Sohini Ramachandran

Sohini Ramachandran is the Hermon C. Bumpus Professor of Biology at Brown University, where she also holds a courtesy appointment in Computer Science. She is the Founding Director of Brown’s Data Science Institute and has led programs in computational molecular biology and biological data science. Her research applies mathematical and computational approaches to understanding genetic variation, evolution, and complex biological systems.

Sohini has been recognized with numerous national awards, including a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Pew Biomedical Scholar award, and the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE). She directs Brown’s NIH T32 Predoctoral Training Program in Biological Data Science and serves as a standing member of the NIH Genetic Variation and Evolution study section. Beyond research, Sohini is celebrated for her teaching, receiving the Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship and the Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Physical Sciences.

Transcript

Speaker 2 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 Scientess.

Speaker 3 0:37

Dr. Sohini Ramachandran is the Herman C. Bumpus Professor of Biology and Data Science and Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. She was the founding director of Brown's Data Science Institute and also served as the director of the Brown University Center for Computational Molecular Biology. Sohini uses statistical and mathematical modeling techniques to study population genetics and evolutionary theory, generally using humans as study systems. In her work, she uses genetic data to infer human demographic history, and her early research examined the genetic relationships originating within people from Africa, where she showed that diversity decreases as distance from Africa increases. Among more scientific questions listed on her research website, she also lists a very basic underlying question. How does population genetics research highlight our shared humanity? For this research, Hini has received many highly prestigious fellowships and awards. She was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, has been an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and FQ Biomedical Scholar, received an NSF Career Award for her research, and was awarded a coveted Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering. While on sabbatical in 2019, she was a Natural Sciences Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden. She was also awarded the Samuel Carlin Prize in Mathematical Biology while a PhD student at Stanford. In addition to these research-based accomplishments, Sohini has also received multiple awards for her excellence in teaching at Brown University. While many of us wait for years for recognition of our scientific prowess, Sohini started early when, as a high school senior in 1998, she placed fourth in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the youngest finalist in the group. This hopefully made up for her performance at the 1995 National Spelling B, where she was knocked out of the competition for misspelling the word succidanium. S-U-C-C-E-D-A-N-E-U-M. I have to admit that I had to look up the word, which means a substitute, especially for a medicine or drug. So Heaney, welcome to the Scientist Podcast. My first question is: how did you misspell sexodanium back in 1995?

Speaker 1 2:58

Thank you so much for having me. And I am okay revisiting that trauma. I spelled it S U C C E D A N I U M. And so the terrible.

Speaker 3 3:39

Were you in the finals, or how far did you get?

Speaker 1 3:42

Yeah, so I was in eighth grade, which is the last year of eligibility in the National Spelling Bee. It was my only time there. But I think there were over 200 kids, and I was in the last 35 or something like that. It was like the fourth or fifth round. I'd spelled a few words. The extra spiciness of that story is that my older sister won the National Spelling Bee. So it was like a little extra twist for me. But that was pretty amazing. And being there was so, so cool.

Speaker 3 4:11

Extra sting, the competition with your sister.

Speaker 1 4:15

Yeah. Yeah. Did she win that year or a different year? So I was in 95.

Speaker 3 4:19

She won in 1988, and she's seven years older than me, so got it. So it seems like you took that experience and you used it to propel you forward in your career and make really good things happen for yourself. And so I'm just going to start with some sort of pretty basic questions. Can you tell us kind of how you got to where you are today and what the the arc of your career? Where did you start and did effect to end up where you are now, or how did you end up getting here?

Speaker 1 4:49

Yeah, so you mentioned already that I was in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. I was a finalist and the fourth place winner. So that was my senior year of high school. And that's a research-based competition. I was born into a family of academics. My parents were both professors. They largely taught, but also did some consulting and research and statistics at the California State University of Sacramento. So I grew up in a family that really prioritized education. My sister ended up getting an MD and a PhD, and because of the age gap, I watched her go through that. And so graduate school was highly emphasized in my family, really from the perspective just that an education helps you become kind of irreplaceable on the job market, slash gives you potential security. I don't know that my parents really wanted me to become a professor, but the life we had growing up as an immigrant family was one of incredible flexibility for them. They took a sabbatical when I was in junior high and I got to go to eighth grade in Germany, and that was a huge event in my life. So I think seeing them be able to be around for me and have summers, you know, be more flexible, and then getting to travel a bit made me interested in academia.

Speaker 3 6:07

I can certainly relate to that because that was similar to my experience.

