Instead of banning AI, I made a classroom contract with my students

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From ScienceMag:

I sat in the heavy silence of my office, waiting for an undergraduate computer science student whose academic path I was about to derail. I had noticed a glaring red flag in his final report for my class: It answered questions I hadn’t even asked. It was clear that artificial intelligence (AI) had invented details to fill the gaps. My student had presented a chatbot’s output as his own work, and I could not accept that. But the meeting that was about to take place made me realize a flat ban on AI use was not the answer.

I had worked with earlier forms of AI for almost 2 decades. After a Ph.D. in computer science, I moved to the private sector, teaching machines to catch financial fraudsters and optimize marketing expenditures. Yet, I never left the classroom, teaching two courses at a local university. I felt confident I was preparing my students for the future.

My dual career in tech and academia felt safe and rewarding. Then generative AI rewrote the playbook. Suddenly, I wasn’t just designing software to assist humans; I was watching technology threaten to bypass human input entirely. AI could now generate complex code in seconds. A machine was claiming intellectual territory I had thought was mine.

For the first time, my career path felt like an anxious race to outrun my own obsolescence. So I adapted, spending hours integrating new generative AI tools into my daily routine to summarize emails, draft documents, and automate tedious coding tasks. It wasn’t just professional upskilling; it was self-defense. But in the classroom, I maintained a strict no-AI policy.

At this crossroads, the student I intended to fail walked into my office. He didn’t try to hide that he had used AI to generate much of his assignment. Instead, he admitted his anxiety. He felt that mastering these tools was essential for his future career, yet he had no idea how—or even whether—he was allowed to use them. The more we talked, the more I saw my own doubts mirrored in him. My indignation gave way to a nagging sense of hypocrisy. I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely? Outlawing AI had felt comfortable—a neat wall built to preserve a familiar order. I hid behind rigid rules because I was terrified to admit the ground beneath my academic feet had shifted.

Instead of failing the student, I gave him a chance to rewrite his report. But as the office door closed behind him, the full weight of our encounter settled on me. I realized that instead of building higher walls, I needed to dismantle them.

At my next lecture, I projected a blank screen onto the wall and invited my students to negotiate an “AI contract.” At first, they were guarded, but as I shared my own experience with AI, the classroom dynamic shifted. We stopped playing cat and mouse and became partners. Students opened up about their AI use and began to ask questions. After some debate, we drew a line separating mechanical churning from actual thinking. Automating repetitive tasks or literature searches was acceptable. Bypassing critical analysis was not: System architecture and design would remain strictly human tasks.

I have since made cocreating an AI contract a standard part of my classes. I moderate the discussion, but a consensus always emerges naturally. Although the terms differ slightly for each class, the contracts all insist that critical analysis should remain human.

The challenge of AI has prompted me to make other changes as well. Since the release of ChatGPT, student reports have grown steadily longer. I often felt I was evaluating a machine’s capacity for volume, not a student’s capacity for insight. So, I now limit written papers to two pages and base students’ grades more heavily on oral discussions of their work, which allows me to probe their thought process and challenge their decisions.

After doing these things for four semesters, I’ve seen benefits beyond reducing AI use. Defining the AI contract has become a powerful icebreaker, creating a collaborative atmosphere. The short reports force students to synthesize their knowledge, and oral defenses sharpen their argumentation skills.

Our real duty as teachers has always been challenging students to think. The task now is finding ways to engage them in the painful, essential work of critical thinking in a world where machines are willing to do it for them.

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Having a child during grad school is especially hard on women

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From ScienceMag:

It wasn’t the ending she wanted. After becoming a mother during the final year of her Ph.D., geographer Lauren Gifford finished her program with a deep-seated anger about the lack of support she received from her university as she navigated pregnancy, the aftereffects of a traumatic delivery, and child care. “It was just so hard in so many ways, and I feel like I finished the program out of spite,” says Gifford, now a senior adviser at the climate nonprofit Project Drawdown.

When walking became excruciating at 8 months pregnant, Gifford says she was denied a request for a complimentary campus parking permit. When she had to miss a semester as a teaching assistant because her due date fell in the middle of the term, the dean’s office chastised her for taking too much time off. And when she later signed up for 2 days per week of day care to finish writing her dissertation, it cost 110% of her stipend. “It was so demoralizing,” Gifford says.

Gifford is among the relative minority of researchers who have children during their Ph.D. According to a new study of more than 8000 researcher parents in 119 countries, only 21% of women and 27% of men started to have children during their Ph.D. program. And mothers face particular challenges when navigating parenthood while in graduate school, the study findings indicate.

It makes sense that graduate school would be a sensitive period, says Chaoqun Ni, associate professor of information science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who wasn’t involved in the study but has collaborated with members of the research team. “The Ph.D. stage is when people really … begin building the foundation of an academic career.” If major challenges arise during that time, she adds, it can have a snowball effect—affecting later stages such as postdoctoral opportunities and faculty hiring. “That is why stronger institutional support is important: Graduate students should not have to choose between having children and having a career.”

The study, published last month in Higher Education, was based on responses from a 2018 survey of parents who published at least one first- or last-authored paper between 2007 and ’16. The survey asked researchers about their family situation, including when they began to have children and how many children they had, as well as details about their educational and professional trajectory, such as when they finished their Ph.D. and where they were working. The research team then matched the survey responses with publication histories, coming up with a citation-based metric meant to represent the average scholarly impact of their papers. The resulting data set allowed the study authors to compare researchers who became parents at different ages and career stages, but did not include a comparison with authors who never had children.

