This week, we present two stories about respect in science — how we get it and how we keep it.
Part 1: Meisa Salaita’s brand-new PhD in chemistry isn’t much help as she prepares to teach ninth-grade physics.
Meisa Salaita has made it her mission to help others see and appreciate the beauty of science by making it a part of everyday cultural experiences. Through her work founding and directing the non-profit Science ATL, she spends her days bringing people together through the wonder of science by creating public science events like the Atlanta Science Festival. Meisa also writes, has produced radio stories, and hosted TV shows — all in the name of science. In addition to her work with Science ATL, Meisa is a producer for The Story Collider, a science storytelling podcast. Meisa has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Northwestern, and has been named by the Atlanta Business Chronicle as one of their "Women Who Mean Business" and by Atlanta Magazine as one of their "Women Making a Mark".
Part 2: Early in her career, astronomer Jackie Faherty’s work is stunned when a senior researcher eviscerates her work at a conference.
Jackie Faherty is a senior scientist and senior education manager at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Her research group entitled “Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC)” is at the forefront of low mass star, brown dwarf and giant exoplanet characterization studies. She is also co-founder of the successful citizen science project called “Backyard Worlds: Planet 9” which has involved over 150,000 volunteers in searches for previously missed cold components of the nearby solar neighborhood. Dr. Faherty has over 100 peer-reviewed papers in Astrophysical journals and has won numerous awards or grants from private and national foundations such as NASA and the NSF. She is also a regular science communicator having consulted on stories that ran in the NY Times, the Wall Street journal, NPR, and on national television. In her position at AMNH, Faherty strives to create more opportunities for underrepresented minorities to enter STEM through unique outreach endeavors.
Episode Transcript
Part 1:
I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes convertible and we're cruising over the San Francisco Bay bridge and it is lovely around me. There are mountains and the ocean and San Francisco beautifulness, but I'm not looking at any of that. Instead, I'm staring at my lap where there's a ninth-grade physics worksheet and I'm looking at it with utter incomprehension and total panic.
So there's a forklift and the driver is pushing on a box and now the box is going down the hill. I look over at the man sitting next to me, a man my fiancé calls Kilometer but whose name is actually Miles. And Miles is looking at me with this look I can't quite decipher, can't tell if he's bored or just really shocked that I'm about to teach this stuff in two hours and I know this much about it.
But I have a brand new PhD in chemistry. That means I know a lot about molecules. I don't know jack about forces and friction and physics, but when they offered me this job teaching chemistry they said, “Can you also teach physics?”
While inside I knew that it was my worst subject ever, I smiled and nodded, because that's what you do when you want a job and they ask you to do something you don't know how to do. You smile, you nod and then you do whatever you have to do to get it done. So, for me, this means staying one day behind Miles's physics class so that, as we're carpooling to work every day, he can teach me what I need to know.
This is not how I imagined my teaching career to begin. I was starting this past summer where I had me and all of the teachers who were there. And I say me and the teachers because I kind of felt like an imposter. I mean I was fresh out of grad school. I didn't really know what I was doing. But they're all talking about habits of mind and student engagement to create global citizens, and I nodded earnestly like I knew what they were talking about. Inside, the butterflies are forming.
Meisa Salaita takes the stage to share her story outdoors at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Decauter, GA in September 2021. Photo by Rob Felt.
But those butterflies are nothing compared to what I feel now. I cannot nod earnestly about friction and forces. I actually have to teach this shit.
So before I know it, we get to school and second period is about to begin, but I am good. I walk in with swagger because these kids can smell fear. But I'm all good. I walk in and I start chatting with my students. I tell myself it's important to build personal rapport with your students, but inside, I know that I only have about 45 minutes of stuff to teach and I've got an hour of class, so I have some time to kill.
But when I can avoid it no longer, I get started. But like I said, I am good. I start drawing on the board. I got the forklift. I got arrows all over the plate. I'm sorry. Did I say arrows? I meant vectors, with direction and magnitude. I know all the things.
