Season 2 |
Episode 1: Leveraging personal experience to reimagine academic culture
[00:00:00] Rori: Welcome to the second season of Science Wise, a 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] Emilia: who just so happens to be a badass scientist. I'm Emilia.
[00:00:12] Rori: And I'm Rori. We're two scientists on a mission to make the world of science more welcoming by learning from the experiences of people who came before us.
[00:00:20] Emilia: Our guest today is Dr. Maria Orive, a professor at the University of Kansas working in the biology department. I met her at an NSF grants review panel. And it was remarkable how she was both professional and welcoming and, of course, super smart. She received her PhD in zoology at UC Berkeley in the area of theoretical population genetics.
Her research has been funded by both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Maria Orive became chair of the biology department in 2019 and is now an associate Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas. In 2022, she became a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
And today I'm so excited to learn more about Dr. Maria Orive's journey and her experiences successfully navigating academia. Thank you so much for coming.
I'm really excited to have you here. You're a special treat because Rori and I are both population geneticists, and you are a population geneticist, and you've worked with people that we know, and so I think there's a lot of things that we have in common, and so I'm super excited that we get to chat with you today
[00:01:34] Maria: it's exciting to be here. Thank you.
[00:01:36] Rori: Maria, we did a little bit of research about you and something that I learned is that you were born in Cuba and then you moved to Olympia, Washington, maybe when you were very young. I'm so curious, what was it like to be a Cuban American growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest?
[00:01:56] Maria: So it's really kind of an interesting story. My, my family left Cuba when I was four, when I was small. we all came to the US, um, at a time when a lot of, Cubans were leaving Cuba and we were very briefly in Miami, like most Cuban Americans who come to immigrate into the U.S
Um, but my, my father knew a family whose, the father of the people that my parents knew had moved to the U. S. a long time in the past and was teaching at a small Catholic school, Catholic college in Lacey, Washington, which is an even smaller town next to Olympia.
And so this family was like, we're going to go, we're going to go there because we know somebody so they were the Kapustanis they were going there and so my family was like, we'll go with you, we'll go there also these Cubans, were moving to the U. S. And at the time, the U. S., my understanding is that the U. S. government was trying to get people sort of out of Miami. Um, so if you had a U.S. citizen who would sponsor you they would sort of help arrange travel to get you out of Miami somewhere else and so this, this relative had been in the U. S., was a U. S. citizen and so he sponsored all these people.
[00:03:07] Rori: Sorry so this is a relative of the Pakistanis or,
[00:03:10] Maria: Yeah, the Capistanis. Yeah, not related to us.
[00:03:12] Rori: Not related to you at all, but he was like, I'll sponsor you the ORs. I'll sponsor the Pakistanis. I'll sponsor de León
[00:03:18] Maria: yeah, I know all these people. I'll sponsor them all. So all these people moved to, to Olympia, Washington,
So they all settled in, in that area, eventually found jobs.
And so I always tell people that even though I grew up in Olympia, Washington, I grew up in a Cuban American community in Olympia, Washington. So I grew up speaking Spanish always in family and on the weekends when we visited with all these families and they had kids. They all had, like, ended up having kids roughly similar ages, a little bit different,
[00:03:46] Rori: What did you do for fun? What was fun during, like, Vietnam era Olympia
[00:03:52] Maria: early 70s. well, I think something that's important to know about me is I have very poor vision and I've always had very, very poor vision even as a small child. so, you know, when you listen to people who are biologists, They often tell you a story of, I wandered the forest looking at trees and frogs and gathering tadpoles and, and, you know, that's a really common sort of origin story for, for a scientist. That was not me. I'm very nearsighted still, even as a small child and my vision was very poor. So I, did not like being outside because I couldn't see anything So I was sort of like very
[00:04:23] Rori: nerve
[00:04:24] Maria: Um, so I was one of those kids who stayed home and read.
I was buried in books, yes, I would be in the backyard. My, my, we had a tree we could climb up into, but I would climb up into the tree to read. So, so I was, I was a kid who really, I was in my own head a lot, and, and spent a lot of time reading and imagining and making things up, um, with my, my brother and sister and also other friends and yeah, we did go out, there was a, we call it the woods by our house. I realize now it's all secondary growth, you know, it's typical Pacific Northwest, we thought it was a really dark, deep forest, um, because we were little kids and we would make up all these stories and run around, it's true, but I don't think I was much of a nature person.
[00:05:05] Rori: It was more about, like, the imaginary play in the
[00:05:07] Maria: yeah, yeah,
I'm the middle kid, so if you need something done or someone to worry about stuff for you, that would be me. I organize really well and I'm a really good worrier.
[00:05:18] Rori: Oh yeah. Well, you know, Maria you're in good company because do you know that Emilia is also the middle of three and I am the middle of five and like.
[00:05:25] Maria: The middle of five. Okay. So you've got a lot. Yeah. I'm also, but I am the oldest girl. So it was a boy, my brother, my older brother, me and my little sister. And I feel like, in, especially in Latino families, the oldest daughter ends up taking on interesting, interesting roles. Like I was very much the, the kitchen, you know, not the kitchen assistant, but the kitchen organizer and also my grandmother lived with us,
[00:05:48] Rori: Did you spend a lot of time with her?
[00:05:50] Maria: My mother worked, so my abuela was at home always. She, so actually, ironically, she was blind. She had lost her vision she could see a little bit. Like, she had enough vision to, to sort of see objects, so she really stayed at home. She was very much of a home person, but she was the person who, you know, did a lot of the cooking for us and keeping an eye on us and all that. So I grew up really with my abuela every day and my mother, you know, but my mother worked every day.
[00:06:16] Emilia: I mean, that's three generations right there, right? I assume the transition to Olympia was different for the three of you.
[00:06:23] Maria: so my, My abuela didn't really ever learn English. So her experience of the U. S. was like, was that of an older person with very limited English, um, always. Both of my parents are, well, my father passed away recently, but they're both fluent in English. they have strong accents. My mother, less of, my father never got rid of a very, very strong Cuban accent so, they, you know, they learned English, they worked,
[00:06:47] Emilia: what did they do?
[00:06:47] Maria: originally they were med techs, people who draw blood.
[00:06:51] Rori: Oh, cool.
[00:06:52] Maria: when they came to the U S they were able to find work right away because hospitals needed people to do blood draws and things like that my father had well, they always said he had great hands, his hands were very steady, the hospital near us would call him in to always draw blood for premature babies
[00:07:04] Rori:And you said your dad passed away recently.
[00:07:10] Maria: Two years ago.
[00:07:12] Rori: I'm sorry for his loss.
[00:07:13] Maria: Yeah. He, they had been married for over 60 years when he passed away.
[00:07:15] Rori: Wow. That's impressive.
[00:07:18] Maria: Yeah, so I went through high school in Olympia.
Um, but then I went to college in California, so I went,
[00:07:17] Rori: You make that change?
[00:07:19] Maria: This is a funny story. This shows you like kids who don't know things about anything. I had this vision from, again, you have to realize I read a lot of books. I read a lot of books and I was like, Oh, I, what I really want is to be in one of those schools on the East Coast where people sit under trees wearing I don't know, plaid skirts and reading books and talking about poetry or something, that just sounded so perfect and that happened in a lot of books. And I was like, yeah, and then I found out those schools are, those schools are hard to get into, right? Those are like the Ivy League schools and those like private schools. And I was like, oh, well, maybe that won't happen. Um, but there was this, Kid who was the son of someone my mother worked with Chris, and Chris got into Stanford, and um, he was home from college and He was telling me about it and he's like you should apply to Stanford and I'm like, okay Because to you know, 18 year old me Stanford was just a school in California that Chris went to it was a good school
[00:08:23] Rori: You're like, somebody I know goes there.
[00:08:25] Maria: he's like well Chris went there and I know him and he's he's not you know, a completely different human than me.
So I could do it. So I applied to Stanford and I did get in so I never applied to like, I dunno, whatever I was thinking at Mount Holyoke or Harvard or whatever, whatever it was in my brain. I didn't apply to any of those schools Cause I was like, there's no way I would get into those schools. So I won't even apply to them. But because I didn't know anything about Stanford, really, I applied to Stanford and got in, and they gave me a lot, a lot of financial aid.
So Stanford, like many private schools, has deep pockets, right? So, um, I, was able to go to Stanford for less than it would have cost me to go to the University of Washington, which is how I convinced my parents to let me go to California. I was a smart kid. I worked out like to, I didn't, it wasn't a spreadsheet cause this was pre-spreadsheet days, but you know, on a piece of paper, like this is the cost of Stanford. This is the cost of the University of Washington side by side. I'll look at this. And they were like, you know, yeah, you're right.
[00:09:24] Rori: Well, it's a very, very data-based approach to convincing your parents, too.
[00:09:29] Maria: Yeah,
[00:09:29] Emilia: So did your parents, were they like, okay, Maria, you're going to go, you can go to Stanford or?
[00:09:35] Maria: It took, it took work, Emilia. It took a lot of work. My dad, whom I loved very much, was very conservative, especially in how he raised his daughters. And he was like, I don't think it's a good idea for you to live. away from home while you're not married. I was like, well, here's the thing, dad I don't know if I really want to ever get married.
I don't know what I want to do, but I definitely want to go to college. It took, it took some convincing.
[00:10:00] Rori: When you moved down there, and when you were starting your undergrad, did you know you wanted to do science? When did you know that you were passionate about science?