The team found that an overlap between parenthood and graduate school affected both men and women. Researchers who started to have children before or during their Ph.D. program, for instance, were less likely to have graduated than their same-age but as-yet-childless peers, and for each additional child the probability fell further. But the delay hit mothers harder than fathers—so much so that men with three or more children were more likely to have graduated at any given age than mothers with two children.

The particular effects on younger women parents also became apparent through the citation scores. Men who went through graduate school in their 20s had roughly the same citation score regardless of when they had children. The same wasn’t true for their women peers: Citation scores for women who started to have children before the age of 30 were 14% lower than comparable men and 21% less than women who waited until their late 30s to start having children.

The study also found that regardless of the timing of having children, mothers in the data set were less likely to go on to hold academic positions than fathers. However, the survey did not ask respondents about career goals or how much their ultimate path may have deviated from their initial plans.

The way the authors have woven together personal family information with a wealth of data on a researcher’s eventual publication history and career is impressive, says Antonia Velicu, a sociologist and postdoc at the University of Zurich who has studied the obstacles academic parents face in their careers. It’s a “really cool study.”  

Author Xinyi Zhao, a computational social scientist and postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, hopes the results spur discussions about how to better support academic parents. She’s also quick to say she doesn’t want young researchers to see the results of her study as a blueprint for when to time parenthood. “The point isn’t that women should adapt further to academic timelines,” she says. “The point is that the timeline itself is the problem. If the career was structured for early parenthood—if it didn’t compound into permanent disadvantages—women wouldn’t need to make this choice in the first place.”

The reality, too, is that difficulties can arise when women elect to wait to have children—a scenario that can happen for many reasons, including professional goals, fertility, financial stability, and relationship status. “Early-career scientists may have a harder time finding that more permanent partner because of the requirement to get postdocs and potentially move several times,” says Jane Zelikova, the executive director of the Sustainability Research Initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder and a co-founder of the group 500 Women Scientists, who began having children in her 40s after seven rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF)—a journey that was frustrating and expensive. “For many of us who are not financially stable or don’t come from money, you have to make tough choices—do I buy a house or do I do IVF?”

Institutional supports such as parental leave and affordable daycare can benefit anyone navigating the competing demands of parenthood and research. But in many family situations, women are the most in need of it because they shoulder more of the childcare burden. Their health is also more likely to be impacted by medical situations such as pregnancy complications, fertility treatments, C-sections, and postpartum depression.

“My brain changed because of everything that I went through,” says Lillian Rose Ostrach, a planetary scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey who spoke to Science in her personal capacity as someone who went through an “8 year fertility gauntlet” starting in her postdoc years—including 11 rounds of IVF retrievals, seven pregnancy losses, surgical procedures, and surrogacy. “I was showing up the best I could to work, but … I [struggled to] have brain space to complete work, especially on longer timelines and write papers.”

One thing that’s been challenging for her is how to note gaps in productivity on her curriculum vitae (CV). “There’s no explanation possible professionally that is acceptable,” she says. “I didn’t stop working, so I don’t know how I would account for the gap, and it is one of the biggest anxieties and stressors that I have related to participating in proposals that require a biographical sketch, because that publication history matters.”

In Switzerland, Velicu says, the federal science funding agency changed the application process so that researchers no longer have to submit a CV. Instead, they provide a narrative list of their most meaningful contributions to science. Under this system, “you’re not put in this position that you have to argue why you took some time off of academia to be a mother or a father,” Velicu says.

For many parents, there’s no getting around the fact that there is going to be a period of interruption, “but there could be some ways of making it easier,” Ni says. “I think we just need better policy to support [parents], and also better evaluation mechanisms that would not penalize some sort of interrupted productivity.”

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How a medical crisis spurred me to become an academic entrepreneur

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From ScienceMag:

I lay in the emergency department, suddenly blind. As a motor-learning scientist, I knew it was not a good sign. In that hospital bed holding my newborn daughter in my arms, I learned I had multiple sclerosis (MS). My vision came back, but the timeline of my disease was sobering: My odds were good until age 55, but after that no one could say. Suddenly, just 4 years in to leading my academic research group, I faced the prospect of losing not just the intellectual reward of working as a senior academic, but also many of my top earning years. I knew there and then that to support my family through my inevitable decline, I would need to reconsider my long-held beliefs about academia’s financial trade-offs.

As immigrants raising a family without a safety net, my wife and I were no strangers to money pressures. But working in academia felt like a calling to me, even when the financial math did not add up. I was convinced if I paid my dues as a cog in the academic machine and focused every bit of energy on the next grant or promotion application, I would eventually be rewarded with financial breathing room. In the meantime, I tried to squeeze every cent out of my contract, even opting out of life and disability insurance to increase my take-home pay. It was a risk, but I was doubling down on my academic future.

When my diagnosis came, I literally couldn’t afford to keep going as I had; I needed to maximize my earnings now so my family would have a cushion when I could no longer work. Even before my diagnosis, financial pressures had led me to explore a possible exit from academia, but the prospects were demoralizing. Recruiters and head hunters told me my skill set was far too narrow for industry. And ultimately, I didn’t want to leave. I still had a passion for pursuing new discoveries.

