Bobbi Peckarsky

Bobbi Peckarsky is an Honorary Fellow in the Biology Department and an Adjunct Professor of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She is also Professor Emeritus of Entomology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, where she spent over 25 years studying the fascinating interactions between stream-dwelling organisms and their environments. She was the first female faculty member hired in Cornell’s Entomology Department, in 1979.

Bobbi research focuses on predator-prey dynamics, invertebrates as indicators of water quality, and how disturbance and climate change affect freshwater ecosystems. She has conducted extensive field studies on stream ecology at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and has been recognized internationally for her contributions to ecology. Beyond academia, Bobbi has championed the health of freshwater ecosystems by serving on several environmental boards and advisory councils.

Transcript

Speaker 3 0:02

Hello, and welcome to the Scientess Podcast, where we talk to women with successful scientific careers about the joys of science. I'm your host, Karen Levy, an environmental health scientist at the School of Public Health at University of Washington in Seattle. I'm excited to share with you the stories of some pretty incredible women on this podcast. My hope is that these interviews will show aspiring young scientists that a career in science is not only possible, but can also be extremely rewarding and a whole lot of fun. Let's jump in with today's featured scientists. Dr. Fabi Pikarski is an honorary professor in the departments of integrative biology and entomology at the University of Wisconsin. She moved to University of Wisconsin in 2005, where she grew up, when she retired from Cornell University after 26 years on the faculty, where she is still faculty emeritus. She was the first female faculty member hired in Cornell's entomology department in 1979. Her research focuses on biological interactions among stream-dwelling invertebrates. She has spent every summer for the last 50 years leading research in Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. She and her fellow Benthets, as she affectionately refers to her research team, don waders and other gear and head into the streams to collect data on behavior, life histories, and biological interactions of the invertebrates, fish, and algae that call the streams home. She is the author of more than 100 research articles and is an active member of the Ecological Society of America and the North American Benthological Society, now called the Society of Freshwater Science. She has mentored hundreds of students from high school to PhD level. She even was a guest scientist at the nature and science camps my own kids attended as elementary students. Bobby, welcome to the Scientists Podcast. As you know, this is a podcast for women about the joy of science and why women might want to consider a career in science. We will talk with women with successful careers in science about how they did it, why they did it, and what they love about the work they do. I've gotten to know you over the past 15 years during summers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab, where my husband also does research. And I wanted to invite you on the podcast because you're one of those people who is always laughing and smiling. You really seem to enjoy your work, a quick look at your website, and you can see the joy of science come through so clearly. Your lab team photos are always silly and you don't take yourself too seriously. So I thought you would make a perfect interview subject. So uh let's start with some basics. How did you get to where you are today? Can you tell us the arc of your career?

Speaker 1 2:44

All right. Well, when I first started undergrad, I knew I liked science, mostly biology, but I didn't really know how to apply that interest to a career. And so I started out looking through the catalog at the University of Wisconsin for classes that I thought would be interesting, and I ended up deciding to major in nursing because nursing had mostly really interesting biology requirements, and it didn't have much of the other things that I wasn't too excited about, like physics or chemistry. So I went two years, there was a baccalaureate program there, and they did not provide any sort of practicum during the first two years all just coursework, and it was really, really interesting to me. My beginning of my junior year, we got our little outfits, you know, we got our nurse outfits and my little hat that never quite worked right, and we went to in the hospital, and we were given a tour of the hospital, and then we were each given a patient, we had to read their chart and decide, you know, go introduce ourselves, tell us, tell them we were gonna take care of them. So my first patient, and turns out only, was a terminal cancer person. And when I went to introduce myself, like you said, I'm sort of a positive person and I try to be accessible and and uh easy to talk to. And he was sitting near the window of the his hospital room looking outside, and I couldn't get him to talk to me.

Speaker 2 4:20

So I started to cry and I ran out of the house. And I don't want to be a nurse anymore.

