Posted on by mamothena · 2 Comments

Smoothie tips for the academic blender

I am a blender. And no I don’t normally take my fruit and vegetables in liquid form. But an academic blender.  Combining into one research project at least a couple of different disciplines, trying to find better solutions to problems in maternal health in my case.  And I have been thinking about what it really means to be an interdisciplinary researcher, lately.  Doing interdisciplinary research as one person, as opposed to a team, puts you on a mental roller coaster of sorts. Trying to make the shifts and bends needed to think in two different ways, and blend two different schools of thought to make one coherent thesis.

interdisciplinary-learning
Interdisciplinary thinking: Blending the compartments. (source: socialsciences.cornell.edu)

 

I built my epidemiology and biostatistics graduate education on an anthropology and natural sciences foundation. For my PhD project, I maintained some elements of epidemiology while for the first time I decided to delve into health systems and policy research.  I adopted an interdisciplinary framework of life-course health development to help me investigate the extent to which the health system and the “social” environment would really impact maternal health. I don’t mind interdisciplinary thinking because it is more satisfactory for me. But it means I had to basically gain new expertise. This is great and will make me a stronger candidate, but it also means that much more work when I am doing these paradigm shifts from deductive to inductive reasoning.

I am hoping that at the end of my PhD I will be a different person, able to reduce things to numbers and testable hypothesis but capable of meaningful interpretation at the same time. I will probably be hard pressed to articulate what my “specialization” is but hopefully interdisciplinary scientist or some other such thing will suffice. Hopefully I will develop some dexterity between my chosen specializations, and develop my own which serve my goal best: to do actionable research highly relevant to the society I am in.

 

Interdisciplinary quote
I sure hope not! (Source: quotefancy)

 

But that is in the future. In the meantime, I have to constantly strategize on how best to go about my research. At the moment, after spending a lot of time on qualitative work, I have to shift gears and think about the quantitative aspects of my work. That means I set aside my thinking about all of the nuances of context, processes, complex interrelations of things with one another within the health systems paradigm. Now I have to isolate “factors” from this complex milieu, transform them to valid, measurable entities and investigate hypothesis of what influences what. I already have to anticipate how these “independent factors” will actually translate back into my relativism-heavy earlier work and make a coherent story.  It feels like a lot of work waiting for me.  And in the end, the product of my interdisciplinary work has to be a nice-tasting smoothie that both positivist and relativist[1] thinkers can somewhat enjoy. So, how to do that?

interdisciplinary smoothie
source: MThai

 

I quickly summarize what I have been thinking and reading so far:

  1. Choose your fruits and vegetables wisely.

A basic awareness of the epistemological orientation of each of your disciplines, with all their “pros” and “cons” is necessary. This helps with the validity of your work within each paradigm, but also helps you figure out what it is you are really contributing at the higher, theoretical level.

  1. ¾ fruits, ¼ vegetables. Or vice versa?

Then there is the question: How “much” of each discipline are you injecting into your research project? In the beginning I thought my work would have a heavy quantitative lean, because that’s what I was invested in. But the qualitative stuff have taken a significant space now that I realized how much deeper I had to delve, in order to have a truly mixed, interdisciplinary output. I don’t think it will ever be 50/50 and this depends on the background and interests of the interdisciplinary researcher. But it seems inevitable that with interdisciplinary research, one side will always “suffer”.

  1. What taste and texture?

It is needless to say that not all research projects need be interdisciplinary.  The goal of research is to answer questions and come up with solutions.  So the goal very much dictates the approach.  The taste and texture you want from your smoothie dictates the fruits and vegetables you choose, and how much of each. In the final analysis, I still have to be cognizant of what the overall goals of my thesis were. And sometimes re-evaluate how to blend the different analytical methods and frameworks to tell a coherent story.  If I spend a lifetime as an interdisciplinary researcher, I hope to be competent enough to correctly predict how things will go together before commencing a project.

  1. What do you wanna call it?

Any good smoothie needs a nice, catchy and descriptive title. Something that captures the essence of what you are. Some people are microbiologists, others epidemiologists, mathematicians. How will I characterize my research at the end of it? Titles are important, because they are a window for other people to see what you have to offer. They affect how you see yourself and the opportunities you go after. For smoothies, a Sun Salutation, Nutty Date or Radiance may sound nice 🙂 . But upon closer look, you might wanna decide if you want cayenne pepper, hemp or “bee pollen” in your drink. So how to describe my research in a meaningful way when I’m out there in the world? I’m still figuring that one out…

[1] Natural scientists typically fall into the “positivist” category, while humanities scholars tend towards relativism. But there are in betweens, and things aren’t always straightforward. See this robust discussion on the complexity of the issue.