As I pondered my options, I realized maybe the answer lay in something that set me apart as a sports scientist compared with my colleagues in other disciplines. They were invited to academic conferences; I spoke at coaching events and delivered custom education to help coaches design better practice sessions. I enjoyed these opportunities and knew there could be money in them, but I had worried about “selling out” and compromising my academic integrity. Maybe it was time to revise that mindset.

After a few months to wrap my head around my diagnosis, I was ready. With the blessing of my department chair, I began to offer paid services to teams, embedding myself in the coaching staff as a consultant, while continuing with my academic responsibilities. The increased income provided the financial boost my family so desperately needed. And at a time when I could not trust my own body and mind, it was exhilarating that these high performers looked to me for guidance, and rewarding to see my academic work make an immediate impact.

As the work gradually picked up, I began to consider the next step: founding a company. With a condition where fatigue hits fast and hard, I questioned whether I could excel in the dual roles of academic and entrepreneur. But the fear of my own decline overcame those hesitations. With the continued support of my department chair and the help of a lawyer, I set up a company I could run legally and ethically, as long as I kept it separate from my academic work.

Now, nearly 6 years out from my diagnosis, the MS is stable, and the forced shift has transformed my life. My family is financially secure at last and my sports consulting has changed my approach to my academic work for the better. The compulsive chase of the next publication or grant has been replaced with a clear understanding of what athletes and other end users of my research actually need. The integrity of my academic work isn’t at risk; rather, it has been sharpened.

I spent years waiting for permission to be more than a cog in the machine, only to find the machine had no safety net for me. Now, I know there’s no shame in diversifying my value.

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What my dog taught me about leading a lab

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From ScienceMag:

As I sat at my desk wrestling with the grant proposal I was coordinating, I could feel my eyes glaze over. I’d spent all afternoon figuring out how to keep dozens of consortium partners happy, and I was now deep in the thankless task of cutting budgets and moving numbers from one column to another. But just then an unlikely lab member offered a reprieve: my dog, Zazil. She had been snoozing under my desk, but now she put her head on my thigh. This was the signal: Enough, let’s go for a walk. For 2 years Zazil had been giving me this kind of wise counsel on a daily basis.

When I received an offer to establish my lab in 2022, I was delighted at the prospect of some stability after years of being a postdoc. But I had seen too many colleagues burn out from the pressure of running a lab, or push their trainees so hard that everyone in the group felt miserable. How could I create an environment where we did good, robust, cutting-edge science while also looking out for each other?

As I pondered these questions, I learned that the institute I was joining allowed employees to bring dogs to work. I was thrilled. Zazil was my wife’s dog, and had been part of my life since we’d met 4 years previously. It had taken a while for Zazil to trust me, but we’d grown very close during the COVID-19 pandemic, when our daily walks brought some much-needed routine. When I moved into my new office, I brought a pillow in for her, and soon she began to accompany me to the lab nearly every day.

It was nice to have a companion in those early days, when I was the only member of my fledgling group. But as the pressure ramped up, I found that Zazil wasn’t just a personal comfort—she also helped keep me grounded. When I got hung up on paper rejections, failed grant applications, or administrative busywork, she kept things in perspective—after all, these things didn’t matter to her. Zazil was a rescue dog from the Caribbean, and she had lost a leg in an accident at a very young age. She didn’t let her injury limit her, and she showed remarkable resilience and persistence.

As the lab grew and I began to hire my trainees, having Zazil constantly by my side helped me think beyond myself. The daily responsibility of caring for her and interpreting her needs was a reminder that my primary responsibility was to those around me, no matter how much outside pressure I felt. Although I was initially focused on maximizing productivity, my approach shifted with time. I made a conscious decision to ask my trainees about work-life balance at the beginning of our one-on-one meetings, and I became more attentive to how their workload affected them.

Zazil improved my own well-being, too. Her mandated pauses for walks didn’t always come at a convenient time. But they ensured I got fresh air and exercise, and gave me downtime to reflect on my work, often helping me get unstuck when a problem had been plaguing me—such as how to balance the books when overseeing a large consortium (the answer: to cut everyone’s budget by the same fraction).

I didn’t expect everyone to accept Zazil’s presence in the lab. But over time, even the cat lovers warmed up to her. She became an integral part of the group, who dubbed her Floor Manager and Sleep Practitioner. I would joke that she held a “dogtorate” in Advanced Morale Management. In weekly lab meetings her snoring provided comic relief—fitting for a lab concerned with circadian rhythms and sleep. One postdoc would entice her with cheese and other delicious snacks. Another lab member based overseas would ask us to pan the camera to Zazil at the end of the calls.

Academia often rewards speed, intensity, and constant forward motion, but Zazil reminded us of the importance of looking out for each other, and of how much of scientific life happens between experiments and deadlines. Not every lab can or should have a dog, but there are many other steps group leaders can take to cultivate care and patience alongside productivity.

Zazil passed away in December 2025. But although she no longer pads through the hallway, her legacy remains. She kept my lab human.

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The road to research independence may be bumpy. These lessons can help

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From ScienceMag:

Achieving independence is a rite of passage in an academic career. But for many early-career researchers, when and how it occurs can feel elusive. It doesn’t help that institutions, funders, policymakers, and even scholars often have different interpretations of what it means.

For some, independence can refer to gaining the knowledge and skills to conduct research autonomously at the end of doctoral training, says Dangeni, a higher education postdoctoral researcher at Anglia Ruskin University. For others, researcher independence can be developing an academic identity or publishing papers and securing funding, she adds.

