Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

How Did I Become a Professor?

Not until I was nearly finished with high school did people suspect I would someday become a chemical engineer or professor. I had a natural aptitude and love for math and chemistry, and since chemical engineering combines these two subjects, in hindsight it was an obvious choice. I also enjoyed my high school job of tutoring others in math and science, and especially loved that indescribable feeling when I helped a student achieve an “A-ha!” moment: the dawning of recognition on their faces and the almost tangible clarity they suddenly seem to emit was a moment of mutual excitement for me as a teacher as much as it could be for him or her as a student. A teaching career was therefore a clear option by then as well. Without the aid of hindsight, my career plan follows my interests from earlier in my childhood.

Growing Up

When I was about ten years old, my parents took me on a visit to a log home company from which they were considering buying a vacation/retirement property. I saw how the structure was made, including the many options for corners, insulation, seals, and roofing. Someday I would design and build houses; I decided: I would be an Architect! Even at ten, I was never one to do something halfway, so I pored over planbooks and tried to learn how to draft by hand.

My uncle, a builder, encouraged me. With his guidance I drew up countless floorplans and elevations over the next few years. Even after years of practice, my elevations resembled the drawings of a talented kindergartner. It was probably obvious to everyone that I was not cut out for architecture. Nonchalantly, my grandfather, who was a mechanical engineer, suggested I also consider an engineering career, since it would require less artistic ability. Just before I started high school I was logical enough to agree that engineering was a better fit for me.

I transformed all the passion I had for architecture into exploring other careers, especially civil and architectural engineering, and attended all the local workshops and outreach events I could for aspiring engineers. The next year I had my first detailed exposure to chemistry, and it became my favorite class. I began to tutor others in the subject and quickly expanded to tutor students in any math or science course. I nonetheless remained undeterred from my goal of a civil engineering career until I took physics and found force balances far less intuitive than any aspect of chemistry. In this way, by the time I applied for college, I was set on a degree in chemical engineering without knowing what, exactly, a chemical engineer did. It was enough for me to know that it involved math and chemistry, and designing, well…something.

The College Years

My father was in the U.S. Air Force and as a result of his career my family moved all around the country. Perhaps due to this upbringing, I was fiercely independent and eager to go out on my own. I also wanted to see a part of the country where I had not yet lived, so I applied primarily to universities in the Midwest. I chose to go to Illinois Institute of Technology, a small engineering college in Chicago. IIT offered me a full merit-based scholarship, as part of their new Camras Scholars program, and that made my decision of which university to attend an easy one. Once in college, I never wavered from my decision to major in chemical engineering. IIT offered an excellent introductory course to make students aware of the careers available in the profession, and I was delighted to learn that chemical engineers were needed to design processes (I knew that all engineers had to design something!) to make almost every consumer product imaginable, including pharmaceuticals. I still wanted to use my talents to do something positive for the world, so making lifesaving medicine seemed like the perfect fit. It wasn’t quite as tangible as a completed building, but it was close.

My engineering courses were difficult, and filled with both theory and practical examples. I remember coming out of my first exam in my Materials and Energy Balances course thinking that I was going to change majors because I had done so poorly. As it turned out, I did do poorly on an absolute scale, but so did everyone else; we all failed to appreciate at first that engineering is not a topic to memorize if you wish to do well—a common mistake for entering engineering students. I stuck it out, of course, and as I began to understand the importance of treating each problem as a puzzle to be solved from basic principles, I performed much better. I even served as an undergraduate assistant for some calculus and chemical engineering courses over the next few years and served as a tutor in the campus resource center for three years. These experiences served to enhance my love of teaching, and I began to strongly consider a career in teaching. At that point, I thought a professor was only responsible for teaching courses, a vision that would soon be corrected.

During my junior year, I was encouraged by one of my professors to try an undergraduate research project in the area of mass transport and polymers. The project was theoretical in nature (no experiments or bench work) and I struggled with what was my first attempt at solving an open-ended problem that drew a little bit on everything I had learned so far. The project was unrelated to my favorite area of biotechnology, but I loved working on a problem that nobody had ever solved before. With this experience, I learned that research was about solving current real-world problems in creative ways and did not resemble my standard homework problems. I also spent a lot of time with both the professor who advised this research and his group of graduate and undergraduate students. I saw how much time my professor spent mentoring everyone and thinking about research and realized for the first time that THIS was what professors did in the many hours they had each week outside of the classroom. I also learned about myself: after spending so much time on theory but surrounded by experimentalists in the group, I knew I would prefer a project that required laboratory experiments. I also had yet to try working on a biotechnologically relevant problem and set that as a future goal.