Speaker 1 4:29

I was very worried that my family was gonna be so disappointed in me. My family was very supportive of whatever our kids the three of us wanted to do. So there was never any stigma there, like, well, you're a girl, so you have to do this career or that career. So I was worried they were gonna be very upset with me. On the contrary, they were relieved because they did not think that was the right choice for me. My sister was a physical therapist and older, three years older than me, and she didn't want to say anything, but she felt that it was not the right path. So, long story long, I ended up back as a biology major, got a degree in biology, still didn't know what to do with myself, and I thought, you know what, I'm gonna just get a teaching certificate. And they had a program at UW Madison where you could do pick a subject matter area. Interestingly, I chose genetics because I was smitten with James Crow, who at that time was teaching genetics at Wisconsin with a little workbook called Crow's Notes, and it was a workbook. It wasn't his book yet. But he was a phenomenal professor, so I thought, well, I'm just gonna do genetics. And so I did genetics and education, got a teaching certificate, thinking, you know, something to fall back on, but I didn't really at that time appreciate how much I was gonna love teaching. I thought, well, this would just be a practical thing for me to have. So during my student teaching, which was part of the master's degree, I totally fell in love with teaching. And my master's thesis was an undergraduate, was a uh curriculum in environmental education. I just wrote an entire curriculum. And so then I got a job for four years teaching high school in the Madison area. Super lucky to find this opportunity. It was a very progressive and really well-funded program at Monona Grove High School, which is an outline community in the Madison area. And there was a science team, and the guy who was the head of the science team got an NSF grant, for goodness sake, funded an incredibly, you know, well-endowed program that had all kinds of cool stuff that could be done. And we wrote our own curriculum. It was a concept-centered team taught. There wasn't like biology, chemistry, physics. It was science 1A and science 2B, and it was concept-centered. So I had a just phenomenal experience teaching high school. But it was is hard. Teaching high school is really hard. It was a burnout. I was exhausted a lot of the times. And the summer after each of my years of teaching, I would take classes at UW Madison just for, you know, to stay in the to keep learning. But I was teaching swimming and I was a waterfront director for a day camp in the Madison area on one of the lakes. And on a parents' day, a lot of the faculty kids came to this day camp. And on a parents' day, Hugh Iltis was a botany professor at UW Madison. I was telling him, Hugh, there's no I took all of the field classes in the summer. How come you guys don't offer more? And then he said, So why stay here? He said, Why don't you go to a field station? And I was so naive at that point. I said, Well, what's a field station? He told me about Rumble. Rumble is the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. He also told me about Flathead Lake and uh Montana, which I looked into, but that's sort of the University of Montana. All the kids, you know, go up and and spend the summer up at Flathead Lake. This really struck me as the place to be. And at that time, uh, it was much simpler than now. There were there were four courses offered. Undergraduates had to take two of them, and you were in class six days a week, and then you got the seventh day off. And so, like, something like two and a half days in each of uh the other classes. Did I add that up to six? But anyway. So I took Rocky Mountain Flora with Harriet Barclay. I was fortunate enough to be one of the people who got to take that class from her. She was amazing. She was 72 when she taught that class, and we all thought she was so old. That's all relative now. But in the other class I took was aquatic ecology with Stan and Ginny Dotson. And Stan and Ginny Dotson uh were at the University of Wisconsin, but I finished my master's in 1971, and then they came in the fall of 1971. So I didn't know them. I met them here. Wow. And so I became I knew at some point I wanted to go back to grad school because I just I loved uh, you know, just the whole concept of doing field work and being outside, and I love biology. And so Stan, at the end of that summer, he said, Hey, you want to go back to grad school? I said, Sure. So he wrote a few proposals, got the funding to support me for one year. Then after that, I was sort of on my own for support. So that I had to do a project in uh the streams here because anybody who had more than an undergraduate degree in the class was required to do an independent project. And that was my first experience with these phenomenal stream critters that live in these beautiful streams. So I expanded that to my PhD research.

Speaker 3 10:09

I was just going to take a moment uh to just say that we're recording this here while we're at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, RMBL, or Rumble, and we're staring out the window at Gothic Mountain, which is really beautiful. So maybe you could just describe for the listeners who are not familiar with Rumble what this place is, just more generally, since most people won't be familiar with it.