To shed light on what it really feels like and how it evolves over time, Dangeni and five other higher education scholars who have trained and worked around the world reflected on their own paths to independence. Using an evocative approach that involves visualizing their experience as rivers, they found their journeys shared key common traits, they report in a paper published last month. For all of them, developing independence has been “a bumpy road,” says lead author Yusuke Sakurai, an associate professor at Hiroshima University. And to push ahead, they’ve had to demonstrate agency and seek validation from others in their community, he adds.

Science Careers talked to Dangeni and Sakurai about how the study may inform the journeys of other early-career researchers. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: Can you explain the “river of experience” method you used in the study? Do you think this could serve as a useful reflective tool for early-career researchers?

Dangeni:  This approach consists of drawing a certain journey as a river, with each bend of the river representing a significant moment, person, or factor that impacted your journey. It’s a powerful approach to unveil unspoken thoughts and feelings. When you draw this river out, maybe something just comes out subconsciously, and when you dig into it through questions from others, you will realize there’s a hidden impact or factor. So I would say that it’s a really helpful tool to start reflecting on your own journey, but it’s more important to talk it through with either your supervisor or your peers to gain deeper insights.

Q: What insights does this study offer for early-career researchers seeking to develop independence?

Yusuke Sakurai:  First, things do not always go smoothly. You will come across difficulties and challenges. Sometimes you are making progress and sometimes you run into roadblocks and cannot push things forward. Knowing that beforehand is quite important for doctoral students and early-career researchers to be emotionally ready. And then, at the same time, they have to take control of their own experiences. So they should develop an ability to analyze and reflect on the academic skills and knowledge they already have and those they still need to develop. They should strategically and proactively think about their own career development. Finally, they should seek opportunities to get validation from others in their field to grow their self-confidence and sense of competence. Of course, sometimes it’s difficult, like when a publication or a grant is rejected, but getting positive comments from your supervisor or being invited to contribute to a project can also be empowering. As a doctoral student, simply talking to like-minded researchers at conferences about each other’s research contributed to my sense of independence by making me think, “Oh, yes, I can be a researcher in the future.”

Q: What facilitates or impedes independence?

Y.S.:  It’s quite difficult to judge if specific factors are hinderers or promoters. Supervisors, for example, are really helpful to achieve conference presentations and publications. But at the same time, too much support—or too little—can also be an impediment. This and other things can be a double-edged sword. That’s why taking control of their own experiences to the extent possible is so important for doctoral students. When submitting a draft manuscript to their supervisor, for example, you could acknowledge that supervisors are busy by saying there is no need for immediate feedback and that you can continue working on other tasks in the meantime. This kind of communication may help maintain a healthy and supportive working relationship while making sure you keep making progress

D.: It would be helpful for Ph.D. researchers to have tailored discussions with their supervisors throughout their training about how they see themselves and their future careers. Universities should also support early-career researchers by offering them space and opportunities to develop themselves, regardless of whether they want to pursue a career in research or elsewhere.

Q: How did the idea for this study come about?

Y.S.: Myself and Dangeni are members of a special interest group focusing on researcher careers within the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction. In 2024, we all gathered for a workshop on researcher independence. In the literature, researcher perspectives spanning doctoral, early-career, and midcareer stages seemed to be missing. So, in our project, we took a very exploratory approach, trying to reconstruct the concept of researcher independence across career stages from our lived experiences.

D.: This whole idea started with the publication of a book by Elliot et al. on how to support researcher independence, which was quite a heated discussion topic back then. Now, we’re all social scientists in the study, so maybe we’re more familiar with working by ourselves than researchers in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] areas, who might work more extensively with others in a lab. But STEM researchers, too, are expected to experience and practice researcher independence. So, many of the things that we shared in our study, like the bumpy road or the importance of validation, might come in at different stages depending on your discipline. But there might be some similarities.

Q: What was a particularly low time for you on your journey toward independence, and how did you navigate it?

D.: In my river, I draw taking a professional development adviser role right after my Ph.D. as a bend, because there were not many available researcher roles at that time. As an international scholar, I also needed to obtain a stable visa. I enjoyed it very much, because it gave me intense teaching hours, and I managed to seek out different opportunities. But it was quite challenging to maintain my researcher identity, because no research engagement came with this role. I had to continue doing research in my own time, actively pursuing publications and attending carefully selected meetings and conferences to stay in touch with my research community. I was able to come back to research full-time 2 years later with a postdoctoral position. But looking back, the experience was really challenging in terms of my time management and my physical and mental well-being.

Y.S.: Like Dangeni, a major turning point for me was right after finishing my Ph.D., which I did in Finland. I returned to Japan, but the competitiveness for research positions was such that I had to find an alternative route to survive in academia while searching for a better fit. I first took a fixed-term position, in which I was mainly in charge of administrative and management work as an assistant professor. Four years later, I got a teaching and research position in language education; however, the heavy teaching and other responsibilities limited the time I could devote to research. Altogether, it took me 7 years to land back on my ideal pathway with my current role. To get there, I had to be strategic, recognizing that having weak personal connections back in Japan was a roadblock to my career progression and actively going to national conferences to create my network.

Q: Have you experienced psychological distress in your search for independence? Do you have any insights on how to deal with this?

