In this episode we travel back to the SACNAS National Convention. SACNAS stands for the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science and is the largest STEM society dedicated to racial and ethnic inclusion.
This year we speak to many scientists about new ideas in their field and our place in academia. Enjoy these amazing stories of struggle and support.
Part 2 guests: Randall Acosta (JPL Engineer), Julio D’Arcy (UCLA Chemistry Prof) & Corey Welch (Director, STEM Scholars at Iowa State University)
Special thanks to our guests & SACNAS
Image Courtesy of SACNAS
Spark Science Podcast
Inclusive Science: Ideas & Academia – Part 2
Regina Barber DeGraff: This is Regina Barber DeGraaff, host of Spark Science and you are listening to our episode about new science ideas and inclusive education. We recorded on location at the SACNAS Convention in Long Beach, California.
Jordan Baker: Here we go!
[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around
[♪Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is Spark Science, this is Regina Barber DeGraaff, and we are exploring stories of human curiosity. I am here with Randal Acosta and I want to let him tell us a little bit about his position at NASA and then we’ll get this interview started.
Randal Acosta: Hi, as Regina mentioned, my name is Randal Acosta. I am an assistant engineer, currently working in the jet propulsion laboratories. I’ve been at JPL full time for approximately a year and a half but I worked at JPL prior to that as an academic part-time employee. So collectively, my time at JPL is maybe about three and a half years.
But during my time at JPL, I have worked a multitude of projects, even within the three years, both planetary exploration related and earth science. Two of the projects right now that I helped support are both earth science missions. One of them is Grace Follow-On and the other one is MISR.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So you were saying that you’ve worked on three different projects. I would like to hear more about planetary exploration. We’ve had many Mars scientists on the show, but I would like to know maybe about planetary exploration outside of Mars, so maybe moons of Jupiter or anything like that.
Your colleague here also said that you used to work in the clean room, and I wanted you to tell me something about that, because maybe our listeners don’t really know what a clean room is before we get into like planetary exploration.
Randal Acosta: So one of the new upcoming missions that they’re working on is called Grace Follow-On. Now, what Grace Follow-On is, is essentially an earth science mission that is used to map gravitational fields for earth. So it’s two space crafts that orbit around the earth in tandem with each other and the distance between the two space crafts measured very precisely using a laser. And as the two spacecraft end up passing over different land formations, so mountains or other things like that, or valleys, the first spacecraft is actually either rise or fall and that changes the distance between the two spacecraft and that’s measured with a laser.
Measuring that minute change in the laser’s distance, they’re able to measure and predict patterns for the gravitational waves.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So our students actually went to Ligo and went through the tour for measuring gravitational waves and they were using land-based interferometer and you’re talking about the space-based interferometer, which sounds super exciting.
And for our listeners, he’s using a lot of hand movements and he’s showing us the orbits and stuff, but hopefully you can check out something about . . . and what was this mission again, one more time?
Randal Acosta: Grace Follow-On.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK, so you can go ahead and check out that mission to see maybe good visuals on what he’s talking about.
Randal Acosta: On the note that when you’re dealing with planetary exploration, a lot of times we’re looking at other plants because there’s an interest in finding life outside of our world. Right? So in the event that you do discover life on another planet, you want to be 100 percent certain that we didn’t bring it there. So that’s essentially the importance of having these high level clean rooms.
For example, the Curiosity Rover for MSL, Mars Science Laboratory, that was built in a class 100,000 clean room. The 100,000 implies that per cubic foot, there is no more than 100,000 particles that are all each less than half a micron across in diameter.
And now most people aren’t immediately familiar with how big a micron is, but if you were to look at a human hair, the average human hair is about 100 microns across. So each particle is about half of a micron, so that would be 1/200th of the width of a hair, which is pretty intense.
And if you were to compare that to a typical hospital, hospitals, or even the average house, is on the order of 200-300,000 particles per cubic foot. If you’re outside and in like your typical polluted air, like here in Los Angeles, you can see it easily be five or six-fold that.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: It is smoggy this morning. Was that smog or was that fog?
Randal Acosta: I think that was definitely fog, but it could have been a combination of both.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Can you add something about what was it like to go into those clean rooms? Like what did you have to wear? What was the preparation?
Randal Acosta: It depends on the cleanliness requirements of the project itself. So, interplanetary missions, like MSL, Mars Science Laboratory, we’re sending spacecraft and a rover to another planet, so you want to make sure that whatever you find there on that planet you didn’t bring from your home planet, whatever biological pieces of evidence you gain.
But for something that’s like an earth science mission, you don’t have to have as stringent cleanliness requirements. So when you go into the clean room for a lower class clean project, you only have to wear what’s called a frock and a frock isn’t a full bunny suit, so it doesn’t cover your legs, shins can be exposed. You don’t have to wear gloves. But if it’s for something like MSL that I mentioned before, we had to wear full bunny suits and they get hot, they get sweaty, they are uncomfortable.
