Pathways Voices: Episode 4

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

From the Center for Faculty Advancement at New York University.

Group:

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

DeeSoul Carson:

I’m DeeSoul Carson.

Maddie Albanese:

I’m Maddie Albanese.

DeeSoul Carson:

Faculty development is at the core of what we do.

Maddie Albanese:

Our programs are devoted to faculty support and development.

DeeSoul Carson:

From recruitment to career advancement…

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

… throughout the faculty life cycle.

Maddie Albanese:

We are also creating pathways for a younger generation of academic scholars, researchers…

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

… and future professionals.

DeeSoul Carson:

Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

Maddie Albanese:

There are only beginnings.

DeeSoul Carson:

How do you get there?

Maddie Albanese:

Who paved your way? Your path?

DeeSoul Carson:

How did you get here?

Maddie Albanese:

Who brought you along and held your hands?

DeeSoul Carson:

How do you get anywhere?

Maddie Albanese:

Whose shoulders are you standing on today?

DeeSoul Carson:

Who paved your way? Whose shoulders are you standing on? Who brought you along and held your hand?

Maddie Albanese:

Are we there yet? How do you get there? How do you get there?

DeeSoul Carson:

How do you get there?

Maddie Albanese:

How do you get there?

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

There are only beginnings.

Stephanie Cook:

I pride myself in not only working really, really hard in the work I do around structural racism and health, but also making sure I work equally as hard around developing pathways, being a good mentor and making sure that I pave the way for people to come behind me. But I don’t only pave the way, but I also bring people up behind me. It’s a lot of work outside of our everyday teaching responsibilities, our everyday research responsibilities, and sometimes it becomes a bit overwhelming.

My name is Dr. Stephanie Cook. I’m a James Weldon Johnson New York University Professor. I’m also an Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, as well as Biostatistics in the School of Global Public Health.

I had a very influential mentor. He’s still my mentor today, Dr. Marc Zimmerman. I remember that I interviewed for the Minority and Health International Training program during my sophomore year. It was a very, very competitive National Institutes of Health research training program, and I thought I had no way, there was no way I was going to get this fellowship. But I still decided to go ahead and apply.

I remember that he interviewed me. At that point because I was pre-med, I had just done very poorly in organic chemistry, and so my grades were not the best. But in our interview, it was a conversation. He asked me questions about not only my background but my interests. Why did I want to be a medical doctor instead of thinking more critically and broadly about population health? Then I still didn’t think that I was going to be accepted into this fellowship.

But then I got the call and I was accepted into this very prestigious fellowship at the University of Michigan. I remember years later asking him, “What happened there? My grades weren’t that great.” He said, “I am really good at spotting talent, and I saw something in you. That really got me, and I wanted to give you a chance.” And so, after I came back from South Africa where I spent my fellowship time and I did research on violence prevention, I continued to work with Dr. Marc Zimmerman. He wrote me amazing letters for my Masters of Public Health program. I decided to go to Columbia after getting into all of my programs. To this day, we still work together, we still collaborate together, and he has been one of the most influential mentors to date.

I think growing up, you don’t realize that you’re disadvantaged in some ways. I grew up in a lower income suburb of Detroit, Michigan, but I had five brothers and sisters. I went to a decent elementary, middle school, and high school. We played outside until the lights came on. When I look back on it now, there were lots of disadvantages; but generally I thought I had a pretty healthy childhood.

What I realized when I went to college was that there are things that are given to people that do not look like me, or ways in which people grow up who don’t look like me necessarily, that infer great benefit. And this comes in the way of social networks, social capital, things you know, people you know. So when I arrived at the University of Michigan, I didn’t know that if I wanted to be a professor one day, I needed to do things like work on research projects and publish. I didn’t have a parent who could reach out to a colleague or a friend and introduce me so I could potentially get these research opportunities.

I think that there are so many things that happen through mentorship and networks that I didn’t necessarily experience until I got to the University of Michigan and I met my mentor, Dr. Marc Zimmerman. Now, at this stage in my career, I take mentorship very, very, very important. I do a lot of work around mentorship, not only in my lab but also with my thesis students. I always make sure to participate in opportunities to increase pathways for underrepresented minority students in STEM because I think that it’s critically important. And I will always rely on and be eternally thankful for someone seeing something in me, even though it wasn’t apparent by looking at, for example, my transcripts.

I was on advanced placement track in high school, so myself and a group of my peers, we took all advanced classes to take the advanced placement tests. So my sophomore year, we all took Algebra 2, which was advanced placement track. Algebra 2 was so horrible. It was so hard. I didn’t understand what was happening. Now I understand that the teaching wasn’t so great, and from that class, that class of 35 students, only 5 students stayed on advanced placement track for math. In that moment, I decided I didn’t like math anymore. I was like, we’re not doing this ever again. All the rest of us, we went back on the regular track. So we ended with calculus in high school.

And so, at the University of Michigan, I did not take one math class, not one. I took a statistics class because I think statistics is a little bit different than math, but I did not take one math class. Then when I started working in research, I realized that it’s really important and I had to take math. So the summer between my undergraduate and my master’s program, I took algebra, calculus, probability, a lot of these math classes that you need, which are the bases of statistics so when I entered my master’s program I wasn’t very much so behind. In my master’s, I specialized in quantitative methods and statistics. You could specialize in these different areas, and that was my specialty.

I run the Attachment and Health Disparities Research Lab. I have a booming lab of 20 undergraduate, graduate Ph.D. students. And also in the summer, I also work with high school students, and on occasion, middle school students. And so, I have several projects running right now. I’m very interested in how racism or intersectional discrimination, so discrimination based on being at the intersection of multiple identities that tend to be marginalized. So these are mutually constitutive and reflective of higher level social processes. So being a Black woman is not only about being Black or only being about a woman, but it’s really at that intersection, and what discrimination is experienced at that intersection and how is this related mechanistically to health and health behaviors.

One of the big projects I’m working on now is looking at how intersectional discrimination is associated with cardiometabolic health behaviors among sexual and gender minorities of color. This is vitally important because we know that cardiometabolic health behaviors such as smoking behavior, alcohol use, tend to be coping mechanisms for experiences of discrimination. We also know that cardiovascular disease risks, we have indications that it is higher among sexual and gender minorities, certain sexual and gender minority populations compared to heterosexual and non-gender minority populations. We know even more so that among Blacks, for example, cardiovascular disease risk is very high.

In this work, I try to understand how intersectional discrimination specifically is linked to cardiometabolic health behaviors so we can find an approach to intervene specifically for those at the intersection of multiple identities that tend to be marginalized in society. And so, with this project, along with my JWJ funds and a little bit of seed funding from my school, we are collecting data on different sexual and gender minority of color groups and collecting survey data, biological data, and other data related to cardiometabolic health behaviors. Then hopefully we’ll publish this work and it’ll bring us a little bit closer to understanding how and where we can intervene because we’ll understand the nature of the problem a little bit better.

If we want to make a more just world, then we have to increase representation at the highest levels of every field: government, academia, the healthcare system. And the only way to do that is to increase pathways and have a critical mass of people working on a daily basis to provide and encourage students in STEM all the way down in middle school. So I have middle schoolers that do projects with me in the summer, and not only saying this is just a summer opportunity, but checking back in with them summer after summer, year after year, “How can I help you? How can I support you? How can I be a mentor to you?” Because that young woman or man or what have you, will remember that experience and hopefully they’ll also increase representation and work really, really hard on increasing pathways. That’s why I do it.

Maddie Albanese:

Are we there yet?

DeeSoul Carson:

We’ll see you next time.