Courageous Scientist Podcast Kate Clancy

Dr. Jane Willenbring is an Associate Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and will be joining the faculty as an Associate Professor of Geological Sciences at Stanford in fall 2020. Dr. Willenbring was also featured in the recent documentary Picture a Scientist. She tells us about her own awakening in deciding to come forward as a survivor of harassment, but also what it's like to have a vulnerable part of you be shared so publicly. Check out Jane's faculty profile page and Google Scholar page to learn more about her amazing research.

This week I had the absolute pleasure of talking to astrophysicist Rose Ferreira. I've been following and learning from Rose on Twitter for ages, and am so glad she agreed to talk to me for the podcast! Please check out her website at rosedf.net to learn more.

*Content warning - death of a child*
In this episode I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Jodie Wiggins, Teaching Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Wiggins has found her place at the nexus of teaching and research after many years of searching, and loss.

*Content warning for: domestic abuse, death of a friend.*
Tessa Logan is a graduate student at Stanford, and it was a long road to get there. Logan has persisted despite pauses, restarts, and personal tragedy. Hear how she decided to be like Dory and just keep swimming. To learn more about Tessa Logan find her on Twitter at @tessalationl.
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Kate Clancy (Intro): Okay this is Kate Clancy and welcome to… uh. Oh wow! I was about to say Period Podcast. This is not Period Podcast this is the Courageous Scientist Podcast. (Laughs) This is what happens when you make the mistake of having two podcasts.
-Interview Begins-
Clancy (cont.): Today, I am doing my pandemic-only passion project/ interview and I am really pleased, today to have Tessa Logan with me. She is a graduate student in the Stanford Neuroscience Program. And Tessa is going to be, like all of our previous guests, asking three basic, but I think very important questions: what brought you to science, how have you showed courage in science, and what would you like others to know about being a courageous scientist? So thank you so much for joining me today Tessa.
Tessa Logan: You’re welcome. I’m excited about it.
Clancy: Yeah. So why don’t you tell us: what brought you to science?
Logan: So, there’s one piece of it that’s sort of, um… I have always liked science. My mom, sort of, jokes  that I never outgrew the ‘why’ stage that two-year-olds start and that not entirely inaccurate. That’s a big part of why I really love science is I really like understanding how things work and why it is they happen and why does… you know? What causes it and that sort of thing. So there’s sort of that basic element of, I think it’s just a fundamental part of who I am as a person. I don’t think there’s any way to separate me from my love of science like you couldn’t possibly understand me as a person without that piece.
More concretely, what brought me into science was what I am doing now, that I was very fortunate and got into an amazing lab in my undergrad at San Jose State with Rachel French and that was just such a fabulous experience. To go on a short tangent, she is an amazing PI and like a really fabulous mentor and she was really deeply invested in training us as scientists and I had no idea how luck I was, at least, not initially at getting into her lab.
I happened to be looking into joining a lab at the same time that she was staring one up. She was friends with the professor who was teaching my genetics course and I had done well in the genetics course so she, sort of, recommended me. And so I feel like, while I did work hard in the genetics class, and I worked hard in my academics up until then there was also a very large chunk of luck in ending up doing hands on research in biology. And so my undergrad lab, we worked on modeling fetal alcohol syndrome in fruit flies so I got to do a lot of developmental biology and molecular biology. Learn how fly genetics works and a bunch of stuff along those lines. And I really really loved it. I loved every part of it. I had a project wher we were testing some things and we got sort of this set of conflicting results, you know upregulating in a pathway resulted in one thing and we expected downregulating in a pathway to result in the opposite but it didn’t. So then we ended up with this whole thing where it was just like… ‘Whoa. Wait. What just happened?’ And I was shocked with how much I loved the bafflement in trying to figure out how things work because that was not what I predicted and the, ‘Why is it not what I predicted? How do I explain what I actually saw?’, was so exciting. It was so fun.
And Rachel encouraged me, very heavily to apply to grad school. I was, you know, really hedging my bets. I had started at a community college. And then I transferred to San Jose State, (Insert name) was, by the way, amazing and I loved it. Transferred to San Jose and definitely wa