And in addition to having to wear the suits, we had to put on two layers of gloves, latex gloves, and duct tape them around the wrist. Yeah!
Regina Barber DeGraaff: [Laughing.] I like that you were like “yeah!”
So before we get into other like space missions, can we kind go back in the way back machine and like talk about how did you get involved in science? How did you get interested in science as like a child or as a young adult? Do you have a time in which like you know that this is the moment when I wanted to be a scientist?
Randal Acosta: There is a pretty defined point in time where I decided, “Hey, I am interested in space.” But if you wanted to go back all the way to the very beginning, I lived in Tucson, Arizona for quite some time and so in Tucson, Tucson is different from Los Angeles in the sense that there’s not as much pollution, so the night sky is a lot more visible, a lot more clear, so as a child, I spent a lot of time looking at the stars. As a I grew up, I knew that I was interested in sciences, but it wasn’t until I attended Cal Poly Pomona and found out that they have an aerospace engineering program that I really started getting involved with space exploration.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Can you tell me about any other sauce missions that you’ve been involved in? Because you said you’ve been working for a short amount of time?
Randal Acosta: There’s one, it’s actually a smaller class project. It’s almost an extension to Curiosity, the MSL, the Mars Science Laboratory, and this project was titled “LDSD” and that stands for Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. So low-density refers to the atmosphere of Mars, because the atmosphere of Mars is a lot less dense than that of earth.
I think it’s on average about half the density of earth. So with a lower density, as you know, you’re entering the atmosphere, there’s less friction, there’s less breaking power, in a sense. So you come screaming into this Mars atmosphere, there’s not much particles to slow you down. The project that I was working on, LDSD, is an extension of the entry-vehicle.
So the entry-vehicle is pretty much your heat shield, it’s that giant parabolic dish and it has that ablative material. Ablative just means that it burns away as it heats us. With that base heat shield, what they did was they added an additional piece to the outside called a SIAD. Now, a SIAD is another acronym. JPL loves acronyms! It stands for Supersonic inflatable Aerodynamic Device. So what it does, it essentially looks like a giant donut and when they inflate it, it increases the surface area of the heat shield itself, so it essentially increases your declaration factor, so it slows them down a lot.
But the cool thing about this is that they’re actually able to kind of control with different thrusters the direction that the entry vehicle is headed, so they’re able to reduce their landing ellipse to a pretty specific area. Landing ellipse is just like the approximated area that you’re expected to land in.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s awesome. You work for NASA. This is a job that many of my listeners, many of my students, this is like their dream job. Is there any advice you would give them to help them get to that dream if they wanted to work for NASA?
Randal Acosta: Yeah, actually, there is some pretty good advice. If I had to break it down into two general categories, one would be maintain your academics above all. Maintain a solid GPA, because a lot of the opportunities out there are really competitive, just like scholarships. So if you want to earn a scholarship, you want to have a really high GPA. If you’re applying for a job position and the minimum GPA is a 3.0 and a lot of the people who are applying are 3.8/3.9s, you really want to be in the 3.8/3.9 range.
The second component to the advice that I’d want to give is networking. It’s definitely good to become familiar with not only staff and faculty from whatever academic institution you’re at, but if you do have an internship somewhere, or some kind of employment position, become familiar with your line management and your group supervisors, because you want to make them happy so they can make their bosses happy. And essentially, in the long-term, it gets you a lot of recognition for the work that you do.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s like really, really good advice. And here at SACNAS National Convention, that’s all there is here. I shouldn’t say that. It’s a networking event. It’s science and networking event.
I usually ask this to my interviewees too: is there a story that you tell, maybe at a dinner party, or if you’re in a room full of people who are not necessarily NASA people, or are not necessarily even scientists, is there a story you tell them about working at NASA? Is there like a fun story that you always tell, it’s like your go-to?
Randal Acosta: OK, yes, and this relates to the hiring process. This is funny because it’s more of a personal story. It’s not really science-centric to all.
So when I first applied to JPL, it took them about six months to finally give me a phone call response, about six months. They are really busy. I came in for one of my initial interviews around January of 2013. It wasn’t until four months later in April that they actually called me in to go meet them on lab. So six months waiting for the phone call, and then another four months until they invited me to lab for a tour.
When I went for the on-lab interview, and mind you, this is during April, I’ll tell you what day after . . . I finished the round of interviews and I’m speaking with one of the HR representatives and the comment I made to her was that, “Seems like I played my cards right. I believe they’re going to give me the internship, right?” She’s like, “Oh, that’s the thing. They’re not going to give you the internship. You must have really impressed my supervisor because they want to hire you as a part-time employee.”
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, wow!
