Season 1 |
Episode 7: Transformative mentoring and mentee-ing with Dr Maria Elena Zavala
[00:00:00] EMILIA: You're listening to Science Wise, the podcast designed to inspire people embarking on a career in science through conversations that will feel like talking with your wisest auntie.
[00:00:09] RORI: Who just so happens to be a badass scientist. I'm Rori.
[00:00:13] EMILIA: And I'm Emilia. We're two scientists on a mission to make the world of science more welcoming and to amplify the contributions of women.
[00:00:21] RORI: Imagine a wonderful mentor. Someone who not only creates an environment where students grow But someone who does her own learning to better understand the students different experiences. Someone who gives students information about the landscape they're entering without telling them what to do.
That mentor is Dr. Maria Elena Zavala. Dr. Zavala studies plant developmental biology as a full professor at the California State University Northridge, or CSUN. She received her PhD at UC Berkeley. Where she was the first Latina to graduate from the botany department. At CSUN, she developed and created programs to diversify and increase participation in science, which have had a huge impact on creating science research opportunities for students.
For her success in mentoring and inspiring developing scientists, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. A year later, she was named one of the top 100 most influential Hispanics in the United States by Hispanic Magazine.
She was the first Chicana president of the Society of the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, SACNAS. Today, Dr. Maria Elena Zavala shares with us her wisdom and her journey in science.
We are so happy to have with us today Dr. Maria Elena Zavala, Professor at California State Northridge. She is a trailblazing plant scientist and she is a, you know, air quotes, first Latina on so many fronts. First with a PhD in botany, as a fellow of multiple scientific societies. All the while, she's maintained a focus on making sure she wasn't the last.
She's led so many student programs and organizations and was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. So, Dr. Zavala, while you were doing all of this active scientific and mentoring work, you had an additional impact on a particular scientist. I am working with a wonderful postdoc right now, uh, who's designing methods, quantifying accuracy, applying them to ancient DNA and forensic genetic context, and when she was in high school, she decided to do a Google search on her own name, and I'm telling you this, Maria Elena because her name is Elena Zavala.
So what came up was you. You came up when she Googled her name, Dr. Maria Elena Zavala. And that was the first time that she saw Dr. in front of something very close to her name, and it was the first time she considered that someone like herself, with her name, could go and have a PhD and be a practicing scientist.
And, you know, that became her goal, which she achieved. So this is one tiny example of how just you being yourself and being excellent at what you do has inspired and motivated so many other scientists. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:03:11] M.ELENA: Well, you're very welcome. I'm honored to be here. And that was really, if you could see me, I'd be blushing.
You hope that you serve a purpose in your life. And, um, that just made it for me.
[00:03:22] RORI: Oh, one of many, many.
[00:03:25] M.ELENA: But you never know. You never know.
[00:03:27] EMILIA: I know the postdoc and I didn't know the story, Rori. So it's really nice. I want to talk a little bit about your upbringing and about your family life when you were a kid.
[00:03:38] M.ELENA: Sure.
I had a, I had a really, mostly a very fun childhood because it was still the time of freedom. So, you know, playing stickball with friends or, and I'm number four. out of six kids. And so I had the benefit of older siblings who had managed to navigate through the school system. My mother and dad were in the same school system, but when they went to school, it was segregated.
So Mexicans couldn't go to the white school. My city, La Verne, California, was the orange capital of the United States. Um, in the early, in the 20s, 1920s to I don't know when, 40s, something like that. It was also one of the main headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah.
[00:04:22] RORI: Wow.
[00:04:23] M.ELENA: So it was, it was clearly segregated.
Also, you know, so if you're a Protestant, You could live in certain areas. If you were Catholic and white, you lived in another area. You just couldn't buy homes, uh, in certain places. So many layers. Yeah, my mom and dad had, had been raised in that, in that city. So they went to the segregated school that was, Uh, Paolo MA School
[00:04:46] RORI: before the Sylvia Mendez court case that desegregated
[00:04:49] M.ELENA: Absolutely.
[00:04:49] RORI: Schools in California. Mm-Hmm. .
[00:04:51] M.ELENA: Yeah, exactly. And, my cousin was one of the first Catholic Mexican Americans to go to the white school, and she passed away about two years ago. There was a movement led by my aunt.
[00:05:03] RORI: Wow.
[00:05:03] M.ELENA: Who said kids who go to Paeda school? Yes. They might, uh, graduate eighth grade, but then.
They don't finish high school and she thought that that was not appropriate. So, she worked hard to change that status.
[00:05:16] RORI: She kind of like paved the way for, of course, her children and for you. And you have these older cousins and sibs who kind of like went through the system before you too. That's amazing.
[00:05:26] M.ELENA: Yeah. Thank Kevin too for my aunt and also to the support that she had from my mom and relatives in the community that was there. So I was raised with that kind of history.
[00:05:35] RORI: Yeah. Like the family of change-makers.
[00:05:38] M.ELENA: Yeah, right, exactly. And I also was raised by, um, by my parents who were skeptical of leaders, just always questioning things, except for when they decided something.
You couldn't question when they said no, but, but, but everything else. was fair game. Everything else.
[00:05:54] RORI: Don't, don't question them, but they, yeah.
[00:05:57] M.ELENA: I learned very early on that there isn't one history. That
different people have different, different perspectives on what happened.
[00:06:04] EMILIA: Questioning,
right? It's part of being a scientist as well.
What inspired you to, to study science?
[00:06:10] M.ELENA: I am a curious person in lots of ways. I'd like to figure things out. I would spend my money when I had extra money on puzzles. Puzzles and books. I didn't have to buy the books, but going to the library was the only place I could go by myself. What's in school? I would go to the five and dime and, and buy myself the next puzzle, a puzzle that I could work on and then go to the library It was sort of a, an incredible space for me.
I loved it.
[00:06:37] RORI: Libraries are the best, right? Like access to free books that you can borrow and someone else can use. It's like, One of the best systems we have here.
[00:06:46] M.ELENA: Yeah. I do remember about our library. It was kind of a small library, but, um, on the librarian's desk, there was a picture of Albert Einstein. And so she asked me why I was interested in these books that I was checking out.
And I said, Oh, because I want to be a scientist like him. I knew he was a scientist. And she said, Well, you can probably be a scientist who probably won't be as famous as him. And I said, That's okay. I was raised in a very optimistic family, even though my parents had very hard lives, they were both optimistic about the future.
[00:07:20] EMILIA: And being a woman never was never like a factor. It was never limited in that sense.
[00:07:25] M.ELENA: Not until later. I think I was in like 5th or
6th grade when I realized that I was really, really happy that I was not a male.
[00:07:34] RORI: Hmm.
[00:07:35] M.ELENA: And
it's a very strange reason. The rationale was that because I was raised in a very, uh, traditional family.
Uh huh. Males. had to support their families, therefore they had to have a job that someone wanted them to do, right? But if you're a woman, you could choose anything.
[00:07:56] RORI: So you're like, as a woman, I
can be poorly paid and it's okay in kind of this family structure.
[00:08:03] M.ELENA: That's exactly it.
[00:08:04] RORI: I mean, I see that though. I can see that.
You know, you have the freedom to choose something that you're passionate about, not that you are gonna support a family on.
[00:08:13] M.ELENA: I just remember
when I realized that, I thought, Oh, wow, this is really great. Because those guys have to do something that they may not like but will help pay for their family, help them support their family.
And I think I think it was mostly because I saw that in my dad because my dad was smarter than the job that he had, but that was all he could really do.
[00:08:32] RORI: He was like, I've got to earn the money.