 

 

Posted on by Loosely Translated · 1 Comment

Women STEM from a special place: community

“Let us choose for ourselves our path in life, and let us try to strew that path with flowers.” I really like this quote from Émilie Du Châtelet, a natural philosopher, physicist, mathematician and author, who is well known for translating Newton’s Principia into French, her advocacy of Newtonian physics and contributions to Newtonian mechanics. This quote, I believe, was aimed at women in science, but it has meaning to me too, as a man. When I think about this quote, I believe Émilie is asking us to choose our own path, own it and give it our own personal touch, with flowers. (If you don’t like flowers, it could be something else, like a collection of mini Star Wars Lego figurines…)

The 11th of February was International Day of Women and Girls in Science. This day was declared, by the UN, to improve gender equality, empower women and give full and equal access to science for women and girls. There were two trending hashtags on the day, #WomeninSTEM and #Womeninscience, which I followed quite closely in anticipation of writing a blog piece on women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). I read a number of blogs, tweets, articles and stories about new and old science and the contributions women made and continue to make across the globe. It was interesting and I learned a lot.

It got me looking at the people around me. I realized that I am quite lucky that I get to work with and study under a number of incredible female scientists who are always publishing (well) and contributing (significantly). Our newly formed department, the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology, recently had a research day to share ideas, research and promote collaboration. Of the 40 speakers/PIs who presented on the day, 20 of them were females.

What really moved me about the 11th of February was the coming together of a community. Women scientists, from around the world, famous or not, participated in this day to promote women and STEM. My Twitter feed was filled with stories about amazing scientists, their wonderful science, the challenges they faced, their hopes and dreams; and the amount of encouragement for those trying to make their way in STEM, inspiring! Those hashtags still popup today; it’s like its women in STEM day every day! Amazing!

Many women in STEM followed paths that chartered new territories, while often they were vocal about not making these discoveries/breaking boundaries only for themselves. In some cases, the discoveries changed the world, while the women themselves were hidden away.

One of the more touching stories that stuck with me was that of Alice Ball (1892-1916). She was an amazing scientist. In her short life, she received two degrees from the University of Washington for pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy; published a 10-page article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, which was quite rare for a woman at the time; and got a Master’s degree from the University of Hawaii. With the completion of her Master’s she became the first African American to graduate with a Master’s degree from the University of Hawaii. She then joined the chemistry department and, again, was the first African American chemistry professor at the University of Hawaii.

Alice BallFollowing on from her Master’s, Ball was asked to work on improving the treatment for Hansen’s disease (leprosy). Many had tried to modify the traditional treatment, the oil from the chaulmoogra (Hydnocarpus wightianus) tree, to treat leprosy but could never get consistent results or overcome the unpleasant side effects. Eventually, Ball isolated the ethyl ester compounds from the fatty acids in the oil, which meant that it could now be used in an injection to treat the disease more consistently without the side effects. The isolation technique or “Ball method” was the preferred treatment for leprosy for nearly two decades, until 1940.

Unfortunately, Ball passed away before she could publish her work and it was completed and published by the then-president of the University of Hawaii. He proceeded to name the technique after himself, and with time, all of Ball’s achievements were forgotten. It was not until the 1970s that her life was investigated, the truth uncovered and her legacy re-established. Alice’s path will always be remembered for challenging the status quo.

Like Ball, there have been many other firsts for women in STEM. Marie Curie (1867-1934), a polish physicist and chemist, was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, after her win in physics in 1903. She was also the first person to win one again for chemistry, eight years later. She was also the first woman professor at the Sorbonne. In 1992, Mae Jemison, an American engineer, physician and NASA astronaut, became the first African American woman to travel in space, nine years after Sally Ride—the first women in space. Jemison’s passion doesn’t only lie in science but people. She is a crusader for women’s rights and civil rights and was inducted into both the National Women’s Hall of Fame (1993) and the International Hall of Fame (2004).

Much was written and shared about these three brave women on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science; I hope that they are still being spoken about after that. (Well, at least in this blog they are). While both Ball and Curie began paving the way for women in the early 1900s (and inspiring more today), Jemison is one of the many brave women still leading the charge for STEM. She is inspiring young women to reach beyond the stars, advocating for more people to start careers in STEM and is always fighting to bridge the gap of gender inequality.

There are many other examples that I could write about, but I would encourage you to discover them for yourselves. They can teach you a lot about your career, passion and life. To end off, Marie Curie once said:,

“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.”

We should learn to be more like the women in STEM community to help and develop others, both in STEM and those who will benefit from STEM — society. In doing so we should follow our own paths, making it our own.