Speaker 1 10:33

Well, Rocky Mountain Biological Lab was founded in 1928 by a few biologists, primarily a person named John C. Johnson, who was at Western, which is now Western Colorado University. And he used to bring his family up here for picnics and just for a spectacular place to hang out. And this was an old silver mining ghost town at that time that there was one resident still around, Garwood Judd of Infamy, the Man Who Stayed. But actually the truth of that is he never stayed through a winter. He was only here in the summer. Billy Barr is now the currently uh should be holding the title of the man who stayed because he stays all year round. But anyway, John C. Johnson and a few other biologists founded this lab and they paid a pittance like in back taxes or something. They bought this now phenomenally valuable piece of property that is just stunning and um started the lab and in 1928, and they had professors come from various institutions that people that they knew who were colleagues and they taught through the years, and people would come and do research on the various systems on mammals or birds or aquatics or plants and pollination, and uh reputation just grew and grew and grew. By the time I came in 1974, it had been in existence for almost 50 years. It was fairly primitive at that time, and it was a place where you disconnected from the world and you just immersed yourself in nature and uh surrounded by other people with like aspirations but different disciplines. So pretty much everyone ate in the dining hall, and so we all talked to each other about what we were doing. It was a very close-knit community, and it was a place where many people, including myself, found ourselves. We discovered who we were as people and what was important to us as people, not only in terms of uh being able to accomplish our science or our research or our teaching functions, but just as a really high-quality way to live. Yeah. And I think that that's really the strength of what Rumble is. It's grown uh in a lot of ways since then in the last 50 years, but I think that sort of basic bond among the people who come here is is still persists.

Speaker 3 13:06

One thing that is really unique about Rumble is that people can bring their families. Yep. Uh, and so I've come here with my family, my kids for 15 years, and my kids have grown up coming here and going to the nature and science camps. Did you have a family and did you bring your family here to Rocky Mountain Valley?

Speaker 1 13:26

So I did. So I came in 74. I met my now my husband in 76, and we skied out in the winter of 76, 77 so that he could meet Billy Barr, because Billy Barr needs to appro needed to approve that this guy was worthy. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Speaker 3 13:44

Billy Barr is somebody who came here in 1971, right? And he basically came as an undergraduate student and he never left. He really never left. He just stayed here year-round and he was sort of known as a hermit, although he's a very social guy. Yes. So he's the most social hermit that you'll ever meet. So Billy Barr needed to approve of your husband.

Speaker 1 14:06

We we were I got pretty close to Billy Barr over those all these years. He's just a remarkable person, somebody everybody should read about. Go see the watch the Snow Guardian, and then you'll learn a lot about Billy Barr. There's a children's book about Billy Barr. Did you know that?

Speaker 3 14:20

I did not know that. There's also a bar in town called Billy Bar.

Speaker 1 14:24

They named in the elevation, they named it the Billy Bar with small bees. He doesn't believe in capital letters. But anyway, so we skied out here so that my husband, then to be Steve, met Billy so he could approve. The other part of it was that if Steve didn't like Rumble, forget it. That was the end of our relationship. He did love Rumble, and he ended up actually working in many capacities here over the years. He helped Scotty Willie look for salamanders. He was up at Mexican Cut collecting Zolplington for Peter Bersard. You know, he was a sort of a jack of all trades. He did salamanders with Howard Whiteman. He he claims he taught Howard Whiteman how to deal with the stomach contents of salamanders. Okay. Anyway. Well, his degree is in geography, cartography. He learned cartography before there were computers. So he ended up morphing into doing GIS. But what happened was when he and I got married, he was still in school at the University of Wisconsin getting his cartography degree. And then when I got my job at Cornell, we moved to Ithaca, and there weren't very many opportunities for him there. He worked in Madison and the cartography lab. He was really close to all the people doing what he was doing. But he ended up for quite a while being sort of a freelance guy so he could come out here in the summers, which was awesome. And he eventually then got a job with a county doing GIS in uh Ithaca.

Speaker 3 16:04

So it's that I mean, I feel like that's a really important part of the story that you were able to follow your scientific career because you had a husband who was flexible and even flexible enough to come with you on your field work in the summers.

Speaker 1 16:17

Aaron Ross Powell Yep, and couldn't have done it without him. I remember when I got my job at Coriel. No, we moved there and there were like a hundred things that I had to do. And you know, he had to get driver's licenses and we had to find a dentist and you know everything, this and that. And I didn't have time to do any of that, and the papers would be shoved in front of me when I was busy doing preparing for tea teaching or something that here, sign here. You know, so he took care of all of the transitional stuff that it took us to move there, and that was absolutely critical. And I will forever be grateful to him because he's not too proud to have been uh the person who really enabled me to be able to pursue my professional career.

