I am a cross-disciplinary expert. Combined understanding of Scientific Computing, Computational science, Design, Data Science, 3D modeling, and 3D spatial-dynamics is a gateway to new inventions in tech, and a pre-cursor to the new field that I am building. To insult me on my face suggesting incompetence and to deny me opportunities for jobs all the while taking credit for my work behind my back, suggests professional dishonesty and inferiority complex.
Everyone who supports this conduct – silently or vocally, intentionally or unintentionally – serves as the bottleneck to the problem of pipeline, prosperity and opportunity for careers of capable women in STEM.
When RZ thinks of scientists in terms of himself and other stereotype scientists, he admits that 3-dimentional spatial thinking is a key scientific understanding, which is perceived to be a male skill in the literature. However when he superimposes the same 3-dimentional visuo-spatial work to have been done by me, he has extreme trouble admitting that I am good at my job – his attitude changes and subsequently 3-dimentional spatial thinking and understanding is reduced to scientifically unimportant skill. This is an example of Disparate treatment.
Here is a fun fact. I could envision and design that model in its entirety because I have strong 3D spatial-dynamics skills. In my head, I see the world in terms of motion, I see how things move and fit against each other, and protein folding at nano-scale has been a perfect use-case for that ability. Experts would agree that I have implemented that vision with finesse in the end-product Peppytide – and I know this because I get regular emails from experts and labs telling me that the model would be useful to their research, and asking how they might procure one from me.
A mathematical study of form (geometry, topology, fractal, higher dimensions) needs to go hand-in-hand with study in physical models of forms in their various dynamic states. I think this is an inevitability. Whether we can formalize such physical models is at the core of my research exploration. Formalization in lieu of unexpected and seemingly impossible concepts has led to many new explorations in the past. For example, Boole formalized logic (i.e. everyday conversation) into Boolean Algebra that gave way to Mathematical Logic, and eventually to developments in computer hardware and software as we know today so that we can talk to computers in their languages. Mandelbrot developed fractals that algorithmically formalized clouds, trees, mountains, coastlines and signal noises. Fractals also gave rise to better on-chip tiny antennas that all cell phones, computers and TVs now have instead of the chunky antennas we used to have on rooftops. These in turn gave way to new branches of mathematics.
To understand the level of complexity of my work, try to imagine 100 connected atoms (each about 2 Ångstroms) in motion in space all at once, some exhibiting planar one-directional motion, some exhibiting a 3d solid-angle rotation of 360 degrees, while others moving as a group with respect to each other and clashing spatially at certain configurations. The key here is the relational movement. While the solution looks trivial and simplistic after looking at the model, I had to solve it from void. Which means, I had to imagine this complex relational movement in my mind to initiate the design process, and even with longer chains like 1000-2000 atoms to see how they would pan out for secondary and tertiary structures. There are too many spatial constraints and degrees of freedom occurring simultaneously. I then assimilated all these inner visions into my work. Computational modeling and mathematical modeling of such systems need the same kind of spatial understanding to begin with. This is not an easy task or a low-hanging skill (in fact, it is proven that visuo-spatial skills play an important role in mathematical thinking). There is a reason that Protein Folding Theory is an active area of research where scientists are still looking for the exact solution and the exact theory (To get a feel of the cutting-edge status of the topic, you could take a look at the CASP competitions).
But few years later, the credit for my work had been completely hijacked.
As it works in STEM community, proper credit is the currency of a STEM career and a door to future job opportunities, which motivates early-researchers to keep working despite long hours, all-nighters, no weekends, no job security and a generally low salary. The compensation is the bait of good jobs and opportunities that exploitative supervisors dangle over abused overworked researchers under them in academia. If these junior research positions do not come with a support to get the desired next opportunity for next-gen scientists who are working IN somebody’s lab – supervisor role’s scope seems to be a matter of debate – then these positions are just 3-5 years of temporary, low-paid, high-skilled labor of research work, used, abused and fired. That would be pretty careless to next-gen. I want the scientific and academic community to reflect on this truth and its repercussions. We already know the sad case of the grad student John Brady’s suicide case at UW Madison because of PI-bullying and intimidation.