[00:08:34] M.ELENA: In those days, everybody's mom stayed at home. Essentially, almost everybody's mom stayed at home.
[00:08:40] EMILIA: You didn't want that for yourself, right?
[00:08:42] M.ELENA: To stay home? That was not part of the game. I couldn't see myself home. Um, as a matter of fact, I remember insulting my mother along the way. I said, you know, Mom, you're really smart and you have directed all of your talent, all of, all of yourself to our well-being. You could have been so much more. I actually told her that.
[00:09:01] RORI: Ooh. Yeah.
[00:09:02] M.ELENA: She was not happy with that statement.
[00:09:04] RORI: I'm sure.
[00:09:05] M.ELENA: She just said, well, you know, you have different opportunities from me. And that was essentially it. And she also told me she didn't think she had wasted her life. I actually asked her that. I said, did you waste your life on us?
[00:09:17] RORI: Wow.
[00:09:17] M.ELENA: Because we're not, we're not everything you might have wanted.
[00:09:19] RORI: Oh.
[00:09:20] M.ELENA: She said, you know, I did the best I could and you guys all turned out pretty good.
[00:09:25] RORI: Yeah, and she did have the grace to be so clear. She's like, you have different opportunities than I did. It's not that she wasn't as smart as you. It's not. It's that you could envision a future where you had a job in fifth grade and that was not available to her.
[00:09:40] M.ELENA: Right. It was not.
[00:09:41] RORI: But then you kept going. I mean, you obviously went 12 and everything. And you kept going on after that to college and then a PhD in botany at UC Berkeley. What motivated you to keep going in
school?
[00:09:56] M.ELENA: I liked what I was studying. I liked thinking about plants and how they work and how they evolve.
[00:10:01] EMILIA: And did you do like an
undergraduate research? How did you know about a PhD?
[00:10:06] M.ELENA: Well, I went to Pomona College. So 70 percent of my class was in graduate professional school a year or two after. After graduating, they were all in graduate professional school.
[00:10:18] RORI: So you've learned from other undergrads that like that's a path you could
take?
[00:10:22] M.ELENA: Well, yeah. So I was in, I was a botany major and it was a pretty small major. Most of the pre-meds were all in zoology. Initially, when I went to Pomona, I wanted to be a biology major, but then I went to the zoology department, and they scoffed, to be perfectly honest, at the idea of a biology major. They said that I was not committed to studying plants or animals.
And who wanted to study plants? And I said, well, oh, because plants were instrumental in my dad's livelihood, but also in my great grandmother. My great-grandmother was sobadora curandera, a medicine woman, very indigenous. And, um, so her garden was full of very useful plants.
[00:11:08] RORI: Wow. And you got to know some of these medicinal plants through her.
[00:11:12] M.ELENA: Absolutely. Yes.
[00:11:13] RORI: Wow. So you had a ton of botanical knowledge already.
[00:11:17] M.ELENA: I didn't have a ton, but I had some.
[00:11:20] RORI: Was your grandmother living?
Did she know that you majored in botany?
[00:11:22] M.ELENA: My great grandmother, she wasn't living.
[00:11:24] RORI: Okay.
[00:11:24] M.ELENA: But she would encourage us to help her Pick the plants for her decoctions that she would give people when they'd come to visit her for information or for cures or whatever when they weren't feeling well.
I mean, I do remember after my father's stepmother passed away, we moved into my father's childhood home. Since my mother was an orphan and was raised by her grandmother, So I knew my grandma, my great-grandmother, a lot.
[00:11:50] EMILIA: How do you think growing up with grandparents, like, influenced you in any way?
[00:11:55] M.ELENA: Because of their knowledge.
They were relatively self-sufficient in lots of ways. And so growing your own food, um, growing your own medicines, slaughtering animals.
[00:12:06] RORI: Yeah.
[00:12:07] M.ELENA: All of
that stuff that was sort of farmy. I got to experience it.
[00:12:11] RORI: Sounds like you had these incredible relationships, both with your grandparents, great grandparents.
What do you think your great-grandmother would think of when you went into botany?
[00:12:20] M.ELENA: Oh, she probably would have hated it.
[00:12:22] RORI: Oh, why?
[00:12:25] M.ELENA: Because even though she was a very independent woman, she kept my mother from going to high school.
[00:12:30] RORI: Okay. So she had some ideas about appropriate family structures or roles that were very inconsistent with the path that you took.
[00:12:38] M.ELENA: Yes. I know that my grandfather, when one day we were eating dinner and I was in graduate school, and he said, why do you have to study so much?
[00:12:46] EMILIA: That's what my dad used to say.
[00:12:48] M.ELENA: Yeah. My dad looked at me and then he sort of gave me the, I'll take care of this one. So I just buttoned up. And he said The knowledge she's making or the knowledge she'll have is like money in the bank.
My grandfather knew about saving money. He said, and this is knowledge and it's been going to be stored and saved. When you need it, it's there. You don't know when you're going to need it. You will need it. So, and that's what this is about.
[00:13:13] RORI: Power of an analogy right there. Yep. Did your parents support you?
It sounds like your dad supported you.
[00:13:18] M.ELENA: Oh yeah. My mom and dad both supported me, yeah. While I was married and I was in college, my parents would, every week when they would go grocery shopping, they would give us a care package.
[00:13:27] RORI: Oh, wow.
[00:13:28] M.ELENA: They, they supported me and my ex-husband. Mm-Hmm. tremendously.
[00:13:31] RORI: That's really sweet.
You got this great support from your parents and you were in college and then in grad school. I guess I'm kind of curious how you started to learn about mentoring at that time in your life and I'm wondering how much of that you learned from your academic life and how much of it you must have learned from your family in life.
How did you first start thinking about mentoring back then?
[00:13:51] M.ELENA: I didn't really think about mentoring per se.
[00:13:53] RORI: Uh huh.
[00:13:54] M.ELENA: But there was a lot of interaction in college with the professors. Okay. Because it's a small school. Uh-huh. And the major I had was also very small. There are a few of us. And so each class maybe had eight botanists in it.
And so you got to really know your professors very well. One of the professors Edwin Phillips wrote this little book on fieldwork and ecology and plant ecology. And so we would go out and go through clines and go through different environments and, um, hike and all that kind of stuff. And I really liked that.
I remember he was very, a hands-on kind of professor.
And he one day was telling me that his mother was a housekeeper and that she converted basically all of her housekeeping earnings for his tuition at Colgate.
[00:14:40] RORI: Wow.
[00:14:41] M.ELENA: So I felt like I belonged there. Right. But like that, we had similar stories. He was not, From the upper class,
[00:14:48] RORI: so having that shared background made a huge difference for you.
[00:14:52] M.ELENA: Then even though one day I walked in and I was trying to make a decision of something or the other, he looked at me. He said you're free white in 21. I looked at him and I said, first, I'm not 21, and if you haven't noticed, I'm not white. He said, what I'm trying to tell you is that you can make your own decision.
[00:15:08] RORI: It feels like that's a very complicated way to try to say that to you at
that moment.
[00:15:13] M.ELENA: And I sat there and said, what the heck? What's this guy telling me? Right? But then he sort of apologized. He said, you know what I really wanted to tell you was that you can make up your own mind. You know how to make decisions.
[00:15:24] RORI: So he had like faith in you and was like kind of wanting you to like, go out and like write your future.
[00:15:30] M.ELENA: Right.
Yeah. And that's basically it. I mean, just wanted us to be as successful as we could be.
[00:15:34] EMILIA: Nice. So it sounds like as an undergrad, you were learning how to mentor people and how to remove some of the barriers that students face.
