Jo Handelsman is director of the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, and that's just the latest step in research career that began with an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship in 1984.
She's a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, co-founder of the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute, and founder of the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching.
She was the associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and President Obama awarded her the Presidential Award for Science Mentoring.
And she's nationally recognized for her work on understanding implicit biases.
ACS talked with her about:
4:38 - On her book, Entering Mentoring: A Seminar to Train a New Generation of Scientists – “We started interviewing faculty that we thought were great mentors, and all of them said, ‘I don’t know anything about mentoring; I just make a lot of mistakes.’ So we thought, ‘You know maybe we could do a little better than this,’ and that’s how we developed the course. It really evolved from what the mentors and mentees told us.”
8:58 – “I always tell junior faculty, if you can’t get other people to run the seminar, just run it yourself. I guarantee you’ll have people who want to take it, and you’ll learn so much from teaching it. And of course, you don’t really have to ‘teach’ it. I’ve taught it dozens of times now and I think I still learn almost as much the 20th time as I did the 1st time.”
10:35 – The story behind her landmark 2012 paper, "Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students" – “If you imagine the hundreds of interactions that a given faculty member will have or that a student will have with all their faculty…If you imagine the males are getting just a little more time, or they’re being encouraged to try for slightly more ambitious internships, research experiences or jobs…You can see why men and women end up in very different places.”
13:05 – On why the study’s results didn’t surprise her – “This is an old story in the field of psychology, but when I would talk about studies like this (and there are hundreds of them, if not thousands, out there), scientists would always say, ‘But we’re trained to be objective, so we don’t do that.’ And of course, that shows a certain lack of understanding of what implicit or unconscious bias is. Science trains us in our cognitive minds to be objective but that doesn’t influence our biases. Frankly if it did, then we wouldn’t have to run blind experiments.”
15:45 – On the video interventions she’s developed to address the issue – “We think there are ways to address these implicit biases even if they’re kind of stuck in our deep brains and can’t be rooted out. We can certainly deal with their impact.”
19:20 – Advice she’d give to a young scientist on how to address implicit gender bias – “It’s not an accusation against white men. It’s not a plot to keep women and minorities out of academic science. This is just something all people do. And I think when you present it that way and say that becoming aware of it is a way to be more fair, get better people hired, better grants funded, and better papers accepted, it becomes a lot less threatening to people.”
23:20 – On her 3-year term under President Obama as the Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy – “He really did seem to have a special respect for, appreciation for, and just kind of nerdy enjoyment of science. So it was always exciting to talk science with him and to develop policy for him and with him. That was probably one of the greatest privileges of my life—working for him.”
29:13 – On the impact of ACS funding at the start of her career – “Well I think the ACS postdoctoral fellowship made me very aware of the unity of biology very early on…biology is biology and what we learn in one aspect is probably going to have some relevance to other aspects of biology.”