[00:10:09] Maria: That's a good question. So I thought I wanted to study math, so I was like, maybe science, biology, math, so different, I wasn't totally sure, but you know, those areas. I went to see a professor at Stanford early on, um, about being a math major.
Um, Stanford doesn't make you declare a major right away, or at that time they didn't, so you just showed up and then took classes and they had a lot of Courses that you had to take for your liberal arts degree that everybody has to take so your first-year you don't really need that much to know where you're going. So I went to see this guy and he was super not supportive.
He was like, he basically said, if you're going to be, I can't remember how he phrased it, but he was basically saying if you're going to be really good at math if you're going to be brilliant, we would know by now. Um, cause I was 18. He said, do you think you're brilliant at math? And I was like, brilliant? No, I don't think I'm brilliant. I work really hard. I like it. He's like, no,
it's not for
[00:11:02] Rori: Wow.
[00:11:04] Rori: I don't know the culture that this person was creating there.
[00:11:07] Maria: Actually, sometimes you talk to people who say this, that, that, you should go into a field where you have like natural ability.
And I actually don't believe in that because I'm not naturally anything. Everything I've ever done, I've had to like practice and fail and try. I'm a grinder, not a, like a brilliant person. So, you know, if I had waited to find something I'm like naturally brilliant at, I wouldn't have any job because I, you know, not like naturally brilliant at anything.
[00:11:32] Rori: I mean, many people might say you are a brilliant evolutionary biologist, but even if we don't say brilliant, you are an evolutionary biologist who has tested interesting hypotheses, who has done a ton of innovative work, and you feel really confident that it's not because of a natural ability that you
[00:11:47] Maria: No, I, I would say it's absolutely not a natural ability. I, I like math. I've always liked math, but it's not easy. Like, I have to like, you know, grind through it and think about it, and it's not fast it's like great to have like things that come easily, but I don't think that it not coming easily should necessarily shut the door on your face. Like, if you really are interested in something, you should do it.
[00:12:08] Rori: But this, you had this conversation and this guy, you're like, okay,
[00:12:11] Maria: I feel like he kind of, I think he kind of did me a favor. Because, um, I was like, right, well I like biology a lot, I'll, I'll, I'll do some biology. I took, uh, a biostats class from Mark Feldman.
[00:12:23] Emilia: Famous person?
[00:12:24] Maria: famous person. So I'm taking this class from him and I really like it and I went to see him in office hours, And I remember sitting in his office, um, and I said, I really like this class and I like math.
I didn't end up being a math major. Is there an area of biology that sort of combines like math and biology? Because I, And he, the look on his face, the joyous look on his face, told me that the answer was yes. And he reached behind him and he had written a small, he's written a small book on sort of theoretical population genetics or population genetics.
And he said, why don't you look through this book and see if this interests you? And boom, you know, and it did. And so that was, you know, that was a really good thing.
[00:13:05] Emilia: So it sounds like that meeting with Mark really put you in the direction of mathematics and biology and probably population genetics. So, Did you do some research as an undergrad then?
[00:13:19] Maria: So I did, but a little bit differently. Um, so I did some, like, real biology. I did some field work at Jasper Ridge, on, uh, Euphidrius Editha, the checkerspot butterfly and checker spots were kind of famous because they, had been part of the thinking of metapopulation biology.
So this idea of local populations going extinct and then getting recolonized by others, so they had years, decades of data of butterflies being captured. And what they had, which I realized right away was going to be really useful, was butterflies that had been caught and the first time at the beginning of the summer and the last time at the end of the summer. So they were all presumably about the same age, right? Or there was enough the same amount of time happened, but they were caught a variable number of times between. So we know that they're all Yeah, so they're all like three months from here to here, but these only were touched twice. These were touched three times. These were touched five times. And so we're like, well, let's see if the number of times that they're caught changes the age estimate that the scientists gave them. So we went through all this data I did not have a laptop. So you have to understand this is like pre-laptop. So we're like, like doing this analysis on the, the mainframe. but, um, we did just some, you know, basic stats.
They're very basic regression, looking to see significance so that is my undergraduate research. It uses Wingware as an indicator of age and it is published in the Journal of the Lepidopterist Society. It's my first publication.
[00:14:51] Emilia: What's the answer?
[00:14:52] Maria: So it did not significantly age the butterflies. Neither the males or the females. We did them separately. And it gets cited every so often because people still use wing wear as an indicator of age.
And so sometimes people cite that paper, which I think is really funny.
[00:15:05] Emilia: you as an undergrad, you had a publication. That's pretty, that's pretty big.
[00:15:10] Maria: did the work as an undergrad and it took a while, but I think it got published, like, when I was my first year of grad school, but yeah, it's my undergrad research.
And it's with Jack, with John Bowman,
[00:15:19] Emilia: Okay. And so when did you think, Oh, I like this. I want to do a PhD. Is that like a possibility?
[00:15:26] Maria: As soon as I started doing that reading, I started thinking about that.
The other thing that's really important to all this and kind of ties into one of those student questions that you sent me about, um, aunties and uncles in science.
Everybody has those, but I also have, like, I think of a couple of siblings and one of my science siblings is Sally Otto, who I met when we were both undergraduates in this sort of theoretical ecology class.
Sally and I became friends right away, And Sally, Was just one of those brilliant people and she definitely was going to grad school. And so I was like, oh This is a whole this is a whole possibility this is a thing
[00:16:03] Rori: Yeah.
[00:16:04] Maria: And that would have probably been either sophomore or junior year that I was like, okay, this is I might go to grad school
[00:16:10] Rori: And you were really motivated by like your academic sib,
[00:16:12] Maria: yeah, because I was starting to meet people Oh, and also when I started working with Jack like what he was doing and I was like, these people seem really happy.
maybe if Mark had shared more information about faculty meetings, I might have a different viewpoint, but that part of it, the science part of it just looked fantastic.
[00:16:28] Rori: It's also kind of amazing to me to be like, oh, you and Sally Otto like were and maybe are tight. I'm like, oh my God, all of these badasses are actually like have relationships
[00:16:39] Maria: I Love to tell people that we met when we were teenagers because we were both still in our teens when we
[00:16:43] Rori: Wow.
[00:16:44] Maria: , in fact, I I have a story when I walked into that class, I was a very awkward person and I was sitting there, you know, sort of awkwardly sitting there. And this woman walks in, she's dressed all in black. She's so cool. I could tell she was cool. She walked in and I thought, man, look at how cool that woman is. I wish she would come over and sit next to me and we could be friends. Like in my mind, I was like, so I obviously willed it into being because, you Sally walks over.
She's a very friendly person and says, Hi, I'm Sally. Um, what's your name or something like that and sat immediately like introduced herself and was super friendly and, and we've been friends ever since.
[00:17:20] Rori: That's amazing.
[00:17:21] Emilia: that's a very cool story. What class was this theoretical?
[00:17:24] Maria: I think it was theoretical ecology.
[00:17:26] Emilia: So how many women were in that class?
[00:17:29] Maria: might've just been me and Sally. So it
might've
[00:17:32] Rori: that's another reason
[00:17:33] Maria: it's another reason, looking back, it may have been that The year after we took Biostats with Mark Feldman, we became the graders for that class.
So Mark would pick the students who did the best in the class and say, I'm going to hire you to be my graders. So Kat and Sally and I, um, spent a lot of time together because we graded problem sets, um, together as undergrads. I didn't have any money, so I was always looking for jobs. I Had a regular job, I had a work-study job, and then I took some extra jobs that I didn't tell the work-study people about,
[00:18:01] Rori: doing that while you were taking classes full time and doing research.
[00:18:06] Maria: yeah. You know, even though they give you a lot of financial aid, there's never enough money to like fly home or, or do those other things.
[00:18:11] Rori:How did you choose the next step or who you were going to work with?
[00:18:23] Maria:You know, I feel like I depended a lot on, on the goodness of other people. So when I told Mark Feldman that I wanted to go to grad school, he said, all right, and then he got a piece of paper out and he wrote out a list of programs that were strong and sort of popped in and specific people that he thought would be good advisors and he said, there's other really good people, but I'm only giving you the names of people I would send you to. of People that I trust, basically.
[00:18:46] Emilia: How many names were on that list?
[00:18:47] Maria: Maybe eight or something. I and, I have done that for students. I have said, here are the names of some scientists. You may not end up working with them, but these are people I trust. Go ahead and reach out to them and talk to them. One of, the names on that list was Monty Slatkin at UC Berkeley. And that's who I ended up working with for grad school,it was really easy to go see Berkeley because like there's a bus between Berkeley and Stanford and so I took the bus over to, um, to meet with Monty. And, um, we had a really great conversation and he walked me around being in Monty's lab I didn't realize it at the time, like later in retrospect, I benefited greatly from being around really smart folks. It never felt competitive. It would always felt like we were like all trying to figure stuff out.
[00:19:27] Rori: it sounds like your undergrad and your grad research experiences were like really marked by like collaborative, mutually supportive, and excited kind of atmospheres. Did you ever encounter a different? Atmosphere?
[00:19:41] Maria: yes, I did. So sadly, yeah, it happens.