Randal Acosta: So when they hired me, I come in for my first day of work and as I show up, the same HR representative approached me and said, “You didn’t get the memo? You didn’t respond to the email. They gave your position to someone else. And then turns to me and says ‘April Fools’.”
Regina Barber DeGraaff: That is horrible! That’s a horrible story!
Randal Acosta: That is my beginning at JPL.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: But that says that NASA has a sense of humor, a sadistic sense of humor, but they do.
Randal Acosta: Humor is an important component to maintaining their sanity. And there’s a lot of difficult stuff we do at jet propulsion laboratory, a lot of stuff that’s not done anywhere else in the world. We lead the forefront in pioneers for exploring Mars. Having a good sense of humor, it’s definitely good in the long run. After that first day, I’ve loved every day since at JPL.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So this is the last question I’ll ask you and it’s about pop culture. First, what your like favorite pop culture thing right now? What’s like your favorite thing? And then second, how is your field, whatever your profession is from maybe your undergrad major or maybe your position now, how is that portrayed in the media and how do you feel about that?
Randal Acosta: The first question is somewhat not applicable to myself, because I’ve become somewhat of a “home body” recently. I recently started my Master’s program at UCLA. So after work, because I work a full 40 plus hours a week, I normally go home and sit there and work on my classes. So, not much of a social life at the moment. But once I have my Master’s degree and I get the salary increase, I expect my social life to improve ten-fold. And then maybe I can make a comment on pop culture in that point in time.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So nothing, nothing like . . . even when you’re growing up, you saw like an engineer or scientist on TV, nothing, did any of that affect you going into science?
Randal Acosta: Maybe being a kid and watching Wiley Coyote and his engineering adeptness! [Laughing.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: He’s so good at it.
I want to say thank you for talking to me and I learned a lot. Is there anything you would like to add?
Randal Acosta: Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you’ll land amongst the stars.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Beautiful. Well, than you Randal. Again, thank you so much for talking to me.
Randal Acosta: Not a problem. Appreciate the opportunity.
[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]
♪ Early late at night
♪ I wander off into a land
♪ You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul
♪ There’s a world inside
♪ Where dreamers meet each other.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is Spark Science, this is Regina Barber DeGraaff and I am at the SACNAS National Convention in Long Beach. And I’m going to let you introduce yourself and tell us your position and what you do in science, what kind of scientist are you?
Julio Darcy: OK. My name is Julio Darcy and I am an assistant professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. And my area of expertise are conducting polymers, energy storage, and fluid-flow dynamics, so how do droplets evaporate and how can you control droplet evaporation to make new types of materials?
Regina Barber DeGraaff: For my Master’s degree, I actually worked with polymers and computational models of polymers, so could we like just for our listeners talk about what is a polymer and how do you use it in your work?
Julio Darcy: Sure. So a polymer is basically a noodle. On the molecular scale, you can think of them as a molecular noodle. It’s just the very disordered chain of atoms. But they have very interesting properties. For example, these chains can be highly disordered or they can be more ordered. And by controlling that disorder, you can control the properties of polymers.
So in my case, I make plastics that conduct electricity. So the polymers that I synthesize are materials that have the same properties as semiconductors. You can control how much conductivity can flow through a piece of plastic.
And what’s really interesting about that is that these materials have been around since the ’60s. It actually led Nobel Prize in the year 2000 for the control of the properties of these materials.
So far, there are not many commercial applications for them, but one of the goals of my lab is to try to use these materials for making batteries and capacitors and things that can store energy, something that is very important.
So controlling the properties of polymers for storing energy or for making information is something that is still very active today for a field of research.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I remember little from that. That was a long time ago.
I also want to ask, so is there a story that you like to tell at parties, maybe around non-scientists and you want to kind of explain what you do, or explain something interesting about science.
Julio Darcy: So what’s interesting about what I do, is that I am really curious about fluid-flow dynamics and how do fluids affect the synthesis of new materials? And in my case, I use droplets of reactants that become polymers. One of the things that I like to talk about a lot is wine, because . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: At a dinner party?
Julio Darcy: At a dinner party. Because wine has really cool fluid-flow dynamic properties. For example, wine is described as having “legs” or wine is described as crying. So you might have heard of something called the “tears of wine.” And the tears of wine, it’s basically a phenomena where the ethanol concentration in wine is not homogenous in a glass of wine.
So if you have a glass of wine and you put it on a table and I’m going to assume you’re drinking out of glass and not a plastic cup, the glass will start to show “tears.” Basically, you will see that there’s some kind of fluid movement on the walls of the glass, even if you’re not drinking the wine. So you don’t have to stir it. You just leave it on your table and you walk away and come back a few minutes later and you will notice that the glass looks wet, even though you haven’t actually drank any fluid.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And you haven’t swished it around or anything?