Further, to deny someone credit for their scientific work, is to deny a part of their true, deferred compensation. I consider this as an abuse of human labor. Especially with the silencing, it has to be a serious problem. It is a part of the job of a lab-head to understand how to properly credit someone’s work, especially if mentoring young researchers is within that person’s job responsibilities. Using someone’s work with the excuse of “am the PI” and with an overarching, ambiguous, self-shifting “we” is unacceptable. Plus more importantly, it is a part of the job for the institute itself to make sure that the lab-heads are not confused about what their role is or isn’t.
The matter of grave concern with the above toxic attitude is that these are the people who are constantly training the next generation of researchers in their ever-replenished huge labs. So it is not okay if they are confused about their roles as mentors. Likewise, they cannot be careless or carefree about their responsibilities regarding their mentees’ professional growth.
Here is an opinion blog from eLife about the positive roles mentors play behind successful careers: Assessing the quality of mentorship in research environments.
Further, federal government spends $$$/yr to advance careers of girls in stem. Plus there are private donations too. Imagine how much toxic mentors cost us as a society. Toxic mentors who push down their mentees in order to advance their own self, collectively cost the nation billions per year not only because they destroy lives, but also because they break pipeline linkages for contributions for years to come that could be of great use to society if they are properly nurtured or given their due chances. And of course they distort history, which then takes someone like Margaret Rossiter’s lifelong work and lifelong federal funding (by NSF) to partially undo.
It doesn’t matter whether this “am the PI” behavior has been tolerated in history. We need tools and efforts to object to such behavior at our times, of which there exists none. Talking about credits is a taboo. Either you end up with responsible, honest mentors or you don’t. And it is darn hard to prove it if your mentor is dishonest and your institute has deep systemic issues and biases. As it stands now, it is a matter of fate. It is 21st century, so we need to make the matter less probabilistic (like fate) and more causal, more deterministic (like policies). We shouldn’t leave our future scientists’ careers to luck, should we?
As my supervisor at Berkeley Lab, RZ’s actions had spanned the entire checklist of non-events for my case. This is disturbing because I had trusted him as mentor. As defined in Nature’s Laboratory life: Scientists of the world speak up for equality, non-events are about not being seen, heard, supported, encouraged, taken into account, validated, invited, included, welcomed, greeted or simply asked along. The article continues: “Non-events can be manifold. Superiors or colleagues might ignore or bypass women’s research and performance; fail to invite or welcome them to important informal and formal networks; bypass them for awards, prizes or invitations; fail to give them merit-advancing tasks such as representing the research group in public forums; not ask them to design or participate in scientific meetings, conferences, panels or as keynote speakers; or simply stay silent when it comes to career support, advice and mentoring.”
I experienced all – all! – of the above examples of non-events in addition to the deliberate omission, deliberate lack of inclusiveness, bullying, numerous manipulations, and lack of acknowledgment of my scientific leadership. RZ has made things very difficult for me, just so that he can get complete credit for my “unscientific” work.
I thought he supported me, but that is obviously a wrong impression I was made to believe so that he could grab my work.
It is shocking how much weight supervisors have on young scientists’ careers. It is time to loosen that up.
Unfortunately, evaluation by senior scientists is the only way junior scientists can prosper and progress, because this is how the system had been designed to evaluate capability in the past and present. This process generally assumes an honest and non-discriminatory evaluation, as well as a supportive mentor. This is a faulty assumption. At the very best, this is a bottleneck, and hence an inherently malfunctioning process as far as pipelines are concerned – a process for which minority women (esp. immigrants from the east) have to routinely pay with loss of their careers – and mental healths. Or with lesser salary, less prestige, and less resources at the very least. With a dishonest mentor, one’s career can go down south very fast.