So it sounds that at least the scientific part of the community in undergrad was like You, you felt like you belonged in the community. Afterward, though, you did a PhD at UC Berkeley, which I assume was a different community. And then you did a series of research positions, uh, and you had faculty positions in different places.
What guided your decisions about how to navigate those positions?
[00:16:07] M.ELENA: When I was a graduate student, that was really a shock.
It
was shocking because they were very competitive.
[00:16:13] RORI: What did the competition look like when you were at UC Berkeley?
[00:16:16] M.ELENA: It was not nice. Mentoring was not there. Okay. As such. So there are people who know a lot about things, right?
It was your task to, to absorb a lot of that content.
[00:16:27] RORI: I see. It's not like you were in a supportive environment where the goal was to have you learn. Do you think other people at UC Berkeley were also kind of getting anti mentorship or do you think it wasn't something specific to you?
[00:16:37] M.ELENA: I don't know. But I do know that the graduate students, supported each other.
It's kind of strange.
[00:16:42] EMILIA: So yeah, it sounds like you went from like a nice environment to a very competitive and anti-mentoring type of environment. What happened next, like for your postdoc and the research positions that followed after? What guided your decisions?
[00:16:57] M.ELENA: What guided my decision to go to Indiana was that the lab was interested in small molecules and I wanted to see which cells are actually involved in which processes and if could I identify proteins or compounds that would help me.
So I figured that might be a good way to learn how to localize these compounds.
[00:17:17] EMILIA: What was it to move to the Midwest?
[00:17:19] M.ELENA: Oh my god. It's like, um, learning how to live in an unusual or a very different kind of social structure.
[00:17:26] RORI: In Indiana?
[00:17:27] M.ELENA: In Indiana. Walking from campus to my apartment, you know, getting catcalls and whistles and eventually it was really gross.
So, yeah, eventually I was quite frustrated with that.
[00:17:40] EMILIA: How long did you stay there?
[00:17:41] M.ELENA: Oh, not very long. I mean, I liked the lab. The lab was really fine. Yeah. But, the environment was not so fine.
[00:17:48] EMILIA: And, but then you went to Yale University after that.
[00:17:51] M.ELENA: I was living on the East Coast. Socially, it wasn't, wasn't such a good place.
I went to Yale cause I got this postdoctoral fellowship from Ford. Um, Ian was very much into Helping people achieve their goals, whatever they were. And so, um, I wanted to learn more about that. So I was interested in pollen longevity, but also in roots. They had a really nice bean system. I started working on, on beans.
[00:18:18] RORI: Cool.
I want to fast forward a little bit because you, you had these different kinds of like short-term positions for a few years and we hear that like a lot of the science you were doing was awesome. You were like learning tissue culture, you were learning like sperm preservation, learning about root development, you were making these exciting discoveries.
And then in 1988, you returned closer to home and you were like, And with a faculty position at California State University, Northridge, CSUN, and we're curious, why did you decide on that opportunity?
[00:18:47] M.ELENA: Oh, this is sort of, this is very weird. I'm going to be honest about this one. Okay. So I was a visiting professor at Michigan State University and I had landed my first big grant there and they were trying to figure out whether to hire me or not because that's what this Rosa Park Cesar Chavez fellowship or visiting professorship was about.
[00:19:06] RORI: Okay.
[00:19:06] M.ELENA: And they couldn't decide. One of my friends there, one of the professor's friends said, these guys are like engineers. You got to show them that you got another job. So they go think you're worthy of being hired. And I said, well, that's stupid. Ridiculous.
[00:19:20] EMILIA: Sadly, that's still true.
[00:19:21] RORI: Yep. Yeah. Totally.
[00:19:23] M.ELENA: And I told him, I said, you know, if, if I apply someplace else, I will psychologically be prepared to go.
Otherwise, I'm not going to apply for the heck of it. He said, Oh, you'll use it as a bargaining chip. I would want to leave here.
[00:19:35] RORI: For him, it was great, I guess.
[00:19:37] M.ELENA: I guess it was great for him. But for me, it was snowy and cold. Anyway, so ultimately. Um, as if by magic, I'm not kidding, I got this phone call from, uh, a SACNA's uncle who said, hey, I heard about this job, why don't you apply?
And so I said, ah, my chip, my, my bargaining chip, you know, I applied, I came to Northridge and the students won me over.
[00:20:01] RORI: Oh, yeah, of course,
because they're the best. I mean, I was at SF State for many years, and I just can only imagine that the CSUN students are similar to SF State students in being incredible.
[00:20:13] M.ELENA: They are. And, you know, I knew that CSUN was, was known. For being very, very, uh, among the top schools in the country for producing students who go out and earn a PhD in STEM.
But if
you look at the demographics of those people, that did not include Latinos.
[00:20:33] RORI: That time,
huh?
[00:20:34] M.ELENA: At that time.
[00:20:35] RORI: What were the demographics of the, CSUN undergraduates at that time in general?
[00:20:40] M.ELENA: It was about 15, 15%, 15 or 20%.
[00:20:43] RORI: Okay. So it really changed quickly at that time. Okay. But okay, so you, you went to CSUN and you were like, Oh my gosh, these students are amazing. It's 15, 20 percent Latino students. You're like, I'm going to stay here.
[00:20:56] M.ELENA: Well, yeah. And it's also close to home.
[00:20:58] RORI: Close to home. Students
want to go get PhDs after this.
You have lots of Latino students.
Yeah.
[00:21:04] M.ELENA: So when they offered me the opportunity, um, to come to Northridge, I accepted. And then my SACNAS uncles called me up and said, Hey, why did you do that?
[00:21:17] RORI: Really? Like they were displeased?
[00:21:19] M.ELENA: Oh, they were disappointed. They said, With your pedigree, you should not be a CSU.
[00:21:24] RORI: Wow.
[00:21:25] M.ELENA: And I'm going, also, Rampant Elitism.
[00:21:28] RORI: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:30] M.ELENA: So, then I came back to them with a, you know, a scientific paper, if you're lucky, is good for five years. But the effect that you have on students, not only affects those students, but it affects their families.
[00:21:42] RORI: Yes. Totally. You're like broader, longer, impact.
[00:21:46] M.ELENA: Broader, exactly. That's how I framed my decision to them. So I told them it was about this, it was about the students and the opportunities I thought I might be able to show them, you know, opportunities. You can lead a horse to water. You can't make them drink, but you can say, look, have you thought about this?
[00:22:02] RORI: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the students are motivating. And then, I mean, you've been at CSUN for, you know, decades now. And in that time, you know, we mentioned SACNAS, so for any listeners who don't know, that's the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science. And you've been an active member for a long time.
You were even the first Chicana president of SACNAS. And not just SACNAS, but you've been involved in a ton of scientific societies. You were a member of the Minority Affairs Committees for the American Society of Plant Biologists and for the American Society for Cell Biology. What motivates you to do this kind of social work?
And what are you proud of from your decades of
society work?
[00:22:45] M.ELENA: I think I represent a voice. Also, I don't like to hear people just complain.
[00:22:51] RORI: Mmm, okay. You're like, let's make the change.
[00:22:54] M.ELENA: Yeah, right. Exactly. Same kind of thing. Maybe you haven't seen anybody like me, so you should question why haven't you? Even though one time I was at a conference, and we were having a subgroup meeting, and there was an outcry from the people who used other systems.
We really want diversity in the subjects. And so I piped up that, yeah, we should have diversity in scientists too. How was that received? Oh my gosh, I got kruscheffed. This guy took his shoe off and started pounding on the
[00:23:23] RORI: Seriously? Really?
[00:23:24] M.ELENA: Yes.
[00:23:25] RORI: Oh my god. What? Like, your statement honestly was extremely mild, right?
