Kari FischerHere at SolvingFor we’re delighted to welcome three new board members—all existing members of the SolvingFor community. We recently sat down to talk about what drew them to SolvingFor, their vision for our future, and what drives them to work in culture change.
Sara Suliman, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Department of Experimental Medicine University of California, San Francisco
What you’re most excited to tackle with us:
I’m an immigrant, I grew up in Saudi Arabia, so you don’t see research and then you don’t see women in science at all. Having structured programs—including postbac programs like UCSF’s PROPEL—for people who don't see those career paths as normalized is really important. And I feel very strongly about raising awareness about unconscious biases that stifle people’s path, which SolvingFor is pursuing through NEST. There's definitely a national crackdown on talking about systemic barriers like race. Some of my colleagues who are involved in DEI work are specifically being targeted, and I think people are underestimating how much pushback there is.
A moment where you deeply felt the need for culture change:
I think the most pressing thing that made me realize that this is necessary is just the culture of science since COVID has been go-go-go, and it's become less rigorous and thoughtful. And unfortunately our careers are structured in a way that we’re rushed all the time. So there have been a few periods since I became faculty where I felt burned out. This is a very personal lens but I think more systemically, as a collective we don't have the luxury to think about science carefully, and that creates nasty things like competition and abuse and exploitation of workers and postdocs and trainees. So if we can collectively slow down that would be better for everyone.
José Ordovás-Montañés, PhD
Assistant Professor, Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition
Co-Director, Cell Discovery Network Boston Children’s Hospital
What you’re excited to accomplish us: I'm very excited about having a group of people that isn't retired from the game, wondering what they should have done differently. It’s people that are very much in the game right now, who are selflessly taking valuable time and energy to make things better. I don't necessarily have a favorite problem for us to go after, but believe that the process of tackling these things is actually going to help bring people together, regardless of the solutions. Maybe it's super antithetical to say that given it’s SolvingFor!
What drew you to SolvingFor:
What makes me believe in it is that change-making attitude. In many cases, we know the problem, it’s been a problem for a long time, and someone says “hey you should study the problem better.” What I wish we could be figuring out are the mechanisms that we need to drive change. As scientists, we should be so much better at that because much of the game is: observe, come up with a model, perturb it, then go back and do that again until you get closer to identifying how the parts give rise to the whole. It’s very central to science, and we should remember this when it comes to identifying drivers of structural change.
Ananda W. Goldrath, PhD
Executive Vice President Allen Institute for Immunology
What you’re excited to accomplish with SolvingFor: For me, the most compelling nugget inside of the idea of Solving For Science is community-driven collaboration. What are collaborations good for? They enable you to go bigger and better and more impactful than you can alone—that's true in my daily scientific endeavors, and that’s absolutely true in scientific culture as well. It's also about honoring all of the additional work that scientists do to impact their culture, to really enable individuals who may be more junior but have really phenomenal ideas, and to give the tools the people need to do those additional labors of love within their field.
A moment where you deeply felt the need for culture change:
It was time after time that my friends and I would meet after a meeting and talk about all things that needed to change; but then realizing: wait a second, we’re it! We’re in charge now! We are department chairs, heads of committees—we each have agency, we all have voices and we need to be using them. So having a community like SolvingFor that supports you and that enables this culture change work, because we all have more than full-time jobs, it's kind of a revolutionary idea.