Julio Darcy: You have not moved it around or anything. So this phenomena has been around since the Old Testament and it was first reported by King Solomon. The reason why this happens is because, basically wine is comprised of water and alcohol. Alcohol lowers the surface tension of water. But because the concentration of ethanol is not homogenous, you’re going to have a concentration difference in surface tension.
And this leads to directional fluid flow, what was is referred to as the Marangoni flow, Marangoni phenomenon. Marangoni was a physicist, graduate student, a physics graduate student, who learned in a convention from Lord Kelvin’s brother, the guy who developed the Kelvin scale. He heard from him at a presentation that the reason why wine cries is because of surface tension gradient but no one actually published this work.
So Marangoni wrote an entire thesis about it in his PhD dissertation and to this day, this is referred to as the Marangoni Flow and this is really one of the perfect stories of why you need to publish your work, because Marangoni did not discover this, but we refer to it as the Marangoni flow.
And it’s a very cool phenomenon, because it’s responsible for a lot of things in nature. In my case, I evaporate droplets of water and I look at how the surface tension of water affects the precipitation of materials out of water. And what I do specifically is that I make solutions of water that have catalysts in them and I set up droplets on the surface and I allow these droplets to evaporate.
In the process of evaporation, I am trying to control all the surface tension phenomena that are associated that the evaporation of water, capillary forces, coffee ring effect, Marangoni flow. These are basically fluid-flow dynamic phenomena that allow you to control the mass transport of solute inside water or allows you to control the rate at which droplets evaporate.
And what we try to do, is try to understand why do droplets evaporate at a certain rate and how do these rates affect the precipitation of reactants that I can then use for my material synthesis.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I love that story about the wine. That was awesome. So when did you want to be a scientist? Like when did that happen? We’re going to go in the “way back machine.” Was there a spark when you were a child? Did it happen in undergrad? Do you remember the instant in which, or was it not an instant, in which you wanted to become a scientist?
Julio Darcy: It was a very particular moment when I was an undergrad and I was really interested in the ions responsible for muscle movement in the human body. And I remember my biology professor telling me that my interest in ions is not really an interest in biology. And he told me to basically pursue chemistry if that’s really what I cared about.
And I didn’t understand it then. But I followed the advice and I took more chemistry courses and eventually I really dig chemistry and I really liked a lot of the research I was doing at my school. And that’s how everything got started for me. But it was through biology that I got into chemistry.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Let’s go back to your energy storage. What kind of practical uses would that be for? I think many of our listeners, and I can think about these ideas, but let’s just lay them out. Why is your research beneficial to the world?
Julio Darcy: So, energy storage is very important, right? There’s no “holy grail” device out there that can give you the performance that you need. Batteries in car need to be recharged and they don’t get recharged at the rate that we want them to. They don’t provide enough energy that you can travel thousands of miles on them.
Cell phone batteries also need to be recharged. So, ideally, there is still a lot of unknowns. Everyone is searching for a device that allows you to charge your batteries quickly and for a long time.
So currently what do people do, right? We use carbon as the ideal material for storing energy for devices that are known as electrochemical capacitors. Carbon has a lot of advantages, but unfortunately, the way that we make carbon is by burning coconut shells, for example.
Carbon ultimately has certain limitations. Carbon does not store as much energy as you want it to store. You also have other materials that allow you to store energy, not just carbon. Metal oxide is also a great material that allows you to store energy, but they also have their own limitation. Metal oxides tend to be insulating.
So the ideal material for storing energy would be a material that allows you to develop some type of surface charge on it, or a material that allows you to oxidize or reduce, or a material that allows you to remove electrons from it, or accept electrons readily, and a material that’s conductive. Furthermore, if this material happens to have a high surface area, then you have a great candidate for storing energy, because in the field of energy storage, surface energy is probably one of the most important things.
The greater the surface energy of an electrode, the more energy in theory you can store in that electrode. And this is true. It holds. It’s not directly proportional, but it is proportional.
So in the case of what I do, I am looking for new materials. Since the materials that are currently out there have stiffen limitations, there is a lot of room for improvement. Plastics that conduct electricity are great materials because they are highly conductive. If you control their structure, they are easily oxidized and reduced and you can also attach or adhere surface charges onto them, you know how to develop electrodes that have high surface areas.
Furthermore, I am a nanotechnologist. So all my syntheses are geared towards making electrodes that have a high surface area. So I am interested in making polymer chains that pack into nanoscale architectures. When I do this, I typically end up making a material that has very good performance for power and energy.
So power is basically rate, is how fast you can deliver charge over time. And if you wanted to accelerate an electric vehicle, you need a lot of power. If you want to drive long distance in an electric vehicle, you need high energy density.
Gasoline, hydrocarbons, are really good at giving you a lot of energy. We’re all trying to make materials that have an energy density close to that of hydrocarbons but not using hydrocarbons. Conducting polymers give you more energy than carbon materials. Conducting polymers are more conductive than metal oxides. And conducting polymers are synthesized in solution in fume hood and this allows you to make new structures in a beaker and apply them in an electrode in a battery.