Speaker 1 6:11

Yeah, exactly. And also I think and you might have had a similar experience, just meeting other professors when I was young. I think they were really interested in talking to me as a kid and talking to me about math problems or science problems. And I found that really fun and learned very early on about the idea that we don't know the answer to everything, everything can't be looked up in a book. And the idea that there are questions to continue working on and questions that are still open sort of fascinated me. And then my sister, who is someone who's always been the most important role model in my life, I would say, after or with my mom and dad, she actually, when I was thinking about entering the science talent search, she introduced me to Mark Feldman at Stanford. And he agreed to talk to me. I had taken like AP biology by then and calculus. And he said, if you want to come join the lab for a summer, I would like to have you. And that was a hugely formative moment for me. There were lots of great graduate students in the lab at the time who are all now professors. I have wonderful academic siblings. And when I look back on that experience, that really solidified my desire to become a professor because what happened in the Feldman lab for me that summer, and I was really just a kid, right? Is I showed up and all of these researchers, graduate students, postdocs, and Mark, they were really treating me very kindly and like a colleague. And they didn't find my questions annoying. I was learning how to program for the first time. You know, I was bothering them with a lot of questions, but everyone was really patient and interested in things I would show them. Like I'd show them results and they would sit down and say, oh, that looks really cool. Let's talk about it. And as a teenager, I think that was just really incredibly exciting to feel like I had something to contribute. And I think that kind of open scholarly community is something that I still strive to create in my own lab and in the administrative work that I've done.

Speaker 3 8:13

Well, the Feldman Lab certainly has been very productive and it seems like a lot of incredible scholars have come out of that lab. And so what you describe of the climate there doesn't surprise me that you would have such a collaborative, open sharing environment that fostered this inquisitiveness and productivity.

Speaker 1 8:34

Yeah, and I think it's really special when a lab can kind of treat everyone, no matter what their career stage is, as somebody who has something to offer and also somebody who has something to learn. And something Mark was really good at creating was a sense that there isn't seniority in the lab and that everyone is sort of an equal partner. And I think that, again, was really inspiring to me. And then the next formative intellectual experience for me, I went to Stanford and I spent some time in the lab, in the Feldman lab, but I mostly I wasn't applied, I was a mathematical and computational sciences major. It was a great degree. It's been renamed now to data science. The coursework was amazing. It was in computer science, math, operations, research, statistics, and it kept me pretty busy. But my junior year of college was when the draft sequence of the human genome was published. And so I had gotten a sense from that high school research of and watching the Feldman lab how mathematics could be used to think about biological complexity and genetics specifically. And then when the reference sequence was published, the fanfare was all about we're going to cure all the diseases, cancer will be a thing of the past. And of course, we're still working on all of that. But what I remember thinking was how is this single reference sequence going to really help us help everybody? And the idea of understanding human genetic variation, both what generates it in the past and also its implications for the future and for disease became really interesting to me. So when I was applying to graduate school, it was the beginning of bioinformatics and genome sciences as a discipline. Like those first programs were just being formed. And it was an exciting time, so exciting to me that all my friends from college who were going to the early dot com startups, like Google and Yahoo and stuff, were they telling me how cool their work was. And I was telling them, you should come to graduate school. Genome is really interesting. But yeah, those were the things I think set me on the intellectual path I'm on.

Speaker 3 10:44

Do you think that your identity as an immigrant had an impact on that perspective about the diversity of the human genome that you described?

Speaker 1 10:56

That's an interesting question. Uh maybe so. I mean, I guess I should clarify. I was born after my parents and sister came to this country, but I definitely grew up in that kind of first generation mentality. But yeah, this kind of sense of how movement influences people, how people can change their environments, but also that there's something in our genome we carry with us through migration and how does that influence who we become was very interesting to me. Also, I grew up bilingual, and so thinking about cultural transmission of environments as well as genetic transmission of traits was something interesting to me. But certainly thinking about how personalized medicine was actually going to get implemented from genomics was it seemed to me a very, very open question. And yeah, it still is interesting.

Speaker 3 11:51

And so you mentioned the publication of the first human genome. Is there something else that you can point to, or is that kind of a specific moment that solidified your interest in human genetics?

Speaker 1 12:04

I really think it was that. Yeah. Um, that combined with the happenstance of Marx mentorship. I think those were the things that really led me to this.

Speaker 3 12:16

So what excites you about your science and how has that changed over time?