Like, we should have a diversity of scientists.
[00:23:32] M.ELENA: He was a guy in
charge of this a developmental section in the society, right? And afterwards, he just got into my personal space and, and then took off his shoe and started pounding. He said, these people would be welcome to my lab. They just don't show up. And I said, well, are you sure?
[00:23:47] RORI: Wow. I feel like that's some like white male
fragility. Right there.
[00:23:51] M.ELENA: Yep, he was that.
[00:23:53] RORI: I mean, I don't know how I guessed. Yeah,
[00:23:55] M.ELENA: but yeah, it was, it was pretty strange. It's sort of like, well, I've got to find a society that's more to the idea of
diversity.
[00:24:03] RORI: Uh huh. Okay, so you kind of found the, the kind of like subfields of science and scientific societies where you were like, I can make a difference here.
I'm not going to get this Ridiculous aggro response.
[00:24:13] M.ELENA: For me, the way that I operate is I listen first and see, see if I can make a contribution. If I can make a contribution, well, great. If I can't, then I just, I won't because there's too many
things to do.
[00:24:25] RORI: That's true. You kept on doing a lot of things too.
So, I mean, you talked about how the students at CSUN motivated you so much and you were so excited to, you know, make some connections and reduce some barriers for these students. And you did. You created and ran. So many student research programs and fellowships like RISE, USTAR, MARC, and BRIDGES. I would love to hear what motivated you to run those programs.
[00:24:50] M.ELENA: Students! Once again, I mean, the students are not aware of the opportunities that are available to them. Yes, it's hard. We had a student go to, um, League for the summer. Uh-huh. And he was told, well, you're only here because of your ethnicity.
[00:25:03] RORI: Ugh.
[00:25:04] M.ELENA: It's ugly.
[00:25:05] RORI: Totally.
[00:25:06] M.ELENA: And somebody once told me that, they said, well, you're here because of your ethnicity.
And I said, and you're here because you're white. I was so mad.
[00:25:13] RORI: Untrue, though. Not untrue. That's a good response.
[00:25:15] M.ELENA: They just, they just,
well, that's what they said. They never, they never made those assumptions about me again. And then when it came to CSUN, there was an older, senior faculty member who saw me in the hall and said, hi, honey, I'm glad you're here.
[00:25:33] RORI: What?
[00:25:33] M.ELENA: Now that set me off. I And I said, excuse me? And he said, you know, you're very young. My daughter is the same age as you. And I realized I was inappropriate. So I want to welcome you here. And I said, thank you. And we became good friends.
[00:25:50] RORI: Oh, you kind of had the grace to let him realize that and move forward too, which is Pretty remarkable.
So I'm going to ask you one specific question that is self-interested. You know, I've run some student programs, I'm excited about student programs, and you have so much experience with them. I'm curious, what do you know now about student programs to support students to engage in research that you wish you had known when you started that work?
[00:26:17] M.ELENA: I don't know, I've just always been optimistic about
students abilities. It's just whether they choose to use them in a productive way or not.
[00:26:27] RORI: Okay.
[00:26:28] M.ELENA: And also my childhood, my family life was really very stable compared to a lot of my student's lives.
[00:26:36] RORI: Oof. Yeah.
[00:26:37] M.ELENA: And that's the hard part for me that I, I didn't realize I've never, you know, never experienced hunger.
I was not prepared for the level of conflict and need that a lot of students have. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:49] EMILIA: Yeah. You're a really extremely experienced mentor and, uh, you have been recognized for your mentoring excellence. You got a Presidential Medal for that. Uh, could you tell our listeners why mentoring matters?
[00:27:03] M.ELENA: Mentoring matters is, is a way of transferring, um, information and showing people opportunities. and then giving them some hints. So, I mean, I think that mentoring is being able to share what you know, um, but not expecting people to follow your path. One of my dad's favorite, favorite sayings to me was, Piensatelo bien.
Think it through. Gather the facts and make a decision.
[00:27:28] RORI: Uh huh. Do you give that advice to your students?
[00:27:30] M.ELENA: I do. I say I will not tell you what to do. I will propose things you might consider in making your decision.
[00:27:36] EMILIA: I think that's something that's sometimes hard for students to get because they expect you to know the answer.
But yeah, like you said, you are providing information and it's up to them to make their choices.
[00:27:46] M.ELENA: I tell students about my failures. Because things go wrong sometimes. Yeah. And you just have to figure out, okay, so what did you learn from it, right? I've had students come in crying because they're convinced they're not going to get in anywhere, so they're making all these applications everywhere.
[00:28:00] RORI: Uh huh.
[00:28:01] M.ELENA: And then one student in particular, I remember, She's very upset and I said, you know, you've done very well. I'm sure you're going to get into someplace good. And later she came in and started crying again because she couldn't decide. She, had good offers, right? Oh, and that's what she was crying about.
I said, where do you think there's space for you?
[00:28:20] RORI: Yeah. Where are you going to get the support?
[00:28:22] M.ELENA: The support? Not, I don't like to tell people where they're going to fit in because no,
[00:28:26] RORI: Yeah.
[00:28:26] M.ELENA: You can't contort yourself that way.
[00:28:28] RORI: But where's there space for you? Not where you fit in, but where is there space for you?
For undergrads and grad students who are seeking out mentorship, what would you tell them to look for? How do they find a mentor who's going to help them navigate the system? Who's gonna, like you're saying, like give them the tips and the heads up that they need in order to reach their goals.
[00:28:47] M.ELENA: That is really difficult because
mentors Mentors and mentees.
It's a personal, intimate relationship.
[00:28:55] RORI: Mm-Hmm.
[00:28:55] M.ELENA: that you develop. Relationships evolve. People say, oh, I have one, a mentor that looks like me. And I say, well, you know if I was waiting for a mentor who looked like me when I was seeking
[00:29:04] RORI: Wow.
[00:29:04] M.ELENA: I would still be waiting.
[00:29:06] RORI: Yep. Right.
[00:29:06] M.ELENA: Mentors don't have to look like you.
[00:29:09] EMILIA: So, now we are going to transition to our segment titled Revise and Resubmit, where we talk about parts of science, culture, or your own career journey that you, that you'd like to change or revise and resubmit. So, Maria Elena, why would you revise and resubmit?
[00:29:27] M.ELENA: You know, a long time ago, I decided
I would live without regret.I don't make decisions without thinking them through. So,
[00:29:36] EMILIA: Piéntatelo bien.
[00:29:37] M.ELENA: Because of that, I mean, I may fail, and so then that just means I have to rethink it.
[00:29:42] RORI: It sounds like you already revised and resubmitted, though. Like, it's a constant process.
[00:29:46] M.ELENA: It's not like a grant proposal, rather, where you throw the pink sheets or the whatever sheets or summary statements and you smash them on the floor and throw them at your desk and say, these guys can't read.
Life moves on. So if you resubmit, you're not going to resubmit to the same life.
[00:30:00] RORI: Oh yeah,
can't go back to the same river twice, huh? Maria Elena, I feel like I could keep on talking with you for hours and I'm so grateful for the time that you've shared with us here today.
[00:30:10] M.ELENA: I'm humbled and, you know, my mom and dad would be, if they were still alive, would be very happy that I'm sharing this knowledge, but it's because of my mom and dad that I'm here.
[00:30:19] EMILIA: Thank you for listening to this episode if you like what you heard, share it with someone.
[00:30:23] RORI: You can also support this program by writing a kind review.
[00:30:26] EMILIA: This episode was produced and edited by Maribel Quesada Smith, and Sound Engineering by Keegan Stromberg. Special thanks to Dr. Maria Elena Zavala, the host of Science Wise Rori Rolfhs and me, Emilia Huerta Sanchez.