Y.S.: The workaholic tendency in Japanese academia was a culture shock for me upon returning from Finland, as they continue exchanging emails during the weekends and in the evening. This affected my sense of independence, because that was not really my way of working and I found the pressure difficult to manage. But over time, I learned to ignore the emails that can be replied to on Monday even though you got them on Saturday, and that increased my sense of control over my work.

D.: Because developing into a fully-fledged researcher is such a long and gradual journey, full of ups and downs, I feel that our well-being is constantly affected. People talk about resilience a lot. Sometimes I agree, but sometimes I feel that overresilience can also be very problematic. Based on our study, I’d recommend not being too harsh on yourself, as we have limited time, limited resources. We have to be very strategic about what we can do and what we cannot, prioritizing certain activities or leaving them for a later stage in our career. The many shared experiences in our journeys show that we’re not alone, but we need to find out whom we should seek help from and which direction we should take to develop ourselves.

Q: Is there such a thing as true independence?

D.: That’s such a tricky question. It’s inevitable to have to constantly validate your sense of independence through feedback from others. And for moving up to the next career stage, we are evaluated through outputs like funding and publications and other very specific criteria, so researcher independence is conditional in a way. But mapping out what it means to you and identifying certain areas that you would like to develop is a really good way to start taking control of your independence.

Y.S.: It’s quite difficult to define what perfect research independence is, as people have different ambitions and expectations. You have to make your own decisions about how you want to develop your career and what kinds of achievements you want to make. Having said that, you must also think about producing a variety of outputs and having a lot of support from different angles. Well-roundedness, I feel, might be important to nurture independence in a research career.

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New documentary follows researchers’ increasingly fraught career path

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From ScienceMag:

The fruits of scientific discovery are ubiquitous, from the medicines that treat disease to the satellites that enable navigation—but only in rare circumstances, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, do scientists get thrust into the public spotlight. Much of the work behind scientific discovery remains stubbornly invisible to many of the people it ultimately serves. That gap inspired biophysicist Aaron Mertz and immunologist Shruti Naik to create The Endless Frontier, a new documentary that follows three U.S. researchers at different stages of their careers as they attempt to navigate an increasingly uncertain funding landscape and mentor the next generation.

The Endless Frontier makes its world premiere today in Washington, D.C., followed by a screening in New York City next week and additional festival appearances. The filmmakers plan to make the documentary available to a wider audience through a streaming platform. Science recently spoke with Mertz to discuss why he and Naik—the film’s executive producers—wanted to pull back the curtain on scientific careers, how they selected the researchers featured in the film, and what the current moment means for the future of U.S. science.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: What drove you and Naik to develop a documentary about scientists?

A: It was the pandemic, when a lot of news stories started talking about how scientists were working to combat this very strange disease that was moving into the United States. Shruti and I realized that people didn’t actually understand what we as scientists do.

We’re all working on behalf of the public good to discover new knowledge and new applications. We have a very long and intensive training process, and we realized that that process is entirely opaque to most members of the public. Even though scientists were getting a lot more airplay in the news then, people didn’t understand how their careers actually looked. We thought a feature length film could be a way to show audiences what a laboratory and the whole long training process is like.

Q: How did the title come to be?

A: The final title is The Endless Frontier, referencing Vannevar Bush’s landmark 1945 report to President [Harry Truman]. He was the principal science adviser for our country, and that report laid the groundwork for the establishment of our National Science Foundation. We believe that quote captures the nature and goals of science very well, because we believe science is endless.

One of the issues that I want to combat through this film is the framing of how science is talked about in our country and world. Science to kids is mostly presented as a textbook with a closed cover or a homework assignment with an answer key—a finished endeavor.

But science is endless. It’s a work in progress. Scientists always learn how to revise our thinking based on new data that comes in, so this idea of “the endless frontier” captures the spirit of the scientific endeavor that we want to portray.

Q: This film focuses on three scientists’ stories. How did you decide which scientists to feature?

A: We wanted to present a range of scientific fields, geographies, and career stages. We selected Andrea Graham, an ecologist and immunologist at Princeton [University], and Paul Barber, a marine scientist at UCLA [the University of California, Los Angeles]. And we didn’t want to show that science only happens on our coasts, so we have a fantastic researcher, Jacob George, a neuroroboticist at the University of Utah.

Q: These are scientists in very different fields. What kinds of experiences unite them?

A: A couple of narratives unite them. One is just what being a scientist is like—working in a laboratory, never knowing what the answer is, and using experiments and data analysis to find it. This process of iteration is a uniform narrative across all three, and across all scientists.

Also, the training process involved in scientific careers unites them because all of them have trainees with whom they work. And that long process is not something that people tend to understand. Even my own family didn’t fully understand why I was in school until I was 30. This is one story that unites all of them and unites all scientists.

Another storyline that emerged is all the upheavals in federal support for science. They were already united by this challenge of securing grants to carry out their research and hire new team members and maintain their research portfolios, and those challenges became even greater in early 2025. We were able to capture that narrative by listening to them talk about their struggles to get funding and the strong possibilities that they’ll have to shut down certain parts of their research portfolios and possibly terminate a lot of training positions within their labs.

Q: What do you hope the viewers of the documentary will walk away thinking?

A: The audience will see that there are real human beings behind research. Science is not done by robots—yet. Science is done by human beings who are passionate about making a difference in our world, and they need investment in their work for our society to continue to be at the cutting edge of health care, of technology, innovation, and economic prosperity. That investment in basic science research is a very strong way to keep our country strong.

Q: After making the film, are you feeling optimistic or pessimistic about the future of U.S. science?

