Transcriber: Aijia Yang Reviewer: Ido Dekkers
So when you hear that I’m a scientist,
what images come to mind?
perhaps you see me in a white lab coat working on some cure,
or solution to a problem.
And that was actually my reality.
So for 10 years of my life,
I was privileged enough
to do research from the Gorongosa Crater in Tanzania
through the timeless halls of Oxford University in the United Kingdom
to the labs of the National Institutes of Health and Harvard University
here in the US.
And during those years, I was very lucky.
I was surrounded by scientists
who used all of the tools that they had at their disposal
to teach and train me to be just like them.
Except now, when I look back on those years,
I realize that those tools maybe weren’t the most intentional,
or even the most effective.
You see, I’ve spent the last three years of my life
studying the social and behavioral sciences,
taking what we know from organizational psychology,
educational psychology and sociology
to study, well, the science of doing science.
And that's what I'm here to talk to you about today.
I'm here to tell you how and why we should leverage
the science of human interaction
to teach our scientists to be happier, healthier,
more creative and innovative with what they do.
I’ll give you a little bit of a back story
as to how I got into this line of work.
So when I was doing my Ph.D. at Oxford University,
I was part of a program with the counseling center
to support peers who were struggling with mental health issues
like depression and anxiety while they were going through their own training.
And there was this one colleague in particular who,
after struggling through years of abuse and harassment from their supervisor,
decided that they were going to quit academic science altogether.
And I think the most heartbreaking thing for me during the conversation
that we would have is that we would sit down
and talk about everything that the supervisor of theirs did,
the emotional manipulation, the gas lighting,
laying blame on other people.
And at the end, they would still look at me
and wonder what it was they were doing wrong,
whether or not they were cut out to be in academic science.
See, these people in charge were those that my peers,
colleagues and friends trusted to support and train them
through some of the most rigorous and sometimes difficult years
of their scientific careers and training.
And it wasn’t just the supervisors.
The administrators in the department knew very well what was going on,
but they refused to do anything
because in their eyes,
these scientists were doing good science.
But at what cost?
And can we really call that science good
if the cost is actually the well-being
and future careers of scientists,
especially those who like me, trans, autistic,
the Mexico are underrepresented in these spaces.
I still remember fighting back through the tears while I was sitting in
the lab cafeteria with my supervisor and saying to her,
There is something seriously wrong with
a system that is meant to polish us into diamonds
and instead continuously keeps churning out dust. Something has to change.
You see, it wasn't just this one incident.
I went back to the United States to finish my training,
and I continue to hear the same stories, witness the same behavior.
It was a pattern, a trend, and I'm a scientist,
so I decided that I wanted to study those observations.
And that’s how I switched over from the biomedical sciences
and to the social and behavioral sciences.
Now we know that not every scientist is perpetuating abuses of power.
That number likely depends on, you know, the departments,
the institutions and how permissive or even encouraging
the culture within those institutions are of such behaviors.
Most scientists are actually brilliant
and talented people who were never taught how to be good managers,
good leaders and good trainers. It wasn't in the curriculum.
We have a survey that looked at faculty from across the US
and found that 96 percent of them had is their high
or highest priority to train their undergraduates for the workforce
or for an advanced degree. And yet of those same faculty that were surveyed,
only seven percent had ever received any formal training on how to do this.
That's a huge discrepancy.
How did that happen and how did we get to where we are?
Well, the National Institutes of Health spent $40 billion last year
investing in biomedical research.
Of those $40 billion that were invested,
less than three percent had any requirements or regulations on them
for how the people using that money to do research needed to be trained.
Just three percent. There are absolutely no incentives.
We are losing some of our most brilliant minds from one of
the most diverse generations of STEM trainees
because we are not investing in them with what we know works.
So what does work?
Well, the team that I’m currently on has boiled it down to about five skills
that we teach to scientists from around the nation
and sometimes even from around the world.
Communicating effectively.
Aligning expectations among team members and between team members and leaders,
addressing and approaching the importance of equity and inclusion
in the lab and the workplace,
promoting the professional development of the trainees.
And fostering the independence of those budding young minds.
It is that simple.
To explain to you some of the science of it,
we actually find that when scientists take our leadership
and management training.
They feel more confident and better prepared to lead,
manage and train their own team members.
For me, the coolest part about this research by far,
is the fact that the trainees, the people I do this work for,
notice the changes in their supervisors’ behavior,
even if they don't know that their supervisors are taking training.
This stuff works.
You’d think we would all be taught these things while we’re
being trained to be scientists, but we’re simply not.
Science is frustrating. It’s hyper-competitive and it takes up
so much of our time already that we feel there is little to no time left over
for another class or another training.
I mean, I'm seeing the eye rolls in my mind.
Because it feels like this has so little to do with the research
that we’re actually doing in the bench,
except there's a catch and that catch is that knowing
the skills of human interaction
and leadership tend to pay dividends when it comes to a team's productivity
and effectivity.
We know this not just from the world of academic science,
but from the world of tech and business too.
This stuff works. This is what leads to good science and even greater discoveries.
People working together effectively.
Why does this matter, though?
Why should we in the audience and myself care about this?
Well, if we go back to that 40 billion
that the National Institutes of Health invested in research last year.
I want you all to take just a brief moment
to imagine where we would be
as a country, maybe even as a world,
if more of this money came with the conditions
that the people using it had to go through training regularly
and implement best practices in their research groups.
With the world that we live in today,
climate change, public health crises, health disparities
and a public that no longer trusts science leaders
who weren’t taught how to communicate with them,
can we really afford to lose the next generation of brilliant minds?
black, indigenous, queer, trans, autistic,
disabled just because of their supervisors?
The stakes are just too high,
and we need these people in positions of power to be making decisions about
what gets funded, and how the research is done.
Ultimately, the impact extends beyond biomedical sciences,
tech, industry, nonprofits. Leaders of high stakes,
to decrease their high stress jobs are already using findings like these
to decrease their employee burnout,
and therefore increase the impact that they have
on the populations that they serve.
That's because workplaces have cultures and cultures can change for the better.
That last quote is from another TED talk. One by Dr Ori Alon.
I actually had the privilege
and pleasure of having breakfast with him
just a few months after that other conversation I had with my lab supervisor.
And in the cafeteria.
And during that talk, we talked about a lot of things,
but one of the things that stuck with me the most is he looked at me in the eyes
and he said, “I think you’re an agent of change
for the kind of change that we need in scientific spaces”.
He also signed my guitar, too, and that was really cool.
(Laughter)
But the point is that this is just one example
of the kinds of motivations championing and support that we need from supervisors
as young scientists to push limits.
Think outside the box and come up to solutions to the problems of today.
See, I knew then as much as I know now that there is a better way to do things,
except now I know that a future for training our scientists
in better and more effective ways is not just possible,
but it is one we are already building.
Countless individuals and organizations,
many of whom I have had the pleasure of working with, already are redesigning,
redefining, reinventing and advocating for changes
to the way we train scientists, and also therefore improving
the science that they do.
We have decades of research
as to how people innovate best, create best, and work best together.
And that is a science of skills that we can teach.
And that is the future of research I’m working towards.
Thank you.