[00:00:09] RORI: Who just so happens to be a badass scientist. I'm Rori.
[00:00:13] EMILIA: And I'm Emilia. We're two scientists on a mission to make the world of science more welcoming and to amplify the contributions of women.
[00:00:21] RORI: Imagine a wonderful mentor. Someone who not only creates an environment where students grow But someone who does her own learning to better understand the students different experiences. Someone who gives students information about the landscape they're entering without telling them what to do.
That mentor is Dr. Maria Elena Zavala. Dr. Zavala studies plant developmental biology as a full professor at the California State University Northridge, or CSUN. She received her PhD at UC Berkeley. Where she was the first Latina to graduate from the botany department. At CSUN, she developed and created programs to diversify and increase participation in science, which have had a huge impact on creating science research opportunities for students.
For her success in mentoring and inspiring developing scientists, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. A year later, she was named one of the top 100 most influential Hispanics in the United States by Hispanic Magazine.
She was the first Chicana president of the Society of the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, SACNAS. Today, Dr. Maria Elena Zavala shares with us her wisdom and her journey in science.
We are so happy to have with us today Dr. Maria Elena Zavala, Professor at California State Northridge. She is a trailblazing plant scientist and she is a, you know, air quotes, first Latina on so many fronts. First with a PhD in botany, as a fellow of multiple scientific societies. All the while, she's maintained a focus on making sure she wasn't the last.
She's led so many student programs and organizations and was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. So, Dr. Zavala, while you were doing all of this active scientific and mentoring work, you had an additional impact on a particular scientist. I am working with a wonderful postdoc right now, uh, who's designing methods, quantifying accuracy, applying them to ancient DNA and forensic genetic context, and when she was in high school, she decided to do a Google search on her own name, and I'm telling you this, Maria Elena because her name is Elena Zavala.
So what came up was you. You came up when she Googled her name, Dr. Maria Elena Zavala. And that was the first time that she saw Dr. in front of something very close to her name, and it was the first time she considered that someone like herself, with her name, could go and have a PhD and be a practicing scientist.
And, you know, that became her goal, which she achieved. So this is one tiny example of how just you being yourself and being excellent at what you do has inspired and motivated so many other scientists. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:03:11] M.ELENA: Well, you're very welcome. I'm honored to be here. And that was really, if you could see me, I'd be blushing.
You hope that you serve a purpose in your life. And, um, that just made it for me.
[00:03:22] RORI: Oh, one of many, many.
[00:03:25] M.ELENA: But you never know. You never know.
[00:03:27] EMILIA: I know the postdoc and I didn't know the story, Rori. So it's really nice. I want to talk a little bit about your upbringing and about your family life when you were a kid.
[00:03:38] M.ELENA: Sure.
I had a, I had a really, mostly a very fun childhood because it was still the time of freedom. So, you know, playing stickball with friends or, and I'm number four. out of six kids. And so I had the benefit of older siblings who had managed to navigate through the school system. My mother and dad were in the same school system, but when they went to school, it was segregated.
So Mexicans couldn't go to the white school. My city, La Verne, California, was the orange capital of the United States. Um, in the early, in the 20s, 1920s to I don't know when, 40s, something like that. It was also one of the main headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah.
[00:04:22] RORI: Wow.
[00:04:23] M.ELENA: So it was, it was clearly segregated.
Also, you know, so if you're a Protestant, You could live in certain areas. If you were Catholic and white, you lived in another area. You just couldn't buy homes, uh, in certain places. So many layers. Yeah, my mom and dad had, had been raised in that, in that city. So they went to the segregated school that was, Uh, Paolo MA School
[00:04:46] RORI: before the Sylvia Mendez court case that desegregated
[00:04:49] M.ELENA: Absolutely.
[00:04:49] RORI: Schools in California. Mm-Hmm. .
[00:04:51] M.ELENA: Yeah, exactly. And, my cousin was one of the first Catholic Mexican Americans to go to the white school, and she passed away about two years ago. There was a movement led by my aunt.
[00:05:03] RORI: Wow.
[00:05:03] M.ELENA: Who said kids who go to Paeda school? Yes. They might, uh, graduate eighth grade, but then.
They don't finish high school and she thought that that was not appropriate. So, she worked hard to change that status.
[00:05:16] RORI: She kind of like paved the way for, of course, her children and for you. And you have these older cousins and sibs who kind of like went through the system before you too. That's amazing.
[00:05:26] M.ELENA: Yeah. Thank Kevin too for my aunt and also to the support that she had from my mom and relatives in the community that was there. So I was raised with that kind of history.
[00:05:35] RORI: Yeah. Like the family of change-makers.
[00:05:38] M.ELENA: Yeah, right, exactly. And I also was raised by, um, by my parents who were skeptical of leaders, just always questioning things, except for when they decided something.
You couldn't question when they said no, but, but, but everything else. was fair game. Everything else.
[00:05:54] RORI: Don't, don't question them, but they, yeah.
[00:05:57] M.ELENA: I learned very early on that there isn't one history. That
different people have different, different perspectives on what happened.
[00:06:04] EMILIA: Questioning,
right? It's part of being a scientist as well.
What inspired you to, to study science?
[00:06:10] M.ELENA: I am a curious person in lots of ways. I'd like to figure things out. I would spend my money when I had extra money on puzzles. Puzzles and books. I didn't have to buy the books, but going to the library was the only place I could go by myself. What's in school? I would go to the five and dime and, and buy myself the next puzzle, a puzzle that I could work on and then go to the library It was sort of a, an incredible space for me.
I loved it.
[00:06:37] RORI: Libraries are the best, right? Like access to free books that you can borrow and someone else can use. It's like, One of the best systems we have here.
[00:06:46] M.ELENA: Yeah. I do remember about our library. It was kind of a small library, but, um, on the librarian's desk, there was a picture of Albert Einstein. And so she asked me why I was interested in these books that I was checking out.
And I said, Oh, because I want to be a scientist like him. I knew he was a scientist. And she said, Well, you can probably be a scientist who probably won't be as famous as him. And I said, That's okay. I was raised in a very optimistic family, even though my parents had very hard lives, they were both optimistic about the future.
[00:07:20] EMILIA: And being a woman never was never like a factor. It was never limited in that sense.
[00:07:25] M.ELENA: Not until later. I think I was in like 5th or
6th grade when I realized that I was really, really happy that I was not a male.
[00:07:34] RORI: Hmm.
[00:07:35] M.ELENA: And
it's a very strange reason. The rationale was that because I was raised in a very, uh, traditional family.
Uh huh. Males. had to support their families, therefore they had to have a job that someone wanted them to do, right? But if you're a woman, you could choose anything.
[00:07:56] RORI: So you're like, as a woman, I
can be poorly paid and it's okay in kind of this family structure.
[00:08:03] M.ELENA: That's exactly it.
[00:08:04] RORI: I mean, I see that though. I can see that.
You know, you have the freedom to choose something that you're passionate about, not that you are gonna support a family on.
[00:08:13] M.ELENA: I just remember
when I realized that, I thought, Oh, wow, this is really great. Because those guys have to do something that they may not like but will help pay for their family, help them support their family.
And I think I think it was mostly because I saw that in my dad because my dad was smarter than the job that he had, but that was all he could really do.
[00:08:32] RORI: He was like, I've got to earn the money.
[00:08:34] M.ELENA: In those days, everybody's mom stayed at home. Essentially, almost everybody's mom stayed at home.
[00:08:40] EMILIA: You didn't want that for yourself, right?