Speaker 3 17:03

Yeah, I think that we don't talk about that enough about sort of the allyship of men and how men can really help women thrive in science. And it can come in many different ways. It can come in the form of a husband, it can come in the form of a mentor. Um, there's all kinds of ways, but I think that's an important thing to discuss. And then we had kids after five years.

Speaker 1 17:27

So he loved it here. We had a great time here. Billy Bar approved together. Yeah, Billy Bar approved. And then it was we were married for about five years before we had kids. And then we were living in snow mask cabin. I remember when I was pregnant, you know, I was getting bigger and bigger and uh trying to climb up in the loft with my big belly and so on. But and then we had our first child in 1983, and we brought out a niece who was 14 years old, who is a dancer. She was really talented. She actually became a professional dancer. And she did dance summer in Crested Butte. So in exchange for us making sure she could do the dance summer uh program, she came and helped us with Brian with our with our little baby boy. So he spent his first summer out here, and he spent every summer, his first 18 summers out here. Our daughter Allison was born two and a half years after that, and that became a little more complicated in terms of childcare. I'm sure you guys have experienced the same thing, is that we did find there was a woman in town who actually came out. We moved to Barclay Cabin at that point after the summer. We became smitten with Barclay Cabin. And it was cold and there was mice and you could see through the walls and everything. But what a phenomenally cool place that was. And we raised our two kids there. And uh, we did hire a woman from town that came out and took care of it takes a little skill to take care of a toddler and an infant. Amongst the rats of the Barclay Cabin. Yeah, I know, I know. But in any case, they grew up here, my kids.

Speaker 3 19:08

And do they love the outdoors and this sort of lifestyle?

Speaker 1 19:13

They do. It was sort of I always say that this place is really was so much of a factor of who our family is, that it's who we became. And every weekend, even when they were tiny babies, we'd put them on our shoulders before they could walk. And we would point ourselves, okay, which way should we go? And we'd go backpacking with these little munchkins for years and years. And during the academic year when we were back in Ithaca, the kids would play this game called backpacking to Yule Basin or to Yule Lakes, and they would take all their stuffed animals and put them in their backpacks and go into the living room and then take all the blankets and c sofas and pillows and make a tent. And they just love My My daughter came back.

Speaker 3 20:02

We used to live in Atlanta, Georgia, and we came back in the fall after being here in Colorado, and my daughter had to do a report and she on an animal. So she did a report on the yellow-bellied marmot. And we were thinking that the teacher in Georgia probably had no idea what a marmot was. It's a round haw over there. Yeah. And she even had um the names of marmots that are here at RMBL on her poster.

Speaker 2 20:28

It was very cute. They lived under your cabin. Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 20:32

Yeah. So they grew up here, and again, it was an incredibly welcoming community for families. And that I think sets it apart from a lot of other field stations. People that I recruited to come here that I knew from Cornell or whatever, Kaelin Mooney, they were so surprised. They said, Really? You can bring your kids, you can bring your family. But that's the way it had always been.

Speaker 3 20:54

And it's something that also has led to long-term research here that people are have been able to come back year after year, decade after decade to lead long-term research projects because it works for families. And I think that's a really important thing. Really good science has been done and really great careers have been lived because of the inclusivity of families. Right.

Speaker 1 21:23

And the thing that's really striking to me is how many really amazing women that scientists there are here. And that's a question is why is that? You know, why are there so many successful women scientists at Rumble? And people who've done it in various ways. I mean, some of us have families, some don't have families, some, you know, are single. And it's just that I think that the environment fosters sort of create diversity of approaches to how you want to do your science. Everything is acceptable. And if you need to bring Your family, or you want to bring your family, great. You know, our kids grew up helping me in the stream, you know, helping me with I had a little weather port set up down near Barkley Cabin, and they were down there helping me find my bugs to put in the channels. I actually hired both of them during their collegiate years. My son spent one summer with another friend of his. My son's an engineer. His buddy was a political science major, but those guys were incredible. My son, the the engineer, designed an entire really cool plumbing system where we could no electricity, just use gravity, and we were able to f to power a bunch of little artificial streams right next to the East River. And with my son's uh ingenuity and his engineering capacity, he was so he's part of the legacy of our work. And my husband is also part of the legacy because in order to be a stream ecologist and do experiments, you need to be a plumber. And I have zero capacity as, you know, all of those sorts of I know what to do, just not how to accomplish it. And so these guys design so many cool, very simple, inexpensive ways to manipulate stream habitats and uh things that you could do way out in the middle of nowhere with very little, very few resources. So that's amazing. So my son's an engineer. My daughter, he's a sprinkler where he does it designs and and implements, uh, he designs and and approves sprinkler systems for commercial buildings. So he's got this kind of hydraulics thing going. Our daughter's a public defender. So she, you know, took a completely different path. But when she was three years old, boy, she could distinguish all of the aquatic insects from each other. She knew everything, you know, she knew all the species. She was very meticulous about that. That's so cool. Yeah, she was great. I mean, uh, she could give her a pan of stream insects and she'd sit there for hours picking out stuff you needed. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Speaker 3 24:07