As graduation loomed, I considered the idea of a Ph.D. because I was so interested in someday teaching at the university level. The expense of graduate school seemed far too high—there was a reason I had gone to the university that offered me a scholarship, after all—and so I resigned myself to at least starting out in industry to earn money for a higher degree. I rationalized that this was for the best, because I would be gaining valuable experience to pass on to my future students. Then I received a flyer in the mail advertising a Ph.D. program in chemical engineering. The flyer highlighted the fact that Ph.D. students would have their tuition paid for and would receive a stipend on top of that. I wish I had saved that flyer because it certainly marked the turning point on my career trajectory. After speaking with my professors about it, I learned that most graduate programs in engineering were set up in this way. They expressed surprise that I didn’t know this already—how many others were unaware? I promised to spread the word. Among my close friends in chemical engineering at IIT, about half ended up pursuing a graduate degree.

Graduate School and Beyond

I applied and was accepted to a program at the University of Texas at Austin with Dr. George Georgiou as my first choice for dissertation advisor. Dr. Georgiou was already well known for his protein and antibody engineering achievements and fortunately agreed to advise me. At the time, I chose the lab because the projects were interesting and I knew Dr. Georgiou was highly respected for his work. To this day, I cannot believe I was so lucky given the criteria I used. It turns out that it was much more important to my career that Dr. Georgiou is an excellent mentor and genuinely cares about the lifelong success of each of his academic children.

My dissertation project required the engineering of a system for transporting proteins across the inner membrane of bacteria. This began my long obsession with studying the transport of materials across cellular membranes, a topic that eventually formed the basis of my own research group. (This is not so far from what I envisioned as a freshman undergraduate student: I design the microscopic factories—bacteria and other microbes—that turn sugar into medicines and other useful chemicals, and make it easier to get the products out!) As I neared graduation, Dr. Georgiou and I discussed potential postdoctoral research areas and advisors. It was the early 2000s, and he told me that I should think about getting involved in biofuels and/or synthetic biology. I stared at him blankly, having not heard either term yet. Both, of course, became quite popular within the next few years and I marvel still at Dr. Georgiou’s ability to stay a little ahead of the crowd in this way. I followed his advice and ultimately joined the laboratory of an up-and-coming synthetic biologist: Dr. Chris Voigt—another rather lucky decision, in hindsight. At the time I worked with him, he was at the University of California San Francisco, and pre-tenure. I watched as he molded the laboratory research portfolio from a rather disparate set of projects into a focused research group renowned for its ability to engineer genetic circuits and program cells for applications varying from nitrogen fixation to spider silk production. Dr. Voigt also taught me a suite of valuable skills for success in the academic world, including grantsmanship, the importance of understanding politics, and effective communication.

By this point, I knew academia was the right place for me. I would engineer living microbial factories, and I would have even more impact by teaching thousands of others how to do it. Less than a year into my two-year postdoc in the Voigt lab, I began to apply for faculty positions. I was invited for several interviews and (admittedly, to my surprise) received multiple offers. A lot went into the decision, as is always the case when deciding on a job, but I found myself at University of California Berkeley in Fall 2009 and feel incredibly fortunate to have had my haphazard path lead me here.

figure b

The Tullman-Ercek Group, June 2013, in front of the UC Berkeley campenile

How Did I Become a Mother?

I have always loved children, and the thought of not raising children of my own never crossed my mind. I did, however, worry about the logistics of raising a family—will I find the right partner? When is the right time to start a family? Should one of us stay home to care for the children while they are young? I also wanted to prove I was self-sufficient before settling down, and I wondered if this would be possible. Could I wait until my career was established before marrying and having children?