[00:08:42] M.ELENA: To stay home? That was not part of the game. I couldn't see myself home. Um, as a matter of fact, I remember insulting my mother along the way. I said, you know, Mom, you're really smart and you have directed all of your talent, all of, all of yourself to our well-being. You could have been so much more. I actually told her that.
[00:09:01] RORI: Ooh. Yeah.
[00:09:02] M.ELENA: She was not happy with that statement.
[00:09:04] RORI: I'm sure.
[00:09:05] M.ELENA: She just said, well, you know, you have different opportunities from me. And that was essentially it. And she also told me she didn't think she had wasted her life. I actually asked her that. I said, did you waste your life on us?
[00:09:17] RORI: Wow.
[00:09:17] M.ELENA: Because we're not, we're not everything you might have wanted.
[00:09:19] RORI: Oh.
[00:09:20] M.ELENA: She said, you know, I did the best I could and you guys all turned out pretty good.
[00:09:25] RORI: Yeah, and she did have the grace to be so clear. She's like, you have different opportunities than I did. It's not that she wasn't as smart as you. It's not. It's that you could envision a future where you had a job in fifth grade and that was not available to her.
[00:09:40] M.ELENA: Right. It was not.
[00:09:41] RORI: But then you kept going. I mean, you obviously went 12 and everything. And you kept going on after that to college and then a PhD in botany at UC Berkeley. What motivated you to keep going in
school?
[00:09:56] M.ELENA: I liked what I was studying. I liked thinking about plants and how they work and how they evolve.
[00:10:01] EMILIA: And did you do like an
undergraduate research? How did you know about a PhD?
[00:10:06] M.ELENA: Well, I went to Pomona College. So 70 percent of my class was in graduate professional school a year or two after. After graduating, they were all in graduate professional school.
[00:10:18] RORI: So you've learned from other undergrads that like that's a path you could
take?
[00:10:22] M.ELENA: Well, yeah. So I was in, I was a botany major and it was a pretty small major. Most of the pre-meds were all in zoology. Initially, when I went to Pomona, I wanted to be a biology major, but then I went to the zoology department, and they scoffed, to be perfectly honest, at the idea of a biology major. They said that I was not committed to studying plants or animals.
And who wanted to study plants? And I said, well, oh, because plants were instrumental in my dad's livelihood, but also in my great grandmother. My great-grandmother was sobadora curandera, a medicine woman, very indigenous. And, um, so her garden was full of very useful plants.
[00:11:08] RORI: Wow. And you got to know some of these medicinal plants through her.
[00:11:12] M.ELENA: Absolutely. Yes.
[00:11:13] RORI: Wow. So you had a ton of botanical knowledge already.
[00:11:17] M.ELENA: I didn't have a ton, but I had some.
[00:11:20] RORI: Was your grandmother living?
Did she know that you majored in botany?
[00:11:22] M.ELENA: My great grandmother, she wasn't living.
[00:11:24] RORI: Okay.
[00:11:24] M.ELENA: But she would encourage us to help her Pick the plants for her decoctions that she would give people when they'd come to visit her for information or for cures or whatever when they weren't feeling well.
I mean, I do remember after my father's stepmother passed away, we moved into my father's childhood home. Since my mother was an orphan and was raised by her grandmother, So I knew my grandma, my great-grandmother, a lot.
[00:11:50] EMILIA: How do you think growing up with grandparents, like, influenced you in any way?
[00:11:55] M.ELENA: Because of their knowledge.
They were relatively self-sufficient in lots of ways. And so growing your own food, um, growing your own medicines, slaughtering animals.
[00:12:06] RORI: Yeah.
[00:12:07] M.ELENA: All of
that stuff that was sort of farmy. I got to experience it.
[00:12:11] RORI: Sounds like you had these incredible relationships, both with your grandparents, great grandparents.
What do you think your great-grandmother would think of when you went into botany?
[00:12:20] M.ELENA: Oh, she probably would have hated it.
[00:12:22] RORI: Oh, why?
[00:12:25] M.ELENA: Because even though she was a very independent woman, she kept my mother from going to high school.
[00:12:30] RORI: Okay. So she had some ideas about appropriate family structures or roles that were very inconsistent with the path that you took.
[00:12:38] M.ELENA: Yes. I know that my grandfather, when one day we were eating dinner and I was in graduate school, and he said, why do you have to study so much?
[00:12:46] EMILIA: That's what my dad used to say.
[00:12:48] M.ELENA: Yeah. My dad looked at me and then he sort of gave me the, I'll take care of this one. So I just buttoned up. And he said The knowledge she's making or the knowledge she'll have is like money in the bank.
My grandfather knew about saving money. He said, and this is knowledge and it's been going to be stored and saved. When you need it, it's there. You don't know when you're going to need it. You will need it. So, and that's what this is about.
[00:13:13] RORI: Power of an analogy right there. Yep. Did your parents support you?
It sounds like your dad supported you.
[00:13:18] M.ELENA: Oh yeah. My mom and dad both supported me, yeah. While I was married and I was in college, my parents would, every week when they would go grocery shopping, they would give us a care package.
[00:13:27] RORI: Oh, wow.
[00:13:28] M.ELENA: They, they supported me and my ex-husband. Mm-Hmm. tremendously.
[00:13:31] RORI: That's really sweet.
You got this great support from your parents and you were in college and then in grad school. I guess I'm kind of curious how you started to learn about mentoring at that time in your life and I'm wondering how much of that you learned from your academic life and how much of it you must have learned from your family in life.
How did you first start thinking about mentoring back then?
[00:13:51] M.ELENA: I didn't really think about mentoring per se.
[00:13:53] RORI: Uh huh.
[00:13:54] M.ELENA: But there was a lot of interaction in college with the professors. Okay. Because it's a small school. Uh-huh. And the major I had was also very small. There are a few of us. And so each class maybe had eight botanists in it.
And so you got to really know your professors very well. One of the professors Edwin Phillips wrote this little book on fieldwork and ecology and plant ecology. And so we would go out and go through clines and go through different environments and, um, hike and all that kind of stuff. And I really liked that.
I remember he was very, a hands-on kind of professor.
And he one day was telling me that his mother was a housekeeper and that she converted basically all of her housekeeping earnings for his tuition at Colgate.
[00:14:40] RORI: Wow.
[00:14:41] M.ELENA: So I felt like I belonged there. Right. But like that, we had similar stories. He was not, From the upper class,
[00:14:48] RORI: so having that shared background made a huge difference for you.
[00:14:52] M.ELENA: Then even though one day I walked in and I was trying to make a decision of something or the other, he looked at me. He said you're free white in 21. I looked at him and I said, first, I'm not 21, and if you haven't noticed, I'm not white. He said, what I'm trying to tell you is that you can make your own decision.
[00:15:08] RORI: It feels like that's a very complicated way to try to say that to you at
that moment.
[00:15:13] M.ELENA: And I sat there and said, what the heck? What's this guy telling me? Right? But then he sort of apologized. He said, you know what I really wanted to tell you was that you can make up your own mind. You know how to make decisions.
[00:15:24] RORI: So he had like faith in you and was like kind of wanting you to like, go out and like write your future.
[00:15:30] M.ELENA: Right.
Yeah. And that's basically it. I mean, just wanted us to be as successful as we could be.
[00:15:34] EMILIA: Nice. So it sounds like as an undergrad, you were learning how to mentor people and how to remove some of the barriers that students face.
So it sounds that at least the scientific part of the community in undergrad was like You, you felt like you belonged in the community. Afterward, though, you did a PhD at UC Berkeley, which I assume was a different community. And then you did a series of research positions, uh, and you had faculty positions in different places.