So I got the force of gravity over here. I got friction over here. And over here I have a hand in the air. Let's be real. Ninth-grade boys aren't prone to raising their hands. It's Noah and he's shouting out his question.
“Meisa,” this is San Francisco. They all called me by my first name. “Meisa, what happens if the forklift is in outer space?”
“I don't know.” Just like last week, I didn't know what happens to the ball in outer space, and the week before that, the car driving in outer space. I don't know, because outer space is weird. But it doesn't seem to matter what I teach them. All they want to know is what happens if we do it in outer space. Or in a microwave. They're also very interested in microwaves.
But I do my best to answer these bizarre hypotheticals because I am shaping a future generation. I take my job seriously. I learn as much physics as I possibly can. And I like to think that I do a decent job teaching it.
But I also learn that if you can't exert some level of authority over your class, it doesn't matter how much physics you know. That's the situation I was in because I'm 26 and this is my first job. What do I know about authority?
One day, now in my chemistry class, I've got all these lab materials set up right by the front door. Noah walks in. You remember Noah? The outer space-forklift kid. Noah is one of these kids who is just so dang charming and funny and smart and this kid just gets away with everything. He walks in and he starts touching everything, because his little 14-year-old hands can't help themselves.
I say, “Noah, stop that. That's for lab later on.”
And he goes, “Meisa, why?”
“Noah, safety first.”
And he's like, “But it's just food coloring.”
True, it's just food coloring.
“Meisa, can I squirt some in my mouth?”
“Hmm,” I think. Well, it's food grade. He could squirt some and we probably still have enough to do the lab. He could squirt some and he won't die.
“Sure, Noah.”
Noah does a double take, which I should have immediately taken to mean that I have just made a grave error. But before he lets me figure that out, he squirted 20 drops of blue food coloring into his mouth. Do you know what happens when you put 20 drops of blue food coloring into your mouth? Your mouth turns blue for days.
So Noah goes home that night to his parents, his parents who are spending $35,000 a year on his fancy education, and opens his mouth and gives them a solid glimpse of where their money is going. But somehow I didn't get fired. I think Noah's parents are probably just really used to that.
But this is just one example. This stuff was happening every day in my class. I couldn't even command their attention because they were talking all the time. They'd talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and I try to talk louder. But instead of my voice getting louder, it would just get higher pitch, like this. And everybody would talk over me.
I also laughed at really inappropriate times. I was doing this demonstration in my chemistry class. I had this beaker and I'm making nylon and these two liquids are touching each other. Right at the interface of the liquids, the nylon is forming and so you can grab onto it. You can just keep pulling it out of the beaker and it just keeps going and going and going.
One of the students shouts out, “It just keeps coming.”
And another one goes, “That's what she said,” and I laugh uncontrollably.
One day, I'm drawing on the board and out of the corner of my eye is the San Francisco Bay. I see one of those giant boats that carries all the shipping containers. And I'm not from San Francisco. I've never seen anything like this and I go, “Whoa!”
It's understandable. Everybody in the class gets up and they go look out the window. And they don't sit down again for the rest of the period. And this is just my every day. This first year of teaching feels like a disaster.
Meisa Salaita shares her story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Decauter, GA in September 2021. Photo by Rob Felt.
But as the first year goes into the second year, little by little, things start to feel a little better. I'm less scared. I learn on the job. For example, I do not put materials right by the front door where 14-year-old hands can't resist them. I’ve become an expert on what can and cannot happen in outer space. And I learn that scientific logic should not always guide my classroom management decisions.
Even things with Noah are better now. He loves me and the feeling is mutual. Somehow, this kid has taught me how to be authoritative but kind and caring. I think because I was so naïve, he opened up to me in ways that he wouldn't have otherwise. He even helps me now. I still haven't solved that problem where I sound like Mickey Mouse when I talk loud, or not loud.
So instead, I just tap Noah on the shoulder and he does one of those really loud finger whistle things that I can't do, and suddenly everyone just snaps to attention. It's like magic. Everybody listens. Even he listens now.