So there’s a lot of versatility with conducting polymers. It allows you to go as a chemist inside a fume hood, make a new material, and it requires very little engineering once you develop a device because the material properties are ideal.
So conducting polymers are a really interesting candidate. Also, they are stable. Conducting polymers have been around since the ’70s and they can attain conductivities as high as that of copper. That’s incredible. Unfortunately, those polymers are unstable in air.
Nowadays, we’re able to synthesize polymers that have a much higher conductivity but are stable in air. So, energy storage is one of these fields where conducting polymers are very attractive candidate for exploring the properties of energy storage.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: When you’re talking about this and talking about conductivity and surface area, I keep on thinking about the little I know about energy storage, reading or hearing about how what we really would like is to be able to transport batteries that actually can have that energy. Maybe there’s one region of the world that has a lot of wind and we can like get that energy, but somehow we’re losing it because that battery storage isn’t really efficient. Is that what you mean by stable? There’s this leakage of once you put the energy into these devices, because it’s conductive, some of it is going to leave.
I feel like when you’re saying we want more conductivity, that kind of scared me, because once we put it in, then it’s going to easily come out if we don’t want it to come out. So how does that work?
Julio Darcy: So that is a really good question. So stability, right? There are many ways of defining it. In the case of a material that conducts electricity, in the case of a polymer, you have transport along the chains of the polymer and you have transport between chains that are close to each other.
Because conducting polymers are semiconductors, we can easily control the amount of doped-ns, or the amount of charge carriers, the amount of impurities that are present in the material. So we can control the electrical properties of these materials.
Leakage current is a function of engineering. Leakage current can also be a function of the chemistry and we need to find ways in which we can minimize the leakage current. For example, contact . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Just to . . . when you say “leakage current,” you mean losing the energy that you have stored?
Julio Darcy: That’s right. It means you’ve charged your battery, you don’t turn on your car, you come back the next day and your battery is dead. You’ve lost some of this charge carriers that you had stored, whether it’s electrons or ions, they have left the electrode, they have left the conducting polymer.
So why does that happen? Well, there are different reasons. For example, if this material that you have synthesized has imperfections, it does not have the right structure. Conducting polymers have a conjugation length, which means alternating single and double bonds. The longer the conjugation length is, the more conductive they are. The shorter they are, the less.
Leakage current can be a function of conjugation length. You can store materials, you can store electric ions on a conducting polymer, but if the conjugation length is short, the conductivity is going to be low. If the ions that you store are too big, then that can also have an effect on how much of these ions will be retained on the surface.
If the structure of the polymer is porous, you would then fill those pores with ions. But are the ions going to stay inside the pores? You need to control the ions in the electrolyte, you need to control the solvation sphere of these ions going inside a pore.
Sometimes, ions will shed their solvation spheres so they can actually fit inside a pore, but the stability of the ion is not the same as when it’s solvated. So, when you match the material structure to the properties of the ions and electrolyte, you can also increase the efficiency of the battery and you can have less of a leakage current.
Contact resistance is another reason why you would have leakage current. And in this case, you have to engineer these batteries and capacitors. You need to actually attack physical cables onto them. And you can do this in different ways and if you’re not careful, over time, this point of contact will delaminate, or will loosen up. And this will also lead to leakage current.
The stability is one of the most important things for electrochemical capacitors because you want to set up . . . you want to use batteries for example on wind turbines and these wind turbines are really tall. And you want to put these capacitors on the top of these wind turbines so wind turbines can rotate from the left to the right so they can follow the wind pattern. You don’t want to go to the wind turbines and have to change the capacitors often because they lose their capacity to retain energy.
So the stability is probably one of the most important things for you to develop an application. If you don’t have enough power or enough energy out of a device, you can work around that. You can couple the devices in parallel or you can couple them in series so you can control the amount of energy that you get out of them, or power that you get out of them.
But if they are unstable, you cannot commercialize, or you can not actually use the technology. So, in my lab, stability is one of the key parameters for synthesizing the materials and then for engineering them.
[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]
♪ Dance in the trees
♪ Paint mysteries
♪ The magnificent droid plays there
♪ Your magic mind
♪ Makes love to mine
♪ I think I’m in love, angel
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I am Regina Barber DeGraaff, host of Spark Science and you are listening to our episode about new science ideas and inclusive education. We recorded on location at the SACNAS Convention in Long Beach, California.
I want to get to this conference, because I’m also asking many of my people that I’m interviewing about this conference. So you said that this is your first conference and what do you think about the SACNAS conference. Again, to our listeners, SACNAS stands for Society for the Advancement of Chicanos, Hispanics, and Native Americans in Science, but it’s really just a larger inclusion in science national society. So if this is the first time you’ve been here, how has your experience been?