What guided your decisions about how to navigate those positions?
[00:16:07] M.ELENA: When I was a graduate student, that was really a shock.
It
was shocking because they were very competitive.
[00:16:13] RORI: What did the competition look like when you were at UC Berkeley?
[00:16:16] M.ELENA: It was not nice. Mentoring was not there. Okay. As such. So there are people who know a lot about things, right?
It was your task to, to absorb a lot of that content.
[00:16:27] RORI: I see. It's not like you were in a supportive environment where the goal was to have you learn. Do you think other people at UC Berkeley were also kind of getting anti mentorship or do you think it wasn't something specific to you?
[00:16:37] M.ELENA: I don't know. But I do know that the graduate students, supported each other.
It's kind of strange.
[00:16:42] EMILIA: So yeah, it sounds like you went from like a nice environment to a very competitive and anti-mentoring type of environment. What happened next, like for your postdoc and the research positions that followed after? What guided your decisions?
[00:16:57] M.ELENA: What guided my decision to go to Indiana was that the lab was interested in small molecules and I wanted to see which cells are actually involved in which processes and if could I identify proteins or compounds that would help me.
So I figured that might be a good way to learn how to localize these compounds.
[00:17:17] EMILIA: What was it to move to the Midwest?
[00:17:19] M.ELENA: Oh my god. It's like, um, learning how to live in an unusual or a very different kind of social structure.
[00:17:26] RORI: In Indiana?
[00:17:27] M.ELENA: In Indiana. Walking from campus to my apartment, you know, getting catcalls and whistles and eventually it was really gross.
So, yeah, eventually I was quite frustrated with that.
[00:17:40] EMILIA: How long did you stay there?
[00:17:41] M.ELENA: Oh, not very long. I mean, I liked the lab. The lab was really fine. Yeah. But, the environment was not so fine.
[00:17:48] EMILIA: And, but then you went to Yale University after that.
[00:17:51] M.ELENA: I was living on the East Coast. Socially, it wasn't, wasn't such a good place.
I went to Yale cause I got this postdoctoral fellowship from Ford. Um, Ian was very much into Helping people achieve their goals, whatever they were. And so, um, I wanted to learn more about that. So I was interested in pollen longevity, but also in roots. They had a really nice bean system. I started working on, on beans.
[00:18:18] RORI: Cool.
I want to fast forward a little bit because you, you had these different kinds of like short-term positions for a few years and we hear that like a lot of the science you were doing was awesome. You were like learning tissue culture, you were learning like sperm preservation, learning about root development, you were making these exciting discoveries.
And then in 1988, you returned closer to home and you were like, And with a faculty position at California State University, Northridge, CSUN, and we're curious, why did you decide on that opportunity?
[00:18:47] M.ELENA: Oh, this is sort of, this is very weird. I'm going to be honest about this one. Okay. So I was a visiting professor at Michigan State University and I had landed my first big grant there and they were trying to figure out whether to hire me or not because that's what this Rosa Park Cesar Chavez fellowship or visiting professorship was about.
[00:19:06] RORI: Okay.
[00:19:06] M.ELENA: And they couldn't decide. One of my friends there, one of the professor's friends said, these guys are like engineers. You got to show them that you got another job. So they go think you're worthy of being hired. And I said, well, that's stupid. Ridiculous.
[00:19:20] EMILIA: Sadly, that's still true.
[00:19:21] RORI: Yep. Yeah. Totally.
[00:19:23] M.ELENA: And I told him, I said, you know, if, if I apply someplace else, I will psychologically be prepared to go.
Otherwise, I'm not going to apply for the heck of it. He said, Oh, you'll use it as a bargaining chip. I would want to leave here.
[00:19:35] RORI: For him, it was great, I guess.
[00:19:37] M.ELENA: I guess it was great for him. But for me, it was snowy and cold. Anyway, so ultimately. Um, as if by magic, I'm not kidding, I got this phone call from, uh, a SACNA's uncle who said, hey, I heard about this job, why don't you apply?
And so I said, ah, my chip, my, my bargaining chip, you know, I applied, I came to Northridge and the students won me over.
[00:20:01] RORI: Oh, yeah, of course,
because they're the best. I mean, I was at SF State for many years, and I just can only imagine that the CSUN students are similar to SF State students in being incredible.
[00:20:13] M.ELENA: They are. And, you know, I knew that CSUN was, was known. For being very, very, uh, among the top schools in the country for producing students who go out and earn a PhD in STEM.
But if
you look at the demographics of those people, that did not include Latinos.
[00:20:33] RORI: That time,
huh?
[00:20:34] M.ELENA: At that time.
[00:20:35] RORI: What were the demographics of the, CSUN undergraduates at that time in general?
[00:20:40] M.ELENA: It was about 15, 15%, 15 or 20%.
[00:20:43] RORI: Okay. So it really changed quickly at that time. Okay. But okay, so you, you went to CSUN and you were like, Oh my gosh, these students are amazing. It's 15, 20 percent Latino students. You're like, I'm going to stay here.
[00:20:56] M.ELENA: Well, yeah. And it's also close to home.
[00:20:58] RORI: Close to home. Students
want to go get PhDs after this.
You have lots of Latino students.
Yeah.
[00:21:04] M.ELENA: So when they offered me the opportunity, um, to come to Northridge, I accepted. And then my SACNAS uncles called me up and said, Hey, why did you do that?
[00:21:17] RORI: Really? Like they were displeased?
[00:21:19] M.ELENA: Oh, they were disappointed. They said, With your pedigree, you should not be a CSU.
[00:21:24] RORI: Wow.
[00:21:25] M.ELENA: And I'm going, also, Rampant Elitism.
[00:21:28] RORI: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:30] M.ELENA: So, then I came back to them with a, you know, a scientific paper, if you're lucky, is good for five years. But the effect that you have on students, not only affects those students, but it affects their families.
[00:21:42] RORI: Yes. Totally. You're like broader, longer, impact.
[00:21:46] M.ELENA: Broader, exactly. That's how I framed my decision to them. So I told them it was about this, it was about the students and the opportunities I thought I might be able to show them, you know, opportunities. You can lead a horse to water. You can't make them drink, but you can say, look, have you thought about this?
[00:22:02] RORI: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the students are motivating. And then, I mean, you've been at CSUN for, you know, decades now. And in that time, you know, we mentioned SACNAS, so for any listeners who don't know, that's the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science. And you've been an active member for a long time.
You were even the first Chicana president of SACNAS. And not just SACNAS, but you've been involved in a ton of scientific societies. You were a member of the Minority Affairs Committees for the American Society of Plant Biologists and for the American Society for Cell Biology. What motivates you to do this kind of social work?
And what are you proud of from your decades of
society work?
[00:22:45] M.ELENA: I think I represent a voice. Also, I don't like to hear people just complain.
[00:22:51] RORI: Mmm, okay. You're like, let's make the change.
[00:22:54] M.ELENA: Yeah, right. Exactly. Same kind of thing. Maybe you haven't seen anybody like me, so you should question why haven't you? Even though one time I was at a conference, and we were having a subgroup meeting, and there was an outcry from the people who used other systems.
We really want diversity in the subjects. And so I piped up that, yeah, we should have diversity in scientists too. How was that received? Oh my gosh, I got kruscheffed. This guy took his shoe off and started pounding on the
[00:23:23] RORI: Seriously? Really?
[00:23:24] M.ELENA: Yes.
[00:23:25] RORI: Oh my god. What? Like, your statement honestly was extremely mild, right?
Like, we should have a diversity of scientists.