Strangely I got no credit even for little things, for example, a symposium that I had organized all by myself at a top scientific conference in February of 2015 (at AAAS Annual Meeting 2015), “Emerging trends in visualizing, physical models and rapid prototyping for bio-systems.”. This is becoming a cliché to write about, but I conceived the idea, wrote and submitted the symposium proposal, and organized every other aspect of it, including choosing the speakers, inviting the speakers (I have all the emails). It was my domain of work so it was quite exciting to me. My fault was to put RZ’s name as the organizer and moderator (suggested by someone that I should do so), and myself as the co-organizer. BIG mistake. Submitted prior to when I was to have the epiphany of the big scheme, I was trying to be nice, humble and generous as always! The reward that I got for my niceness was ridiculous comments later like:
“You and Dr. Zuckermann jointly organized a symposium at AAAS. He thanked you for your work on it.”
Huh!
That was an entertaining dismissal, id est, the thankers of the world find it in their role to thank people from time to time to entertain the rest of us. Let us also recall that he thanked me in the NIH talk as well for one long second. And in those media interviews where I am invisible, unsaid. In others words, I have been, um… thoroughly thanked. Thanks to him, I am now eligible to empathize with people who were thanked 50 or 100 years ago:
Like a true talented manipulator, RZ kept changing his verbal narrative as per his need of the moment and his need to devalue me as a “grad student” was hilarious. So let me take a pause here to summarize a few of his and LBL’s written quotes with dates:
- From the email to me commenting on my work and doctoral defense (dt 3/26/14):
- “We seized an opportunity to make history together! It was a bold thing to do. … I’d say we had a major impact in a short amount of time! This does not happen very often so it is a very special thing.”
- From his email to all speakers upon acceptance of my AAAS symposium (dt 7/8/14):
- “We are very excited at this opportunity to showcase the exciting developments in the emerging field we are all creating.” (Signed as “-Ron & Promita”)
- From his email to me, apologizing after trying to throw me out of my Director’s Achievement Award (late July ’14):
- “But there is no doubt: you deserve this award and to be recognized!”
- To me, refusing recommendation letter this excuse was provided (dt 9/8/14):
- “I was also told that candidates typically have many high impact papers. So at the moment my take on this is that we are not in a good position to apply for this.”
- Berkeley Lab’s letter to me (7/14/16):
- “Recommendations for the most competitive fellowships in science are not “owed.” Dr. Zuckermann has an obligation to act in a professionally scrupulous manner and to support only those candidates whose scientific careers demonstrate that a recommendation would be appropriate and might result in a successful application. He is ethically obligated to write recommendations that are consistent with his assessment of scientific promise.”
- RZ to Scientific American in an interview about my work behind my back (dt 8/22/16):
- “The understanding I have gained from the model has been invaluable in helping me design new polymers”
Even after giving him some leeway for liberal use of “we”, is there anyone else other than me who sees a problem of consistency in the above?
If this back-and-forth yo-yo switching seems maddening, imagine that this is just a minuscale sampling from my years of dealings with him. Surprisingly, I still have my sanity, but it has deeply injured my psychology. I am still in trauma.
This manipulative, slippery, labile nature of scheming, excuses and underhandedness over an extended period took its toll on me physically and mentally. I am in constant need of treatment for the physical impact of psychological post-traumatic stress incurred over the last eight years. Five-and-half years since leaving the Lab, I am still struggling to make ends meet.
Recently I am on my way to healing mentally and physically, but this is not how it should work. The funny thing is that Berkeley Lab prides itself on safety and health, dedicating an entire division’s resources to these (Environment, Health & Safety Division). Let me be clear, by resources I mean huge amount of DoE money per year. But it has taken me almost 5.5 years (and counting) after I had left, to recover from the sustained damages of the toxic effect of the workplace bullying, psychological and other harassments and abuse. So much for a safe workplace!