Julio Darcy: It’s been amazing. It’s been amazing for two reasons: the students and the other professional people that I’ve met here, my colleagues that I’ve met also from other schools. So on a personal level, I got a lot of invitations to go and present at other universities, which is incredibly important to me and all scientists. And typically when I go to other big conferences like MRS or ACS, I do get invitations, but here, the packing density of faculty is concentrated and so you do get to interact with a lot of other colleagues and this is one of the reasons that I am so happy that I came.
The students is another reason. Because I have met so many great students with such vast potential. And my advice to all these students is always pursue a PhD. One of the things that I have discovered here is that some of these students had not thought about that. I am really happy that I got a chance to tell them, tell them why I should.
I think a student should always pursue a PhD in sciences for different reasons. Undergrad and a Master’s is just not enough. There’s just so much to learn. There’s just so much more information out there. It’s not possible that you learn it all, or that you learn enough as an undergrad or a master’s so you can actually make a significant contribution outside of the walls of academia.
Even if you go into an industry with a master’s or an undergrad or a BS or a BA, your job is not going to be as much fun as it could be with a PhD. And I know that initially maybe you’re happy because you’re getting money.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: [Laughing.] This is a very blunt talk!
Julio Darcy: But, at the end of the day, you’re not going to be happy. It’s a honeymoon period of when you get the job, you’re happy. After six months, you realize that your potential is not being utilized because as a master’s or an undergrad, you’re going to be working for someone who has a PhD.
So, I also think that it’s not all about the job that you’re going to get, but more about the journey. I think a PhD can teach you a lot about who you are as a person. I think that you’re going to learn your true value as well, your contributions to going to be significant, your contributions are going to be very clear and apparent to you and everyone around you.
And I think that that is a very addictive feeling for students and I have seen it with many students and it happened to me. When you get your first publication out, your life changes when you see your first name as an author. It’s a very good feeling. And I think you owe it to yourself if you’re a student to experience that.
There is a greater likelihood that that will happen in a PhD simply because you’re there for a longer time. I don’t think that you should follow a PhD because you’re going to get the right job and you’re going to make a lot of money and life is going to be good. There are no guarantees, right? But the PhD experience itself is a wonderful experience.
The students that I have met at this conference, they have so much to offer and I want all of them to find out their worth, their true worth. And when I hear a student tell me that they want to do a master’s instead of a PhD, I want to know why. And what I have discovered is that a lot of the time, students don’t know how much they’re worth, and they aim for the master’s because they think that that’s what they are worth. They think that that’s the path of least resistance for them to get to their end goal.
But the resistance is equal between a PhD and a master’s. Master’s students and PhD students take the same courses. Master’s students and PhD students do the same kind of research. At a certain point, the master’s student just stops coming to the lab because they graduated, but in my opinion, that’s when it gets fun: when you finish your courses, that’s when the PhD really starts. That’s when you get this experience of learning what you have inside. It’s wonderful to see students that develop and they start contributing scientifically and they teach me and I learn from them.
Typically, a master student doesn’t get to that point because they graduate, they have to move on. They finished their coursework and then it’s done. So, I always want to know why you want to do a master’s and not a PhD. And typically, it’s because a student doesn’t know how much they’re worth and they think that this is the right thing for them, because . . . different reasons, but typically these reasons are wrong. It does not matter . . . you know, you need perspective in life and sometimes we’re just so full of emotion and there’s so much noise around us that it permeates our way of thinking and that’s why we make sometimes wrong decisions. Instead of doing a PhD, you do a master’s. I think everyone should do a PhD.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well thank you so much for talking with me. This was very enlightening for me as well. So thank you so much.
Julio Darcy: Thank you, Regina. I really appreciate it.
[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants
♪ The grass grows inside
♪ The music floats you gently on your toes
♪ Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
♪ Don’t freak and hide
♪ I’ll be your secret santa, do you mind?
♪ Don’t resist
♪ The fairygods will have a fit
♪ We should dance
♪ Dance in the trees
♪ Paint mysteries
♪ The magnificent droid plays there.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So I’m here at the SACNAS National Convention and we are here on the last day here and I’m with my buddy, Dr. Corey Welch. But I’m here with him and I want to talk about what he does for SACNAS, what is SACNAS, and what he does at Iowa State University.
Dr. Corey Welch: SACNAS is the Society for the Advancement of Chicano, Hispanic, and Native American Scientists. It’s the largest multi-disciplinary, multi-ethnic science organization is in the country. It is about 43 years old and there are chapters, like 115 chapters around the country and we have a big national conference where pretty much every major university in the country is here recreating. We have 1,000 students presenting research.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think I want to go into that story you have about science or the science you do, or maybe about SACNAS, just like a really good story because our tagline is “sharing stories of human curiosity.”
Dr. Corey Welch: I’ll give an example of the work I do. I work with under-represented populations and helping those students get into science or whatever academic they want across the field of STEM.
