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The US Congress is taking on AI —this computer scientist is helping

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The dome of the US Capitol is seen at dusk in Washington, DC.

Half a dozen AI scientists have moved to Washington DC to advise the US Congress.Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty

Regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) is booming in the United States. Since 2016, federal lawmakers have passed 23 AI-related bills into law1, many more than any other country. Now AI scientists are joining the action, trading academia for Capitol Hill on a mission to feed technical advice into proposed laws on AI.

Among those scientists who have gone to Washington is Kiri Wagstaff, a computer scientist who temporarily left her teaching position at Oregon State University in Corvallis to work for a year in the office of Senator Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and former astronaut. Wagstaff is one of six AI researchers now serving in Congress through the Science & Technology Policy Fellowships programme run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The fellows’ expertise is unlikely to go to waste. In 2023, 181 AI-related bills were proposed at the federal level — more than twice as many as in 2022.

Wagstaff spoke with Nature about US’s AI regulation boom as seen through a scientist’s eyes.

What’s your background in AI?

I spent about two decades at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory [JPL, in Pasadena, California], developing ways to apply AI and machine learning to space exploration. This was about analysing very large data sets, but also about what we could put on board our rovers and orbiters to help them be a little smarter. The Mars Science Laboratory rover, for example, has a laser spectrometer; it can point a laser at a rock metres away and get information about the composition of that rock. In 2016, JPL gave it a software update that allowed it to take images of a scene, rank all the rocks by science priorities and autonomously decide which ones it should aim the laser at. That was very, very productive because we typically only have an opportunity to talk to the rover and give it instructions a few times a day.

Portrait of Kiri Wagstaff.

Computer scientist Kiri Wagstaff.Credit: Dutch Slager

How did you come to this fellowship?

I’ve been working in applied machine learning for my whole career, so I care a lot about what happens when you try to solve real-world problems with these techniques. When this opportunity with Congress came through, I thought, this is perfect. I was super excited the instant I saw it.

The AAAS sent out the call in late July [2023], with a submission deadline of the first week of August. The six of us who were chosen to be AI fellows reported to Washington DC on September 1 of last year. It was a whirlwind. They [the fellowship organizers] don’t usually do things this way; it usually takes about a year. They realized they didn’t want to wait to bring in AI experts and get this ball rolling.

What do you do day-to-day?

If staffers or anyone in the congressional offices have ideas about ways to encourage AI innovation, or to regulate it or keep it safe, I’m able to assess that from a technical perspective and say, first of all, do these words make sense, and is that feasible, and what might be overlooked.

I get to review many bill proposals. AI is so broad: it’s touching on finance, jobs, education, copyright … everything. The ubiquity is such that asking if your topic touches on AI is getting to be like asking if you use a computer or electricity.

What has been the scope of legislative action?

There have been more than 300 AI-related proposed bills introduced in this congressional session [beginning in January 2023]. They range all over the place, from controlling misinformation to how can we stimulate AI innovation and research.

Does some of this legislation touch on things relevant to the upcoming election?

There’s a cluster of bills that have been proposed on what to do about misinformation.

Some of these bills suggest that if you have a campaign out there that uses generative AI in any way, whether it’s misinformation or not, that requires a label or disclaimer. Others straight out prohibit what they call deceptive AI: portraying something that didn’t actually happen or wasn’t actually said. They say that should be illegal and punishable.

Certain kinds of falsehoods are already illegal, of course, and if you use generative AI and it falls into that category, you can just use existing law to deal with that. The real question before us is: where does existing law fall short?

Where are those holes in the law that need to be patched?

There’s actually a bill that says we should find that out: the ASSESS AI Act says we should task a commission with going through all the relevant laws and identifying places where AI creates new issues that aren’t being covered.

One development that I think is important and exciting is a growing recognition that AI systems themselves have a pretty large environmental impact, in terms of energy use and also water consumption for cooling the data centres. There’s a bill out there to really measure those impacts.

Europe is usually seen as the leader in global AI regulation. What do you make of the European Union’s AI Act, which passed in March 2024?

This is an excellent opportunity for us in the United States, because we’re watching another entity charging forward trying to solve the same problems that we’re trying to solve, but being more on the proactive side. That means we get to see what are the points of disagreement that [EU countries] run into, and how does that play out. We reap a little benefit by not being the first adopter; we get to learn from their example.

But it’s really important to remember what’s different about our situation. The really big difference is the first amendment [which protects freedom of speech]; it pops up everywhere, and that’s not a constraint that most other countries work under. Take generative AI: if it offends someone, how much of that do we allow to just be as it is without restrictions? We have to draw that line carefully.

What direction does AI policy need to take next in the United States?

We’re all talking about AI, but there’s a rising parallel threat concerning data. Who owns your data? What is it worth? What should you have control over? What should you opt in or out of? That’s almost as important as the AI part.