I had my struggles as a grad student. I got to the very end of my dissertation and the last chapter and I were having so much trouble. Um, and I felt like it would never get published. And there was like this point, like, I feel like it was only like two months before the end where I was like, I'm probably gonna have to quit grad school. I'm not gonna finish. But I think it was just that last hill that I couldn't quite You know, do. Eventually, I did do it and it was, it was fine. It was just one of those things where I always tell students that it's really easy to lose motivation even when you're really close. And I tell them that story of like sitting at home watching reruns of TV shows and not working on my last chapter because I was so depressed about it, It was so like not working, I did two postdocs. And my first postdoc was at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, in the genetics department with a theoretician named Marjorie Asmussen and she's passed away. , and Marjorie and I did not have a great time together. she was just brilliant, just a brilliant person.
And I learned a great deal from her. But she was very different. From the advisors and the mentors I'd had before then. She had a way of mentoring that I think worked for some people, but did not work for me. detail-oriented, maybe micromanaging. , and it made me stressed. It made me worried. I was worried all the time that I was doing a bad job because it was very like intense we'd produced, I think, two really good papers. I'm really proud of those two papers. The fact that there's only two is kind of a bummer, but we could have produced more.
They're monster papers too. They're like, they're in genetics and they're really long.
Um, yeah, I like the work we did.
[00:21:20] Rori: Uh huh.
[00:21:22] Maria: But it was not good. That was not a good place for me.
[00:21:24] Emilia: So you think what didn't work was there was already something like the environment was already a bit, a tense?
[00:21:31] Maria: I think there was some tension. You know, grad students, you can be critical of them, but you also have to be critical in a supportive way that's going to get them through that, that thing. , you have to be supportive enough so they move through that difficulty. And that's hard. That's a hard piece of mentoring. And so Marjorie and I, our writing was difficult and maybe it was a good lesson that not, not everything's always going to be easy. Um, but it was not easy. That was a hard postdoc. And then I had personal stuff going on too. and so did Marjorie. So Marjorie was coming off of the end of a marriage. She had two young kids. I was getting divorced. For my first husband, somebody else in the lab was facing some serious health issues. There was a lot happening. It was a pressure cooker and we were all under a lot of stress.
[00:22:13] Rori: That sounds so difficult.
[00:22:14] Maria: That was not fun.
[00:22:15] Rori: everybody's stressed. Nobody has capacity and the kind of ways people are working together are like not meshing.
[00:22:22] Maria: we needed one person whose life was chill to be a buffer in there. And we just didn't have that
[00:22:29] Rori: yeah, do you think that you were put in almost like a middle-child situation
[00:22:33] Maria: Yeah. I mean, postdocs often are, I think that's one of the things that made me learn from that experience was you also have to protect your postdocs.
[00:22:40] Emilia: right.
But going back, to what you said about finishing your PhD and how you were so close but felt like you were not going to be able to finish, how did you move through that?
[00:22:52] Maria: I think maybe I was not burned out exactly, but I, you know, you work at a really high pace through grad school and The first two chapters of my dissertation were published. One was out, had been out for a while. The other one was in press. So things were looking good. So in some ways, some of it was published, but there was this other part I wanted to publish and that was just separate. And I was like, the way I was thinking about it wasn't quite right and it wasn't working. And then I would redo the model. And normally I don't mind that tinkering part of models where you work for a while and then Nope, you scrap it and you start again. I kind of like that. I think of it as like tinkering. It's fun. I was feeling like it's time to finish and you couldn't keep tinkering. You've got to finish.
And I felt really stressed, about it being done. And it, it seemed insurmountable. And then finally, it's funny because, Monty had been away, , on sabbatical.
And then one day I sent him a draft, and, You know, that draft came back with like, yeah, just a few more changes. I think this is ready to go.
And I was like, what? I just somehow was like, it's never, ever, ever, this is never ever going to finish this chapter. And then it was finished and it was published and it was fine. So I don't, I can't even almost describe what, what was wrong, but I felt like I would never finish that chapter. I would never get my PhD and I needed to drop out of grad school, which I realize is an overreaction to being stuck.
But , You know, I, I feel like it can happen, also I mean, I think you should always work to make your work better.
[00:24:20] Rori: Absolutely.
And keep working until it's really good. But you also have to just stop and be like, okay, this is fine.
[00:24:27] Rori: Yeah, like that's saying, a couple more tiny changes and then just publish it. Don't get too perfectionist about it. You probably could keep on improving it, but
[00:24:36] Maria: forever. I think of that sometimes when I'm working with students. It's like, don't let, um, perfect be the goal the best dissertation is a completed one.
[00:24:47] Emilia: I would say, something similar happened to me where I felt like, oh my God, like, when am I going to be done? I could feel the stress.
[00:24:54] Maria: To finish? Cause I think that's also part of it. There's, there's always a cohort of people and a few of them will finish first. And when you see them finish, you're like, Oh, it's time, it's time to be getting close to finishing. What if I don't finish? That happened so close. To when I was completely done, it's really weird to get to the point where you're like pretty sure you might need to quit when you're actually just a few steps from being finished.
What I really needed looking back, probably, I probably should have taken a week off and gone somewhere with a friend or something Just done something else for a week.
[00:25:33] Rori: yeah. Taking a break.
[00:25:35] Emilia: yeah. Maria, I didn't know you were married as a postdoc. Did you marry as a grad student or as a postdoc?
[00:25:42] Maria: Yeah. So I had a boyfriend in college. , he was a chemist, he was studying chemistry and he got his PhD at Berkeley also.
We got married in grad school. uh, I was 22 or 23. So I was very young. In many ways we're really well suited. We're both academics, we're both scientists, and we both like nerds who like the same kinds of books. So we got along really well. we came from the same kind of background and, it was an easy fit in many ways. And then I went to the postdoc and he stayed in California and we were doing a long-distance thing and that did not work. That did not work. When I was at Georgia, we, we split up, , he found someone else, and it was really hard.
[00:26:21] Rori: That sounds devastating, Especially in this moment when your professional life feels really hard too, and then you're like,
[00:26:27] Maria: I think looking back, I'm like, what were we thinking? Like a cross-country, long-distance marriage. It's like only for the most, the toughest people, maybe. I don't, I don't know. Not, um, something I would recommend to other people. It didn't work out. It was a real mess. Um, I did have a lot of people who were so supportive, who really helped me. I remember a friend who's a, who's another scientist, saying, you know, put my phone number on a sticky pad next to your phone. And if you feel like calling him, call me at three in the morning or two in the morning, because I was having a hard time just like giving up. , even though he had made it clear that he didn't want to be with me anymore. , I had friends who were like, We will help you. We will help you do this. And they did, and these are some of my best friends, even to this day.
[00:27:14] Rori: Very nice. So how did you and Michael meet?
[00:27:16] Maria: Well, we met in a bar
[00:27:17] Rori: That's like the old-school way to meet people, you know?
[00:27:20] Maria: I was at home and I was kind of depressed and, uh,, and this friend, Alice, who is a botanist, was like, it's Halloween. Let's go out. And I'm like, Oh, I do not want to go out and please leave me alone. And Alice says I'm coming over to your apartment. And she came over and she had, you know, those vampire teeth. She had that and a black plastic cape. And she said, you always wear black, put this on, you're a vampire. Boom. Costume. So we went to, a bar in Athens And I, I saw him and I was like, Oh, that guy's cute. And Alice was like, you should go talk to him. I was like, uh, no, I'll go over and say hi to him for you if you don't. And I'm like, Oh man, she's just pushy.
So I went over and talked to him. And so we met. He's not an academic. He was working as a bartender and a musician and, and he was still not an academic.
So I don't talk about my work with my husband when I come home. I do. I mean, I complain about my work sometimes, but Yeah.
[00:28:14] Rori: I love that. And I love that your friend really pushed you and then you're like, well, that turned out well.
[00:28:18] Maria: Well, we had, we had a really cool conversation about Scotland actually because I knew I was going to be going to Edinburgh, um, because I had the NATO and I was like, Hey, you want to go to Scotland? and he said, I can't right now because I have a job And at the end of the summer, I'll have made enough money and I'll come to Scotland.
[00:28:35] Rori: And he did.
[00:28:37] Maria: And he did.
That worked out really well. That worked out really well.
[00:28:40] Emilia: Very nice.
[00:28:40] Rori: so he came with you then after that when, you got a job at the University of Kansas, a faculty job, right? How was it to transition to faculty? Like, why Kansas?
[00:28:51] Maria: I had never been to Kansas before. I was applying to jobs. I got some interviews, but I wasn't like landing. I wasn't getting on the shortlist. I was on the long short list. And then I got an email from a woman who's since retired here from Kansas, Helen Alexander. She was the chair of the search committee and they were, they were searching for theory. And she, Sent me an email specifically and said, this is a theory job. And I'm like, I better apply to that job. Cause this one, they're like, they're actually looking for someone doing theory.
so I applied, Um, I got the interview and they're like, yeah, we'll fly you from Scotland to Kansas. I'm like, okay, all right, we're going to do this. So they, they flew me out. And I liked it right away. And the department seemed like there was a good, it was a good vibe. They offered me the job. They also hired at the same time, two other people and they ended up hiring three people. They hired Hiroshi Akashi, John Kelly, and me, and they were going to bring all at the same time, And then when we moved to Kansas, we were so far from family. I think that is the hardest thing about academic jobs. This thing where you end up far from family.
[00:29:54] Rori: Totally. It's a tough thing about the academic culture, for sure. I mean, it's turned out well, you've stayed there, you stayed at the University of Kansas, you kind of like went through the ranks, you like, went, you got yourself tenure, and you started doing not only the theoretical population genetics research you're doing, but you started taking on these kind of like admin roles too, like weren't, you were department head and now are you associate dean?