But it really goes to show how even the science background or the experience cataloging things and being meticulous. There's a lot of different pieces of science, and those skills can translate to a lot of different future careers, right? Whether it's a public defender, engineer, and learning the hydraulics out by playing in streams. So it goes both ways, I guess. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. Interesting. Right. So I have a question. Are there ways that being a woman you think has positively impacted your career?

Speaker 1 24:37

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, I do. You know, at the risk of uh of sounding of not being accurate. I think women are better at a lot of things than men are and that are important to being a successful scientist and mentor. And a lot of those are people skills, communication skills, listening, the ability to listen to people, to to not feel like you have to be in charge of everything, to involve uh groups of people that uh work as a team. My group always worked as a team. There's never any hierarchy. I actually learned that from a man who is my advisor, Stanley Dotson, and that was the way he handled his mentorships as well, that he instilled in each of his graduate students that there's no one has a premium on ideas, that in fact sometimes people who are not familiar with the field and haven't read everything are less biased and they're going to come up with more creative ideas and be able to ask more innovative questions and that sort of thing. So he treated his whole lab group as equals, and that was a trait that I really appreciated in him and that I tried to foster in my group that with the way I handled my group. We had everybody from little kids to work, you know, my children to high school kids to to um you know, postdocs, to graduate students and undergrads, and we'd have this whole gamut of people who had various experiences, but everybody was equal, and everybody contributed to every stage of the research coming from designing the questions, designing the experiments, how we were going to test things, troubleshooting, and then trying to go through the data and figure out, okay, what do these data mean and this sort of thing. You know, maybe I I'm not right about this, but I think that sort of approach to uh science is probably more common in women than in men. But I have been influenced by men who had that capacity. The other one was Scott Whissinger, and that was the way Scott Whissinger always treated all of his his He was another another Rumble scientist, Scott Whissinger. And he was the oldest of six children, and he had five younger sisters. So he figured that had maybe something to do with his ability to how to uh communicate with people and be inclusive.

Speaker 3 27:10

So team team science.

Speaker 1 27:14

Team science communication, listening, uh not feeling like you have to be in control. Yeah. You want to be a part of a team and that you can learn. I always tell my students that I learn more from them than they learn from me. And I that's not just I'm not just saying that. I think that that's really true.

Speaker 3 27:33

So how do you take that approach of these sort of maybe for lack of a better term, f feminine traits that you think really improved your science and enabled your science? And how did you take that and sort of work in like a man's world, sort of be, you know, to become a scientist and to how do you how do you balance those different uh needs of the different traits?