Speaker 1 12:23

Well, I think one of the things that really excites me about population genetics is that the scale of the data we work with has changed so much. But our classic models are still really relevant and just over a hundred years old. So now thinking about how the data that we're generating today might help us find things the models aren't covering or predicting appropriately, or violations of the model that are more routine than we thought, is really exciting to me. So the thing that I'm getting most excited about now, which I never would have anticipated would be something I would work on, is very recent genetic history. So usually when we think about inferring human history from genomes, we think about thousands of years in the past, tens of thousands of years in the past, thinking about, as you mentioned in the intro, our origins in Africa, expansion out of Africa, maybe the transition to agriculture around 10,000 years ago. There's a lot of focus on that in ancient DNA. But now with medical biobanks that combine medical records and genetic and genomic data, we can actually start to think about the genome really as a historical document and think about like the last 10 generations, last 15 generations. And there it turns out a lot of classic models start to break down because they don't really account for how ancestral relationships like our family pedigrees can constrain evolution. And that's an area that even 10 years ago, I certainly didn't think we were going to have the data to do the kinds of studies we're starting to think about doing now. It's also maybe extra interesting to me because I married a historian. So thinking about the limitations of genetics, what it can tell us about the historical process and what it can't. I think that's another aspect of my science that has changed is I actually think the project of human genetics, and I would say my project in it for the next five years, 10 years, is to really talk about the limits of genetics for helping us achieve things like personalized medicine. You know, when should we be thinking about incorporating genetics into models of interventions? What types of traits do we really get traction on when we use genetics? And where are their confounds when we start to think about complex traits in genetics? Because that's something that the genomic era has really taught us is that traits are very complex, which in genetics means very polygenic, have mutations influencing them all along the genome. And then that means that the environment also plays a really important role in shaping traits. And so I think we need to shift as a community more into thinking about establishing the limits of what genetic variation can and can't help us do with diagnosing and treating different diseases and understanding the evolution of different traits.

Speaker 3 15:10

That's really interesting. And what you said about your husband being a historian and bringing that interdisciplinary lens to what you do is really interesting. And as an environmental health scientist, there's always that piece of thinking about the environmental conditions that are influencing us. And of course, it's an interplay between that nurture and nature.

Speaker 1 15:30

Right. I mean, any epidemiologist would say, you know, genetics isn't something that you can intervene with, so why not study the other stuff? And I totally am getting to that viewpoint now in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 15:40

Well, the underlying genetics will tell you about whether an intervention's gonna work.

Speaker 1 15:45

Right. Right, right. And there is so much in our society around just the way we talk about things being in our DNA, the way we learn about genetics in school is something a lot of people are doing really good work on. Uh, notably, a kind of academic nephew of mine, Brian Donovan, has done some beautiful work on introducing concepts of heritability and how heritability can change over time into curricula and that it can really help people relax their genetic determinism. That's something that I've started to think about more and more is this the way we're taught genetics in high school, it's like pretty cartoonish considering what we know in the genomic era now. It's still pretty Mendelian. So that's something that's shifted for me.

Speaker 3 16:30

Next question Are there ways that you might be able to point to that being a woman has positively impacted your career?

Speaker 1 16:40

Yeah, I think that well I became a scientist because I love collaborating. I see science as a collaborative enterprise, and mentoring is an important part of that, but also collaborating with my own peers. And I don't know, maybe I'm stereotyping a little bit about what it means to be a woman. But to me, an important part of my identity is my social relationships and my professional social relationships are really, really special to me. And uh when it comes to collaborating, I have very much a friends-first model. I think ideas will come, but working with friends is exciting. We can have hard conversations when we need to. We can criticize each other's ideas and like be okay. And I think also my approach to science is pretty inclusive. It's very interdisciplinary, which also means being willing to learn, being open to critique, being open to realizing things I think are new and innovative are actually whole fields of study in another discipline. So those are maybe soft skills that I think I was socialized to have as a girl and a woman, and I see as important.

Speaker 3 17:58

I will just say that other interview subjects have pointed to something similar. And similarly have also questioned, oh, I don't know, maybe this is stereotyping. But I think there might be something there. Maybe not. Who knows?