[00:30:18] Maria: I'm the associate dean for natural sciences and math is,
[00:30:21] Rori: kind
[00:30:22] Maria: is, is a big deal, but it's what we are. I will say one thing I do want to mention because I think it's, I don't know if it's good for people listening to this, to hear this. I had a long period of being an associate professor before I went on for fall. And this happens sometimes, the hardest part of my career was that part in the middle when I was like, not sure I would ever make fall.
And I was like, it's something I wanted and it doesn't look like it's going to happen and it was hard. It coincided with me having two small kids I didn't have enough bandwidth to do all the things I wanted to do and, and get to the point where I could be full. I did eventually do it. And, and, and when I did, I was like, Oh, this is, this is great. This is awesome. You know, I got to this place,
And I was able to think about science in a different way again and really, get back to it. It's one of the things as Associate Dean I actually really care about. We have a new program here at KU. , we give it a dorky name because that's what we do. It's called College Cares and Career Advancement Research Enhancement Semester.
So it's for people who are Associate Professors, but they're past like the first year of college. chunk of time and they would like to, to make that next promotion, but they need some time to like revamp something to get things going again. And so it's a semester where you don't teach. And also you're supposed to be free from service, which can be a big deal for a mid-career folk it comes with a small amount of research money as well. And you're supposed to have a letter from your department chair talking about how this is going to help you advance to full because the idea is it's supposed to. Get the department chair involved in like making a plan for this person.
And then part of the, the application is you're supposed to talk about like what might've interrupted your ability to, to progress to full. We were thinking specifically about people who have a lot of caring responsibilities or have done a lot of service. The reason I started it is because it took me so long to become a full professor.
[00:32:22] Emilia: I remember actually when I met you at an NSF panel, uh, Maria, this is something that you mentioned to me. And I remember also one of the program officers was collecting data because apparently women spent a lot more time as associate professors and don't make a lot of money jump into full professors. , did you feel like that because the chair said, oh, these are the things that you need to do to become full professor and you just were not, did not have enough time to, like, leave those milestones or was it more like an internal sort of you decided for yourself?
[00:32:57] Maria: it's, it's interesting cause I was talking to a friend of mine who I went to grad school with, at the sort of point where I was starting to publish a lot and get grants again and, and, and things started to ramp up again. She said, we know I'm talking to you, you sound different when you're talking about your science. And I think it doesn't, it's not necessarily true for everybody, but when my kids were small, I felt like I didn't have enough creative bandwidth or something. Like I was very tired and I didn't have enough and I was doing a lot of service. And I needed a specific kind of time. , large blocks of time that are uninterrupted. I didn't have any of that.
All my time was always interrupted.
I got to a different place in my life, in their lives,
and I said, okay, well now I do this. I got a grant funded. I got some papers published. I picked up my collaboration with Bob again.
. I did the things that the committee wants you to do to be a full professor.
And it wasn't hard at that point.
It would seem it's much easier again. I mean, I don't know that what happened to me. is necessarily what happens to other people. But there was definitely, a time when I just didn't feel like I had the attention, the undivided attention that I needed to do the stuff that I wanted to do.
, and then when, when I had that and I became full, I was just really like, yeah, this is, I want to do this.
That's so interesting.
Yeah. And it's me too. It's like, like, who am I now versus then?
[00:34:18] Rori: But I mean, you're saying like creativity, I agree with that. You have to like, you have to put some thought in, just thought and presence into it in a way that's like, you know, parenting is also demanding. You've got to be present in a certain way.
I think for me, and I always try to keep it like personal cause then different people work really differently. For me, I need. My undivided attention on something.
[00:34:38] Maria: Just this early summer, a colleague of mine and I wrote a huge grant. We wrote this big center grant and we submitted to NSF and it was like a ridiculous amount of work. I like took three hours, four-hour blocks in the evening to work on it.
And, and that's how I could do it. And I'm like, that just didn't exist. You know,
[00:35:00] Rori: Three or four-hour blocks of time. That's very hard to come by.
[00:35:03] Maria: So when, when people say, Oh, you progressed to your career, I always want to bring that up because I feel like
I did, but there was this thing where I was an associate professor for a really long time and I'll tell you one little story that
I don't know if it was motivational or upsetting, but I applied for this, an administrative position in the, in the college and I didn't get it, it was fine. Um, but the guy who was. he was the dean of the provost. He kind of gave me an exit interview. And we're talking and he's like, well, you know, I see you're an associate professor and blah, blah, blah.
What are your goals? And I said, well, I'm working towards getting to the point where I can go for full. I, I don't want to be, you know, one of those people who stays associate professor forever.
And he said, you sort of already are.
[00:35:46] Rori: Ouch.
[00:35:46] Maria: I was like, Oh, okay.
[00:35:49] Rori: It's like a little echo of the math professor who was like, you're 18
and you're not brilliant. It's too late. The boat
has, you know, the ship has
[00:35:56] Maria: So he was kind of like, well, you've already been an associate professor for so long, you know, why would you even, keep trying or something? I don't know if that's what he meant
or what, but it's funny, I have a friend who I told the story and he emailed me when I became full.
He said, spite is such a great motivator. I'm like, yeah. and I have heard that from other people that if someone is an associate professor for more than pick some number of years, seven years, they'll never make full. They'll never make full. And I'm like, Wow, you're so sure.
[00:36:25] Rori: Yeah. Based on what data?
Like.
[00:36:27] Emilia: I hope that. people are, you know, the associate professors at your institution. I'm sure they're going to like this initiative that you've created, that's wonderful. It's like a little mini sabbatical almost.
[00:36:40] Maria: like a little mini sabbatical and it's meant specifically for this. , so one of the people who applied, who didn't get it, sent me a note later and said, even though I didn't get it, I wanted to thank you because I had to write up this thing and I went to talk to my chair. And I would have been scared to talk to my chair because it was so depressing.
All of this is so stressful and depressing. But I sat down and said to my chair, I want to make full. I think these are the things I need. I think this is the timeline. What do you think? And this, the chair said, well, yeah, maybe like this, or maybe we could do this. And they had a conversation and they put together a plan, even if they didn't get the semester and had an excuse to say, this is my goal and I want to do it, and not
feeling like ashamed because it's like, well, I'm late.
I'm late to being full. I, you know, but you don't
know. You're never late. You can do it whenever you want. It's fine.
Everybody's career path is totally different and I would love there not to be any stigma so that at any point someone could
say, no, now, now is the time I want to do this now.
[00:37:38] Rori: I mean, it makes sense. I haven't looked at the data, but from my anecdotal experience, there's a real bias in who ends up staying an associate professor. For longer,
Maria, now we're going to go to a segment that we like here called Revise and Resubmit, where you can tell us about a part of your academic path. Or if you want about, academic and science culture, that you would change, that you would revise and resubmit.
[00:38:03] Maria: It's funny because it's specifically about revising and resubmitting. So
this is, it's, this is, uh, it's really about me, my path, but it's something that I, I wish if I could change something about myself or the way I've done things, this is the thing I would change. A couple of times, twice at least, I have gotten a rejection on a paper or a rejection on a proposal.
And I have allowed myself to become like, oh no, no, no, no, I can't, I cannot deal with this.
I must put it aside. Um, I can't deal with the rejection right now. I wish what I had said is, okay, I will give this, Three weeks, one month.
And I am not going to think about it, putting it aside, but then I'm going to come back
because a couple of times I've dropped it completely and it just floundered off into the sea and nothing ever
happened. That is what I would like to revise.
My, my attitude towards that, because I think if you say to me, Nope, that's not ready or no, I should give myself a certain amount of time to let it sit or, you know, maybe not think about it for a while. And then you have to come back
and
try again.
you can be sad for this amount of time, then you've, you got to come back. And that's the part of my career I, if, if I had, cause I think now I do that.
I wish I'd done it from the beginning,
[00:39:21] Rori: Okay. Yeah.
Uh
[00:39:22] Maria: not, not that it's wrong to be upset and to need some time and to need to step away from projects. That's totally fine. But to give yourself a set amount of time and then come back and see, you know, revisit that paper, revisit that grant, revisit that idea
and say, okay, what's wrong with it and what can I fix?
[00:39:41] Rori: I feel like that's like advice my mother would give me. She's like, Rori, you can feel sorry for yourself for this long, but then you gotta stop. You
[00:39:47] Maria: just, I wish I had learned that earlier because
I definitely need to take a little break sometimes,
but just set an amount of time, put a reminder that says, you know, on September 1st, you're coming back and you're going to
[00:39:59] Rori: You're gonna revisit. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's powerful. Thank you for sharing that one.
[00:40:05] Emilia: Yeah, Maria, that was great. It was great getting to know you a little bit more. There were lots of things that I didn't know, even though we had met a few times before. And so, um, thank you so much for being here with us today.
[00:40:19] Maria: Thank you. I really enjoyed getting to talk to both of you and it was really fun. Thank you so much.
[00:40:25] Rori: Oh, it's a joy.
We'll see you soon, Maria.
[00:40:30] Emilia: Thank you for listening to this episode. If you like what you heard, share it with someone.
[00:40:36] Rori: You can also support this program by writing a kind review if your listening platform allows it.
[00:40:41] Emilia: This episode was produced and edited by Maribel Quesada Smith. Special thanks to Dr. Maria Orive, the host of Science Wise, Rori, Rolf, and me, Emilia Huerta Sanchez.
