The fundamental idea that you do the best possible research and try to solve the most important difficult pressing questions at a place where at the same time you get students exposed to all of this very early on in their careers, is fundamental to keep the research and technological development alive in the United States and in our society. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m very sad when I see countries with economic problems like Argentina; when governments start cutting education and research. That is not a good idea in terms of long-term prospects. It takes a lot of time to grow and nurture people like the professors that you see around here. Look at China, for example: the country is smart because of a focus on investing for the long-term. They made the decision to put money into science and technology. Ultimately, we are all bound to this planet. We may screw it up, we may have already screwed it up irreversibly, if there is a way to save our civilization, it will be through science and technology. We have to figure out how to harvest energy and live in this planet when the temperature is 20 degrees higher. 40

However; going to other planets is going to be hard, the laws of physics will not change as a function of time. I try to live my life as I believe is right for the environment - although I can always improve on that- but I am not an incredibly loud advocate. I try to use my knowledge strategically. I try to stay as apolitical as possible to make the science I do something that everyone believes in, no matter what side they’re on. I don’t want anyone questioning my science because they think I’m doing it for a specific end. I don’t know if that’s the right answer though. It’s something I’ve struggled with a lot, and I reconsider my position every time an issue arises on which I have expert knowledge, but also a personal opinion.

TURNING POINTS SEVENTEEN

Lead By Example Thomas Killian, Ph.D. Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

As a chair, you always lead by example, but as a colleague in the department you lead even more so by example. The chair will typically ask you to do things and you want to be a good model for the fellow faculty by doing a good job at the things that are important. And sometimes to get the tasks done that people donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really want to do, you end up doing a lot of cajoling trying to motivate people. Academia is an interesting environment. Once somebody gets tenure, you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a lot of sticks to hold over their head. So you work a lot on the culture. As a faculty member who is not the chair, if you want to change things, youtry to get more like-minded people like you to volunteer their efforts. Really in academia, if a professor is willing to step up and do something, they can do it. So if a professor thinks 43

there should be a new program or we should do more for our students or we should change the way we recruit …if that professor is willing to step up and do it, then that’s great. If you say it should be done but I’m not going to do anything, well then it’s not going to happen. As chair, very similar principles apply. You have to show by your own commitment what’s important to you. You have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and get in there and really help out. The challenge is that you’re now responsible for so many things, you don’t have the time. You have the responsibility for all of those things but you don’t have the time to do everything. So you have to be able to motivate other people to do things when you’re not going to be able to have the time to get into them as deeply as possible. I really try to think as chair of aligning the incentives right. Not trying to overburden people with doing things that are a waste of time, but trying to show people what is important, how much their work can benefit the department and the students. I help them see the pay off and hopefully that motivates them to give of their time and their effort. 44

I’m just starting as chair. We’ll see if at some point I have to use some sticks too, but right now I’m working on the carrots.

TURNING POINTS EIGHTEEN

Teaching & Freedom Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University

I think in society, academia plays a couple of important roles. The most obvious is education. You need to educate the next generation of scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors and historians, etc., and that’s the primary goal of all universities. However, there’s another, less talked about side to academia. I think society as a whole needs to have people who are free to think and work and research whatever they want. A lot of good comes from allowing people to discover things free of interference from corporate, governmental or other societal interests. This is partly why the tenure system exists – to allow that freedom. There has recently been a movement away from the tenure system, in that a lot of universities are hiring 47

non-tenured lecturers. I understand why itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there are economic forces that drive universities to do it. I also think lecturers are sometimes unfairly criticized as being inferior teachers. Nothing could be farther from the truth. At the same time, the movement towards lecturers and away from tenured faculty diminishes one of the major roles of universities in society â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to provide a place for academics to work free of economic interest.

TURNING POINTS NINETEEN

Scientists as Advocates Haldre Rogers, Ph.D. Faculty Fellow, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Rice University

We had a debate in the Conservation Biology class I taught last fall about whether scientists should also be advocates for change. On the plus side, scientists know a system very well and the likely endpoints of specific actions. Therefore, they can advocate very effectively for a specific action. Additionally, most are in their field of research because they really do care about the issue or system, so they can lend passion to advocacy. On the other hand, when scientists start to act as advocates, people can question the motivation and legitimacy of their science. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve struggled with this a lot, both as a scientist and someone interested in environmental issues. I try to live my life as I believe is right for the environment - although I can always improve on 49

that- but I am not an incredibly loud advocate. I try to use my knowledge strategically. I try to stay as apolitical as possible to make the science I do something that everyone believes in, no matter what side they’re on. I don’t want anyone questioning my science because they think I’m doing it for a specific end. I don’t know if that’s the right answer though. It’s something I’ve struggled with a lot, and I reconsider my position every time an issue arises on which I have expert knowledge, but also a personal opinion.