Speaker 1 18:13

This is not exactly what you're asking, but another thing that is true about me and my career is um having a mother with a PhD and a father who was very, very supportive of my mother's career and they were in the same department, they made their career decisions together. That was hugely influential in my life, in that I never thought that an academic career was out of reach for me. And it was really persisting in academia. The longer I've persisted, the more of a radicalized feminist I've become. And I see, especially as I got tenure, I think I started, and when I became a professor and I saw how students saw me in the classroom and how seeing in in biology, right, we know that you know women don't persist in the faculty ranks or in the administrative ranks in biology in proportion to the degrees that we get, right? Women get the majority of all degrees from undergraduate through all forms of graduate degrees and in the life sciences, but that's not what the most senior faculty look like. And when I started teaching at Brown, it just didn't really even occur to me. I didn't really notice the sex or the gender of my professors in college. There were very few female professors I had. I was often, because I was in a lot of these math classes, you know, one of the only women in the class. And I actually remember kind of enjoying that. I didn't think anything of it. And when I started teaching at Brown, female students would come to me and say, I haven't had a female professor at Brown in biology, or you're the first woman of color who's taught me. And I saw how important that was to them. And then I started to, well, I started to realize first, of course, how important it is to see a representation of yourself in people who are ahead of you. And I was lucky I had that at home. But yeah, that has been a feature of my life. And I guess I do think being a woman has given me a lot of opportunities throughout my career, whether it's speaking in conferences or participating on study sections. I think that need for representation has given me opportunities that I've been able to take advantage of and also help open the door for other people.

Speaker 3 20:24

Are there any examples that you could point to where there was a challenge of being a woman in science that you had to overcome? And how did you overcome it?

Speaker 1 20:35

I can think of a couple, although I would say they were challenges that also kind of intersected with my personality, which again has to do with how I was raised and things like that, stereotypical expectations of girls and women. But one I can think of is that I um what's that French saying about the thought you have on the staircase? I'm not good with the comeback, right? So this idea that there's the thought you have when you're leaving of the thing you should have said. I'm I'm not quick in most. Exactly. Yeah. And so I do think there have been a lot of moments in committee meetings and just small interactions where somebody said something that landed pretty clunkily and probably not just for me. And I really wish I had called it out early. Again, not because I think there was a lot of bad intent on their part, but just even saying, like, why is that funny? Or I don't agree with that, right? Just saying that in the moment would have been useful for everyone in the room, but especially for me, right? Because I'm still thinking about it.

Speaker 3 21:41

Yeah. How do you overcome that? Do you have ways either just internally for accepting that you didn't say what you wanted to say or preparing yourself for the next time?

Speaker 1 21:50

Yeah, I think now I am better at just asking questions. That's kind of my approach, regardless of how I'm actually feeling about something that's happening in the moment, to try to approach it with curiosity. Or just ask a question like, what did you really mean by that? Or are you we really saying this? You know, often I tell students, if they're trying to advocate for themselves, I say something that works well for me is to ask, what would I need to do to achieve that thing, or what would I need to do so you would nominate me for that award, you know, after seeing someone else get it. So sometimes I just like to frame things as questions. But I also have three kids, and my middle daughter, especially, she's very good at when we are laughing with slash at her because she's said something particularly adorable, but she might not have meant it to be funny. She has this very steely look and she says, I don't find it funny, and I love it. I keep telling her, hold on to that. It's gonna be useful as you get older. The other thing I'll say that I think back on is so my husband and I met as postdocs, and we were at different institutions, we're in different fields. At Brown, we're actually across schools because biology is in the medical school here. We've been lucky to be physically in the same place since we got married, but we had to go on the job market a lot, negotiating, and it was always challenging. But initially, I had two offers, and Brown created a visiting position for him with an assistant professor-sized salary, which was really amazing. And so that's a reason we came here. And we've been very happy here. And he's now tenured, and so we navigated with lots of interviewing and thinking we were going to leave many times, ended up with him on the tenure track and then tenured here. But when we first got the two offers, I didn't ask for more money for myself. I didn't ask for a slightly higher salary because I thought, oh, we're so lucky they're giving us two positions, and his salary is actually like a real salary. I just don't want to complicate the negotiation. Like this is enough. And I just didn't think about the percentage-based raises. I didn't think about the fact that they could have just said no. The reality is if I had asked for $8,000 more, they would have given me three and a half. And I just didn't think about the consequences. And I think that was probably a pretty gendered way of viewing it. I just saw the package and his position as part of something I was being given, as opposed to like, that's a separate situation, a separate transaction. And I also need to advocate for myself. What happened later on? I was on a big multi-PI grant and I got to look at the budget and saw where I stood amongst all my colleagues that were on this grant. And then I thought, oh, I really need to figure out how to get a raise. Because we were yeah, because we were interviewing anyway, things happened. But that is something that I would have approached differently, I think, if I had been a man.

Speaker 3 24:42

I think that women tend to be good, at least what I've heard, and again, stereotypical, but that women tend to be good at negotiating when it comes for other people, but not as much for themselves. And so it's useful to think about I'm negotiating for my family. Instead of thinking about this is something that I need for me, it's something that I need for the people who I'm supporting and for the students who I'm supporting. I'm gonna negotiate for whatever I need to support them. So thinking about things like that can be helpful. And then the other thing is, as you mentioned, parity is an easy way to get your head around. Well, why should I get less? I should get where other people are getting. I don't know what I'm worth, but I should at least be worth what the person who's just as good as me is worth.