[00:00:09] Emilia: who just so happens to be a badass scientist. I'm Emilia.
[00:00:12] Rori: And I'm Rori. We're two scientists on a mission to make the world of science more welcoming by learning from the experiences of people who came before us.
[00:00:20] Emilia: Our guest today is Dr. Maria Orive, a professor at the University of Kansas working in the biology department. I met her at an NSF grants review panel. And it was remarkable how she was both professional and welcoming and, of course, super smart. She received her PhD in zoology at UC Berkeley in the area of theoretical population genetics.
Her research has been funded by both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Maria Orive became chair of the biology department in 2019 and is now an associate Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas. In 2022, she became a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
And today I'm so excited to learn more about Dr. Maria Orive's journey and her experiences successfully navigating academia. Thank you so much for coming.
I'm really excited to have you here. You're a special treat because Rori and I are both population geneticists, and you are a population geneticist, and you've worked with people that we know, and so I think there's a lot of things that we have in common, and so I'm super excited that we get to chat with you today
[00:01:34] Maria: it's exciting to be here. Thank you.
[00:01:36] Rori: Maria, we did a little bit of research about you and something that I learned is that you were born in Cuba and then you moved to Olympia, Washington, maybe when you were very young. I'm so curious, what was it like to be a Cuban American growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest?
[00:01:56] Maria: So it's really kind of an interesting story. My, my family left Cuba when I was four, when I was small. we all came to the US, um, at a time when a lot of, Cubans were leaving Cuba and we were very briefly in Miami, like most Cuban Americans who come to immigrate into the U.S
Um, but my, my father knew a family whose, the father of the people that my parents knew had moved to the U. S. a long time in the past and was teaching at a small Catholic school, Catholic college in Lacey, Washington, which is an even smaller town next to Olympia.
And so this family was like, we're going to go, we're going to go there because we know somebody so they were the Kapustanis they were going there and so my family was like, we'll go with you, we'll go there also these Cubans, were moving to the U. S. And at the time, the U. S., my understanding is that the U. S. government was trying to get people sort of out of Miami. Um, so if you had a U.S. citizen who would sponsor you they would sort of help arrange travel to get you out of Miami somewhere else and so this, this relative had been in the U. S., was a U. S. citizen and so he sponsored all these people.
[00:03:07] Rori: Sorry so this is a relative of the Pakistanis or,
[00:03:10] Maria: Yeah, the Capistanis. Yeah, not related to us.
[00:03:12] Rori: Not related to you at all, but he was like, I'll sponsor you the ORs. I'll sponsor the Pakistanis. I'll sponsor de León
[00:03:18] Maria: yeah, I know all these people. I'll sponsor them all. So all these people moved to, to Olympia, Washington,
So they all settled in, in that area, eventually found jobs.
And so I always tell people that even though I grew up in Olympia, Washington, I grew up in a Cuban American community in Olympia, Washington. So I grew up speaking Spanish always in family and on the weekends when we visited with all these families and they had kids. They all had, like, ended up having kids roughly similar ages, a little bit different,
[00:03:46] Rori: What did you do for fun? What was fun during, like, Vietnam era Olympia
[00:03:52] Maria: early 70s. well, I think something that's important to know about me is I have very poor vision and I've always had very, very poor vision even as a small child. so, you know, when you listen to people who are biologists, They often tell you a story of, I wandered the forest looking at trees and frogs and gathering tadpoles and, and, you know, that's a really common sort of origin story for, for a scientist. That was not me. I'm very nearsighted still, even as a small child and my vision was very poor. So I, did not like being outside because I couldn't see anything So I was sort of like very
[00:04:23] Rori: nerve
[00:04:24] Maria: Um, so I was one of those kids who stayed home and read.
I was buried in books, yes, I would be in the backyard. My, my, we had a tree we could climb up into, but I would climb up into the tree to read. So, so I was, I was a kid who really, I was in my own head a lot, and, and spent a lot of time reading and imagining and making things up, um, with my, my brother and sister and also other friends and yeah, we did go out, there was a, we call it the woods by our house. I realize now it's all secondary growth, you know, it's typical Pacific Northwest, we thought it was a really dark, deep forest, um, because we were little kids and we would make up all these stories and run around, it's true, but I don't think I was much of a nature person.
[00:05:05] Rori: It was more about, like, the imaginary play in the
[00:05:07] Maria: yeah, yeah,
I'm the middle kid, so if you need something done or someone to worry about stuff for you, that would be me. I organize really well and I'm a really good worrier.
[00:05:18] Rori: Oh yeah. Well, you know, Maria you're in good company because do you know that Emilia is also the middle of three and I am the middle of five and like.
[00:05:25] Maria: The middle of five. Okay. So you've got a lot. Yeah. I'm also, but I am the oldest girl. So it was a boy, my brother, my older brother, me and my little sister. And I feel like, in, especially in Latino families, the oldest daughter ends up taking on interesting, interesting roles. Like I was very much the, the kitchen, you know, not the kitchen assistant, but the kitchen organizer and also my grandmother lived with us,
[00:05:48] Rori: Did you spend a lot of time with her?
[00:05:50] Maria: My mother worked, so my abuela was at home always. She, so actually, ironically, she was blind. She had lost her vision she could see a little bit. Like, she had enough vision to, to sort of see objects, so she really stayed at home. She was very much of a home person, but she was the person who, you know, did a lot of the cooking for us and keeping an eye on us and all that. So I grew up really with my abuela every day and my mother, you know, but my mother worked every day.
[00:06:16] Emilia: I mean, that's three generations right there, right? I assume the transition to Olympia was different for the three of you.
[00:06:23] Maria: so my, My abuela didn't really ever learn English. So her experience of the U. S. was like, was that of an older person with very limited English, um, always. Both of my parents are, well, my father passed away recently, but they're both fluent in English. they have strong accents. My mother, less of, my father never got rid of a very, very strong Cuban accent so, they, you know, they learned English, they worked,
[00:06:47] Emilia: what did they do?
[00:06:47] Maria: originally they were med techs, people who draw blood.
[00:06:51] Rori: Oh, cool.
[00:06:52] Maria: when they came to the U S they were able to find work right away because hospitals needed people to do blood draws and things like that my father had well, they always said he had great hands, his hands were very steady, the hospital near us would call him in to always draw blood for premature babies
[00:07:04] Rori:And you said your dad passed away recently.
[00:07:10] Maria: Two years ago.
[00:07:12] Rori: I'm sorry for his loss.
[00:07:13] Maria: Yeah. He, they had been married for over 60 years when he passed away.
[00:07:15] Rori: Wow. That's impressive.
[00:07:18] Maria: Yeah, so I went through high school in Olympia.
Um, but then I went to college in California, so I went,
[00:07:17] Rori: You make that change?
[00:07:19] Maria: This is a funny story. This shows you like kids who don't know things about anything. I had this vision from, again, you have to realize I read a lot of books. I read a lot of books and I was like, Oh, I, what I really want is to be in one of those schools on the East Coast where people sit under trees wearing I don't know, plaid skirts and reading books and talking about poetry or something, that just sounded so perfect and that happened in a lot of books. And I was like, yeah, and then I found out those schools are, those schools are hard to get into, right? Those are like the Ivy League schools and those like private schools. And I was like, oh, well, maybe that won't happen. Um, but there was this, Kid who was the son of someone my mother worked with Chris, and Chris got into Stanford, and um, he was home from college and He was telling me about it and he's like you should apply to Stanford and I'm like, okay Because to you know, 18 year old me Stanford was just a school in California that Chris went to it was a good school
[00:08:23] Rori: You're like, somebody I know goes there.
[00:08:25] Maria: he's like well Chris went there and I know him and he's he's not you know, a completely different human than me.
So I could do it. So I applied to Stanford and I did get in so I never applied to like, I dunno, whatever I was thinking at Mount Holyoke or Harvard or whatever, whatever it was in my brain. I didn't apply to any of those schools Cause I was like, there's no way I would get into those schools. So I won't even apply to them. But because I didn't know anything about Stanford, really, I applied to Stanford and got in, and they gave me a lot, a lot of financial aid.
So Stanford, like many private schools, has deep pockets, right? So, um, I, was able to go to Stanford for less than it would have cost me to go to the University of Washington, which is how I convinced my parents to let me go to California. I was a smart kid. I worked out like to, I didn't, it wasn't a spreadsheet cause this was pre-spreadsheet days, but you know, on a piece of paper, like this is the cost of Stanford. This is the cost of the University of Washington side by side. I'll look at this. And they were like, you know, yeah, you're right.
[00:09:24] Rori: Well, it's a very, very data-based approach to convincing your parents, too.
[00:09:29] Maria: Yeah,
[00:09:29] Emilia: So did your parents, were they like, okay, Maria, you're going to go, you can go to Stanford or?
[00:09:35] Maria: It took, it took work, Emilia. It took a lot of work. My dad, whom I loved very much, was very conservative, especially in how he raised his daughters. And he was like, I don't think it's a good idea for you to live. away from home while you're not married. I was like, well, here's the thing, dad I don't know if I really want to ever get married.
I don't know what I want to do, but I definitely want to go to college. It took, it took some convincing.
[00:10:00] Rori: When you moved down there, and when you were starting your undergrad, did you know you wanted to do science? When did you know that you were passionate about science?
