Roundtable Discussion
Rice University may be small among America’s tier-one universities, but it’s a giant among schools with top women researchers in the sciences and engineering — not to mention the humanities and social sciences. For this issue on women in science and engineering, Rice Magazine brought together five who are among the best in their respective fields to talk candidly about their lives as academics and how they’ve succeeded in endeavors traditionally dominated by men. Here is some of that lively conversation, moderated by Linda Thrane, Rice’s vice president for Public Affairs. Linda Thrane: How did you all become scientists, and how did you find your research areas? Marjorie Corcoran: My field of research picked me. I became interested in particle physics when I was in the seventh or eighth grade. I was reading about it and said, “Wow! This is so amazing.” It went on from there. Yildiz Bayazitoglu: I had a heat transfer teacher in my third undergraduate year who was very strong and very well known at that time. He influenced me. Cindy Farach-Carson: economics!
I
failed
home
Corcoran: My mom was a home ec teacher and was chagrined that I could never do very well in it.
Farach-Carson: I wanted to be a paleontologist. I loved dinosaur bones and all that stuff and still have a collection, but I became a bone biologist instead. I think the common thing is that your path finds you. My dream is to go back now and look at all my favorite molecules in dinosaur bone marrow. Bonnie Bartel: I was actually in premed. I realized I could take all this biology, but then I would have to go to medical school. It would be interesting, but at the end I would be a doctor. That was not at all appealing to me. Julia Morgan: Apparently my mother knew I would be a geologist when I was 8. We traveled quite a bit to the mountains, and I would complain about all the work you had to do to climb to the top. I was miserable, which made my parents very unhappy. Once, while
Rice Magazine
•
No. 5
•
2010
Bonnie Bartel
A
Bonnie Bartel, Rice’s Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, researches the molecular mechanism of plant growth, specifically how growth is influenced by the hormone auxin. A member of the Rice faculty since 1995, she uses a variety of methods to study how auxins, which promote root growth and are widely used by commercial growers, are regulated in Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant native to Europe. Her work has extended to the study of plant microRNAs — regulatory molecules that dampen gene expression in both plants and animals. Currently, she is using genetic approaches to understand how proteins enter and exit the peroxisome, which are subcellular organelles that house enzymes implicated in auxin production. She received Rice’s prestigious Charles W. Duncan Jr. Achievement Award for Outstanding Faculty in 2005. Bartel considered studying medicine during her undergraduate days at Bethel College, but her love of research led her to study biology as a graduate student at MIT. She has enjoyed working with numerous students in her lab at Rice, and in 2006, she received a four-year, $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to develop programs at Rice that combine undergraduate teaching with research and focus on bringing freshmen and sophomores into research laboratory settings. Bartel and her husband, Seiichi Matsuda, who also is a professor at Rice, have “one perfect child,” Ella, age 12.
23