Speaker 1 25:25

So yeah, and I just had no idea that of course they're giving me a number and there's a range and it's probably on the lower end of the range. And I just had no idea about the psychology because it was more money than I had ever thought I would make, you know.

Speaker 3 25:40

Um yeah, it's like going to buy a car, you are doing it once every few years. Okay. They're dealing with it every day. They have the upper hand. So you mentioned your husband, and then also the example that you have of your dad supporting your mom. You also mentioned um Dr. Feldman. Are there men who you have seen as allies in the success of your career?

Speaker 1 26:10

Yeah, well, those are three, three really important ones. We already talked about also my postdoctoral advisor, John Wakeley, has been an incredible advocate for me, an incredible intellectual interlocutor. He's on a large grant, the subject of which I was drawn to because of my postdoc work with him. So we're going to start working together again, which I'm very excited about. Something that really helped me in my career was that as I transitioned to becoming a faculty member in 2010, when I left his lab and Harvard, he became chair of organismic and evolutionary biology. And that was incredibly helpful to me because when there were periods I was negotiating or just thinking about career moves I wanted to make, even just in my field, things I wanted to do, but also as Jeremy and I were working on the two-body problem, I had him as a sounding board and his view as a chair of a department of okay, here's when you tell your chair you were interviewing somewhere, or here's what the chair is thinking when they're going to the dean. And that was really, really helpful. And then another important male advocate and collaborator in my life is Noah Rosenberg. He's my academic sibling. He was in graduate school when I was in college in the Feldman lab. And then when he started as postdoc and I started graduate school, he went to USC. We started collaborating closely. And he's just an incredible scientist, but also I have been lucky to have mentors academically who were at very different career stages. And I think that was so helpful for me having Mark be so senior. John got tenure just a couple years, probably before I joined his lab, or he was mid-career for sure at that point. But he had just transitioned recently to tenure. And then Noah being kind of one PhD cycle ahead of me really helped me understand the job market in different ways, understand grant writing and advising and having these different perspectives on just the mechanics of being a scientist and growing a lab has been really influential. And Noah and I have also recently started collaborating on different special issues, reflecting on classic papers in our field and history of science projects about the genomic era and also some actual science. So yeah, that's been really amazing.

Speaker 3 28:29

Now you're in a position of either being an older sibling or having your children in academia. What's your favorite piece of advice to pass on to others who are trying to succeed in academia?

Speaker 1 28:45

Well, I think one thing I like people going into academia, specifically into science, to think about into maybe I'll say experimental science, is that in some sense being a scientist with a lab, you know, as a professor in university, you know that in some period, and the length of that period is going to vary depending on the discipline, but in some period, the techniques that you are well versed in become totally obsolete. And you sort of need to embrace that and believe that what you transition into having to offer is a lot of intuition and understanding of the history of the field, the ability to see the bird's eye view of the projects, to pivot, to recognize opportunities when they come. I think it is really hard when that transition happens. It can be very emotionally hard. Like a silly example, but a reality of my work is when I was in college, I learned how to program in C. I'm a very good C programmer. I did a lot of Perl, which now it's kind of silly to think back that we there was a period where we all thought Perl was the next language before Python was really popular. I'm like a B plus, maybe B minus, actually, Python programmer. Python 2B plus programmer, Python 3 B minus programmer. But while I might not be able to actively debug my students' code the way I would like, I still have a lot of intuition when I look at the output to say, okay, I think there's a bug here. Or okay, I think this makes sense.

Speaker 3 30:20

And some ways that might actually be better because you don't have to get mired in the details.

Speaker 1 30:25

Yeah, I think so. And yeah, I think just understanding that transition is coming is important. I also think a joy for me of being an academic is the multifaceted nature of the career and that you get to choose to lean into different parts of it at different times, especially post-tenure. And so I think the other piece of advice is in the beginning, it does feel like you have to kind of do it all, but you also can have seasons, you can have a few years where you really focus on service in your field and grant writing, or where you become more reflective, or where you totally pivot in a new direction, or where you decide to lean into teaching or something, right? So all these things can happen. And I think that's really special. I don't know another career, but I think we're very lucky.