A: In the short-to-medium term, I’m optimistic about science because politics goes in waves and we have elections every 2 and 4 years. I’m hopeful that there will be more national support for science in the medium term.

What I worry about is the long-term implications and repercussions of everything that’s happened in the past year. I think it will take more than half a term or a full term to undo damage that was done to science in our country, with all the uncertainty surrounding grant support for research.

What worries me most is that rising generations right now won’t look at science careers in the same way as they did previously because the prospects for a career in science are not as great as they once were. I think rectifying the situation will potentially take up to a generation: Even a few years of stalled or canceled grants for trainees will mean that people don’t pursue these careers.

So I’m pessimistic in the long term, even though all the changes that have happened have been in just a short period.

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To succeed in my Ph.D., I had to rethink my mother’s story

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From ScienceMag:

I went into my Ph.D. with one goal: I would not end up like my mother. When she became pregnant with me while pursuing a mechanical engineering Ph.D., her adviser cut her funding and she was forced to leave the program. What happened was of course not her fault, and later she went on to successfully complete a Ph.D. Still, I saw it as a cautionary tale. I was determined her story would not become mine. I would make sure to find a supportive supervisor, and I would never do anything that could give the possible impression I didn’t deserve my place. I didn’t realize my focus on protecting myself could go too far—and that I’d completely misunderstood my mother’s story.

It was my mother who first inspired my interest in science. In raising my brothers and me, she developed a passion for science education. Once we were all in school, she began her new Ph.D., studying methods for teaching engineering concepts. I grew up testing out her classroom experiments, helping transcribe recordings, and ultimately attending her successful thesis defense.

For my own doctoral pursuits, I knew from my mother’s first Ph.D. experience that I would need a supervisor whose support I could rely on, even in difficult times. I turned down offers from otherwise appealing programs because of misgivings about potential advisers. I also wanted to be sure any program I joined would give me a chance to rotate through multiple labs and gain a deeper understanding of each lab head’s supervision style before choosing my ultimate Ph.D. adviser.

Despite my precautions I could not quiet the nagging worry that any vulnerability I showed could be used against me. If a pregnancy cost my mother her adviser’s support, why not a failed experiment, or an illness? As I went through my lab rotations, I was guarded and cautious. Rather than ask for help, I chose to figure things out myself, even if it took me much longer. When well-meaning colleagues offered constructive feedback on my work during lab meetings, I felt myself become defensive, seeking to validate that I was “on track.” I evaded meetings with my rotation advisers, dreading that they’d tell me they were dissatisfied with my progress.

This pattern came to a head when I found myself struggling to understand a paper I was to present for a journal club. Instead of either choosing a different paper or seeking help, I froze. When the moment came to give my presentation, I claimed I’d been too busy to prepare. What I intended as a face-saving excuse was received as disrespect, and the professor told me I was his worst student ever.

I feared I was repeating my mother’s story—my academic journey ending because of a single deviation. But as the shock wore off, I recognized uncomfortably that my defensiveness had contributed to the outcome. Instead of protecting me, the walls I’d built were getting in the way of the very things I had come to graduate school to do: learn and grow, with guidance from my mentors.

I also realized I had misinterpreted my mother’s story all along. She had started her Ph.D. halfway around the world, far from her support system, and after her setback, she restarted in a new field and persisted to earn her degree. She chose bravery over caution in order to achieve her goals. The lesson was not to guard against every risk, but to press forward anyway, even when it meant being vulnerable.

From that point on, I tried to do the same. When my rotation period wrapped up, I chose a supervisor who had been open and kind. I still carried the fear that anything personal I revealed could somehow be used to undermine me. But as I settled into the lab, I slowly let my guard down. During one meeting with my adviser, I brought up my mother. He in turn opened up about his mother, whose schooling had been interrupted as a child. Because of her experience, she had become a fierce advocate for my adviser’s education and his brothers’, the same way my mother had always been for me. Now, as my graduation date nears, instead of treating my mother’s story as a cautionary tale, I aim to be exactly like her.

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A fun way for scientists to reach out—as a pen pal

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From ScienceMag:

Experimental Error logo
Experimental Error is a column about the quirky, comical, and sometimes bizarre world of scientific training and careers, written by scientist and comedian Adam Ruben. Barmaleeva/Shutterstock, adapted by C. Aycock/Science

I’m a huge fan of scientific outreach. I feel like part of my duty as a scientist is to interact with the public as much as possible to help demystify and humanize science, especially in a time when science needs all the help it can get.

So, when I learned about Letters to a Pre-Scientist (LPS), I knew right away it was something I wanted to try. The program pairs each scientist with a middle school pen pal. Scientists are encouraged to write something fun and interesting, and according to the LPS website, the students have a blast opening their letters together.

I hadn’t had a physical-letter pen pal since I was 9 years old and some kind of service matched me up with a boy in Melbourne, Australia. He and I exchanged letters for about a year. The only parts of that correspondence I remember are his use of the word “lollies” and my probably confusing hand-drawn map of Delaware. But this time, I was sure, would be more impactful.

I begin with the mandatory online training sessions. For example, the students will get to see a one-sentence description of your work before sending their first letter. The training helps you write that sentence—and then learn why what you wrote would baffle and dismay the students, then walk you through the editing process. At the end, my sentence reads, “I help keep people healthy by making sure the blood and urine tests they might get at the doctor’s office work well.” I give myself full marks for keeping it comprehensible, but a failing grade at being the kind of scientists who can truthfully write something more exciting, such as, “I study the effects of radiation on chimps in flight simulators!” (Note that this is not what another scientist wrote. This is the plot of the 1987 film Project X starring Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt.)