[00:10:09] Maria: That's a good question. So I thought I wanted to study math, so I was like, maybe science, biology, math, so different, I wasn't totally sure, but you know, those areas. I went to see a professor at Stanford early on, um, about being a math major.
Um, Stanford doesn't make you declare a major right away, or at that time they didn't, so you just showed up and then took classes and they had a lot of Courses that you had to take for your liberal arts degree that everybody has to take so your first-year you don't really need that much to know where you're going. So I went to see this guy and he was super not supportive.
He was like, he basically said, if you're going to be, I can't remember how he phrased it, but he was basically saying if you're going to be really good at math if you're going to be brilliant, we would know by now. Um, cause I was 18. He said, do you think you're brilliant at math? And I was like, brilliant? No, I don't think I'm brilliant. I work really hard. I like it. He's like, no,
it's not for
[00:11:02] Rori: Wow.
[00:11:04] Rori: I don't know the culture that this person was creating there.
[00:11:07] Maria: Actually, sometimes you talk to people who say this, that, that, you should go into a field where you have like natural ability.
And I actually don't believe in that because I'm not naturally anything. Everything I've ever done, I've had to like practice and fail and try. I'm a grinder, not a, like a brilliant person. So, you know, if I had waited to find something I'm like naturally brilliant at, I wouldn't have any job because I, you know, not like naturally brilliant at anything.
[00:11:32] Rori: I mean, many people might say you are a brilliant evolutionary biologist, but even if we don't say brilliant, you are an evolutionary biologist who has tested interesting hypotheses, who has done a ton of innovative work, and you feel really confident that it's not because of a natural ability that you
[00:11:47] Maria: No, I, I would say it's absolutely not a natural ability. I, I like math. I've always liked math, but it's not easy. Like, I have to like, you know, grind through it and think about it, and it's not fast it's like great to have like things that come easily, but I don't think that it not coming easily should necessarily shut the door on your face. Like, if you really are interested in something, you should do it.
[00:12:08] Rori: But this, you had this conversation and this guy, you're like, okay,
[00:12:11] Maria: I feel like he kind of, I think he kind of did me a favor. Because, um, I was like, right, well I like biology a lot, I'll, I'll, I'll do some biology. I took, uh, a biostats class from Mark Feldman.
[00:12:23] Emilia: Famous person?
[00:12:24] Maria: famous person. So I'm taking this class from him and I really like it and I went to see him in office hours, And I remember sitting in his office, um, and I said, I really like this class and I like math.
I didn't end up being a math major. Is there an area of biology that sort of combines like math and biology? Because I, And he, the look on his face, the joyous look on his face, told me that the answer was yes. And he reached behind him and he had written a small, he's written a small book on sort of theoretical population genetics or population genetics.
And he said, why don't you look through this book and see if this interests you? And boom, you know, and it did. And so that was, you know, that was a really good thing.
[00:13:05] Emilia: So it sounds like that meeting with Mark really put you in the direction of mathematics and biology and probably population genetics. So, Did you do some research as an undergrad then?
[00:13:19] Maria: So I did, but a little bit differently. Um, so I did some, like, real biology. I did some field work at Jasper Ridge, on, uh, Euphidrius Editha, the checkerspot butterfly and checker spots were kind of famous because they, had been part of the thinking of metapopulation biology.
So this idea of local populations going extinct and then getting recolonized by others, so they had years, decades of data of butterflies being captured. And what they had, which I realized right away was going to be really useful, was butterflies that had been caught and the first time at the beginning of the summer and the last time at the end of the summer. So they were all presumably about the same age, right? Or there was enough the same amount of time happened, but they were caught a variable number of times between. So we know that they're all Yeah, so they're all like three months from here to here, but these only were touched twice. These were touched three times. These were touched five times. And so we're like, well, let's see if the number of times that they're caught changes the age estimate that the scientists gave them. So we went through all this data I did not have a laptop. So you have to understand this is like pre-laptop. So we're like, like doing this analysis on the, the mainframe. but, um, we did just some, you know, basic stats.
They're very basic regression, looking to see significance so that is my undergraduate research. It uses Wingware as an indicator of age and it is published in the Journal of the Lepidopterist Society. It's my first publication.
[00:14:51] Emilia: What's the answer?
[00:14:52] Maria: So it did not significantly age the butterflies. Neither the males or the females. We did them separately. And it gets cited every so often because people still use wing wear as an indicator of age.
And so sometimes people cite that paper, which I think is really funny.
[00:15:05] Emilia: you as an undergrad, you had a publication. That's pretty, that's pretty big.
[00:15:10] Maria: did the work as an undergrad and it took a while, but I think it got published, like, when I was my first year of grad school, but yeah, it's my undergrad research.
And it's with Jack, with John Bowman,
[00:15:19] Emilia: Okay. And so when did you think, Oh, I like this. I want to do a PhD. Is that like a possibility?
[00:15:26] Maria: As soon as I started doing that reading, I started thinking about that.
The other thing that's really important to all this and kind of ties into one of those student questions that you sent me about, um, aunties and uncles in science.
Everybody has those, but I also have, like, I think of a couple of siblings and one of my science siblings is Sally Otto, who I met when we were both undergraduates in this sort of theoretical ecology class.
Sally and I became friends right away, And Sally, Was just one of those brilliant people and she definitely was going to grad school. And so I was like, oh This is a whole this is a whole possibility this is a thing
[00:16:03] Rori: Yeah.
[00:16:04] Maria: And that would have probably been either sophomore or junior year that I was like, okay, this is I might go to grad school
[00:16:10] Rori: And you were really motivated by like your academic sib,
[00:16:12] Maria: yeah, because I was starting to meet people Oh, and also when I started working with Jack like what he was doing and I was like, these people seem really happy.
maybe if Mark had shared more information about faculty meetings, I might have a different viewpoint, but that part of it, the science part of it just looked fantastic.
[00:16:28] Rori: It's also kind of amazing to me to be like, oh, you and Sally Otto like were and maybe are tight. I'm like, oh my God, all of these badasses are actually like have relationships
[00:16:39] Maria: I Love to tell people that we met when we were teenagers because we were both still in our teens when we
[00:16:43] Rori: Wow.
[00:16:44] Maria: , in fact, I I have a story when I walked into that class, I was a very awkward person and I was sitting there, you know, sort of awkwardly sitting there. And this woman walks in, she's dressed all in black. She's so cool. I could tell she was cool. She walked in and I thought, man, look at how cool that woman is. I wish she would come over and sit next to me and we could be friends. Like in my mind, I was like, so I obviously willed it into being because, you Sally walks over.
She's a very friendly person and says, Hi, I'm Sally. Um, what's your name or something like that and sat immediately like introduced herself and was super friendly and, and we've been friends ever since.
[00:17:20] Rori: That's amazing.
[00:17:21] Emilia: that's a very cool story. What class was this theoretical?
[00:17:24] Maria: I think it was theoretical ecology.
[00:17:26] Emilia: So how many women were in that class?
[00:17:29] Maria: might've just been me and Sally. So it
might've
[00:17:32] Rori: that's another reason
[00:17:33] Maria: it's another reason, looking back, it may have been that The year after we took Biostats with Mark Feldman, we became the graders for that class.
So Mark would pick the students who did the best in the class and say, I'm going to hire you to be my graders. So Kat and Sally and I, um, spent a lot of time together because we graded problem sets, um, together as undergrads. I didn't have any money, so I was always looking for jobs. I Had a regular job, I had a work-study job, and then I took some extra jobs that I didn't tell the work-study people about,
[00:18:01] Rori: doing that while you were taking classes full time and doing research.
[00:18:06] Maria: yeah. You know, even though they give you a lot of financial aid, there's never enough money to like fly home or, or do those other things.
[00:18:11] Rori:How did you choose the next step or who you were going to work with?
[00:18:23] Maria:You know, I feel like I depended a lot on, on the goodness of other people. So when I told Mark Feldman that I wanted to go to grad school, he said, all right, and then he got a piece of paper out and he wrote out a list of programs that were strong and sort of popped in and specific people that he thought would be good advisors and he said, there's other really good people, but I'm only giving you the names of people I would send you to. of People that I trust, basically.
[00:18:46] Emilia: How many names were on that list?
[00:18:47] Maria: Maybe eight or something. I and, I have done that for students. I have said, here are the names of some scientists. You may not end up working with them, but these are people I trust. Go ahead and reach out to them and talk to them. One of, the names on that list was Monty Slatkin at UC Berkeley. And that's who I ended up working with for grad school,it was really easy to go see Berkeley because like there's a bus between Berkeley and Stanford and so I took the bus over to, um, to meet with Monty. And, um, we had a really great conversation and he walked me around being in Monty's lab I didn't realize it at the time, like later in retrospect, I benefited greatly from being around really smart folks. It never felt competitive. It would always felt like we were like all trying to figure stuff out.
[00:19:27] Rori: it sounds like your undergrad and your grad research experiences were like really marked by like collaborative, mutually supportive, and excited kind of atmospheres. Did you ever encounter a different? Atmosphere?
[00:19:41] Maria: yes, I did. So sadly, yeah, it happens.
