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Profiles of women in science: Prof. Ingrid Olson of Temple University

2017; Wiley; Volume: 46; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ejn.13775

1460-9568

Dana L. Helmreich,

Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology

We are delighted to initiate our new series ‘Profiles of Women in Science’ introducing leading women scientists from EJN and our parent organization, the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (Helmreich et al., 2017). It is our intention to bring well-deserved and long-overdue recognition and accessibility to successful women throughout our community, and perhaps insight and advice for young scientists trying to make their way in this very competitive time. Dr. Olson received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. After a brief hiatus working at Northwestern Medical School in Chicago, Dr. Olson moved to New Haven, Connecticut to pursue her Ph.D. at Yale University. She worked first with Tom Carew, then Marvin Chun and Truett Allison in the Department of Psychology. Her dissertation work involved the study of a type of statistical learning called ‘contextual cueing’. While at Yale, she also began working with Yuhong Jiang to study visual working memory. For her post-doc, she stayed in New Haven, but moved to the medical school to work with John Gore on biomedical imaging http://www.cla.temple.edu/psychology/faculty/ingrid-olson/ Ingrid has authored or co-authored more than 80 well-cited peer-reviewed manuscripts, is active in training students and post-doctoral fellows and is the Director of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Program at Temple. She and her husband have three teenagers. EJN: Who has been your biggest inspiration in science or life? Ingrid: There's so many people, both living and deceased, who inspire me. Maria Curie, who had to move to another country to get educated and had to work as a governess to pay for this education; Mary Potter, who did research for several years at MIT in a non-tenure track position; Eleanor Gibson who did research in a closet at Cornell because nepotism rules barred them from hiring her. All of these women loved science so they persevered and ultimately, were recognized for their work. Is there anything else you would like to say about being a woman in science? Would you have any advice for women, in particular? I've noticed is that a lot of female graduate students get very freaked out about the whole idea of juggling a family and a career. I want them to know that you can make it work! You just have to be smart about childcare. I had my first child in graduate school and my entire stipend went to childcare. It meant we were poor and in debt, but good childcare was really essential in the early years for allowing me to get my work done. There were a few years when all I did was work and take care of my child – I had no social life whatsoever. I was okay with that, because I knew it was for a limited amount of time and I was willing to make that sacrifice. It all worked out – I got a tenure track job, and I got back my social life once the kids were a little older. For me, having a husband who's an academic has also been helpful because he understand the demands of my work. I'm fortunate in that my husband, Dr. Junhyong Kim, has always been a huge supporter of my career. What do you like best about your job, and what do you like least about your job? I really like designing experiments and mentoring graduate students. I love that part. If I still had time to do my own programming, I would do that and create the experiments too. What I dislike is preparing new courses to teach. I'm not going to lie, creating new lectures is a ton of work. What's your typical day like? If it's a Tuesday or Thursday, those are my teaching days, so I'm panicking because I have two back-to-back courses that I have to teach. One of them, I've taught many times before, the other one is this new preparation. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, are what I consider my research days. I always have some papers I'm working on, some things I have to get back to people. I have tons of emails to get through every day. I'm also the director of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences area in our department, which means I have an administrative job as well. That means a lot of correspondence. My day can be pretty fractured because of all these different hats I have to wear, but I am happy to do it. Where do you think neuroscience will be in 2030? Well, it's interesting to think about various diseases that some of us have been working on, like Alzheimer's disease. So many smart people have been working on Alzheimer's disease, and there's been a lot of breakthroughs, but still we don't have a cure. Since there's been such an accumulation of knowledge about Alzheimer's, I do feel hopeful that by 2030 we will have good early diagnosis for Alzheimer's and we will have some treatments. Perhaps not a cure, but at least treatments, which we don't have at all today. I also hope that by 2030 there will be less issues with women in science, or female faculty members, as well as people of color, people with disabilities, all of these people who have been stigmatized in the past. What's your greatest travel experience? When I was 20, I spent a summer backpacking through Turkey with my sisters. Part of what made it such an amazing trip was that we travelled slowly, really getting to know the country town-by-town. It was very interesting to go to a country where there was such disparity between the cosmopolitan Istanbul and the rest of the country where, in many places, people were still using donkeys and carts to do their farm work. What's the top thing on your bucket list in your professional life? I'm currently doing research on white matter in the brain. I would love to find a way to image local white matter (for instance, the U-shaped fibers that course around sulci and connect neighboring gyri), and to really figure out how to connect it to cognition. How about in your personal life? Making sure all three of my kids get through college (they're currently teenagers) will be a huge relief. What is the last book you read? I recently finished two excellent books: the Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee and When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi. What music do you listen to? I have an embarrassing weakness for music from the 70's. As I drive to work, I've been listening to a lot of David Bowie, Elton John, and Iggy Pop.