One day, I was walking down the hall and I caught him taking a nap on top of the lockers. And while my scientifically logic brain said, “He's pretty agile. He probably isn't going to hurt himself. He's got plenty of time before his next class starts. There's nothing really wrong with what he's doing.”
When I told him to get down and he said, “Why?” I said, “Because I said so, Noah,” and he listened.
Little by little, things have gotten better. I'm less scared and, little by little, I've fallen in love with this school, these kids and this job.
My husband just got an amazing job offer at Emory and we're going to be moving cross-country at the end of the year. When I told Noah that I was moving, he was heartbroken. I was heartbroken and we both cried.
On the last day of school and on my last day at this school, I gave a goodbye speech at our morning meeting. I told everybody about Noah and the food coloring. I told everyone how I felt like I didn't know what I was doing. I told them about how I was supposed to be shaping them but, really, they were shaping me into being a more understanding person, a more sympathetic and kind and patient person, somebody who understood how to use authority to teach and guide but let my naïve-loving self take over sometimes to be somebody these kids could trust.
And while I can't tell you if crying can happen in outer space, I can tell you that right here on earth, in this room, there isn't a dry eye in sight. Thank you.
Part 2: Jackie Faherty
So I became an astronomer because I wanted to do something with my daily work life that I thought would give me insights into the meaning of life. I really thought that the career of an astrophysicist is one that you pursue because you've got a passion and a desire to solve the secrets of the universe.
But there's a process to science. When I entered graduate school, I had to choose a really small subset of the universe that I could focus on. And my astrophysical decision was based on two things. Number one, I wanted to study something that was new to our understanding of the universe and, number two, I wanted to be around good people. I interviewed the people as much as I researched the objects. That's how important both things were to me.
Jackie Faherty shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in August 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
And I discovered that the field of brown dwarfs was fitting both of those things. Brown dwarfs are these objects in between stars and planets. They form like stars but they look more like Jupiter. They're cold and they're faint, so the first one wasn't found until 1995. So it fit the idea that they were brand new.
In 2006 when I started my thesis work, they were the new astronomical bodies on the galactic block. They were brand new so there was lots of room in the science for me. For me to do science, for me to make discoveries, for me to fit in.
And the people made the work just as fun as the objects did. I can remember going to conferences and meeting people for the first time whose papers I knew and thinking, “We've got a connection. We're studying these same objects.” And we would get along. We would go out for a drink. We'd have a world of objects to talk about. It was fun. It was kind. It was jovial. Everything about it had a great vibe.
But at the same time I was working on my thesis, there was another scientific group, halfway across the world, actually. I was in New York City, they were in Hawaii and they were working on a very similar slice of this sub-topic. I didn't really know how similar, but I knew it was something I would call complementary science that was going on.
The other team was led by this senior researcher, this well-respected, this experienced, tenured, permanent job, well-established researcher that was at a major astronomical facility, astronomical university in Hawaii. He was leading a major team.
Now, the overlap in our scientific interests became a reality to me in the summer of 2012 at a massive meeting of all of the people in my subfield in Barcelona, Spain. In anticipation of this major meeting of all the minds working on this stuff that I had decided I wanted to do with all these good people, I was working on a new object and I was so excited about this. There was this new, young brown dwarf that I was characterizing. It was about 100 million years old and it really looked like Jupiter. The properties of it were like screaming at me that it was covered in thick clouds. It had weather-related phenomenon. I felt good. I felt like I was making a big impact in my field working on this object. And part of it was affirming a hypothesis I had had in my thesis. So all of it was very exciting.
And I had a paper that I was putting out for the world to see during the conference because I wanted to talk to colleagues about it at this meeting in Barcelona. I had decided to make this paper visible during a main stage talk in this conference that was on this exact subfield that was going to be happening and it was going to be given by this researcher from Hawaii.
So the conference starts and it starts with a bang, like a literal bang. The whole city of Barcelona is lit up because they're celebrating Saint John's Eve, whatever that was. The whole city is throwing fireworks everywhere and we're out. We're singing, we're dancing. Colleagues of mine that I haven't seen we're talking science. We're having fun. It's amazing, as one would expect from the brown dwarf subfield.