I had my struggles as a grad student. I got to the very end of my dissertation and the last chapter and I were having so much trouble. Um, and I felt like it would never get published. And there was like this point, like, I feel like it was only like two months before the end where I was like, I'm probably gonna have to quit grad school. I'm not gonna finish. But I think it was just that last hill that I couldn't quite You know, do. Eventually, I did do it and it was, it was fine. It was just one of those things where I always tell students that it's really easy to lose motivation even when you're really close. And I tell them that story of like sitting at home watching reruns of TV shows and not working on my last chapter because I was so depressed about it, It was so like not working, I did two postdocs. And my first postdoc was at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, in the genetics department with a theoretician named Marjorie Asmussen and she's passed away. , and Marjorie and I did not have a great time together. she was just brilliant, just a brilliant person.
And I learned a great deal from her. But she was very different. From the advisors and the mentors I'd had before then. She had a way of mentoring that I think worked for some people, but did not work for me. detail-oriented, maybe micromanaging. , and it made me stressed. It made me worried. I was worried all the time that I was doing a bad job because it was very like intense we'd produced, I think, two really good papers. I'm really proud of those two papers. The fact that there's only two is kind of a bummer, but we could have produced more.
They're monster papers too. They're like, they're in genetics and they're really long.
Um, yeah, I like the work we did.
[00:21:20] Rori: Uh huh.
[00:21:22] Maria: But it was not good. That was not a good place for me.
[00:21:24] Emilia: So you think what didn't work was there was already something like the environment was already a bit, a tense?
[00:21:31] Maria: I think there was some tension. You know, grad students, you can be critical of them, but you also have to be critical in a supportive way that's going to get them through that, that thing. , you have to be supportive enough so they move through that difficulty. And that's hard. That's a hard piece of mentoring. And so Marjorie and I, our writing was difficult and maybe it was a good lesson that not, not everything's always going to be easy. Um, but it was not easy. That was a hard postdoc. And then I had personal stuff going on too. and so did Marjorie. So Marjorie was coming off of the end of a marriage. She had two young kids. I was getting divorced. For my first husband, somebody else in the lab was facing some serious health issues. There was a lot happening. It was a pressure cooker and we were all under a lot of stress.
[00:22:13] Rori: That sounds so difficult.
[00:22:14] Maria: That was not fun.
[00:22:15] Rori: everybody's stressed. Nobody has capacity and the kind of ways people are working together are like not meshing.
[00:22:22] Maria: we needed one person whose life was chill to be a buffer in there. And we just didn't have that
[00:22:29] Rori: yeah, do you think that you were put in almost like a middle-child situation
[00:22:33] Maria: Yeah. I mean, postdocs often are, I think that's one of the things that made me learn from that experience was you also have to protect your postdocs.
[00:22:40] Emilia: right.
But going back, to what you said about finishing your PhD and how you were so close but felt like you were not going to be able to finish, how did you move through that?
[00:22:52] Maria: I think maybe I was not burned out exactly, but I, you know, you work at a really high pace through grad school and The first two chapters of my dissertation were published. One was out, had been out for a while. The other one was in press. So things were looking good. So in some ways, some of it was published, but there was this other part I wanted to publish and that was just separate. And I was like, the way I was thinking about it wasn't quite right and it wasn't working. And then I would redo the model. And normally I don't mind that tinkering part of models where you work for a while and then Nope, you scrap it and you start again. I kind of like that. I think of it as like tinkering. It's fun. I was feeling like it's time to finish and you couldn't keep tinkering. You've got to finish.
And I felt really stressed, about it being done. And it, it seemed insurmountable. And then finally, it's funny because, Monty had been away, , on sabbatical.
And then one day I sent him a draft, and, You know, that draft came back with like, yeah, just a few more changes. I think this is ready to go.
And I was like, what? I just somehow was like, it's never, ever, ever, this is never ever going to finish this chapter. And then it was finished and it was published and it was fine. So I don't, I can't even almost describe what, what was wrong, but I felt like I would never finish that chapter. I would never get my PhD and I needed to drop out of grad school, which I realize is an overreaction to being stuck.
But , You know, I, I feel like it can happen, also I mean, I think you should always work to make your work better.
[00:24:20] Rori: Absolutely.
And keep working until it's really good. But you also have to just stop and be like, okay, this is fine.
[00:24:27] Rori: Yeah, like that's saying, a couple more tiny changes and then just publish it. Don't get too perfectionist about it. You probably could keep on improving it, but
[00:24:36] Maria: forever. I think of that sometimes when I'm working with students. It's like, don't let, um, perfect be the goal the best dissertation is a completed one.
[00:24:47] Emilia: I would say, something similar happened to me where I felt like, oh my God, like, when am I going to be done? I could feel the stress.
[00:24:54] Maria: To finish? Cause I think that's also part of it. There's, there's always a cohort of people and a few of them will finish first. And when you see them finish, you're like, Oh, it's time, it's time to be getting close to finishing. What if I don't finish? That happened so close. To when I was completely done, it's really weird to get to the point where you're like pretty sure you might need to quit when you're actually just a few steps from being finished.
What I really needed looking back, probably, I probably should have taken a week off and gone somewhere with a friend or something Just done something else for a week.
[00:25:33] Rori: yeah. Taking a break.
[00:25:35] Emilia: yeah. Maria, I didn't know you were married as a postdoc. Did you marry as a grad student or as a postdoc?
[00:25:42] Maria: Yeah. So I had a boyfriend in college. , he was a chemist, he was studying chemistry and he got his PhD at Berkeley also.
We got married in grad school. uh, I was 22 or 23. So I was very young. In many ways we're really well suited. We're both academics, we're both scientists, and we both like nerds who like the same kinds of books. So we got along really well. we came from the same kind of background and, it was an easy fit in many ways. And then I went to the postdoc and he stayed in California and we were doing a long-distance thing and that did not work. That did not work. When I was at Georgia, we, we split up, , he found someone else, and it was really hard.
[00:26:21] Rori: That sounds devastating, Especially in this moment when your professional life feels really hard too, and then you're like,
[00:26:27] Maria: I think looking back, I'm like, what were we thinking? Like a cross-country, long-distance marriage. It's like only for the most, the toughest people, maybe. I don't, I don't know. Not, um, something I would recommend to other people. It didn't work out. It was a real mess. Um, I did have a lot of people who were so supportive, who really helped me. I remember a friend who's a, who's another scientist, saying, you know, put my phone number on a sticky pad next to your phone. And if you feel like calling him, call me at three in the morning or two in the morning, because I was having a hard time just like giving up. , even though he had made it clear that he didn't want to be with me anymore. , I had friends who were like, We will help you. We will help you do this. And they did, and these are some of my best friends, even to this day.
[00:27:14] Rori: Very nice. So how did you and Michael meet?
[00:27:16] Maria: Well, we met in a bar
[00:27:17] Rori: That's like the old-school way to meet people, you know?
[00:27:20] Maria: I was at home and I was kind of depressed and, uh,, and this friend, Alice, who is a botanist, was like, it's Halloween. Let's go out. And I'm like, Oh, I do not want to go out and please leave me alone. And Alice says I'm coming over to your apartment. And she came over and she had, you know, those vampire teeth. She had that and a black plastic cape. And she said, you always wear black, put this on, you're a vampire. Boom. Costume. So we went to, a bar in Athens And I, I saw him and I was like, Oh, that guy's cute. And Alice was like, you should go talk to him. I was like, uh, no, I'll go over and say hi to him for you if you don't. And I'm like, Oh man, she's just pushy.
So I went over and talked to him. And so we met. He's not an academic. He was working as a bartender and a musician and, and he was still not an academic.
So I don't talk about my work with my husband when I come home. I do. I mean, I complain about my work sometimes, but Yeah.
[00:28:14] Rori: I love that. And I love that your friend really pushed you and then you're like, well, that turned out well.
[00:28:18] Maria: Well, we had, we had a really cool conversation about Scotland actually because I knew I was going to be going to Edinburgh, um, because I had the NATO and I was like, Hey, you want to go to Scotland? and he said, I can't right now because I have a job And at the end of the summer, I'll have made enough money and I'll come to Scotland.
[00:28:35] Rori: And he did.
[00:28:37] Maria: And he did.
That worked out really well. That worked out really well.
[00:28:40] Emilia: Very nice.
[00:28:40] Rori: so he came with you then after that when, you got a job at the University of Kansas, a faculty job, right? How was it to transition to faculty? Like, why Kansas?
[00:28:51] Maria: I had never been to Kansas before. I was applying to jobs. I got some interviews, but I wasn't like landing. I wasn't getting on the shortlist. I was on the long short list. And then I got an email from a woman who's since retired here from Kansas, Helen Alexander. She was the chair of the search committee and they were, they were searching for theory. And she, Sent me an email specifically and said, this is a theory job. And I'm like, I better apply to that job. Cause this one, they're like, they're actually looking for someone doing theory.
so I applied, Um, I got the interview and they're like, yeah, we'll fly you from Scotland to Kansas. I'm like, okay, all right, we're going to do this. So they, they flew me out. And I liked it right away. And the department seemed like there was a good, it was a good vibe. They offered me the job. They also hired at the same time, two other people and they ended up hiring three people. They hired Hiroshi Akashi, John Kelly, and me, and they were going to bring all at the same time, And then when we moved to Kansas, we were so far from family. I think that is the hardest thing about academic jobs. This thing where you end up far from family.
[00:29:54] Rori: Totally. It's a tough thing about the academic culture, for sure. I mean, it's turned out well, you've stayed there, you stayed at the University of Kansas, you kind of like went through the ranks, you like, went, you got yourself tenure, and you started doing not only the theoretical population genetics research you're doing, but you started taking on these kind of like admin roles too, like weren't, you were department head and now are you associate dean?