[00:23:32] M.ELENA: He was a guy in
charge of this a developmental section in the society, right? And afterwards, he just got into my personal space and, and then took off his shoe and started pounding. He said, these people would be welcome to my lab. They just don't show up. And I said, well, are you sure?
[00:23:47] RORI: Wow. I feel like that's some like white male
fragility. Right there.
[00:23:51] M.ELENA: Yep, he was that.
[00:23:53] RORI: I mean, I don't know how I guessed. Yeah,
[00:23:55] M.ELENA: but yeah, it was, it was pretty strange. It's sort of like, well, I've got to find a society that's more to the idea of
diversity.
[00:24:03] RORI: Uh huh. Okay, so you kind of found the, the kind of like subfields of science and scientific societies where you were like, I can make a difference here.
I'm not going to get this Ridiculous aggro response.
[00:24:13] M.ELENA: For me, the way that I operate is I listen first and see, see if I can make a contribution. If I can make a contribution, well, great. If I can't, then I just, I won't because there's too many
things to do.
[00:24:25] RORI: That's true. You kept on doing a lot of things too.
So, I mean, you talked about how the students at CSUN motivated you so much and you were so excited to, you know, make some connections and reduce some barriers for these students. And you did. You created and ran. So many student research programs and fellowships like RISE, USTAR, MARC, and BRIDGES. I would love to hear what motivated you to run those programs.
[00:24:50] M.ELENA: Students! Once again, I mean, the students are not aware of the opportunities that are available to them. Yes, it's hard. We had a student go to, um, League for the summer. Uh-huh. And he was told, well, you're only here because of your ethnicity.
[00:25:03] RORI: Ugh.
[00:25:04] M.ELENA: It's ugly.
[00:25:05] RORI: Totally.
[00:25:06] M.ELENA: And somebody once told me that, they said, well, you're here because of your ethnicity.
And I said, and you're here because you're white. I was so mad.
[00:25:13] RORI: Untrue, though. Not untrue. That's a good response.
[00:25:15] M.ELENA: They just, they just,
well, that's what they said. They never, they never made those assumptions about me again. And then when it came to CSUN, there was an older, senior faculty member who saw me in the hall and said, hi, honey, I'm glad you're here.
[00:25:33] RORI: What?
[00:25:33] M.ELENA: Now that set me off. I And I said, excuse me? And he said, you know, you're very young. My daughter is the same age as you. And I realized I was inappropriate. So I want to welcome you here. And I said, thank you. And we became good friends.
[00:25:50] RORI: Oh, you kind of had the grace to let him realize that and move forward too, which is Pretty remarkable.
So I'm going to ask you one specific question that is self-interested. You know, I've run some student programs, I'm excited about student programs, and you have so much experience with them. I'm curious, what do you know now about student programs to support students to engage in research that you wish you had known when you started that work?
[00:26:17] M.ELENA: I don't know, I've just always been optimistic about
students abilities. It's just whether they choose to use them in a productive way or not.
[00:26:27] RORI: Okay.
[00:26:28] M.ELENA: And also my childhood, my family life was really very stable compared to a lot of my student's lives.
[00:26:36] RORI: Oof. Yeah.
[00:26:37] M.ELENA: And that's the hard part for me that I, I didn't realize I've never, you know, never experienced hunger.
I was not prepared for the level of conflict and need that a lot of students have. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:49] EMILIA: Yeah. You're a really extremely experienced mentor and, uh, you have been recognized for your mentoring excellence. You got a Presidential Medal for that. Uh, could you tell our listeners why mentoring matters?
[00:27:03] M.ELENA: Mentoring matters is, is a way of transferring, um, information and showing people opportunities. and then giving them some hints. So, I mean, I think that mentoring is being able to share what you know, um, but not expecting people to follow your path. One of my dad's favorite, favorite sayings to me was, Piensatelo bien.
Think it through. Gather the facts and make a decision.
[00:27:28] RORI: Uh huh. Do you give that advice to your students?
[00:27:30] M.ELENA: I do. I say I will not tell you what to do. I will propose things you might consider in making your decision.
[00:27:36] EMILIA: I think that's something that's sometimes hard for students to get because they expect you to know the answer.
But yeah, like you said, you are providing information and it's up to them to make their choices.
[00:27:46] M.ELENA: I tell students about my failures. Because things go wrong sometimes. Yeah. And you just have to figure out, okay, so what did you learn from it, right? I've had students come in crying because they're convinced they're not going to get in anywhere, so they're making all these applications everywhere.
[00:28:00] RORI: Uh huh.
[00:28:01] M.ELENA: And then one student in particular, I remember, She's very upset and I said, you know, you've done very well. I'm sure you're going to get into someplace good. And later she came in and started crying again because she couldn't decide. She, had good offers, right? Oh, and that's what she was crying about.
I said, where do you think there's space for you?
[00:28:20] RORI: Yeah. Where are you going to get the support?
[00:28:22] M.ELENA: The support? Not, I don't like to tell people where they're going to fit in because no,
[00:28:26] RORI: Yeah.
[00:28:26] M.ELENA: You can't contort yourself that way.
[00:28:28] RORI: But where's there space for you? Not where you fit in, but where is there space for you?
For undergrads and grad students who are seeking out mentorship, what would you tell them to look for? How do they find a mentor who's going to help them navigate the system? Who's gonna, like you're saying, like give them the tips and the heads up that they need in order to reach their goals.
[00:28:47] M.ELENA: That is really difficult because
mentors Mentors and mentees.
It's a personal, intimate relationship.
[00:28:55] RORI: Mm-Hmm.
[00:28:55] M.ELENA: that you develop. Relationships evolve. People say, oh, I have one, a mentor that looks like me. And I say, well, you know if I was waiting for a mentor who looked like me when I was seeking
[00:29:04] RORI: Wow.
[00:29:04] M.ELENA: I would still be waiting.
[00:29:06] RORI: Yep. Right.
[00:29:06] M.ELENA: Mentors don't have to look like you.
[00:29:09] EMILIA: So, now we are going to transition to our segment titled Revise and Resubmit, where we talk about parts of science, culture, or your own career journey that you, that you'd like to change or revise and resubmit. So, Maria Elena, why would you revise and resubmit?
[00:29:27] M.ELENA: You know, a long time ago, I decided
I would live without regret.I don't make decisions without thinking them through. So,
[00:29:36] EMILIA: Piéntatelo bien.
[00:29:37] M.ELENA: Because of that, I mean, I may fail, and so then that just means I have to rethink it.
[00:29:42] RORI: It sounds like you already revised and resubmitted, though. Like, it's a constant process.
[00:29:46] M.ELENA: It's not like a grant proposal, rather, where you throw the pink sheets or the whatever sheets or summary statements and you smash them on the floor and throw them at your desk and say, these guys can't read.
Life moves on. So if you resubmit, you're not going to resubmit to the same life.
[00:30:00] RORI: Oh yeah,
can't go back to the same river twice, huh? Maria Elena, I feel like I could keep on talking with you for hours and I'm so grateful for the time that you've shared with us here today.
[00:30:10] M.ELENA: I'm humbled and, you know, my mom and dad would be, if they were still alive, would be very happy that I'm sharing this knowledge, but it's because of my mom and dad that I'm here.
[00:30:19] EMILIA: Thank you for listening to this episode if you like what you heard, share it with someone.
[00:30:23] RORI: You can also support this program by writing a kind review.
[00:30:26] EMILIA: This episode was produced and edited by Maribel Quesada Smith, and Sound Engineering by Keegan Stromberg. Special thanks to Dr. Maria Elena Zavala, the host of Science Wise Rori Rolfhs and me, Emilia Huerta Sanchez.