Pathways Voices: Episode 8

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 Lee:

I think you just have this bias for liking people or I guess connecting with people who think similarly to you. But then you can only go so far when you’re both thinking the same way. What you really need is people to come in with a completely new idea and say, how about this? Like, that is really cool. And then you build something together and the diversity in that of exploring a bigger space than you could on your own, I think is where that development will be.

My name is Stephanie Lee and I’m an Associate Professor in the chemistry department at NYU.

My parents came here as immigrants from Hong Kong when they were teenagers, and they met at Stony Brook as undergrads. Dad went on to be an electrical engineer and my mom became a teaching aid for autistic children. Ever since I was a little kid, they really fostered my love of science. I remember going to a community college on weekends when I think I was in elementary school and dissecting pigs, and they saved up money so I could go to summer camps and learn about neuroscience and genetics.

I was able to go to MIT for undergrad and I majored in chemical engineering, and there I tried out a few different labs and where I found my passion was in developing sustainable energy technologies to address climate change.

So, after that, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I think my goal had always been going to college. My senior year of college and I had gone, done an industry internship, hadn’t really enjoyed it so much. And so, I decided to continue on to my PhD, which I did at Princeton, also in chemical engineering. My PhD was really tough. I ended my PhD completely burned out. I had no job lined up, and I just was so focused on finishing and being done that I hadn’t been able to think about what I wanted to do next.

No one in my family had gotten their PhD before that, so I didn’t know what I could do with it. All I knew was that I had to be in New York because my husband’s job was in New York. So, in order to buy time, I started looking for postdoc positions, and I contacted Mike Ward, a professor in the chemistry department here at NYU.

And so, he told me about the Provost’s postdoctoral fellowship. I applied and I was accepted, and I started here in August 2012. And so, the Postdoc Fellowship was really transformative for me. It was a window into what it’s like to be a professor. During the two years I was here as a postdoc. My postdoc advisor took me through things like grant writing and how to put proposals together.

I got to mentor graduate students and undergrads, but I think the most impactful part of the program was being able to teach. It was just life changing for me. I had been a teaching assistant before, but it’s incomparable to being able to design a course from beginning to end on your own. It was so thrilling and used so much of a different area of my brain to try to design ways to explain complex problems to students and seeing their eyes light up when they would understand it and being able to come with them through this journey of a topic that was really difficult for me in my undergrad, and to see them grasp these ideas and embrace them. And so it was through that experience that I started to think that, oh, maybe I can become a professor. Maybe this is where I’m supposed to be. I always loved science and I knew I wanted to do science, but where else in the world can you combine science with a love of teaching than academia?

In the second year of my postdoc, I applied to Stevens Institute of Technology for an assistant professor position. I was hired there, and I spent six years there as an assistant professor. And then in 2021, I had an opportunity to come back to NYU, as I’ve been here for the last two years.

Just in academia in general there’s often a lot of focus on output, how many publications that you have, how many awards you receive, how many talks you’re invited to give. There’s this notion that in order to be a real scientist, we have to sacrifice so much of ourselves, our mental health, our personal life, our families. And I was never willing to do that. I think not growing up in an academic household, I maybe did not realize this idea that we need to give up so much for our pursuit of science and success.

I think that was part of the tension of grad school, of wanting to be a person outside of my research and not feeling like I was able to do so. My postdoc really changed that. One of my heroes is my postdoc advisor, Mike Ward, and what he taught me through our interactions is that I could be a person, I could prioritize my family. It didn’t detract from my science and that I could have interests outside of my research, and that my value is not in my CV. But there’s so much more to doing science and being creative, and that can’t be quantified in these numbers. And I think that really helped me to give me the courage to try to become a professor.

I think that I thought that I couldn’t have kids and be a professor at the same time. I had really no role models to look up to that had done that, that I had crossed paths with and not seeing people doing that to me I think I internalized that, Oh, it’s not possible. And so having this time in my academic career where I could embrace being a person and a scientist and seeing those two integrate was what I needed to have the courage to apply for a faculty position.

Mike is very selfless, and it was never about his own success. And so, as faculty, our students’ success is often our success right. They are the first authors on the publication. We take their data, and we present it at conferences and it can cause this kind of toxic relationship where we need them in order to build our own success. And maybe at that time we can disregard their own needs. Mike never did that. He valued me as a person. And what I really remember so clearly is just not always talking about science. We would talk about politics and extreme weather events and, you know, just life in general. And that he would take the time to do that was very remarkable for me. It sounds so small, but it made a big difference. If you look on paper, my postdoc was the least productive time in my entire career in terms of publications and talks. But if I hadn’t been for that, I would have never gone on to become a professor. So, it was really transformative.

So, when I started thinking about what I want to do, what kind of science I wanted to focus on in my career, climate change was one of the issues that really spoke to my heart.

I had first started wanting to do health care, but then I realized I didn’t have the stomach for it. So, climate change is really like, you know, this huge problem that I wanted to be a part of solving. And when I look at the landscape, I see the most potential in solar. If you look at how much power is emitted by the sun, more power is emitted by the sun than we use in an entire year on Earth as a global society. The sun is emitting photons and ideally you get one electron for one photon. Solar panels will waste 60 to 80% of these photons. They can’t convert everything into photons. We are looking at ways to make this better. You can design compounds that can basically absorb more light and you can do that by changing the chemical structure.

Also in the solar panels, it really matters how they crystallize. So, the solar panels are made out of crystals and the way that these crystals are oriented, the size and the shape of these crystals all impact their performance. And so, our research group is really a crystal engineering laboratory where we’re focused on this transition from the ink, the solution state, to the solid state, how do we form the material and guiding this process to get the crystals optimized for converting photons into electrons.

My purpose for being here in academia, I see it as being here to mentor students, which is different than I think some other faculty members, because we get kind of all wrapped up in this idea of, you know, we need more publications. And so student success in the sense that I want to come alongside of them and give them the courage to reach their full potential that is not easily measured and is not counted in any, you know, any form towards how well I’m doing as a professor.

But if I’m not here for the students, I feel like I shouldn’t be here at a university. The goal or the reason for being a professor in my mind is to be here to support students. So, mentorship is central to my purpose of being a professor at a university and I try to do this as much as I can. I mentioned I have seven undergrads in my lab right now. One has a first author publication. Two have coauthored publications and are working on their first author publications. I had two high school students come through the Tandon Arise program from local NYC public schools, and both of them are coauthors on a publication. And so, we’ve really tried to bring students in from all different places and give them the opportunity to see what science can be like.

Maddie Albanese:

Are we there yet?

DeeSoul Carson:

We’ll see you next time.