Dr. Shellie

An amazing thing happened last weekend. I was in the shoe store, hunting for work shoes. It was the type of shoe store where they pay great attention to measuring your feet and describe to you in detail the technical construction of each shoe. All the shoes are ergonomically correct. I tried on a pair of suede sneakers.

"Not right," I said. "These ones don’t make me look older."

A gray-haired woman sitting nearby laughed. "Maybe you could dye your hair gray!" she said.

Another customer asked why I was trying to look older– was it for my job? "That’s right," I said. "I’m trying to look more like a professor."

"Oh, are you a professor?" asked the gray-haired woman. "So am I."

I explained that I was almost a professor, starting in the fall. We started to chat. She told me her name. I realized that she was actually a Very Important Female Professor, someone whose name I knew, who I had read about several times in our university newspaper. She showed me the shoes she was trying on.

"I’m trying to look more authoritative," she said. I found it funny (and somehow comforting) that Very Important Female Professor had exactly the same goals for her shoes as I did. We went about buying our shoes, and chatted some more. On the way out, she paused. "Email me if you want to have lunch some time," she said.

So I did.

I am really enjoying the "Up Series," a British documentary series following the lives of kids from different social classes in British society. The first film ("Seven Up!") was made in 1964, when the kids were 7. Every seven years, the filmmaker returned to film the same kids, so you see them at age 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, and 49. When the series started, the premise of the first film was that by age 7, a child’s personality and destiny are already formed by their upbringing and social class. As the series goes on, you see that while social class is very important in shaping opportunities, people’s lives can change, sometimes in dramatic ways. (I don’t want to spoil the plot here, but if you want some examples, you can read the Wikipedia page). Not just that– people’s personalities can also change quite a bit. Though certain traits remain very much the same, other traits can change completely. People’s overall happiness can change a lot in 7 years as well. Me, I quit drinking coffee a few years ago in favor of tea, so I figure that already qualifies for a major life change. Now I’m trying to become a person who leaps out of bed in the morning to go running. The other changes are harder to see from the inside. It might be fun to dig out the video camera each year and record something.

Interestingly, one of the participants in the series, Nick, is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin. At age 7, you see him running around the pastures on his farm, the only kid his age in his entire (tiny) village. At 14, he’s akward and shy, uncomfortable in front of the camera. At 21, he’s studying physics at Oxford, wondering whether he will be good enough and smart enough to do what he wants to do– have a research career in nuclear physics. At 28, he’s an assistant professor in Madison, hanging out on the Terrace and visiting the farmer’s market with his wife, Jackie. They’re talking about whether they’ll be able to balance two careers with having kids and the challenges of living so far away from their families in England. I’m halfway through the "28 Up!" film right now, and am looking forward to seeing what happens next. It’s amazing to me that the guy in the film is a "real person"– meaning someone I might actually meet someday, or who probably taught someone I know physics. It’s really cool that the people in the series volunteered for it. It can’t be completely comfortable to expose yourself to the world that way (and some of the participants did drop out part of the way through the series). But it’s amazingly interesting to see how people’s lives develop.

Here’s an interesting article. When a baby is born, it has to "learn" to see– to interpret all the shapes and colors and patterns of light and dark as recognizable objects. How does this process happen? It’s hard to test infants directly, since they can’t talk to us to describe what they are seeing and experiencing.

To understand the development of vision, Pawan Sinha, a professor at MIT, is instead studying children who "learn" to see later in life. These children were born blind, but due to poverty and lack of access to medical care, their conditions were not treated until they were older. Once the kids are treated, the researchers can watch to see the process by which their visual skills (such as color recognition, object recognition, and face recognition) develop. Unlike infants, these kids can describe what they see and so participate in extensive and detailed visual tests.

Sinha has started a comprehensive project in India to identify blind children whose condition is treatable, provide them with treatment, and then study their visual development. I think this is an interesting example in which scientific objectives and humanitarian objectives fit together well.

…not to worry, it’s not too late. There’s a fascinating article in Wired magazine on the work of University of Chicago economics Professor David Galenson. His research tracks the value of famous artists’ paintings as a function of artist’s age when painted. The conclusion? Artists can be classified* into two types: ones that peak early and then decline into old age, and those that steadily gain in productivity throughout their lives, producing their most valuable work right before death.** Of course, the article would have you believe that this trend is a universal feature of human behavior, applying equally as well to indentured servants!

*No variance on the graph shown in Wired. Intelligent comments on the statistical analysis are welcome here.

**Unfortunately, this does not imply that anyone who hasn’t done anything yet in life will be brilliantly successful later on!

This totally kick-ass woman professor I know just got denied tenure. I’m feeling pretty strongly about it. I’m not in her field, and I don’t know any of the details– so I suppose she could have head-butted the commitee chair when I wasn’t looking. But from the outside it looks BAAAAAD. Her CV has everything you are supposed to have– giant list of refereed articles, including 7 in Science or Nature, prestigious awards, successfully-graduated students. What’s worse is that she is actually a person who cares about making science a better place. She runs a mentoring program for women grad students, does K-12 outreach, and got an award for communicating science to the public– things everyone SAYS you are supposed to do, but that most people DON’T. I also know of at least two younger women who she has really helped out in one way or another. And she is friendly and laid-back and cool and had a kid in grad school (takes courage!). But no tenure.

So I just finished writing a letter to the provost of her university, saying basically this– if an amazing, successful scientist like her doesn’t get tenure, why would a young woman like me want to choose academia as a career?

Sure, tenure is a fantastic thing. Make it through this one last hurdle, and you have the freedom to do whatever you want for life. But the flip side is this: many institutions simply throw out a good percentage of their professors in the prime of their career. Sure, what people say is that if you don’t get tenure at one place, you can always go somewhere else. But what a blow– not just the feeling of getting "thrown out," but having to relocate wherever, whenever you finally get that "other job"– maybe without much choice. Makes patent law look good…