There’s a lot more guidance, too, which one might imagine is a good idea when matching children with adult strangers. Most of it is straightforward and expected: Do not ask for their home address, do not contact them outside of this program, never feed them after midnight. Other recommendations come from the LPS team’s years of experience supporting these interactions. Your letter should be understandable; photos, doodles, and little freebies such as stickers are encouraged. Avoid sending lab data or a manuscript preprint. Each of your four letters has its own deadline and theme, such as writing about your career path or how you overcame challenges. This lets the kids compare similar responses from their scientists, with the side benefit of giving you some direction when you’re staring at a blank page and thinking, “Uh … what do I even say to a middle schooler? Something with the word ‘rizz’? Is ‘six seven’ still funny?”

After all of this preparation, it’s disappointing when LPS fails to assign me a pen pal. Apparently this year the number of interested scientists exceeded the number of available students—both a bad problem and a good problem for the program to have—and we didn’t all make the cut.

But then, in January, it happens. A seventh grade teacher in Santa Ana, California, who has participated in the program in the past returns from maternity leave and wants her students to join, giving some of us an opportunity for an abbreviated correspondence: two letters instead of four, but we’ll get our pen pals after all.

During an introductory Zoom call, the teacher explains that her students generally come from disadvantaged backgrounds, with many living in multifamily units and some without homes. They love receiving letters from their scientists, she says. We should be role models, we should help them feel confident, and one time a scientist included glitter in their letter, and that was cool. No pressure. And, she begs, if you handwrite your letter, “please never cursive.”

I feel excited when my pen pal’s first letter arrives. She sounds fun. She wants to be a nurse, and she likes soccer and escape rooms! She asks whether I ever get disgusted doing my job, and I admit that I do, but I think everyone does. She asks whether I went to college, and I say yes, though I deliberately gloss over “and also 7 years of grad school,” because why scare her off now?

I work on my letter for a long time, going back and forth about a photo to include. After considering what kind of picture might fulfill all of the criteria—interesting, something she’d like to see, no personal info, no graphs—I say screw it and go with a classic cat pic. “I also have two cats,” I write. “Their names are Coconut (on the right) and Muesli (on the left). They’re brothers.”

Am I writing this insultingly simplistically? Or am I overthinking it, because cute cats are cute cats?

After I describe my science work and close with a few questions for her about pets, siblings, and the weather in Santa Ana, I print the letter, then toss in a few animal stickers that my son received on Valentine’s Day and that he probably won’t miss. Why not?

Her next letter arrives a few weeks later. I learn that she likes disc golf, and that she has two pets, though one of them lives in her house but the other is in heaven. I decide not to ask any more about pets.

I tell her how I became a scientist, how I failed an important exam once in college, and how I learned to dissect mosquitoes. I really don’t know what to say. But just in case, I add one more cat photo, of Coconut wearing a hat my daughter crocheted. Science!

I finish with three more questions for her, though after I mail the letter I realize this was my last one—LPS is over for the year, and I don’t think we’re exchanging another round of letters. I will never know her favorite ice cream flavor.

I’ll also never know whether my letters make any difference to her career path, or whether she ends up becoming a nurse. But the whole process reminded me how easily we can influence the next generation of scientists through something as simple as a few letters. There’s something deeply intentional about a physical letter that just can’t be replicated any other way. I realized as I was writing this that the Melbournian wasn’t my only pen pal—in sixth grade, our teacher arranged for us to exchange letters with active-duty soldiers in the Gulf War. The letter I received didn’t make me pursue a career in the military, but I remember the special feeling that an adult, busy doing Important Adult Things halfway across the world, took the time to write to me. Thirty-five years later, I still have the letter in my desk.

As the LPS website explains the point of the organization, “Talent and potential are equally distributed in society, but opportunity is not.” That’s why I sent a Letter to a Pre-Scientist, and that’s why I’m looking forward to hopefully doing it again next year. If there’s a middle schooler I can reach with a bit of writing, one more positive association with science I can cast out into the world, I want to do that.

And just like the internet, I have no shortage of cat photos.

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I may not ‘look like’ a professor, but now I know I belong

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From ScienceMag:

Minutes before my very first lecture to first-year undergraduates, I stood outside a locked lecture hall fumbling with my bag, trying to get in and set up before the students arrived. A passing staff member reassured me: “Don’t worry, you aren’t late. The professor will be here soon to set up the room.” Those words confirmed my worst fear: I did not look the part. Doing my best to keep a level voice, I replied, “I am the professor, could you please help me open the door?” This wasn’t the first time in my career I have been assumed to be less than what I am. But it was a pivotal moment, and it forced me to confront a question I had been avoiding: Why did I keep feeling I had to prove I belonged?

As a petite, 34-year-old Indian woman working at a U.K. university, I do not fit the usual archetype of authority. I am frequently mistaken for an undergraduate, a research assistant, or a Ph.D. student. At times, students or university security have simply called me “Miss.” Outside academia, I am fast approaching what is commonly labeled “advanced maternal age.” Inside it, I am treated as too young to possibly be an assistant professor.

