May 10, 2016
Dear Lab,
Yesterday I learned that I was promoted to Associate
Professor with tenure. I have been
thinking, since that time, about how to tell you. It seemed a bit tacky to just send an email. And I didn’t want to steal the thunder from
our reunion/goodbye lunch this Friday. I
also didn’t want you to hear it from someone else. In the end, I thought I’d sit down and write
you a letter, on this Tuesday morning when I surprisingly have nothing
scheduled. You may remember that I was
once an English major, and so I do things like this: write letters, try to mark
occasions that may mean something to me in the longer arc of my life. You will have to bear with me and try not to
laugh before you get to the end.
I have been reflecting on what this promotion means in my
world, in my life. It does not mean as
much as it would had I stayed in the humanities – most tenured English
professors have guaranteed salaries forever, and they do not need hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year to run their labs, so an English professor with
tenure is pretty much free to do whatever he or she wants from that point
onwards. It means considerably more than
promotion to associate professor if I were purely a clinician – for most
clinicians, a change in rank is a mark of honor, with few tangible
benefits. The tangible benefits that I
garner, as a tenured professor in a medical school, are the guarantee of some
salary support (maybe 1/3 of my actual salary) as well as the assurance that I
cannot be fired.
The major benefits are less tangible. What I gain, more than anything else, is the
assurance that what I do is valued. I
know this both because I was tenured at all and because I was tenured early,
before the institution was up against a wall to decide whether they wanted to
keep me or not. What I also gain is the
assurance that the way I do what I do
is perfectly fine. The latter is
important because I am increasingly realizing that it is unusual to be a female
physician-scientist with a bench lab and a young family. I have somehow been extremely late to realize
how unusual this is, maybe because I would never have guessed, in my 20s, that
I would have either a bench lab or children, maybe because I spend most of my
time thinking about specific things, like how to make an assay work. I think in some ways my NOT realizing that
this was an unusual situation freed me.
I have always been pretty open about my clinical life and my family life
in my main (scientific) life. I never
expected this to impact anyone’s estimation of what I could do scientifically,
and, maybe more importantly, I value authenticity very much. As such, an incremental boost to my career
success was not important enough to me to “hide” other important parts of my
life. You are my lab, and we spend a lot
of time together, so you know that I am a generally optimistic (perhaps
unrealistically optimistic) person.
However, even someone with this kind of disposition has to wonder
sometimes whether attending poster sessions at conferences with either a 7yo
kid (reading a book) or a 1yo kid (worn) in tow has adversely affected my
career, so this promotion is reassuring in that regard.
The overwhelming feeling I have had since yesterday, though,
is not one of pride, or of reassurance.
It is one of gratitude. I am
grateful to the senior faculty, including my previous mentors, for the ways
that they have supported me, and encouraged me, and kicked me in the rear every
once in a while. I am grateful to Josh,
my partner now for more than 20 years, for innumerable things including, but
not limited to, tearing apart my first grant, understanding what it’s like to
love learning new things, changing himself so that our ideal of a marriage of
equals could translate into all the mundane things – the making of kid lunches,
the attendance at school field trips – that make such a marriage work in real
life.
Most of all, I am grateful to you. Because you are the reason I have been
successful. Your ideas, your hard work,
your decision to vote with your feet and join me, your forbearance when I am
overly critical, your energy and your endless spirit of inquiry are the
lifeblood of the lab. They are why the
lab can do so much of what it can do, and they are why a conversation with one
of you is almost always the best part of my workday.
I don’t like generalities – they always sound empty to me –
so here is what I really mean by these overly-general statements.
Thank you for showing our lab how to manipulate neurons (Jo
Busch) and how to take gorgeous pictures of them (Emily Bill), how to manage a
first student (Emily Ashbridge), how to do stereotactic animal surgery (Tyler
Skrinak), how to do rodent behavioral studies (Rakshita Charan), how to use
viral vectors (Defne Amado), how to use Python (Marijan Posavi), how to launch
a biomarker discovery effort (Judy Qiang), how to build it into something that
involves a national consortium (Chris Swanson), how to manage a biofluid bank
(Jordan Mak), how to develop classifiers (Ben Liu) and how to apply them (Yosef
Berlyand), how to plunder existing large datasets (Nick Lim), how to close the
deal on papers that persist after a student has left (Ryan Cherng), how to take
constructive criticism and use it to fuel ambition (Fortunay Diatta), how to
learn to do everything and anything as an undergrad (Nimansha Jain), how to
never let them see you sweat even when your unpublished result is somehow in
the Inquirer (Christine Cooper), how to actually do precision medicine (Tom
Tropea), how to do ChIP-seq (Pierce Nathanson), how to perform chromosome
conformation capture (Mike Gallagher). In his own sentence, because the number of
things he has done for the lab is innumerable, is Travis Unger, who, among
other things, has shown everyone else in the lab how to manage me.
Some of you have left, and some of you are leaving
soon. So this also gives me the chance
to tell you that I so value the ways that you have kept in touch. I will have your back, always.
Our lab is exactly six years old today. Happy birthday to us. Don’t make too much fun of me for writing
this. But stop me if you think that my
posting this on our lab website is a terrible idea. And clear your Friday afternoon, because I
suspect that at lunch, there will be much drinking.
With my gratitude and affection,
Alice
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