[00:30:18] Maria: I'm the associate dean for natural sciences and math is,
[00:30:21] Rori: kind
[00:30:22] Maria: is, is a big deal, but it's what we are. I will say one thing I do want to mention because I think it's, I don't know if it's good for people listening to this, to hear this. I had a long period of being an associate professor before I went on for fall. And this happens sometimes, the hardest part of my career was that part in the middle when I was like, not sure I would ever make fall.
And I was like, it's something I wanted and it doesn't look like it's going to happen and it was hard. It coincided with me having two small kids I didn't have enough bandwidth to do all the things I wanted to do and, and get to the point where I could be full. I did eventually do it. And, and, and when I did, I was like, Oh, this is, this is great. This is awesome. You know, I got to this place,
And I was able to think about science in a different way again and really, get back to it. It's one of the things as Associate Dean I actually really care about. We have a new program here at KU. , we give it a dorky name because that's what we do. It's called College Cares and Career Advancement Research Enhancement Semester.
So it's for people who are Associate Professors, but they're past like the first year of college. chunk of time and they would like to, to make that next promotion, but they need some time to like revamp something to get things going again. And so it's a semester where you don't teach. And also you're supposed to be free from service, which can be a big deal for a mid-career folk it comes with a small amount of research money as well. And you're supposed to have a letter from your department chair talking about how this is going to help you advance to full because the idea is it's supposed to. Get the department chair involved in like making a plan for this person.
And then part of the, the application is you're supposed to talk about like what might've interrupted your ability to, to progress to full. We were thinking specifically about people who have a lot of caring responsibilities or have done a lot of service. The reason I started it is because it took me so long to become a full professor.
[00:32:22] Emilia: I remember actually when I met you at an NSF panel, uh, Maria, this is something that you mentioned to me. And I remember also one of the program officers was collecting data because apparently women spent a lot more time as associate professors and don't make a lot of money jump into full professors. , did you feel like that because the chair said, oh, these are the things that you need to do to become full professor and you just were not, did not have enough time to, like, leave those milestones or was it more like an internal sort of you decided for yourself?
[00:32:57] Maria: it's, it's interesting cause I was talking to a friend of mine who I went to grad school with, at the sort of point where I was starting to publish a lot and get grants again and, and, and things started to ramp up again. She said, we know I'm talking to you, you sound different when you're talking about your science. And I think it doesn't, it's not necessarily true for everybody, but when my kids were small, I felt like I didn't have enough creative bandwidth or something. Like I was very tired and I didn't have enough and I was doing a lot of service. And I needed a specific kind of time. , large blocks of time that are uninterrupted. I didn't have any of that.
All my time was always interrupted.
I got to a different place in my life, in their lives,
and I said, okay, well now I do this. I got a grant funded. I got some papers published. I picked up my collaboration with Bob again.
. I did the things that the committee wants you to do to be a full professor.
And it wasn't hard at that point.
It would seem it's much easier again. I mean, I don't know that what happened to me. is necessarily what happens to other people. But there was definitely, a time when I just didn't feel like I had the attention, the undivided attention that I needed to do the stuff that I wanted to do.
, and then when, when I had that and I became full, I was just really like, yeah, this is, I want to do this.
That's so interesting.
Yeah. And it's me too. It's like, like, who am I now versus then?
[00:34:18] Rori: But I mean, you're saying like creativity, I agree with that. You have to like, you have to put some thought in, just thought and presence into it in a way that's like, you know, parenting is also demanding. You've got to be present in a certain way.
I think for me, and I always try to keep it like personal cause then different people work really differently. For me, I need. My undivided attention on something.
[00:34:38] Maria: Just this early summer, a colleague of mine and I wrote a huge grant. We wrote this big center grant and we submitted to NSF and it was like a ridiculous amount of work. I like took three hours, four-hour blocks in the evening to work on it.
And, and that's how I could do it. And I'm like, that just didn't exist. You know,
[00:35:00] Rori: Three or four-hour blocks of time. That's very hard to come by.
[00:35:03] Maria: So when, when people say, Oh, you progressed to your career, I always want to bring that up because I feel like
I did, but there was this thing where I was an associate professor for a really long time and I'll tell you one little story that
I don't know if it was motivational or upsetting, but I applied for this, an administrative position in the, in the college and I didn't get it, it was fine. Um, but the guy who was. he was the dean of the provost. He kind of gave me an exit interview. And we're talking and he's like, well, you know, I see you're an associate professor and blah, blah, blah.
What are your goals? And I said, well, I'm working towards getting to the point where I can go for full. I, I don't want to be, you know, one of those people who stays associate professor forever.
And he said, you sort of already are.
[00:35:46] Rori: Ouch.
[00:35:46] Maria: I was like, Oh, okay.
[00:35:49] Rori: It's like a little echo of the math professor who was like, you're 18
and you're not brilliant. It's too late. The boat
has, you know, the ship has
[00:35:56] Maria: So he was kind of like, well, you've already been an associate professor for so long, you know, why would you even, keep trying or something? I don't know if that's what he meant
or what, but it's funny, I have a friend who I told the story and he emailed me when I became full.
He said, spite is such a great motivator. I'm like, yeah. and I have heard that from other people that if someone is an associate professor for more than pick some number of years, seven years, they'll never make full. They'll never make full. And I'm like, Wow, you're so sure.
[00:36:25] Rori: Yeah. Based on what data?
Like.
[00:36:27] Emilia: I hope that. people are, you know, the associate professors at your institution. I'm sure they're going to like this initiative that you've created, that's wonderful. It's like a little mini sabbatical almost.
[00:36:40] Maria: like a little mini sabbatical and it's meant specifically for this. , so one of the people who applied, who didn't get it, sent me a note later and said, even though I didn't get it, I wanted to thank you because I had to write up this thing and I went to talk to my chair. And I would have been scared to talk to my chair because it was so depressing.
All of this is so stressful and depressing. But I sat down and said to my chair, I want to make full. I think these are the things I need. I think this is the timeline. What do you think? And this, the chair said, well, yeah, maybe like this, or maybe we could do this. And they had a conversation and they put together a plan, even if they didn't get the semester and had an excuse to say, this is my goal and I want to do it, and not
feeling like ashamed because it's like, well, I'm late.
I'm late to being full. I, you know, but you don't
know. You're never late. You can do it whenever you want. It's fine.
Everybody's career path is totally different and I would love there not to be any stigma so that at any point someone could
say, no, now, now is the time I want to do this now.
[00:37:38] Rori: I mean, it makes sense. I haven't looked at the data, but from my anecdotal experience, there's a real bias in who ends up staying an associate professor. For longer,
Maria, now we're going to go to a segment that we like here called Revise and Resubmit, where you can tell us about a part of your academic path. Or if you want about, academic and science culture, that you would change, that you would revise and resubmit.
[00:38:03] Maria: It's funny because it's specifically about revising and resubmitting. So
this is, it's, this is, uh, it's really about me, my path, but it's something that I, I wish if I could change something about myself or the way I've done things, this is the thing I would change. A couple of times, twice at least, I have gotten a rejection on a paper or a rejection on a proposal.
And I have allowed myself to become like, oh no, no, no, no, I can't, I cannot deal with this.
I must put it aside. Um, I can't deal with the rejection right now. I wish what I had said is, okay, I will give this, Three weeks, one month.
And I am not going to think about it, putting it aside, but then I'm going to come back
because a couple of times I've dropped it completely and it just floundered off into the sea and nothing ever
happened. That is what I would like to revise.
My, my attitude towards that, because I think if you say to me, Nope, that's not ready or no, I should give myself a certain amount of time to let it sit or, you know, maybe not think about it for a while. And then you have to come back
and
try again.
you can be sad for this amount of time, then you've, you got to come back. And that's the part of my career I, if, if I had, cause I think now I do that.
I wish I'd done it from the beginning,
[00:39:21] Rori: Okay. Yeah.
Uh
[00:39:22] Maria: not, not that it's wrong to be upset and to need some time and to need to step away from projects. That's totally fine. But to give yourself a set amount of time and then come back and see, you know, revisit that paper, revisit that grant, revisit that idea
and say, okay, what's wrong with it and what can I fix?
[00:39:41] Rori: I feel like that's like advice my mother would give me. She's like, Rori, you can feel sorry for yourself for this long, but then you gotta stop. You
[00:39:47] Maria: just, I wish I had learned that earlier because
I definitely need to take a little break sometimes,
but just set an amount of time, put a reminder that says, you know, on September 1st, you're coming back and you're going to
[00:39:59] Rori: You're gonna revisit. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's powerful. Thank you for sharing that one.
[00:40:05] Emilia: Yeah, Maria, that was great. It was great getting to know you a little bit more. There were lots of things that I didn't know, even though we had met a few times before. And so, um, thank you so much for being here with us today.
[00:40:19] Maria: Thank you. I really enjoyed getting to talk to both of you and it was really fun. Thank you so much.
[00:40:25] Rori: Oh, it's a joy.
We'll see you soon, Maria.
[00:40:30] Emilia: Thank you for listening to this episode. If you like what you heard, share it with someone.
[00:40:36] Rori: You can also support this program by writing a kind review if your listening platform allows it.
[00:40:41] Emilia: This episode was produced and edited by Maribel Quesada Smith. Special thanks to Dr. Maria Orive, the host of Science Wise, Rori, Rolf, and me, Emilia Huerta Sanchez.