For those of us women from the Global South who manage to gain a foothold in Western academia, getting there is only half the battle. Once there, we face barriers that are hard to name. Like many researchers, I negotiate insecurities about research outputs, teaching style, and contributions to my institution and the broader academic community. But I also spend energy proving I belong, energy others get to spend on the science itself.

In my first year, I said yes to extra lectures beyond my allocated workload because I believed doing more was the only way to justify being there. Somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting for others to underestimate me. I started to do it myself. I found myself constantly questioning my own legitimacy and calculating how much of myself I really could bring into the lecture hall, into meetings with students or new collaborators, or even to projects I lead.

When a late-arriving student at an orientation meeting asked, “Sorry, who are you exactly? Are you a Ph.D. student or something?” I was compelled to list my credentials (degrees across India, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and more than a decade of study), as if they could shield me from the assumptions already in the room. Although they seemed to silence the students’ doubts, they didn’t stop those in my own mind.

Now, approaching the end of my second year as an assistant professor, I have realized something unexpected: The real work is not convincing myself I belong, as though this were a confidence problem I could fix with enough willpower. Instead, the challenge is rewiring my own perspectives and my responses to the subtle and persistent messages telling me I’m not what a professor looks like. That includes unlearning my own reflexive responses to those messages, such as apologizing for my own presence, or preemptively using self-deprecating humor.

This takes a lot of vigilance. I have to keep reminding myself that belonging doesn’t need to be constantly earned. When in a recent administrative meeting someone asked whether I was a part-time staff member, I felt for an instant the familiar pull to justify or even apologize. But I caught myself before I acted on it. I said I was faculty and moved on.

Small gestures carry me forward. I keep a note of gratitude from a third-year student on my bedside table. The student wrote that they had not realized how powerful it was to have a mentor who looked like them. I now understand that my presence is not about my journey alone. It is about holding the door open for others.

When a senior colleague nominated me for a teaching excellence award last summer, my first instinct was that there must be some mistake. I am still fighting that reflex, but I am slowly making progress. Now, instead of rushing to justify my presence at the beginning of a lecture, I just set up my computer, look out at my students, and begin. Halfway through this year’s course, two students walked up to me and told me they loved my lectures. I thanked them, and this time, I let myself believe them.

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How a lab accident changed my approach to science

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I had just wrapped up my experiments for the day and taken off my lab coat when upsetting news popped up on my phone: A lab explosion at a university in China had killed one student and injured three. I felt awful for the people involved and their families—and I couldn’t avoid painful memories. Years earlier, I had caused a lab accident myself while I was a master’s student in China. I was lucky I didn’t kill someone. It haunts me to this day.

Back then, I was always in a hurry. I wanted to get results fast, publish papers, and outperform my peers. I took on as many projects as I could, aiming to impress my supervisor and earn a strong recommendation letter. Speed and output felt like the only way to get into a top North American Ph.D. program. I rushed through lab work, too—causing an accident that forever changed my attitude and approach to research.

It happened on a Sunday night. I was running a reaction, trying to gather data for a lab meeting presentation the next day. I had run the protocol, which involved a high-pressure reactor, so many times I barely paid attention. Waiting for the reactor to cool completely before opening it was standard practice, but I considered it a waste of time. So, I forced it open long before it had cooled down.

Acidic liquid shot out. It hit a senior lab mate, who was working on her own experiment just a few meters away. The scalding liquid burned her neck and collarbone. She gave a shocked yelp, and clamped a hand to the wound. I stood there, frozen, the reactor valve still in my hand.

We rushed her to the campus clinic. The nurse cleaned the burn carefully and applied a thick ointment. She told us the scar would fade with time, but it might never fully disappear. I apologized over and over, my words shaky and meaningless. My lab mate just nodded, quiet and pale, and I knew I had broken more than a lab protocol. I had also broken her trust.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I replayed the moment over and over—the stupid decision to skip the cooling time, the hiss of the liquid, her cry of pain. Guilt overwhelmed me. I’d messed up experiments before—ruining data or breaking glassware—but this was different. I hadn’t just ruined work. I’d hurt a person, a colleague who’d helped me learn the ropes of the lab, who’d never hesitated to answer my questions.

In the days after, I couldn’t bring myself to step foot in the lab. I asked my supervisor for a week off, and spent those days alone with my guilt and regret. Ashamed that I had valued speed over the safety of the people around me, I thought about quitting lab work.

When I returned to campus, my supervisor called me into her office. She made it clear I needed to strictly follow protocols for any hazardous experiments.

From then on, I made a point to stop rushing. I read every protocol at least twice. I set timers for cooling and wait times, and I let them run to the very end, even if it meant missing a deadline. I checked every valve, every seal, every setting. Safety wasn’t just a list on the wall anymore. It was a promise, to my supervisor, to my lab mates, to myself.

Slowing down was essential from a safety perspective. But I found it changed my science, too. For the first time, I was fully present in the lab and focused on the work, not just the finish line. I started to catch small errors I might not have noticed otherwise. For instance, before the accident I had made a careless calculation that led me to use the wrong reagent ratio when synthesizing a key catalyst. Unaware of the mistake, I used this flawed catalyst for an entire month, generating unreliable data. Only after the accident, when I slowed down and began to pay full attention to every detail, did I finally notice and correct the error.

I am now a Ph.D. student in Canada, and this slow, careful rhythm has stayed with me. I still set the timer and let it run, check every step twice, pause, and breathe. As I have learned: Science is not only about data, results, and speed. It is about care, responsibility, and respect for the people beside us.

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