Interview by Heidi Molga, CLB Undergraduate 
(under the supervision of Professor Amy Ralston)
October 17, 2013

Heidi: Would you mind providing us with a personal introduction?

Needhi: I am an assistant professor here at UCSC in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental biology. I run a research lab that currently had three grad students, one technician, and five or six undergrads. I teach genetics, an undergraduate class, and two weeks in 200C, which is a graduate cell biology class. I am currently in my fifth year of being an assistant professor, and I am planning on coming up for tenure next year.

Heidi: At what time in your career did you start having children, and did you feel as though that was the best time, over the course of your career?

Needhi: I was in a slightly different position than other people might be, because I didn’t actually start dating the individual I ended up having children with until I ended my post-doc. I had children during the time I was an assistant professor. I started my job in 2008, and I had my first son in 2010, and my second son in 2012. It was pretty soon after I married my partner, so it was right for us. He is a professor here, in MCD.

Heidi: Do you end up “taking work home with you” more often?

Needhi: We used to, but now we make a conscious effort not to. It is really important for us to eat breakfast and dinner together with our sons, so we try not to talk about work at home, but often, it ends up coming up. It is hard to strike a balance, because you want it to not dominate the conversation, but also it is very important for our children to see that we love our work, and we are truly invested in our work.

Heidi: Has being a parent changed your approach to work, both teaching, and research?

Needhi: It has not changed my approach to teaching. I know that there are some faculty here who have children that are undergrad age and it has informed their approach to teaching undergrads. My approach is formed more so from mentoring students in my lab, which has taught me that different students have different skill sets and strengths. The way you mentor one student is not going to be an effective way to mentor another student. That is something that I am realizing with my sons, who are very different from each other.

Heidi: What kind of support would be most helpful to professor parents?

Needhi: I feel like MCD has been very supportive, just as a community in general. One thing that I can say is that I wish people had felt more comfortable talking about what they need at their point in their career. I think that there needs to be a conversation with graduate students, post-docs, and professors. When you are working with someone in your lab, you need to give someone the language or the framework to feel comfortable with that. A lot of people have never had that conversation, so they are not prepared on how to approach it.

Heidi: What do you feel is the best way to change the number of women in STEM tenured positions without compromising excellence?

Needhi: Women and men should both be supported in having careers and children and lives. There should be discussion of career-life balance, but people need to truly evaluate how they view men and women in a professional sphere, and whether or not they talk or think about professional things, and what is okay or not okay to say. People act inappropriately, without realizing that the reason they don’t get called on it is because they are in a position of authority. It can go both ways, but the reality is that more men are professors. A very high number of graduate students [in biology] are female, yet look at who their authority figures are.

Heidi: What do you think is affecting this disparity between the number of women in graduate school versus the number of female professors and chairwomen?

Needhi:  I think it is a variety of things: whether or not women are expected to be the primary caregivers in their relationship, whether or not women decide to have children, whether or not they are in a position where their pregnancy or labor was difficult, and whether they have a supportive partner. I have seen so many situations where the assumption is that the woman is going to take the time off, and then they are automatically at a disadvantage when the time comes up later on.

Heidi: What are the most important goals of graduate school, post-doc, and professorship?

Needhi: I think the most important goal of being a graduate student is to get trained: to be able to think critically about science, to be able to design experiments, come up with controls that accurately allow you to interpret your experiment, and to be able to write your results up in a scientific paper. I think when you are a post-doc, it is a shift because now you have to do that, and the expectation is that you are much more independent. You should be thinking about things to make you known as an entity separate of your P.I., so that when you go on to be a professor, there is an assumption of your capacity to run a research lab, and to have an independent research program. I think the challenge when you are an assistant professor is to have multiple projects that are addressing a common research question, or questions, and to juggle those while marinating oversight on them, while still giving the trainees in your lab opportunity to make the mistakes that they need to make while getting trained and learning from their mistakes. The goal of assistant professor is to get tenure. Once you get past that point, it is up to you to make sure that everyone below you has what they need to be successful in their next step. You are in a department that has nurtured you, so you have a responsibility to following through on mentorship to people below you.

Heidi: What is one thing most people do not know about life as an assistant professor?

Needhi: It is incredibly flexible. You are limited by when you teach, and making sure that you are accessible to the trainees in your lab that need you. Being able to take an afternoon off, and know that I can come back after my boys go to bed and finish what I was doing, is great. You have to be incredibly good at time management, but you also have the flexibility of doing some aspects of this job when it is convenient for you.

Heidi: What is the hardest thing about being a scientist?

Needhi: Constantly being confronted with how much you don’t know, and with the fact that things don’t work the way you expect them to. Constantly being challenged on every level, with the fact that your hypothesis is wrong, you wrote the paper in a way that is unclear to people who do not study what you study, and with the fact that you think this project should be funded and it isn’t. You get a review of your paper that tells you that the paper isn’t saying what you think it is saying, which is hard to hear. People who have come to this point in their career have an incredible amount of resilience.

Heidi: Tell us something about yourself that would surprise others.

Needhi: I am obsessed with young adult apocalyptic literature. Every time a new hunger games type trilogy comes out, I am all over that business.

Heidi:  What is the best advice you have ever been given?

Needhi: It was a piece of advice that I read, actually, in a business book, which is: treat your career not like a sprint, but like a marathon. That is something I have especially tried to keep in perspective, because having small kids, who take up so much of your time, it is really easy to feel like this is going to be the rest of your life. You know, barely scraping by work wise, and parent wise. At some point, I will be able to work on a paper at home while this kid is awake. It is absolutely important who you choose to be your partner, because you need to make sure that you can count on that person to put your career on the same level as theirs.

Heidi: When you are in a rut, how do you inspire yourself?

Needhi: I stop doing whatever I am doing. I read science blogs and watch videos. There are some blogs I read that have nothing to do with science. The place I usually come up with solutions as to how to get out of my rut is the shower.

Heidi: If you could do it all over again, is there anything that you would change?

Needhi: I would have worked as a tech in a lab between undergrad and graduate school, and gained a better sense of what it means to be doing science all the time, versus doing science as an undergrad. I went straight into grad school, and had not yet made that intellectual leap to thinking as a grad student. As a tech, you get more of a sense of what it means to be in a lab, doing experiments, working towards a paper, etc.