Factors that contributed to my healing: There is of course the passage of time as elixir. I had to also accept and embrace the pain, both physical and mental. Had to come to terms with several aspects of being manipulated and not knowing it immediately. But the catalyst was really people – from all over the world reaching out from time to time to tell me how much they got inspired by my work. None of them knew about my hardships, but their getting inspired has inspired me back to stand up and start walking again so that I can continue doing work that is of some use to people.
However there were more barriers to overcome. While doing research-job applications when I told that I couldn’t provide a letter from supervisor, I was told that it was a red flag. Dead end.
At other applications, there were those prove-it guys. Dead end.
Interviews that I went to, asking without asking: why I left. Dead end.
Papers that I had sent out to peer review journals were weirdly rejected. In one submission, a paper was rejected based on 2 reviews with editor’s reasons like “lack of scholarly form”. Out of two reviews, one was completely blank with just the word “Reviewer 2”. Funny. Probably the entire notes went to the hidden-to-the-author section that only editors get to see. And Reviewer 1 (Guy X?) mostly said why didn’t you cite this paper by Guy X, and then proceeded to explain how great Guy X is for the rest of the review. This was from an editor-in-chief who knows my work pretty well. I have a fair idea about who those two reviewers might have been.
Here is the grand realization: It does not matter how hard I work, how good my work is, or how revolutionary the impact could be. There are people who would find reasons to deny me opportunities. My notion that merit, perseverance and hard work alone opens doors does not withstand test of time and event. In fact the better I work, the harder people work back to deny me credibility. This is because they have already decided on the outcome and need to find some filler-reasons to support their decisions. Hence these reasons keep getting more ridiculous with more accomplishments. It is thus no wonder that women are at a constant phase-lag in terms of designations and pay.
I have been browbeaten by the system to at last accept that I have to move on and look for a career elsewhere. At every step there has been a pushback. Years of this has eroded my energy and made me reckon that the bro-club will win irrespective of whatever I do. Every workday had been a struggle, every scholarly submission, every public interaction venue had been a fight. I do not have any more fire-fight left in me. I feel burnt out.
In a just world, I shouldn’t have had to experience this nuisance. I shouldn’t have had to pay for someone else’s greed for more fame, credit and accolades with some good years of my life. No STEM professional should have to go through this sort of nonsense hurdles in their careers. But stereotypes exist and keep prospering. Silent onlookers keep their silence.
I think this is a discouraging signal to youngsters who want to study computer science or chemistry (or any other STEM field). Especially for anti-disciplinary or interdisciplinary computer science, one is doubly scrutinized for knowledge in computer science as well as in the domain science. It’s a double-edged sword for women to engage in interdisciplinary work. So hybrid-experts like me are always at an extra-disadvantage. Probably the truth is that there is no department where my kind of work would totally fit in.
A lot of my current success goes to Virginia Tech’s supportive CS department. I joined Virginia Tech doctoral program in fall 2008 as the CS department seemed uniquely interdisciplinary-friendly to me – something I deeply needed and absolutely required to progress in my work. What I got as an added bonus was the strong support for women within the department that was unprecedented to me. Many within the department knew about my vision and what I wanted to accomplish. My heartfelt thanks to every faculty and friend who had a supportive ear both during and after my time there (2008-2011; graduation in 2014). I still hear back from friends saying that they remember my work and vision on molecular models.
I also like Berkeley Lab and have a lot of respect for the institute. I have a lot of nice memories from my time there. Many great minds do good work there. I also have a lot of friends from Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. I want them to grow and prosper. So it is very important for me to point out and fight for the things that need to be fixed in these places.
I am an Indian-born immigrant, and part of my experience follows from this fact. I refuse to accept the culture of American academia where you remain subservient to subculture of superstar dominance. No good can come out of that.
