CLB Mentor Profile: Professor Stefano Profumo

Interview by Heidi Molga, CLB Undergraduate 
(under the supervision of Professor Amy Ralston)
October 24, 2013

Heidi: Could you start us off with a personal introduction?

Stefano: I am an associate professor of physics, and I am the deputy director for theory in one of the institutes in the physics department.  I got tenured two years ago. I came here in2007, after being a researcher at Cal Tech, and before that, I had a small stint at Florida State University. I went to college in Pisa, and also, attended graduate school in Italy. I spent the first twenty-five years or so of my life in Italy, and I came over here to do research, and stayed here. One of the reasons is because I met my wife in southern California, and we got married prior to moving here.

Heidi: At what stage in your career did you start having children? Do you feel it was the best time?

Stefano: I think I was pretty lucky, because we had my first child when my tenure case was going through review. I felt pretty good about how my professional life was going. I used to be a smoker before I had kids, and from a deal with my wife I had to quit when I had my first kid. I turned my smoking addiction into a running “addiction”. It helps my process for work, because it gives me a long-term perspective.

Heidi: Has being a parent changed your approach to work?

Stefano: You need to be more efficient. The key difference is that you do not have the freedom to work late hours. At night is the only moment you have time to yourself. I waste less time in the office. I just work as hard as I can during the time I have childcare.

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

Stefano: Having daycare on campus would be the most critical thing.

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

Stefano: In the incoming physics graduate class we only managed to attract one woman, which is incredibly low. The year before, we had more women than men graduate. It really depends on the discipline. There are certain disciplines where it appears that there is a natural imbalance, such as mathematics. Of course there are many outstanding women in those disciplines, but there is a natural imbalance. I do not know why that is.

Heidi: Do you think it could be do to lack of women representatives in leadership positions in those specific fields?

Stefano: I think that is not only that, but also that there are a few subspecialties that seem to be naturally less popular with women. We do really keep our eyes open for opportunities to remedy this imbalance.

Heidi: What are the most important goals of graduate school, postdoc, and professorship?

Stefano: I think, if one wants to pursue an academic career, then the goals are to do good research, and to advertise your research. Establish a network of contacts, scientists that work in your field. I think the most important aspect is to present good findings in research. There is also an aspect of quantity. People care about the output. There is a sweet spot you need to find between quantity and quality. There are people who only work in series, and there are people like me, who work in parallel. For those of us who work in parallel, usually the output is greater, but the attention is divided, so it is a fine balance.

Heidi: Spoken like a true physicist. What is one thing that most people do not know about life as a tenured professor?

Stefano: As a professor in a research university, people do not appreciate that we are researchers more than just teachers. The bulk of my time is spent doing research and working with my students. I feel very fortunate that the University of California allows me to spend so much time on my research. I try to do a good job in teaching, but it has been tough, because you get no training. There is a systemic problem in that we should get some training, and so should TAs.

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

Stefano: I don’t know, I think it is a pretty easy job. It depends on whether you are doing things that you are passionate about. Whenever you like what you are doing, you do it well, and you love what you do.

Heidi: What is your next big career goal?

Stefano: I would really like to see my students be as successful as possible, and my postdocs. Last year, three guys graduated with me, and they are all doing really well, and are making a difference in their fields. These were the first guys I saw go all the way through; they were the first guys I recruited. I would really like to make a huge impact with my research. Certainly, along the way, you put out interesting results, and organize conferences, and do incremental work, but what really brings joy to me is to see people who I trained do well.

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

Stefano: When we do not have big things that take out big chunks of our time, we do not realize how capable we are of optimizing our time so well. So I think what really surprised me was that when I really started to devote a lot of time to my training, that I was being very inefficient with my time. You realize that you can be very efficient and spend a lot of time on other things while maintaining the same quality work at your job. My sports and my kids take the most time outside of work. This balance can be achieved.

Heidi: What is the best advice you were ever given?

Stefano: My postdoc advisor at Cal Tech told me, “You have to be very careful about who you hire.” Hiring means a lot of different things, he was referring to post-docs, but this is valid in general. One has to be very careful with surrounding themselves with good, smart people, kind people. I always try to get the best students. Then I have good students, and they have interesting things to work on.

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

Stefano: Endurance sports really are a good thing to keep you going. You think about how you finished a triathlon, and it helps you in your professional life. You have to think that you are not defined by a particular incident, but rather the long path you traveled to get where you are. What defines me is the series of things I have done in the past. You have a bad day, but that is not who you are.

Heidi: If you could do it all over again, what would you change?

Stefano: Probably, I would learn more about cosmology and astrophysics, because my training is in particle physics. In Italy, there is this perspective that if you are good in a certain field than you have to do the hardest thing in that field, so I think I was still affected by that mentality when I picked theoretical particle physics. I am very happy with my life. I think the balance I am striking between family, endurance sports, and my job, would be very hard to achieve in any other professional setting, so I think I am really blessed to be an academic. Maybe, having kids earlier would have been easier in a certain respect. When you are younger, sleep deprivation is a little less dramatic. I think it is unfortunate that, in our society, child rearing has shifted to an older age, because we are designed to have kids at a younger age.