(sonar pinging)
(upbeat music)
- Science to me is not a noun,
it's not something that lives in a textbook,
it's not existing knowledge.
Science is a verb, it's a practice,
it's something that we do every day
as we seek to create new knowledge
and to answer new questions.
In my work,
I study how animals in the ocean find their food
while they avoid becoming dinner.
One of the big challenges
to studying life beneath the surface of the waves,
is that it's dark.
We use sonars,
where you send out a very short pulse of sound
and then we listen for the echo,
kind of like if you walked into a cave and shouted your name
and wanted to hear that come back to you.
You can say something about the environment that
that sound was returning from.
And in the case of the ocean,
we can say a lot about the animals that live there.
It's interesting to use sound
because that's what most of the animals use,
so we're getting sort of a fish eye view
of what it's like to be in the ocean.
When I was in fourth grade,
my family took a trip to an aquarium,
and that was really the first time
that I'd gotten to see marine mammals,
and learn about how they use sound instead of sight,
to sense their world.
I was able to see orcas,
and learn all about how they use echolocation
to find prey and each other
in a world that's dark and three-dimensional.
When we got home from that trip,
I couldn't wait to get to the library
and take out every book they had
on dolphins and echolocation,
because I just wanted to learn more.
- [Voiceover] Few animals hear so well
in the upper frequencies as the porpoise.
The porpoise can hear high sound so efficiently
that it can find its way in the dark
by listening to the echoes of its own voice.
- But it turned out that a lot of the questions
I wanted answers to, really didn't exist.
I come from a long line of mechanics.
My dad is a mechanic, and so was my grandfather,
and all of my uncles and great uncles.
So doing things with your hands
and fixing things was just a normal part of life growing up.
I knew I wanted to go to college,
and that I wanted to somehow be a scientist,
but because I was the first person in my family
to go to college,
I didn't really know what that could look like as a career.
One of the biggest questions about
how to get through STEM was,
how was I gonna pay for it?
And I didn't know that for most scientists
that their graduate work
was not something they paid tuition for,
and in fact, most graduate students in sciences anyway,
get a small stipend.
After I completed my undergraduate degree,
I moved to a graduate program where I got a PhD,
and did a postdoc before moving on to become a professor
at a university where I spent about a dozen years
before moving here to MBARI.
MBARI embodies science as a verb,
that is who we are, and what we do.
A lab is a place where people do science.
Most of the time,
your vision of that probably looks
a lot like a chemistry lab,
with people in white coats and lots of glassware.
But as you can see as we sit here in my lab,
that's not at all what this looks like.
It's mostly electronics and chests of tools,
lots of different instrumentation,
and it's a place where we build and create new things.
We have this vision of scientists working alone in a lab,
in a really intense way,
and that's not my experience of STEM.
My experience of STEM is as part of a team.
(upbeat music)
I get to work at the intersection
of lots of different fields,
from physics to biology, to physiology.
That's brought up some challenges,
particularly early in my career
when people really didn't know what to call me.
So the acquisitions would say, "oh, she's an ecologist."
And the biologist would say, "well, she's an acoustician."
And it really takes time to develop your own identity
and to listen to who you want to be,
and what you want to do,
to get to that point in your career
where people recognize the work you do,
and not just try to put a label on you.
I think navigating STEM often involves relationships.
All throughout my science pathway
I've found mentors and friends
that have helped pull me up through the process,
particularly women who've been maybe half a step
or a step ahead of me on their career paths
have been remarkably generous with their time and expertise,
their collaboration and friendship.
I try really hard to do the same for other young women,
I spent a lot of time mentoring
and just serving as an ally and friend in every way I can
for junior colleagues.
And it's just so fun to watch them succeed
and to see those students and postdocs that I've mentored
go on to have their own students and postdocs,
and find their own pathways and watch them fly.
My path through STEM seems pretty linear,
I went straight from school to school, to the next path,
but I think every scientist has pathways
that are kind of off to the side,
of ways they got into questions
they didn't know they needed to ask.
We keep evolving as individuals,
and we get to change our course
as often as our curiosity changes.