Speaker 1 27:56

Well, you ha you have to be a little thick skinned for one, and you have to stand your ground for another. And those are two things, again, that aren't traditional feminine traits. So there are things that in order to get through some of the perceptions or preconceived ideas for what you're supposed to be as a woman scientist, that's an important thing to kind of to grit your teeth and get through it. And I don't know if you want me to tell I have some pretty harrowing stories from Cornell, as you told, as you mentioned in the beginning. I was the first woman ever hired in the Department of Entomology at Cornell, and that is an incredibly well-known and really world-renowned group of uh scientists and all men. And the aquatic program, the first, really one of the first aquatic entomologists was a guy named J.G. Needham, and he was at Cornell, and you know, a lot of his aquatic entomology work is like the basis of aquatic entomology in the world. So here I was, you know, in the legacy of J.G. Needham. And I interviewed for this job, and I was not finished with my PhD yet. But I was lucky because I'd had a few publications, and that was Stanley Dodson again, encouraged us to, if you're done with a project, write it up, get it out there, you know, get it published, and then you'll, you know, have a foot in the door for getting jobs. So I did get an interview at Cornell. They I was not their first choice. They interviewed three other candidates, and they were all men, and they were all had faculty positions elsewhere, and they were pretty well known, three other guys. I knew them from the then North American Bentological Society. They offered the job to one of them, it was a guy at Berkeley, and uh I had spies that were paying attention to what was going on, telling me what was going on. They don't give up because I don't know if this guy's gonna take the job. There was somebody working in his lab that I knew was a uh fellow grad student of uh in the spy. And turns out the guy turned the job down, but he was messing with Berkeley, did try to get tenure. So they offered the job to me, and of course I knew that I was not their first choice, so I knew that at least 50% of the faculty didn't want me there, or at least would have preferred another candidate. And knowing that, you know, it was a little awkward, a little uncomfortable. But I also had spies within the program who were like strongly in favor of my candidacy, and they would pull me aside and and you know, tell me to hang in there. So the reason that many of these entomology guys didn't want me there is that I was just gonna have children. I was just gonna get pregnant. And then once I got pregnant, then I was gonna be completely unproductive, and it would be a waste, you know, to hire me because I'd never get tenure. So that was the backstory. I knew that coming in. I was when I was hired there, it was about 1979, so I was 32, 32 or so, and we intended to have a family, for sure. So it turns out that the guy who was the chair of the department was a just a, you know, good old boy from the South who had his preconceived notions of what the these guys just had no concept of how to talk to a woman scientist. They just didn't get it. And he uh he sent one of the other assistant professors to the dean to talk to the dean, or that we found out that he and the dean, the chair and the dean, didn't like the way I dressed. You know, I dress the way I'm a field ecologist, right? And I actually at those days I used to wear bib overalls. And then he sent the dean sent this other assistant professor, was this guy who was very embarrassed. He said, I'm supposed to tell you that, you know, they would they think that it would be better role model for uh women in entomology if you were dress a little bit more firmly. And then I just said, Well, what's more important or what's more appropriate as the American gothic?

Speaker 2 32:22

I'm dressing like the Americ Women in Agriculture.

unknown 32:26

Look at me.

Speaker 1 32:27

So that happened. And then I told this poor young sister professor we were both assistant professors, but I was a couple years his senior. I said, You can go tell the Dean I don't like the way he dresses. So you have to you have to be thick skinned about that. The other thing is uh I started getting NSF grants to be able to support my work out here, which is great. I started on a dissertation improvement grant as a grad student, and then I got a postdoc grant that they don't exist anymore. There were these great, you know, one or two year postdocs you could get from NSF. And I was gonna go to Oregon State and do some work there, but then I got this job at Cornell, and NSF let me take the money with me. So I had like two years of NSF support to start with, which was awesome. So I was able to hire a lab tech and, you know, pay for my time out here. Then when I started writing these NSF proposals and they got funded, the chair of my department tried to block the funding of my NSF grant, which was to work out here, because he said I should be working on black flies in the Adirondacks because that was what was important for the people in New York State. And I don't exactly remember he was not going to sign off on some paperwork that I needed in order to get this funding. That's crazy to turn down funding. And then at some point, you know, it got resolved. But I remember that uh one of my favorite uh statements that was said to me by the guy who was the chair of the entomology department is this is where I work, this is where my science is, and this is where the money got granted for me to work. And then when he said to me, and I quote, Don't you worry your pretty little head over anything. Oh my gosh. Yeah, he was a southern gentleman. And that story, Scott Wissinger always used to tell a story, don't you worry your pretty little head over anything. So he knew this story.

Speaker 3 34:30

But it sounds like you really you had your share of battles and you just had to stand your ground and stand by your science and your the you were your value and you knew your value.

Speaker 1 34:43

But there is a happy ending, so I want to make sure that that's the story doesn't end with, oh, this was awful. And so I got pregnant after it was before I had tenure. So I the clock was ticking, I wanted to have kids, and I didn't get the job till then I was in my 30s. So I was about four months pregnant or so when I left for Colorado to for to come out of Rumble to do my summer research, and I just kept loosening the buttons on my bib over. I was wearing more baggy clothes, so no one knew. Nobody at Cornell knew.

Speaker 3 35:22

Turns out your your wardrobe choice was a good one.

Speaker 2 35:25

I know, it was.