In college, I met the man I would marry within the first month of arriving on campus. If you had told me then that he was going to be the love of my life, though, I probably would have laughed—he wasn’t my type, or so I thought. Jim appeared to be a typical southern California surfer boy who lived in the moment and didn’t take much seriously. Though we had many mutual friends, we rarely hung out together or even spoke. During junior year, we had our first real conversation—about life, and not just the weather or how classes were lately—via an online messaging service and had an instant connection. It turned out we had a lot of shared views of the world, and his ability to live in the moment was good for me; he taught me the benefits of relaxing once in a while. We dated for the next couple years, but I was still clinging to the idea that I had to prove I could do everything on my own and so when I went to graduate school I made the decision of where to go entirely on my own. I then told him he could follow me to Austin, but I would not follow him back to California. Not surprisingly, he returned to southern California after hearing my position on the subject. Living apart, I figured out that while I was more than capable of going through life independently, it would be a much more enjoyable life with him in it. He came to a similar conclusion, and when he lost his civil engineering job in the downturn that followed 9/11, he took the opportunity to move to Texas. From then on, he would have an equal say in our decisions. We married two years later and adopted a rescued cocker spaniel. It was the start of my new family.

Jim found a job with a company based in Austin, and as my graduation neared, we had to make choices about both of our careers. His boss had children with advanced degrees—one of his daughters was even a scientist working in academia—and he understood the challenges we faced as a dual-career couple. He offered to let Jim work from home, wherever we ended up. This made the decision about where to do postdoc much less stressful because we now had only a standard one-body problem.

Jim was the sixth of eight children by his father, and had dreams of an equally large family of his own. I negotiated him down to three or four children, but the “when” was still a problem. Jim wanted to have children early, and I wanted to wait until our careers were stable. I also felt guilty about going on maternity leave; my career and that of my advisor depended on staying ahead of the others in the field and having a child would slow this process down, affecting everyone on the project. Soon after moving to the Bay Area, I figured out that I would be in my mid-30s before my career was anywhere near stable, and my biological clock kicked in. I also observed that an assistant professor had more stress and demands on her time than a postdoc, and that it only increased as a person moved up the ladder. It dawned on me, for the first time, that the adage “There is no best time to have a child” is absolutely correct. And if there isn’t a best time with respect to career, then I reasoned that there was no point to waiting until I was older, which can certainly lead to more complications biologically. We made the decision to start our family while I was still a postdoc and were confident we would make it work. The saying “We plan while God laughs” describes what happened next. We tried for over a year, with no luck.

Meanwhile, I was choosing between multiple job offers—one at UC Berkeley and the others all from universities on the eastern side of the country. Each had advantages in terms of the program—Option A would be a supportive environment with terrific students; Option B would offer the opportunity to collaborate with incredible researchers, and so forth. Jim was not especially excited about staying in the Bay Area, nor about the high cost of living there, and wanted me to take the offer from the university nearest to his mother, who had relocated to the east coast. My family also was rooting for us to move to the east coast, as most of our extended family still lives on the eastern seaboard. However, I knew that the position at Berkeley offered me the highest chance of success because the university and its chemical engineering department are ranked among the best in the world. This meant that I would be able to work with the most talented researchers—professors and students—and I would have access to an extensive set of resources to help me get started. More intangibly, the community simply felt like the best fit for me and my research field. After a few weeks of debate, Jim agreed that Berkeley would be best for me and our future family, and I accepted my faculty position offer from UC Berkeley with his full support.

That same summer, I found out I was pregnant. We had given up on natural conception by this point, so we were surprised but thrilled. The timing was not what we would have planned, as the baby was due just a few months before my agreed upon start date at Berkeley, but we appreciated the miracle for what it was. Our son was born in the spring of 2009. This life change triggered some involved conversations between Jim and myself about how I was going to balance a demanding career and an infant. Our strategy was (1) to have his brother, who lived with us at the time, serve as a part-time nanny and occasionally make dinner and (2) to have Jim always carry out duties such as errands, cooking dinner on weeknights, and taking care of most household chores (bathrooms were still my responsibility) while cutting back on his hectic business travel schedule. It was hardly the 1950s model of gender roles, but this division of labor worked remarkably well, and it was a good thing—after a relatively easy pregnancy and delivery, we faced one new challenge after another with the baby. None of the challenges were out of the ordinary, but combined made for many sleepless nights and far too many day-interrupting doctor’s appointments. Fortunately things calmed down as our son grew older, and we felt blessed to have such a wonderful little person in our lives.

