With the end of the semester, we packed up our household and headed out to the other side of the country to visit my parents in southern California. We’re staying for two and a half weeks. My whole family always looks forward to these visits tremendously, since, being so far away we see each other rarely. But the first couple days I never enjoy.The kids miss their friends, the structure of ...

A lot of my memory of college is a blur now, but a few things I stand out in my mind with great clarity. One such clear memory is a moment in a first-year orientation meeting, probably held one of the first days I arrived at the school. From among the descriptions of programs, facilities, people, opportunities came one message loud and clear from a faculty member: “You are all meant to be ...

When my older daughter started elementary school, I asked about helping out occasionally in her classroom and I was politely, but flatly, refused. The Kindergarten teachers were wary of parents in their classroom, and, I think, did not want an at-home parent of a first-born (even though I have a Ph.D. and experience teaching at the college level – sheesh!). While a bit disappointed, I thought ...

I just came across this new NSF-supported event organized by the University of Washington ADVANCE center for institutional change: “On-ramps to Academia”. This program addresses the extreme shortage of women science faculty in academia by targeting another pool of women to hire from – those with jobs in industry or consulting firms or non-academic labs. It’s a free program that offers a ...

I really never thought that I would end up as a grown up life living 3000 miles away from my family. Even as I was choosing to go to college, and then grad school, on the other side of the country, in my mind I was exploring the world; I always assumed that my children’s grandparents, like my own, would live close enough to celebrate holidays, recitals, birthdays, and spontaneous time ...

Earlier this week I came across this old Time magazine article, which reminded me of an interesting character, Dr. Theo Colborn.Theodora Colborn (born in 1927) got her undergraduate degree in pharmacy from Rutgers University in 1947. Soon after, she married and had four children. For the next three decades, while raising the children, she and her husband owned and managed several drugstores: ...

Here’s my weekday morning start: I wake up in time for about 10 minutes of quiet before the 45 minutes of frenetic activity of everyone getting ready for the day – breakfasted, dressed, brushed, packed, (sometimes a last minute homework assignment), shod, appropriately suited up for the weather – crescendos into a burst out the door and then, they are gone – my husband walks the kids into ...

In my last semester as a graduate student, I TA’ed a human behavioral biology course. As it turned out, I was newly pregnant with my first baby, and the course wowed me, especially as the professor reviewed the cognitive development literature, describing a series of amazing experiments carried out in the last 30 years on infants and children. It was an eye opening tour of the evidence that ...

I’ve been planning a birthday party this week with my daughter. Her birthday is Feb. 13, sandwiched right in between Charles Darwin’s birthday on the 12th, and Valentine’s Day. With Darwin and my daughter both celebrating big decades this year (my daughter her 10th, Darwin his 200th), love, family and Darwin’s legacy have been on my mind. Darwin, of course, is known for his theory of ...

This season, the biology doctorate program in which I work had a wonderfully diverse, interesting and impressive pool of applicants (not more applicants than our batch last year, as one might expect in a year of economic downturn, but perhaps more of high quality). Our admissions committee had a hard time coming to a consensus in picking the cream of the crop to invite for our two-day ...