Speaker 3 31:12

I often think that there's a lot of similarities between science and art. There's a lot of creativity, and in some ways, that is a characteristic of art. Like you're used to seeing artists say, okay, now I'm doing this project, and I have my installation, I have my exhibit, and then I'm gonna do a totally different project. And we're used to that from artists. But while that is happening, like you described for scientists, the perception is not of that for scientists, even though that's kind of what we do.

Speaker 1 31:40

Yeah, and I love that you say that because actually my husband's family has a lot of artists, painters and photographers and poets. And it's been really interesting to me to talk to them about similarities in the way we do our work. Because there is this mandate for creative innovation, right? And we're all trying to be creative and bring something new to the conversation in our field. But there's also a business side to it and a learning side to it, a craft piece to it. There's a networking piece to it. And I think there are a lot of similarities.

Speaker 3 32:11

There's a self-promotion piece.

Speaker 1 32:12

Yeah, exactly. Right. We all need to do it, right? Right. And, you know, with lots of disciplines, but I think with these two in particular, it's a mistake to think that being a scientist just means going to your desk and like doing science every day is so many other things. But trying to keep that at the center and accepting that it's going to change over time, I think is that's probably the biggest piece of advice. The other piece of ad I don't know, it's not advice, but it's an observation. I think one thing that really helped me in my career and my family, my parents, but I do see shifting a lot is academia does still have this reality that you need to go where the jobs are. And I was lucky that I was willing to live anywhere. Like any college town seemed great to me. I would have been very happy in lots and lots of places. Seeing my parents move to a new country and they had lived in Chapel Hill, in Athens, Georgia, then they settled in Sacramento. Seeing that, I felt like, oh, I could move anywhere. And that's one thing I see in students today, and I can understand it's socially more of a challenge in our country today. Everybody doesn't necessarily want to live everywhere. So that is something that I think makes an academic career a little challenging if you're not willing to move wherever the work could take you.

unknown 33:28

Yeah.

Speaker 1 33:28

But I think universities can be great places wherever they're situated.

Speaker 3 33:32

Yeah, and there are also opportunities that are not academic. Yes. Classic university academic that can be very great careers as well for people of science backgrounds who want to stay where they are. Need to stay where they are. So you talked about your husband and you both being academics. How do you balance that? And you also have three children. How do you balance that? What are your life hacks for getting through the day, even?

Speaker 1 34:05

Yeah. Well, first, we are just so, so lucky that we're in the same institution. We can walk to work, our kids can walk to school. Our youngest is still in daycare, but it our life has a very small geographic radius, which is incredible for us. Jeremy and I, we can't really do this by design because we're in different departments, but we've been here for 15 years. And I think only one semester, maybe two, we taught at the same time. So when push comes to shove, if children are sick, we can still show up and teach our classes, which is incredible for us. And I think we benefit so much from the fact that we have been able to end up tenured at the same institution because we talk about a lot of things. We both influence each other a lot in terms of our research and the way we see the world. But it's also fun to be able to talk about each other's departments and ask for advice and say, oh, I'm experiencing this in this class. What would you do? And it's really fun and really helpful for us. So we're very lucky. And it really makes life more vibrant that we share this journey together. I also just find his work really inspiring because I could not be in a book field. I like I hate papers. By the time I submit them, I need to let go of them, let them go out in the world. And I sort of love the idea of scientific publishing to me, is again, it's like contributing to a conversation, doing the best work you can in that moment. But as I often say to my lab, in some sense, my hope is like our work becomes obsolete in five to ten years because it means that the field has moved on and we learned something new, right? It's like we did our best, but now we know something new. Um, whereas I don't, I could not write a book. I would not be able to do it. I would not be able to let go of it and feel like it was done. So he really influences my writing a lot, which is wonderful. In terms of life hacks, well, you know, they say spending is a reflection of values. We value childcare a lot. Uh we have always had wonderful babysitters from when our oldest, who's now almost 13, was three months old. We started getting babysitters. We did infant daycare. We love our daycare. This is our last year at our daycare after almost 13 years there. It's gonna be a big transition. Yeah, before care, aftercare sitters who pick up and drop off. We've been very lucky to have really wonderful people in our life and wonderful daycare institutions and schools that our kids have thrived at.

Speaker 3 36:27

I like the way you frame that is that it reflects your values because you do when you invest in childcare, you're watching the money come in and then watching it go back out the door. But it, as you said, sort of reflects your value of it's really important for you to be getting to do this work and you get to go to work every day, and that's what it enables you to do, right?