There’s a student that I worked with that I think her experience captures a lot of some of the challenges, but more importantly the strengths that this student has and why I am very confident she’s going to succeed. She’s currently in graduate school, but this is small town California Latina. She got into research through a first-timer kind of program, liked it. Did well enough in college. Graduated from a good school. She wasn’t always completely clear about the pathway to graduate school certainly at the beginning.
One of the challenges was her family getting her to leave California so that she could go on for a post-bac program and then eventually graduate school, so it took some time for her to culturally and familially train them about the pathways into science. You know, it would be great to stay right within a 50 mile radius.
One of the comments she had in particular was her mom when she was leaving, she got accepted to this very prestigious program. Her mom’s question to her was, “How am I going to get your body back if you die?” That’s some heavy stuff to throw on a daughter, but in reality there is some pragmatic realism. I had to talk with the student to kind of de-couple the feelings she was having about that. Maintaining that connection is really crucial for that student’s success and bringing their family along through the process.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: How do you talk to your colleagues who maybe don’t have that experience of a very strong family connection, or maybe don’t understand that a lot of these students are really struggling with their identity between these two worlds? Like, how do you get a colleague who isn’t familiar with that world to of understand it and be empathetic to those students?
Dr. Corey Welch: Sure. So if I am working with a colleague that’s new to this process, hopefully if I’ve assessed it, they are a little empathetic to the situation and that I’ve given them some background and the ideal world, the student is actually sharing openly with the faculty member. A lot of times, our institutions just have to be a little bit more flexible about how to manage around things like this.
For a Native American community, for northern Cheyenne community, if there’s a death in the family or an important event, I need to be there. So, sometimes our institutions have to be a little bit flexible about pushing back a midterm or pushing up a midterm can help a student not feel trapped between family responsibilities and their educational responsibilities.
I have given students advice and helped them communicate to their family, “Look, this is midterm time. I can be there in two weeks. Is that OK?” So, a lot of times, students don’t quite know what their options are to navigate the system and the institution and navigate their family. There is so complexity between that.
And I don’t get into that conversation with the family so much, but it’s mostly working with the student to try to help them feel like they’re making a good decision and not hurting their academic process. Ultimately, our institutions and lot of the institutions are getting better about this, because they actually do have some flexibility on when you take exams or you let a student drop an exam. There are different ways the institution can be a hell of a lot more open to bringing our families along through the education process.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: When you were going through grad school and undergrad, did you feel a pull between this new academic world that you were getting into and what you grew up with and your experiences with your family and your background?
Dr. Corey Welch: Early on, my family understood ecology and why I was doing that. I grew up paying very close attention to nature in Montana. They understood the work to an extent. Where it got more difficult for them was when I stayed away from the state of Montana long-term. I would, of course, come home at least once or twice a year, minimum. When I first started graduate school, I was old enough that you called collect, my mom would not accept the charge and then she would call me back. As far as maintaining ties with my community, you know, there was a couple early years in my grad school where I didn’t get back to the reservation. I would just go to our hometown — where my mom was was off the reservation, nearby, but I didn’t get onto the land or into the hills with my grandpa or my uncles. So I started making sure that when I did go back to Montana that if I could take half a day and just get in the hills with my uncles, and my grandfather had then passed.
So I also built community where I was at, so I sought out other natives, other brown people. My lab had, you know, the only African American in our department, and, you know, we’re best friends. And that happened at two different . . . I did a master’s and a PhD and I latched on to my other students of color. My tightest friends in the world are from graduate school, so you build family around that.
I got better at communicating what I was doing and why I was doing it to my family. But, you know, I’ll give you an example even during my post-doc. I was asked like, “Well, when are you going to come back to Montana and get a real job?” I had to remind them I had been a professional biologist since I was 18 and I’ve been getting paid to do this for 16 years. So, I had all the letters you want to get beside your name for a biologist. They still viewed me as a student.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I remember telling my family that I was taking summer courses in undergrad and they thought I was in trouble, like my grades were bad, because I was taking summer. They didn’t understand that I was just taking extra classes to like graduate sooner.
Dr. Corey Welch: Yeah. All of that training you to do with your family when you’re first-gen, low income is something that I don’t think people realize that you spend a lot of energy. And it can be emotional energy. I tend to think that those tend to lead to really creative problem-solvers, though. As a scientist moving forward, there is some nice research showing how people tend can feel more isolated as they move up through academia, but again, there are some ways that you can ameliorate that through connections, building your ability to communicate science effectively.
I mean, when you’re coming from an under-represented background and you get any degree by your name, you’re going to be put into positions or opportunities to be a leader.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I wanted to have two things. If you could say to a student who is maybe coming to this conference, or is maybe a student that doesn’t know about the SACNAS conference, what would you tell them to help them succeed in science? And then on the flip side, if you could talk to colleagues that are scientists, that are people in STEM, what would you tell them to help students, under-represented students, succeed?