Speaker 1 35:26

And so then I got bigger and bigger through that summer, and I came back in August, like eight months pregnant. And so there everybody was just freaking out, like, oh my God, see, I told you she was just gonna get pregnant. And so, but the interesting thing, Karen, is that the whole attitude about me of most of the faculty there changed. And it changed for the better. Sort of like they didn't know how to interact with a women scientist. They didn't that was an unfamiliar entity to them. And that when I came back pregnant and that I was gonna have kids and that I wanted to have a family, that was a value that was shared by them. That they said, Oh, well, she we share this with her. She wants to have kids and she's, you know, gonna have a family. And turns out they threw me a baby show, the boys, the entomology boys.

Speaker 2 36:25

Isn't that amazing? And so after that, their whole attitude toward me changed.

Speaker 3 36:30

Do you think it also had to do with the fact that you went to the field while pregnant, you came back with data in hand, you were also showing your value not just about having a family, but also your your value.

Speaker 1 36:43

I still had to prove to them that I wasn't gonna fold up my tent and be unproductive. So I never this was a very you guys are lucky. I think you probably are in the cohort that by the time you had your kids there was pregnancy leave. I couldn't take pregnancy leave. And so I worked through my entire pregnancy. And with Brian, I I had a semester off uh of teaching, so I was lucky. But I remember sitting with him on my lap and writing. There weren't computers, you know, and I was publishing papers and getting trying to be really productive. And I would bring him into the lab, and the people in the office loved it. They would, can you hold Brian for a while? I gotta do this. But he was a great baby, you know. He'd I just put him in a carrier and go everywhere. I'd go to seminars, go to faculty meetings. Everybody'd say, I would stand and rock. That would keep him sleeping. And people say, Well, you know, do you want my seat? And no, no, no, no, that'll wake him up if I sit down, he'll sleep through this. But so I work the entire way through with my daughter. She was born in February, which is during my teaching semester, and I brought her to lectures. Wow. I put a little sheepskin thing down and put her on the the table in front of the lectern, and I gave lectures with my little girl sitting here through the semester. Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 38:07

Do you think that your colleagues kind of acceptance of you and that switch also was because maybe they there was like you were then sort of what they thought of as a woman also, and that you could also be a scientist so that they didn't think you were some weirdo that wasn't what their conception of a woman was also?

Speaker 1 38:30

Well, and they learned I was their first experience with a woman in science. And in fact, the whole ag school, the whole department, the whole college of agriculture at Cornell, there were no women. Wow. Four women were hired at the same time. One was me and three other women in various departments, and uh we were all hired at the same time. We used to go have lunch together. Some of them didn't make it, which was not good, and others, you know, became amazing uh contributors. So it was a really unusual uh situation for these guys, and you you had to kind of cut them a little slack because they had unfamiliarity. And then they got to know me better and they appreciated that I was really dedicated to teaching and that my I would give seminars and the you know my research was interesting to them. They saw that the students appreciated me. So I think that a professional respect developed once they got to know me. But it was a different time. Yeah. I mean you really were uh one of the pioneers. Yeah it was crazy. So but anyway, yeah, those were challenging times, but I can laugh about the stories.

Speaker 3 39:43

So what would be one piece of advice that you would have for women now entering science?

Speaker 1 39:49

So I think the most m important thing is to be yourself. I had some colleagues, actually they were were in ecology and they were very um successful as well. But they were kind of like two different people. They were one kind of person personally with family, and we would get together and do stuff together, and then there were another person in a professional setting that they presumably felt like they had to behave in a different way. A code switch. Yeah. And I would advise women to just be themselves because you can be yourself. You can be a woman and whatever kind of woman you want to be, it's irrelevant to your success in terms of professional goals, teaching, research, mentoring, service, all of those things. I think if you're true to yourself, then you never have to remember where you are or think a little bit too deeply about what everybody's thinking about you.

Speaker 4 40:49

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 40:49

I think you just then you're just one person and then you're yourself. And that there are enough different role models of women, successful women scientists, that there is not one way to be as a woman scientist. So I would say best thing is just be who you are.

Speaker 3 41:08

That's that's one of the things we're trying to do with this podcast is to is to interview a lot of different types of women. And so you can see if you listen to many of the episodes, then you can see that there really is no one way to do it. There's so many ways to do it, and so many ways to be. And I really love that about just be yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Another question, how do you treat yourself?