The next day, I'm out. It's time for the big talk and I've got my paper. I've made it visible to the world. It shows up that morning. I'm so excited. I walk into the auditorium, still got paella and sangria in me. The night before was so fun and the talk starts.
The researcher from Hawaii is presenting this work and it's very related to my thesis and there it is in the big screen. He's citing my stuff, which is thrilling. But something isn't right. He's not praising my work. He's criticizing it. And he's pointing out that errors of my thesis work are just really large, very dismissive.
And I sit there thinking, “Wow. Okay.”
And then the next big blow comes. He brings up a plot from my new paper. I see it and I think maybe this is it, but I see I actually have made a mistake. I've mislabeled something on the plot. If you haven't read the paper, you might think that I've got the age wrong on this object. It's a simple thing. All you have to do is read the text and you'll know that it's just a simple mistake.
But he hasn't read the paper nor has he read the caption on the figure, which would have cleared it up. Instead, on the big screen is this plot, my name, the whole thing, and he's declaring to this audience, a hundred of my peer colleagues, experts in the field that I'm wrong and that he's working on this object and he's got a measurement of it and that I have made a false claim about the age and the mass of this thing and that he's done it. And his error bars are real tiny. It's just outside of what I measured. And he's got an age and my age is wrong and it's just outside of his. And his mass is right, mine is wrong, and it's just about the same as what I said.
So he's claiming the exciting science for himself and he's destroying me in the process. And I sat there and I was pretty destroyed. It felt like he was punching me in the face for three hours. Even though it was a ten-minute talk and he talked about my stuff for 30 seconds.
But it was noticeable. He was senior and well-known. What he said mattered and I was junior and new. Multiple people came up to me after and said, “Oh, yeah. That was pretty harsh.” People I didn't even know came over to say it.
Jackie Faherty shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in August 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
Others just shrugged and said, “That's how science goes. Senior researchers destroy the younger junior people to take the science. That's what happens in science.”
I felt like no one was ever going to look at me as a scientist again. I walked out of there. I walked through the streets of Barcelona to clear my head. And my gut screamed, “You are done with astrophysics.” As much as I loved solving the secrets of the universe, I got rocked by that moment.
For several weeks after that conference I was just investigating new careers, but I realized what I still wanted to do was solve the secrets of the universe. What I was running from was the person, was this narcissistic, selfish act. But isn't narcissism and selfishness in every single career? So I felt like what am I running from? It is.
I thought about it and I thought what I really need to do is heal and thicken this skin. So every morning I would wake up and I'd ask myself, do you feel better than you did yesterday? Not better than the day before the conference but better than yesterday? As long as my answer continued to be yes, I continued my path and I'd remind myself every morning about the good people that I knew, about the amazing objects I was studying, about my desire to uncover the secrets of the universe.
Now, I kept running into this researcher. We run the same circles. We're doing the same science. For years, and for years I would give talks. I would go to conferences. And he was the only person I would see in an audience. It could be filled with friends, with colleagues, with loved ones, with celebrities, it didn't matter. I was laser focused on him.
I would craft my talks so that I would praise his work and his science to feed his ego so he would stay off my back. That's like a classic victim's response.
But my skin thickened and my confidence grew. And just before COVID, there was a meeting in Santa Cruz that we were both at and I gave a talk. It was the first time I can remember where he's in the audience and I just don't care. So, of course, the end of the talk, time for questions, his hand shoots up.
Aggressive, combative question and comment come out of his mouth. Pre-Barcelona Jackie would have run out of the room dumbfounded that this is how science goes on, but I listened. And instead of shrinking in fear, I grew. My back straightened, my hair went back, my hands went on my hips and I responded to his comment that my science was simple and had been done before with, “That's just your opinion, so fuck off with your narcissism.”
Okay, I didn't say that last part, but I did think it, which is critical to the story.
So then I sat down, I closed my eyes and I saw Barcelona. When I opened it again, I felt good. I felt recovered and I asked myself, do you feel better than you did before that conference? And the answer that came screaming out of my gut was a thousand times better. Thank you.