And I know that there isn’t like one thing. I totally know. What is one of the things that you would tell them, I guess, is what I want. I know that there is not a cure for low numbers
Dr. Corey Welch: So here is what I would say to faculty and I have been saying that as one of my concluding slides based on same data, which is: there are under-represented students on the job market, talented, that are not in your network. How you were training is not going to diversity STEM. So, if you’re not at a conference like this, or if you are not actively seeking people out there to diversify your field, you are not going to be ready for the reality of in 12 years, the entering freshman class is going to be minority/majority and our higher level education and our faculty positions, our deans, or provosts, our presidents are so far behind in getting close to that. So, the take-home message to be very succinct is, they are out there and you’re not hiring them, so the ball is in your court and I show them the data.
So, I try to connect with scientists as a scientist. Like, “You’re doing bad science when it comes to diversity work and hiring.” And so the idea that there’s few and far between doesn’t sell. It just doesn’t.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think this conference shows that.
Dr. Corey Welch: It totally does. And obviously we don’t have every single minority post-doc and grad student in the country at this conference, but we have a lot of them. But the talent is here and it’s up to the universities to start becoming a lot more creative in hiring. So we have some major efforts that have to be done by our institutions if we want to be relevant moving on in the next 15-20 years.
And look, we serve the public, so if our institution does not reflect the public, those dollars will dry up. And the question about students, what I say to them regarding getting into science, try it, for the most part. Learn how to apply, figure out that you hate something. Go try ecology, go try lep bench science. Go try geology, physics. Find out you hate it. Cool. You move on. You figured out an area you’re not interested in. Those are some challenges that I don’t think students typically think about as they think they have to know everything. Just get your feet wet! It’s easier to get back into a lab after you’ve done something.
It’s the unknown and diving in. And I tell students all the time, “You can do 10 weeks in the summer anywhere in the country.” And there are at every institution, there are people of color that are there to help, either at your peer level or there will be knuckle-heads like me, and hopefully a growing number of faculty.
The one nice thing about the conference, particularly for students, and this actually applies to grad students, post-docs, and faculty, is SACNAS does have a reputation around the country, so you can actually use that. My wife used it in her job talk. She had to do a chalk talk and she talked about kind of her vision for the future. And part of that included some SACNAS activities and she got a lot of positive feedback on that specific point.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I did one to ask one last question: how is your field, your background, anything that is part of your identity represented in pop culture? And give me a good example, like an accurate example, and give me a terrible example.
Dr. Corey Welch: OK. I worked at a natural history museums through most of my PhD and post-doc. Yeah, exactly. So, Indiana Jones is a horrific depiction of museums in general. I mean, he’s running around ripping off indigenous cultures. He’s not carefully studying anything. It is complicated for native people to think about. The storing of dead animals and bones often can be problematic culturally. And so it’s not necessarily for everyone. And you have to be able to justify, even to the general public, but particularly to native people, why you’re doing what you’re doing.
And I have a good answer to that related to conservation and understanding biodiversity in order to make informed decisions. I mean, I love natural history museums. You can see the world through a natural history museum by just opening up drawers. As a field biologist, there’s just these opportunities for us to kind of change the narrative about what a scientist does, a field biologist.
And there’s been some really cool things that have tapped into this in social media, how to be a black birder was kind of a video that a friend of mine talked a lot about, his experience bird-watching. And also related to this has been kind of an interesting hashtag that a colleague at Virginia Tech got started called #fieldworkfail, where scientists share their funny moments.
I had a funny one that is by far my most popular re-Tweet. I was live trapping rodents in west Texas, couldn’t identify the rodent, field guide couldn’t help. It was a hamster.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: [Laughing.] Awesome! I think we’re going to stop there. Thank you so much for talking with me, Corey. You’re awesome!
Dr. Corey Welch: Thanks for having me!
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Thank you for joining us. We interviewed scientists at the SACNAS National Convention which focuses on making STEM more inclusive. If you missed any of our show, go to our website, sparkscience now.com, or to KRME.org and click on the podcast link.
We’ll be back again next week. Listen to us on 102.3 FM in Bellingham or KMRE.org streaming on Sundays at 5 PM, Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3 PM. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science. This is an all-volunteer run show, so if you want to help us out, go to sparksciencenow.com and click on “Donate.”
Today’s episode was recorded on location in Long Beach, California, in October 2016. Our producer Regina Barber DeGraaff. The engineer for today’s show is Natalie Moore. Special thanks to the Society for the Advancement of Chicano, Hispanic, and Native Americans in Science, which is what SACNAS stands for. Our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackalicious and “Wondaland” by Janelle Monae.
[♪Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
♪ Iodine nitrate activate
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop them
♪ And they hit the ground]
[End.]