As much as we loved being parents, we also quickly adjusted our plans for future children; Jim and I agreed that two children would make our family complete. We welcomed our second child, a girl, in the summer of 2012. This time around things went more smoothly, though her personality was the opposite of our son’s in nearly every way, which meant we had another steep learning curve to overcome.

Despite the challenges, being a mother is the most rewarding job I can imagine. After a stressful day at work searching for funding and troubleshooting experimental protocols, I come home to children that make me forget everything with a smile or hug. Anytime I have a rough moment at work, all I do is think about my family and I instantly feel better.

figure c

The Ercek family at a birthday party in February 2014

How Do I Balance Career and Family?

I am often asked how I am able to handle my tenure-track position and my young children. To be honest, it would not be any easier if I were tenured, so the real question is how I balance any demanding career and still make time for family. In fact, many of my female colleagues, especially those who are pre-tenure like myself, also decided to start their families already. It seems to me that even 10 years ago, women in academia were much less likely to have children pre-tenure, and a shift in the academic culture is finally not only permitting but enabling this change. Thus I think I have it pretty easy compared to other working moms. I have a supportive spouse, for example, and a job that permits some flexibility in hours. The University of California has mechanisms for stopping the tenure clock for all new parents (mothers and fathers) and even participates in a plan that provides emergency backup childcare both at home and while traveling, providing more options should a perfect storm of problems arise. Nonetheless, I admit that my schedule is extremely hectic and far from that of a 9–5 worker. Thus I outline below the balancing act that I call “Monday:”

My days always start at 6:30 am, when my one-year-old daughter wakes up with the precision of an atomic clock. We haven’t needed an alarm clock for months! She also wakes up my four-year-old son, so I (or my husband, if he has a free moment) feed them and get them ready for daycare/preschool. Once they are satisfied, I will turn on an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to entertain them while I get myself ready for work. We leave the house by 7:30, and they are in daycare/preschool by 8:00 am.

I take the train to work and use the commute to respond to e-mails that were neglected the previous day. Barring a transit delay, I am settled in behind my desk by 9:00 am, just in time to review the notes for my lecture one last time. The hour-long class starts at 10 am, and I hold my office hours immediately following lecture. During the lunch hour, I try to eat with other faculty as often as possible, but sometimes cannot avoid dealing with any crises that arose in the morning instead. At least once every 2 weeks I also make time to have lunch with other female faculty members on the tenure track; we share successes, failures, and strategies for balancing work and family, and these lunches never fail to put me in a good mood even on a bad day.

At 1 pm, I have the first of my scheduled meetings with my graduate students. Each meeting revolves around a particular research topic and involves two to four graduate students and the same number of undergraduate researchers. We discuss the previous week’s progress, or lack thereof, and troubleshoot when necessary. We also devise a plan for the next week. These meetings are the highlight of my work week; it is the time when I get to interact with all of my academic “children” and I love talking about and brainstorming ideas for their projects. It is also gratifying to watch them grow into independent researchers.

By 4 pm, if I am on time (a rare event!), the last of these meetings ends. These meetings with graduate students are only on Mondays, but other days are equally filled with activities such as attending committee and faculty meetings, serving on graduate student qualifying exams, advising undergraduate students about careers and coursework, or serving as a peer reviewer on grant proposals or manuscripts.

Typically, the 4–6 pm block of time is used to take care of any issues that arose during the day—perhaps finding someone to fill a hole in a seminar speaker’s day-long visit, or working with my lab safety officer to make sure the Standard Operating Procedure for a new chemical in our inventory is complete and accurate. Occasionally, I meet with a student for whom I will serve on the qualifying exam committee, or with my teaching assistant to discuss a homework problem, and if I am lucky I can use this time to get advice from my more senior colleagues. I also go to an on-campus yoga class from 5 to 6 pm at least once per week; it helps me deal with the stress in my life. I am noticeably grumpier and more tense if I skip yoga for an entire week! I leave by 6 pm so that I can be home for dinner by 7 pm, again using my commute to take care of e-mail correspondence.