Speaker 1 36:50

Yeah, and I think that there was a moment, I don't know how old my oldest was, but let's say she was eight or nine, and I was going to work for a dinner or something. We were home and then I was heading back out, and she said, You're always working. And I said, you know, I love my job and I'm so lucky. I'm so lucky that I get to do it. In that moment, I was able to not give in to guilt or something. And and I I remember her thinking, like, oh, that's kind of cool. And I think it is such a privilege to have a job that feels exciting and rejuvenating, and I just want my kids to see that. And sometimes that means having them see that I have to be somewhere else, right? And to know that there are other people who love them and can help care for them as well. But now it's also really fun to be able to sometimes take them with me. We're lucky at Brown, we have a really incredible dependent care travel fund benefit. So um, yeah, I've taken my kids to amazing conferences with me or taken them when I've given seminars, and then maybe I'll add on a couple days if we're in a fun city like Nashville or LA or something, and we'll get to do something together. But they'll come to my talks or come to my sessions, and I really love that.

Speaker 3 38:04

One thing that I tell my kids sometimes is, yeah, I'm going to work. And one of the things I want to share with you is that I am because I also have two girls, and that I'm doing this so that I can set an example for you, that you also can do what it is you want to do, and that you don't feel like you have barriers.

Speaker 1 38:24

I'm always telling my kids my hope for them is that they get the privilege to have a job they love spending time at. And that it's a joy to feel good on Monday morning and feel good going home Friday evening. Sometimes my husband and I joke because of the three kids. Our kids are pretty spread out. So we have 12 and a half, nine, and four and a half. And when we get to work in the morning, you know, it's three kids, three different schools, everyone's fed, everyone's dressed. I feel like we ran a military campaign. And it means when I come to work and sit down at my desk, it's like, oh, this wonderful, like we accomplished something and now I get to work. And I do think that has been a very positive feedback loop in my life. The joy of the quiet of work, which is different from the wonderful chaos that we love at home. One of my favorite life hacks, which I never thought about, is that I love to cook, but getting food on the table every day. We eat pretty early. We eat at 5 30. So when everyone's home, a dinner has to be on the table right away. I often cook dinner first thing in the morning. So I'll get up at like 5:45 or 6, so I'll get ready, and then I'll make um Indian food or pasta pasta sauce. The house will smell like garlic and onions and stuff, but it'll all be ready so that in the evening we're ready to eat. And that's something I never thought I would have to do, but it turns out to be great and make things a lot easier. And sometimes I can also get some of the food in for lunch that day, so it can it can help.

Speaker 3 39:54

So how do you draw boundaries on what you will and won't say yes to?

Speaker 1 40:02

That's changed a lot over time. I used to say yes to everything, everything, everything, everything, which was great early in my career. Like I said, you know, earlier, I think I got a lot of opportunities and saying yes to them helped me a lot in my career. It took me a long time to feel like I could say no to things. I have a few approaches. I did for a while when I became a center director. I started working with an executive coach, which helped me think a lot about saying no to stuff. Um, so she was sort of a sounding board, and I could say, should I like even granularly in the moment, should I say yes to this? When I was a pre-tenure, I used to just use the phrase, I have to ask my chair, even if I didn't ask. And then that just creating that pause was helpful. What if it was your chair asking you to do something? I know, right? Yeah. No, then I would say yes, probably. But now I think I have a lot more of a sense of the opportunity cost that saying yes now means. And also, I guess the flip side of that, right? So when I was younger, I was worried about this. If I say no, I'm never gonna get asked again. And now I know I will get asked again. In fact, I will definitely get asked again. And so it feels like less of this trade-off of it's either yes now or no forever. It's not. And I wish I had learned that earlier, that these opportunities weren't just gonna manifest once and then disappear forever. But that helps me a lot. And I don't have any hard and fast rules around, you know, I'll only travel this number of days or I'll only do this many evening things. We kind of just take it season by season. But now I'm also in a place where my health, the family comes first. If I have to cancel something or reschedule, I'll do it. And again, realizing that that's okay, right? That you can have a seminar scheduled somewhere and then something comes up, like a medical procedure, and maybe it's routine, but you still want to be there to support a family member, and you can push it out six months and it's fine, and no one's gonna be upset, or you can cancel the sky's not gonna fall. The sky's not gonna fall. Being there for your kids' play is really important, but also trusting that there isn't gonna be a single decision that's gonna like irreparably harm my career. I definitely worried about that somehow early in my career, and I don't as much now.

Speaker 3 42:28

Um probably was more important earlier in your career than it is now. Maybe so. Maybe so. I know that you're an avid knitter, so you can talk about that, but also what do you do for fun? What do you do to treat yourself?