My story is certainly not one isolated case. Toxic attitude and environment is rampant in STEM research. Consequently, extinguished careers of early-career scientists are rampant in STEM research. Prior to my experience, all my life I had retained a belief that if I worked hard enough and accomplished things on merit basis, I would of course get the right opportunities. I believed that I could overcome any barrier however steep. It has taken an experience of super-extreme adversity and resistance to shake off that faith and to accept the reality that merit and hard work play lesser roles than stereotypes, gender, race, power and money.
The adversity might be extreme, but is quite common for women in STEM and academia. This sounds quite depressing but it’s the truth. Abuse of power is surprisingly well tolerated and covered up, though the usual lip service continues about “zero tolerance” at the higher administrative level. It reeks of a network of complicity by remaining silent in chorus.
Academia is a hushed-up world because of its strictly hierarchical nature. We need lived stories to connect the dots to make the landscape whole and to truly identify the magnitude of the problem. Such stories need to be told over and over until they are heard, if we are to make efforts to fix these issues for the next generations. I suspect many early researchers across all genders/ races/ orientations have faced such issues. At some point maybe more people would come forward with their experiences from science/ tech/ academia/ research. I know first-hand how much bravery and inner strength that takes, and can also relate to people who cannot come forward for some reason or other. I believe that there are many many stories spread across our nation in various university labs, research institutes and industry labs, waiting to be heard.
It is time we make it right, not fifty years after someone was pushed out, but from the get-go. I think credit-misplacement (and associated violent silencing) is one of the strongest reasons we see so few women in STEM top positions – and I have no doubt there is “no data” on it. This lack of data is then used over times to argue for biological inferiority and lack of merit. Not funny. So let us have the data and the stories.
First few years, I struggled with putting a name to my horror experiences, as they seemed mostly subtle, wispy, disconnected, evanescent and inconsequential – nothing you could put your hand through in order to bring out hard matter that your conscious mind would register as something. It was so subtle, but the effect so devastating that I did not know at first what had hit me. Slowly the picture emerged out of thin air as I connected the dots into clouds in my mind. Hence the story was so hard to write and is quite non-linear – constantly connecting isolated dots of behaviors back-and-forth between cross-cutting temporal curves and out of it realizing a cliqued graph of events-cum-behaviors from past and present – in order to pull out the core of the malicious-nothing: the gist of my thesis on women’s fate in science. I had to make sense out of seemingly harmless, flimsy sub-dots, and cluster them into meaningfuls, from which emerged the picture of the very alarming. Finally all fell into patterns, the contents of sub-dots repeating with astonishing predictability, once you knew what to look for and where to look for it. Now that the account is on paper in actual tangible words, it does look like something cataclysmic on young careers. Hopefully, this writeup would be of use to people who are struggling with the pattern recognition of their own experiences, which is why I needed to get into the thick of the narrative.
So now, what is this invisible beast of a weapon? It is certainly bullying, it is gender harassment, psychological harassment, abuse of power, microagression and also gender discrimination. Plus it is something else that I cannot quite summarize in one or two words, because there is no terminology for it yet. We need to find a name for it. The simple intent behind RZ’s harassment was to drive me out of my field and career, for which he used all complicated combinations of these somethings, through power-grabbing wormholes of non-sequential portals, and with thorough encouragement from scientific community. As a side effect, it certainly drove me almost out of my lifeline, from which I needed to take a hard u-turn, spanning multiple years. This generic, exploitative, yet-nameless attitude by perpetrators within the scaffold of known, systemic loopholes that let them consistently get away with it – and the resultant crippling outcome within workplaces nation-wide that drive hurricane through people’s lives, dissecting and mutilating every facet of their existence – might be one of the best pointers to the new definition of the formative construct of [gender] harassment, which in itself is the outrider of that something we are yet to name.
Update (on Dec 1, 2019): Added Link to Part 5.