My husband typically picks up the children from their respective daycares and makes dinner for us all. My son says grace and does a round of “Cheers!” and we eat together. It is my favorite part of the day. My son might tell me about how he found five acorns on the playground that he saved for the squirrels, or how he didn’t get any time-outs that day. My daughter will say “Mmmm!” with each bite, even though only about 10% of it ends up in her mouth. She will then dance in her highchair as my son hums the theme of Jeopardy, which is on in the background, and by then it is time to clean up. I do the dishes as my husband coordinates bath time. By 8:30 we are finishing up the nightly routine of eating dessert, brushing teeth, reading a story, and tucking into bed. By 9 pm, the children (and often my husband, as well) are asleep, and I will use my last hours of the day to catch up on my writing. At any given time I have two or three grant proposals in progress and four or five manuscripts to edit for submission to a journal for publication, and these hours are my most productive for working on these tasks.

I have had trouble falling asleep for as long as I remember, and reading works better than any sleeping aid. Each night I attempt to read a chapter of a “fun” book, such as a Jasper Fforde novel or James Rollins thriller, but invariably I fall asleep after just a page or two, always by midnight, and the routine begins again…

Side note: I write about my typical Monday, but I have found it is helpful to carve out an entire day to simply work on my writing tasks—writing grant proposals and manuscripts on my research—in order to accomplish these two vital tasks for my career. These writing days for me are usually on Tuesday and are held sacred on my calendar; if I did not treat them as such, the time would be gobbled up by additional meetings. Since the writing must still go on, that means it would have to happen on weekends, which in turn would mean much less time spent with my family—not a viable alternative. There are other ways to build writing into the workweek, such as daily writing hours, but I found that, for me, devoting an entire day to writing is the best way to ensure it actually happens.

I love my jobs—both motherhood and professorship. It may be obvious from the narrative of my typical day that I love these jobs so much that I don’t leave time for anything else. Not counting Mickey Mouse and Jeopardy, I rarely watch non-recorded TV, and grocery shopping and social networking are squarely in the domain of my husband. But this is my (and our) preference; if I didn’t want it this way I would have switched careers, or decided not to have a family. This is my life, and I love it. The funny part about it all is that until I was in each role, I didn’t have any idea what I was signing up for. So in a way, I was extremely lucky—twice.

figure d

The Ercek family on a camping trip in fall of 2013 at nearby Pinnacles National Park. Hiking with the family is a wonderful way to truly turn “off” and reduce the stress of a hectic life!

Interview with the Author

1. How has deciding to start a family or having a family influenced your career? How has your career influenced your family?

My career initially strongly influenced our decision about when to start a family. Though we married relatively early in my time in graduate school, I felt strongly that having children during grad school would send a message that my career was unimportant. Few women in my program had children during grad school, and other students joked that it was the only way to be guaranteed you could graduate on time (because the faculty advisor would not want to pay a student that was out on maternity leave, presumably). Thus while in graduate school, I did not think I should have children until I had tenure. I revised this decision when I realized that a tenured professor has even less time and many commitments that cannot be pushed back due to maternity leave (obtaining funding for graduate students, or publishing papers in a highly competitive field, for instance). Ultimately, I had my first child just prior to starting my faculty position. Surely those around us felt this was not ideal timing, but we made it work and I would not do anything differently if given the chance.

My family continues to have an enormous impact on my career, as well. I am learning to be a mother at the same time I am learning to manage a group of young researchers, and despite the age difference and skills to be learned, there are many similarities in the two functions. More than that, though, my family requires time, which requires an efficient schedule and that I turn work “off” completely for a minimum number of hours per day. I cannot stay late one day to finish writing a proposal, or I simply do not see my children that day because I get home after they are asleep. I also rarely work at home in the evenings until after the children are asleep, both lessening my guilt at working and making the time much more productive and free of interruptions. Overall, having a family enforced set of times during which I could not be deeply thinking about my research, and (as taking a step back often does) this did wonders for putting certain problems in perspective.

2. Did you have role models? Which examples were set for you in your childhood or while you were growing up?

I write of the influence my grandfather had on me in the narrative, but my grandmother was also an inspiring role model for me. She often recounted the stories of her time in nursing school, and of how she met my grandfather and planned their wedding while simultaneously completing her nursing degree. She loved especially to tell me about one of her professors, who chided her: “Are you working on your M-R-S or your R-N?” She maintained that she could do both, and did. She and my grandfather were together nearly 60 years and raised three children, and she worked as a nurse (often on the night shift) even when the children were young. They did not need the money, given that my grandfather was a mechanical engineer with a productive career designing sewing machine parts for Singer. She worked all those years out of a love for her job, and I plan to do the same.

