'People Are as Important as Results'

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GERALDINE L. RICHMOND,
professor of physical chemistry and materials science,
University of Oregon

Age: 53

Ph.D.: University of California at Berkeley, 1980

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected 2006

Her research: The interaction of chemicals on the surface of materials.

Background: Grew up with three sisters on a corn and alfalfa farm along the Smoky Hill River in Kansas.

Personal: She and her husband, Stephen D. Kevan, a professor of physics at Oregon, have two teenage sons.

***

Q. You have made it your job to encourage, nurture, and serve as a mentor to many young female scientists. What's the payoff?

A. They've seen a way of doing science that looks very attractive in academia as opposed to the stories we oftentimes hear from grad students around the country that they can't imagine doing the job of a faculty member. It just looks too unattractive and hard.

Q. How do you make it look attractive?

A. It's bonbons. No, I have a way that I think you should run a research group that just may be different than other groups. I believe that I get the best science out of my group if I provide them with initial ideas to get them going, if I provide a very supportive environment with an open-door policy. They know that they are my priority. They are more important than anything else I do.

Q. How hard has it been to be a nurturer in academic science, which is not known for its encouraging or soft-hearted ways?

A. It's very hard. I think the value system in the sciences is really set up to actually go against someone coming out and saying that the people they nurture are as important as the scientific results. I think I'm even uncomfortable saying that to you, because it makes it look like I don't care about my science. As if there's some constant amount of devotion you give to your science and if you give part of it to your students you don't have as much to compete or do good science with because there's only so much. So, it means that I care passionately about my science, but I may not be able to get to a place in my career that others may get to if they never acknowledge the importance of their nurturing or teaching side. I stay awake nights worrying about how you interpret the science, but I also stay awake nights worrying about whether some of my students are going to get that laser to work well enough to get the results and get out and have a productive career.

Q. Women earn about 30 percent of the Ph.D.'s in chemistry, but represent only 12 percent of the chemistry professors at the nation's top research universities. Why the discrepancy?

A. In chemistry, we have a very large industrial work force so women can opt to go there rather than academia. And oftentimes it's perceived that those are much more family-friendly career choices than academia. I think there are other factors, too. In chemistry, we break up into subdisciplines that end up being quite territorial. We would never let an organic chemist teach a physical-chemistry class. I think that limits our interactions. It also means some isolation. If a woman comes in and she joins a particular division, there may be other women in the department, but she may not interact with them because she's in her little subdivision.

Q. You created a group called the Committee on the Advancement of Women Chemists, or Coach, in 1999. It has held 77 leadership-training and networking workshops for female scientists around the country. What's the back story?

A. Coach started when I kept hearing from my senior women colleagues the difficulties they were facing as they got older: In their research careers, in not getting recognition their male colleagues were getting, or getting their lab space taken away when they had a productive program, or in not being able to get grad students in their group for reasons that weren't obvious. What I was hearing was when women were starting to be successful, that was when a lot of strange behavior from colleagues started to happen. We had this vision it would get easier when you got more successful, but actually it was getting a lot harder. That was what started Coach. To get a group of women together to talk about whether this was actually a serious issue and if it was, what we should do.

Q. What did you find out?

A. When these women scientists got together, everyone's stories came out: of space being taken away, promotions being neglected, about teaching assignments being enormous. And I'm left in tears because we suddenly realized, Oh my God. None of us are supposed to be having these stories. Our facilitators told us how to go back home and deal with it. Within six months, there were these incredible results from that. So I thought if that could happen to us, imagine what could happen to all these other women out there who don't have a lifeline. So far, we've helped 300 women chemists and 1,000 women across the other scientific disciplines.

Q. What about your own career. Did you have a lot of difficult experiences?

A. I had a lot of discrimination all the way up. I don't want to get into the war details, but in general: not being let into research groups even though I was one of the top students; being veered off into career directions that were more traditionally female oriented; sexual advances that were completely unexpected; difficulties when I had my first child.

Q. Speaking of that, how have you made time for your personal life?

A. I run every morning, never miss. I'm up at 4 a.m., and I run five miles between 5 and 6 a.m. I have two boys — 14 and 16. My husband is a physicist. He works down the hall here. We have a cabin in the coastal range. We spend a lot of time together out there just mucking in the mud. It has a salmon run on it. We watch them spawn in the fall. At home, we have dinner together every night when we're all here. We don't watch TV. Well, once in a while we'll watch a football game. I walk to school with the kids in the morning. It's precious time.