New associate vice president will focus on increasing female students and faculty in science, math and engineering
Q: Tell me about some of the work you have been doing as Associate Vice President for the Promotion of Women in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics.
A: I have had enormous support from both President McCormick and Philip Furmanski. I have come in the middle of a lot of transition, and so I am aware that the academic dust has not yet settled and people are not entirely sure of what the new Rutgers is going to look like. And so I have been scrambling to meet the players. I am also focused on making sure they recognize that we shouldn’t forget the women now that there is no longer a college dedicated to women.
Among our plans is a census, to count how many women faculty there are now, and continue to count as the years pass. In terms of planning other activities, I am dividing it in terms of populations: faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and even K–12 students. Much of my energy this first year is getting to know the faculty and the faculty on board. We’ve created a faculty advisory committee on women in science. Simultaneously, I have been working with the Douglass Project, which is probably the single most focused science group for female undergraduates and K–12 students.
Q: How is Rutgers doing in terms of women faculty in the sciences?
A: It’s pretty good. But it could be a lot better. The chemistry department is very well-represented with high-powered women faculty. We have a number of prominent women in physics and astronomy as well. As you go through other departments it’s more mixed and you can’t generalize. I’d say Rutgers gets a B. And I want it to get an A+.
Q: Talk about your previous experience in areas where women and science intersect.
A: I was at Tulane for 35 years. As a very young faculty member, I was involved in founding their women’s center. I had been on their women’s center committee numerous terms over the years. I was also involved in establishing the women’s studies major. During my years at Tulane, I was the only woman in the natural sciences who did this. There were plenty of people from the humanities and social sciences. So it was always sort of an oddball position, where I was. Especially since my research organism is the fungus. Fungi don’t even have sexes.
After the women’s center was founded, I was asked to teach a course called “Biology of Women.” There might have been some women who would have said no, I refuse to do it, but I had just had two children, I’d been very interested in my own pregnancies and nursing the baby, and I had actually studied up a good bit on the subject. It became a popularized course in obstetrics and gynecology for nonmajors. And the first year I taught it I won the teaching award. It was always a very popular course. I taught it every year for about 20 years except when I was on sabbatical. It was popular with students, and I plan to offer it here at Rutgers.
Q: Have you familiarized yourself with the women’s studies department here?
A: Yes. It is, arguably, the best women’s studies department in the country, which makes it the best on the planet. It’s really strong, and it’s strong in everything but science. They would love to add some faculty who are doing research on women and technology. As time goes on, I will do everything I can to help them get faculty lines.
Q: What about the future of women and science? Will things improve?
A: I think if the critical mass gets bigger it’s going to be easier. When I was a high school student, I felt pretty lonely some of the time. When I took high school physics, the first week of the class I was the only girl in the class and I felt very uncomfortable. Luckily, the second week another girl joined the class. We always sat together.
When I joined the Tulane faculty, there was one woman in chemistry. I was in biology; there was one woman in geology, zero in physics. When I left, we were up to three in biology, one in chemistry, one in physics, and two in geology. This is after 35 years. Look around the other fields – English, psychology. Many of those departments are now 50-50. A generation and a half has passed and for some reason women are not going into the sciences and engineering in the same numbers they’re going into medicine, law, and other professions.
Q: Your research been affected by Hurricane Katrina. How did the disaster change your academic focus?
A: I’ve studied toxic molds all of my life. And if Hurricane Katrina hadn’t happened, I was planning to work at a place called the Institute for Genomic Research and work on the genome of the toxic mold I’ve studied all my life. I was very excited about this sabbatical. I’ll probably never get to do that. Katrina changed my life not only personally but scientifically. What I have now decided to do is work on the molds of Katrina and to shift my interest from toxic agricultural molds to toxic building molds.
Every house that was flooded became this habitat for out of control fungi. In my own house, the water rose 42 inches – three and a half feet. Every chair and all the rugs and all the furniture were submerged, and the walls were covered in mold.
It’s not so much the uniqueness of the mold, it’s the quantity. It ruined the clothes in your closet, the kids’ stuffed animals – those were always the saddest to see. It was very difficult to be in the house before we got all the stuff out. I feel personally that the potential health effects have not received the attention they did right after the hurricane. You heard news reports about how toxic the water was. The real problem is this fungus that’s growing everywhere.
I was able to wash off some of our furniture. All our solid wood furniture was just covered with green. I’m a mold specialist so I decided "Hey I’m going to get something out of this, I’m going to sample my house." Before we left the house I swabbed things, and I took pictures. I did as well as I could – my own lab didn’t have any water or electricity at that point. I identified it and it wasn’t what I expected; it was a species called Trichoderma. It’s not the mold you normally get when you’ve had a leak in your house.
Q: What was it like living through Hurricane Katrina?
A: I had been in New Orleans for 35 years and I had never evacuated for a hurricane. There had been a number of major evacuations in recent years. I had never left. I just stayed home. My husband, who had lived in New Jersey, was concerned, so we decided to evacuate. We got up on Sunday, and the hurricane didn’t come till Monday. We packed up the pets and hit the road. About one o’clock, one of my old collaborators gives me a call at her weekend house. She asked if we had a place to go for the hurricane and invited us to her house, where there was a barn where the dogs could stay. We were in this little tiny cottage in Bush, Louisiana. It was terrifying. In the morning, you couldn’t get out. There were hundreds of trees, every few feet on the road. We had no water, but hey, this was better than the Superdome. We had plenty of food. My husband helped the locals who had tractors and chain saws and they helped clear the road.
You just felt like the whole world was coming apart. We got out on Friday – we had only packed a couple of days' worth of clothes. My husband waited more than an hour for gas. I got on a pay phone trying to track down my son. I wasn’t worried about him drowning, I was worried about him getting shot. He was okay.
It was not a good experience, I could carry on and on and on about my feeling about the total failure of the government, the ineptitude. It’s an enormous national tragedy. You go there now and whole neighborhoods are deserted.