Dr. Krishna Pakala is today's guest and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at Boise State University. He is the Faculty in Residence for the Engineering and Innovation Living Learning Community and the Director for the Industrial Assessment Center at Boise State. He is the recipient of David S. Taylor Service to Students Award and Golden Apple Award from Boise State University. He is also the recipient of ASEE Pacific Northwest Section (PNW) Outstanding Teaching Award, ASEE Mechanical Engineering division’s Outstanding New Educator Award and several course design awards. Dr. Pakala puts students first and prioritizes getting to know them as whole people.
This week was also the week of the #Strike4BlackLives, founded by Dr. Brian Nord and Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and many more, following the most recent wave of protests around anti-Black racism and policing. If you would like to learn more, in addition to that hashtag please check out #BlackInTheIvory, founded by Joy Melody Woods and Dr. Sharde Davis, as well as the websites shutdownstem.com and particlesforjustice.org.
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Kate Clancy (Intro): Wednesday June 10th was the Strike for Black lives, organized by a number of extraordinary Black scholars. I hope those of you who have work to do, like me, used it as a day to educate yourselves and plan the work we all should be doing to end Anti-Black racism in academia and beyond. To learn more, please visit shutdownstem.com, particlesforjustice.org, and take a look at the Twitter hashtag ‘blackintheivory.’
This is the chance to make the constant work of the Black scholars visible and I hope it gave, at least some of them, a day of rest.
I have struggled with what else to say here because it’s a hard balance between trying to avoid being performative in public allyship and making sure you know people are listening while you try to get better privately.
I do want to say though that it is nothing compared to actually trying to survive anti-Black racism so this is a rather small source of discomfort. While I practice anti-racism in my daily life and, make lots of mistakes, leadership in this area, as a white woman, is very much not my lane. Please check out the show notes of this episode at courageous-scientist.libsyn.com for more resources and experts in anti-racist work.
-Interview Begins-
Clancy: Hello and welcome to the Courageous Scientist Podcast. This is Kate Clancy, anthropology professor and aspiring courageous scientist. This podcast is a single season sanity project that arose from the global pandemic.
I am releasing short interviews with aspiring scientists every week for the next few months. I want us to remember that we are connected and that we are all capable of doing good. I want us to notice that there is good work being done right now and many of us unable to do our work will pick it back up again soon. I ask each guest three questions: what brought you to science? How do you show courage in science? And what would you like others to know about being a courageous scientist?
My guests show me what it means to have clear values, to stand in them even when scared, and how to approach obstacles. That doesn’t mean all courageous scientists overcome all obstacles, it means that we know that how we come out the other side is not an indicator of our worth.
Today I am bringing you an interview with Dr. Krishna Pakala, an assistant professor in the department of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Boise State University where he’s been since 2012. He is the faculty in residence for the Engineering and Innovation Living Learning Community. He is the director for the industrial assessment center at Boise State University. Dr. Pakala has also served as the inaugural faculty associate for mobile learning and the faculty associate for accessibility and universal design for learning.
Thank you so much for joining me today Krishna.
Dr. Krish

Dr. Jennifer Freyd is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon, as well as the Founder and President of a new non-profit, the Center for Institutional Courage. Dr. Freyd spoke with me about her journey from studying cognitive psychology to institutional betrayal, to institutional courage, as well as the ways she has had to show personal courage along her scholarly path. Though we don't discuss it in this episode Dr. Freyd is also fighting for pay equity at her institution via a major lawsuit.
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Kate Clancy (Intro): Hello and welcome to the Courageous Scientists Podcast. My name is Kate Clancy and as you probably know from previous episodes this is a short, global pandemic passion project just to, I don’t know, shine a little light into our days and get to know some really amazing courageous people.
I am so excited by who I am getting to talk to today, one of my personal heroes, this is Dr. Jennifer Freyd. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, she is a visiting scholar at Stanford and Jennifer is the founder and president of Center for Institutional Courage. So that should just give you the beginnings of the idea of why I am so excited to talk to Dr. Freyd. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Jennifer Freyd: It’s my pleasure to be here.
Clancy: So, as you know, since we talked about this before I started recording, I am going to be asking you the same three questions we ask everybody. So would you mind just starting with the first one: what brought you to science?
Freyd: Well, you know I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s and I kept switching my major because I kept having new passions from fine arts to philosophy, ending up with anthropology. And near the end of my time in college I, on a lark, took an introductory psychology course and what inspired me to do that was one day walking through the library and seeing somebody’s textbook open with a diagram of the ear, explaining how hearing worked and perception and I thought it was so neat to understand perception. So I took this introductory psychology course and I fell in love with what was then called cognitive psychology: the study of thinking, memory, perception and decided that’s what I just had to do. It was really truly just falling in love.
And so I just managed to get myself into graduate school despite not having a psychology major and I went to Stanford and I pursued cognitive psychology with great enthusiasm for really about ten years.
Clancy: And since then you’ve had certainly a bit of a shift away from cognitive psychology. Do you want to say all what’s motivated that shift.
Freyd: I think it kind of relates to your second question about courage because the shift required a lot of courage. I was in my early 30s, had mad something of a good name for myself in the field of cognitive psychology. Had tenure, was doing work that truly interested me that other people were building upon as well and in the area that I called Dynamic Representations’…had to do with perception and memory and around that time, two things happened. One was that there was a public increased interest in… what had been called different things but basically memories recovered of prior trauma so, especially prior sexual trauma and there were newspaper stories about it and it was touching to me personally in various ways as well and I realized, there are also memory psychologists. I knew a lot, but I had never really learned about this kind of striking phenomenon.
And so I decided it was really important to understand and I delved into it, I learned a lot about sexual violence and hit the history of research on memory and trauma in general and for sexual violence and decided to start doing some research on this topic. And it was met with great consternation from my colleagues.
Nobody was talking about sexual violence in academic psychology and I remember giving a colloquium starting out with some data, f