This article is part of STEMinism in the Spotlight, a monthly interview series. When I met Lisa Goldberg at a seminar on causal inference, I could immediately sense that she had a unique curiosity and an ability to be successful in any endeavor she attempted. Interviewing her only confirmed that suspicion: she is a mathematician
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As science and engineering graduate students, we are constantly engrossed in the details of our  research projects. When we emerge from our research, however, we frequently face culture gaps between ourselves and our graduate student peers, or the rest of society. For example, when we talk with scientists from different fields about our work, or
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As a second-year graduate student, I haven’t worked in academia for very long; yet, it’s been long enough to hear several mentorship horror stories. I’ve heard stories of principal investigators (PIs) who are consistently verbally abusive, hang on to graduate students for eight years, or set a postdoc on fire. Early career researchers (graduate students
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Every January for the past 20 years, scientists from around the world have come to Berkeley for a unique conference. Chemists, biologists, and physicists gather to talk about topics as diverse as liquid water, biological membranes, nanoparticle assembly, and quantum spins. What do these all have in common? What brings such a diverse set of
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Big data isn’t just changing the way we shop, date, and communicate. It’s also changing the way we do science. This April 2 to 5, molecular and computational biologists from across the country converged in San Francisco for the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) annual meeting. The JGI was created by the US Department of Energy
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“I stopped taking the medication,” he told me. Recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, my friend lasted only a month on a new cocktail of pills containing lithium, sleeping medication, antipsychotics, and antidepressants. While he could cope with its physical side effects, such as hand tremors and horrible migraines, he could not stand its mental manifestations.
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