Speaker 1 42:43

Yeah, a lot. But knitting is a big one. I do love to knit. I go to definitely one, maybe two knitting circles a week. I have friends, actually, three, um, three sort of knitting blocks on my calendar. I also work out a lot. I started working out with a personal trainer just over a year ago, which has been an amazing addition to my life. I take a Pilates class each week. I do personal training twice a week. I run twice a week. I run with a colleague. I have two colleagues I run with, and that's really fun because we talk about work while we're running. We ask each other for advice. We co-advise some people too, so we'll talk about them while we're running. But that's really enjoyable. I love to cook and bake as well. And yeah, otherwise, I would say mostly hang out with the family. We have a dog, spending time walking the dog. Yeah, that's a lot of extracurricular activities.

Speaker 3 43:37

By my count, you're exercising quite a bit most days and going to a lot of knitting circles. How do you find time for all that? Well, I stepped down from administration.

Speaker 1 43:48

That helps a little bit. But yeah, I think on the one hand, time is the only zero sum game, right? In some existential sense. I think in a Last few years thinking about that and just thinking about what I really value, I try to touch on everything I value as much as I can over the course of a few days. And so what that means is the biggest priority in my calendar at work is my time with my trainees. They come first and I want to make sure I'm spending a lot of time with them. I have multiple meetings with all of them. Usually there's like a collaboration or a project-based meeting and then a shorter, like one-on-one meeting. We have lab meeting as well. Now more administrative meetings are shorter, maybe less frequent. I used to, if I was meeting with an undergraduate concentration, what we call majors at Brown Advisee, I used to set aside an hour and now it's like 20 minutes. I know we can do this quickly. So yeah, feeling okay pushing out meetings that are less key to the research is important and constraining some of the more urgent things. Like now I've been lucky, my teaching is pretty stable. I've taught the same courses for a while. So my prep is pretty low. So just not worrying about taking up too much time with that. And babysitters are a part of this. Both Jeremy and I kind of agree that okay, there are going to be certain mornings or certain evenings where one of us is at home, the other one's doing this other thing that's really important for them personally, and that makes us better partners, better people, and better parents. So we've just really transitioned into helping each other take time for what we value and then keeping time for ourselves too.

Speaker 3 45:28

I think implicit in what you're talking about is it's a really key lesson that not everybody implements, which is really taking your calendar and dividing it up and doing it by the things that you find most important. And that is a skill that is something that may or may not come naturally to people, but it's certainly a learnable skill.

Speaker 1 45:48

Yeah, I mean, I think the thing I still struggle with a lot with that is it's a very learnable skill. What I struggle with is keeping some time free for just me to think, me to read. So that tends to come less frequently than I would like, or maybe sometimes more in the evening after the kids are in bed, which is not my best thinking time. But that also, again, it's a season, right? So maybe during this semester it's a little more that way. And then next semester I'll reprioritize. But yeah, time blocking is really, really important and something I came to only in the last couple of years, but it's definitely, definitely made my days feel more fulfilling.

Speaker 3 46:31

Yeah. And then the things you didn't get done, you decided that you weren't prioritizing them. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So our last question, which we ask everybody, is if you were not a scientist, what would you do with your time?

Speaker 1 46:47

This is a hard one for me because there is a part of me that would love to like run a pie bakery. So I just really love baking and cooking and sometimes yearn for, I mean, I guess I do do a fair amount of crafting, but working with my hands or working on my feet is something I sometimes yearn for. But I honestly, the truth is if I weren't a scientist, I think I would be an academic in a different discipline. I used to think I wanted to be an economist when I was younger or a legal scholar. I think that the chance to just continue to get to be a student in many ways and to learn and also to teach, to mentor, and to be in a long game. That's what I love about academia, because I think one of the things that drew me to it is basically from the moment I started grad school, partly because of how population genetics is as a field, but partly a big part because of the way Mark structured the lab. I felt like I worked mostly for myself and was really independent. And I could push on projects as hard as I wanted. I could push past what probably a supervisor in for sure in industry would be like, no, stop. This is not going anywhere. And I think we really need that in society. We need the kind of long game of academia for innovation, just like we need industry for innovation. There are just different time horizons that make innovation possible. And I think I like that the freedom that you get when you're not trying to meet a quarterly bottom line or something like that of really trying to approach problems in different ways and try a lot of things that might fail. So, yeah, that's my an interesting answer.

Speaker 3 48:32

That's a pretty awesome answer because it means that you love what you do. I do. Yeah, that's pretty great. All right. Well, thank you so much, Sohini. This has been really a great conversation, and thanks so much for taking the time.

Speaker 48:47

Oh thank you. It's been really fun. 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@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.