3. Did you take any leave to raise your kids? How did you negotiate this? Do you have any advice regarding the organization/negotiation of leave?

The University of California Berkeley has put in place a number of helpful policies to accommodate faculty. For example, women who give notice of maternity leave (of the six- to eight-week variety) are also given one year of teaching relief and, if pre-tenure, one year of tenure clock stoppage. I did not need to negotiate for these benefits and felt they were supportive enough that I did not require additional leave. For my second child, I also had the good fortune of giving birth in June, affording me a lighter load not only during the subsequent fall and spring semesters, but also in the summer months such that I did not officially return to full duties until my daughter was 14 months old.

figure e

The Ercek family in Istanbul, September 2012. Prof. Tullman-Ercek was invited to speak at a conference, and decided to make that trip double as a family vacation

4. Have you come up against any significant obstacles during your career and how did you overcome these?

I have not faced any extraordinary obstacles thus far, though it is still early in my career. I have faced a number of challenges that I believe are typical of a person on the academic path. For instance, I was “scooped” multiple times, both as a student and then as an advisor, and had to figure out how to regroup and make the best of these situations. I also had to learn to be a manager, which is not an easy task for an engineer with no training in that area. For each of these, I found that discussing the problem with my colleagues is useful in coming up with a plan. They have much more experience and offer many ideas on how to approach such relatively common challenges. Speaking with them is also reassuring—I am not the first to face these problems, and that means they can be overcome!

5. Is there anything you would have done differently or would not do again?

Everything I did to this point made me into the person I am now, and so I would not change this for myself. However, I advise others to have children earlier in their career, and in their lives in general, if it makes sense to do so. I learned that there is no perfect time to have children and so there is no point in waiting for such a magical moment to appear. I also learned that children do not necessarily come at the time you specify! Moreover, it is quite difficult to be a parent, career or not, and some negative consequences of aging begin much earlier than I ever suspected, so having children while one still has boundless energy makes that aspect of life a tiny bit easier.

6. What advice would you give to young women hoping to pursue a career in academia? E.g., while studying, when planning a family

The best advice I ever received was from my mother. As I child, I hated to get anything other than the top score on every test and constantly compared myself to my classmates. My mother probably correctly worried that myself worth would plummet when (not if) I was no longer the top student. In direct contrast to the trending parenting strategies of the 1980s, which seemed to be devoted to making every child aware that he/she is special, my mother went out of her way to remind me each time I brought a perfect test or straight-A report card home that “there are always going to be many other people in the world who are smarter than you, and that is okay.” She was proud of me as long as I did my best and did not expect me to be THE best. This didn’t change my instinctive overachieving nature and perhaps even drove me to work harder to prove her wrong. But it also had its intended effect: it allowed me to more easily accept those times when I fell short of my goal, and it helped me to live with the fact that while I am a perfectionist, I am not perfect. This, I believe, was crucial to survival as a graduate student because failure in research is a necessary step on the path to success. Unlike many brilliant scholars, I knew how to accept failure and keep trying before ever setting foot in the research lab.

The mantra is easily reapplied to other aspects of life, such as motherhood. For instance, I know there will always be better mothers than me, so I cannot worry about it if I don’t create a theme for each birthday party or if I cheat and use premade cookie dough to make Christmas cookies. As long as my children know I love them, that is all that really matters.

Message from Danielle’s Son

My son is only four, but told me this: “My mommy is a very good teacher. I like to go to her office because it is fun to see her students. [He comes to the campus a few times a year, and whenever we do outreach events for families.] I also like to draw on her chalkboard.”

figure f

The Tullman-Ercek lab group at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in August 2013. They took time for their camping and hiking retreat to look at the jellyfish and sea otters, and Prof. Tullman-Ercek brought her son along as an honorary group member

Main Steps in Danielle’s Career

2000:

B.S. Chemical Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, IL

2006:

Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, TX

2007–2008:

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California – San Francisco, CA

2008–2009:

Postdoctoral Researcher, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CA

2009–present:

Assistant Professor, University of California—Berkeley , CA