TURNING POINTS TWENTY

The Core of Academic Success Stephen Bradshaw, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University

One of the traits that you need to be a successful academic, probably above everything else, is tenacity. If you’re going to get anywhere in research you really cannot give up on problems. You can realize that a particular problem, once you’re thrown everything at it, maybe at some point you have to come to the realization that it’s not going to yield now, and then maybe move on to something else. But you should never give up on it. As an academia you always have thoughts and ideas swirling around in your mind, it’s not a job in the sense of, you know, you work in a shop, and then you finish at 5, and then you go home, and you don’t think about it again until 9 o’clock next morning, whereas with academia you always work on a problem, and that means that problem is always with you, constantly turning over in the back 51

of your mind, even when you’re doing something else that problem is in the back of your head and you’re thinking about how to solve it, or you’ve seen something weird in your experimental results and you need to explain it and at the moment you’re not sure what it means. There’s always something with you.

TURNING POINTS TWENTY ONE

Products or People Ken Whitmire, Ph.D. Professor, Chemistry, Rice University

Certainly in science, and I think this is true in engineering as well, this idea of academic freedom— of being able to more or less study whatever you want to study—is there. But in science, it doesn’t work unless you have money to do it, because you can’t do anything without funding. Since I started my career, there has always been a constant struggle in the sense that funding has been uncertain. That is always a worry in the back of your mind. To some extent, the pressure is good, knowing that you should be able to justify that what you’re doing is important. Do you choose the most important things that you can study? If the financial pressure is too great, then it really skews what you can do. Because you’re not really free to do anything you want to do, you have to do what people are willing to pay for. That’s a bit disappointing. This is a whole discussion 53

because if you look at the politics of say, the federal government funding science and engineering research, the focus in Congress is, “We’re putting all this money into research; we should expect patents, we should expect companies to be spun off, we should expect that kind of thing,” and they don’t always see those results. My opinion of it is that most of this funding is actually supporting the students and post-docs, and really, it’s training people to have the skills that they need in American industry. The product is not the research; the product is the individual that’s going to go out and be a part of some industrial society and contribute in that way. I think it’s quite simple—and there are some other countries that already do this—which is that the stipends that are provided for graduate students would never go to a university. It might be handled by the university, but essentially that money is given to the student, like an NSF fellowship. Students could go anywhere in the country that they want to go and they could work for whomever they wanted to work for. Then the grants that I, the researcher, apply for could be smaller grants that would give 54

me the supplies and equipment that I need to do a specific project, and my job as a faculty member would be to convince students who have their own fellowship money to come to my laboratory to work on a particular project. That way it’s very clear: this money that was given as a fellowship is to train people, and this money that they give to the faculty member is to work on this particular project. If you go to places like Germany, a lot of the students’ stipends are part of an educational budget where students go to the university for free, but they have to find a place in a research lab where there’s somebody who has the money to provide the laboratory space, the chemicals, and the equipment that they’re going to use to do their project.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

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 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 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. Daniel Carson is the Dean of Wiess School of Natural Sciences, the Schlumberger Chair of Advanced Studies and Research, and Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. His primary research interests involve examining the expression and function of cell surface components that participate in and regulate cellular interactions in developing embryos and various tumor cell models. Dr. Carson earned his B.S. in Biology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975 and his Ph.D. in microbiology at Temple University in 1979. 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 bachelorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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. Eugene Levy is the Andrew Hays Buchanan Professor of Astrophysics and the former Provost of Rice University. His primary research interests involve Astrophysics and Space Physics. Dr. Levy earned his A.B in Physics from Rutgers University in 1966 and his Ph.D in physics at the University of Chicago in 1971. Dr. Kathleen Matthews is the Stewart Memorial Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology and the former Dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences

between 1998 and 2008. Her primary research interests involve the examination of protein-DNA interactions involved in regulating gene expression. Dr. Matthews received her B.S. in Chemistry in 1966 at the University of Texas and earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1970 from the University of California â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Berkeley. Dr. George McLendon is the Howard R. Hughes Provost and Professor of Chemistry at Rice University. His primary research interests involve inorganic and physical biochemistry. Dr. McLendon earned his B.S. from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1972 and his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 1976. Dr. Haldre Rogers is a Huxley Fellow in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice University. Her primary research interests involve the impact of biodiversity loss on ecosystem services, with a focus on seed dispersal and pest control by birds. Dr. Rogers earned her B.A. in Biology from Colgate University in 2000, and her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Washington in 2011. Dr. Gustavo Scuseria is the Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and Physics and Astronomy at Rice University. His primary research interests involve electronic structure theory, including coupled cluster and density functional theories, computational quantum chemistry, notably materials research with quantum applications (HSE functional & successors), solid-state predictions, and projected quasi-particle theory. He earned his B.S. and M.S from the University of Buenos Aires in 1979 and his Ph.D. from the University of Buenos Aires in 1983. 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. Dr. Pablo Yepes is Senior Faculty Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His primary research interests involve particle physics, nuclear physics, and medical physics. Dr. Yepes received his B.S. in Physics in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Particle Physics in 1988 from University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Dr. Weiwei Zhong is Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, and also a member of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering at Rice University. Her research interests center around the gene networks behind complex traits such as development and behavior. Dr. Zhong graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China with a B.S. in Biology and the University of Georgia with a Ph.D. in Cell Biology. She also has an M.S. degree in Computer Science from UGA.

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.