Speaker 1 41:29

What's your Oh you mean what I do for myself? Yeah. Um, I am absolutely a disaster if I don't get out every day and do something physical. Okay. That's great. I'm an indoor fanatic. So so I hike. You know, I used to run until I beat up my knees and everything else. So I hike every day or cross-country ski in the winter and yoga. Yoga is the other thing. I didn't take up yoga till pretty late in life, maybe 15 years ago or so. And that's just like well, yoga. It just does so much for my head and my body. And so those things and uh being with my grandchildren. That's a real special thing, being with kids and grandkids. And we're sports fans. That's a release. We uh grew up in Wisconsin, even though we spend a lot of time in upstate New York, we're big Green Bay Packer fans, okay, you know, Bucky Badger fans and that sort of thing. And that's it's fun. We follow all the Wisconsin sports teams. So that's kind of a a fun escape. So yeah, and my husband and I we love camping when we go camping with our kids and grandkids who have learned that wonderful value of being out in nature. So that's those are the ways I treat myself.

Speaker 3 42:52

Nice. Okay, so last question, which we're asking everybody, is if you weren't a scientist, what would you do with your time?

Speaker 1 43:02

You know, I I saw that that you were gonna ask that, and I kept thinking, but really? But I think that what I would say, and I have to say that is if I wasn't retired, because I'm retired, and so I, you know, would be doing all those wonderful things that I told you that I do for myself, besides I'm still doing science. I'm not really retired. But if I wasn't a scientist, I would want to be a teacher. And oddly, you know, coming back to the beginning of our conversation, is that I never saw myself as a teacher. I didn't think I wanted to be a teacher. It was interesting. So I was in school, I thought, no, and I'm done with school, I want to be done with school. I don't want to be back in school. And then what I was teaching swimming, you know, to kids, and the parents used to say oh, you should be a teacher, you'd be so good at it. No, no, no, I don't want to be a teacher. But then once I did it, it was just so rewarding. And I I think that even more that my consciousness. Contribution to the world, I think, as a professional scientist has been probably I'm more proud of what I did as a teacher than I am of what I did as a scientist. And so I could do both. I was lucky that I could do research and I could teach. But the thing about teaching is that it keeps you growing, it keeps you young, it keeps you learning about new things because your students are they motivate you to be the best part of yourself. And you're one person and then what you do ripples out to many, many, many people. And so I used to give a last lecture in stream ecology or aquatic, I think it's probably in stream ecology where I would get on a bandstand and I'd tell people if there's one thing that you can do, you can you choose whatever you do, but you can make a massive impact if you're a teacher. And think of uh you and I are probably similar teachers that shaped your choices and guided your thinking about where you should be and what you should do with your life. So that's I would have been a teacher of something, if not science.

Speaker 3 45:15

Yeah. Well, I mean, you have gotten to be a great teacher and a great mentor also. And so mentorship also has those amazing ripple effects. Yeah, it really does. Yeah.

Speaker 2 45:25

I complain sometimes like, oh my God, I'm so busy and I really need to sort of really retire.

Speaker 1 45:31

And my husband, and I have too many students, and I have to read this and that, and I'm so exhausted. And he says, But you know, this is you it they mean so much to you, these guys. It's worth every second of of these wonderful young people that you surround yourself, and that's why I'm still here. That's what keeps me going. That's really cool.

Speaker 3 45:54

Bobby, thank you so much. Really appreciate all of your stories and thanks so much for it.

Speaker 1 46:00

You know, thinking about all this stuff. And I'm really excited about what you're doing. I think this is gonna be a really important contribution.

Speaker 3 46:08

Well, it's so fun to talk to so many great, amazing people. And yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you. All right.

Speaker 46:16

Thanks for tuning in to the Scientess Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow on your favorite podcast app. It helps more curious minds like yours discover the show. You can find additional bonus content and make a donation to help support the show on our website, www.scientess.org. That's S-C-I-E-N-T-E-S-S. You can also follow us on Instagram at @scientesspodcast. We'd love to hear from you with comments, questions, or suggestions for future interview subjects. Drop us a line at scientesspod at gmail.com. The Scientess Podcast is supported in part by the Seattle branch of AAUW, the American Association of University Women, supporting women and girls in the Seattle area since 1908. Note that this podcast is not affiliated with the University of Washington, and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Washington. We'll catch you in the next episode.