Wagstaff declined the use of an AI-based service to transcribe this interview because of questions surrounding the subsequent use of that data. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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US National Academies report outlines barriers and solutions for scientist carers

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Many academics grapple with caregiving responsibilities, and yet they are not always given the support that they need — even when doing so could address long-standing gender, racial and ethnic biases in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM). Such are the conclusions of the report Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Action, released last month by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report provides a road map for institutions and individuals aiming to better support academics who are looking after children, family members or friends.

An uneven burden

Elena Fuentes-Afflick, a perinatal epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who chaired the report committee, says that the group was motivated by high levels of attrition among carers in STEMM, particularly among women and especially women of colour, who have historically been more likely to assume caregiving roles. The report notes that Black, Asian and Hispanic carers are more likely to provide care for non-relatives or extended family members than are those in other groups.

Research has shown that parenthood disproportionately affects the careers of women in STEMM1. Nearly half of new mothers (and one-quarter of new fathers) in STEMM reported leaving full-time employment after the birth of their first child2. Much less research touches on other forms of caregiving, including that for older people, spouses, dependent adults, extended family or non-relatives, and language in policies is often geared towards heterosexual couples with young children and can alienate those with other types of responsibility.

“Caregiving is a universal experience, whether one is a recipient or a giver,” Fuentes-Afflick says. “But as a country, we haven’t created an environment where all caregivers can thrive.”

Addressing this spectrum of needs will require buy-in across the entire academic ecosystem, the report argues, from federal agencies and funders to institutions and individual department heads and peers. The United States, for example, is one of 38 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — and is the only member without national, paid caregiving leave (the report suggests that a minimum of 12 weeks should be offered). Existing US federal and state policies that protect carers — such as the landmark federal civil-rights law Title IX, which bans sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational programmes, along with the Family Medical and Leave Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act — are inconsistently applied.

“There are many best practices that exist right now that are firmly grounded in the law, and yet are not always adhered to,” Fuentes-Afflick says. For example, pregnancy-related discrimination is a violation of three federal laws, yet universities do not always follow them when making hiring and promotion decisions. “The first step is fully implementing all of the current laws.”

The report also highlights ways in which funders can offer support, such as by providing flexibility in the timing of grant eligibility and application due dates. Institutions in turn should appoint dedicated leaders to highlight resources — including paid leave; stop-the-clock tenure policies, in which candidates are given extra time before tenure evaluation to compensate for lost productivity owing to caregiving responsibilities; and free or subsidized childcare — in a centralized online repository, and to ensure that successful policies are made permanent. The report authors note that such resources exist at many universities, but they’re often not adequately advertised or funded, resulting in programmes that either are underutilized or have prohibitively long waiting lists. Although many of the report’s suggestions require financial buy-in, others, such as not scheduling meetings during school pick-up or drop-off times, require only discussions.

Improving conditions

Having frank conversations is essential to maintaining a diverse and competitive workforce, says Leonard Pace, a science-programme senior manager at the Schmidt Ocean Institute headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Pace has organized several conference sessions on caregiving. “Obviously, there’s an ethical incentive to support each other, but it also benefits us financially to retain experienced people,” he says.

The institute offers flexible working arrangements, paid parental leave and caregiving supplements for those conducting fieldwork — policies that Pace has used as a father and while providing care remotely for a parent with lung cancer. As the culture at his workplace shifts away from stigmatizing people with caregiving roles, Pace says, more people are using these resources.

Indeed, creating an environment in which carers can do their best work will require a broader shift away from the stigma attached to deviating from what the report calls the “ideal worker norm” — the idea that scientists should focus on their careers to the exclusion of all other aspects of life (see ‘Stepping up for carers’).

Several scientists who spoke to Nature expressed feeling shame when caregiving responsibilities pull them away from work. Some say that stigma kept them from seeking support. Sarah Bacon, a reproductive physiologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, is both a parent and a carer for her mother, who has been hospitalized twice this year and now requires home care.

To fully support her, Bacon has pulled her work back to the bare minimum, teaching classes and holding virtual office hours — and has shared this with only a few key colleagues. “But in the afternoons, when I go to be with my mom, I know my office is dark, and I feel embarrassed,” she says. “Everybody works so hard, and it looks like I’m just slacking off.”

Bacon adds, however, that seeing her experience reflected in the testimonies of the 40 scientists interviewed in the report nearly brought her to tears. Similarly, Taghreed Al-Turki, a single mother and cell biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says that after reading the report, “I wanted to print copies and go through, lab by lab by lab, and hand it to every single principal investigator”. Al-Turki now plans to organize a committee in her department to read through the report, and Bacon has pledged to ask her university’s Title IX officer what policies her university offers.

“As one person, it can feel risky to speak out, but seeing many people amplify how you feel — that’s hope, and I am so thankful,” Al-Turki says. “I love being a scientist, it’s been a dream since I was a kid, and my son is a piece of my heart. There’s no reason I can’t have both.”

Stepping up for carers

There are a number of steps that institutions and individuals can take to create a more supportive environment for scientists with caregiving responsibilities.

• Make caregiving policies easily accessible. Owing to the hodgepodge of federal, state and institutional regulations, people might not always be aware of existing resources. Make a single repository — such as this University of California, San Diego, website, which also includes links to local and national policies — and display it prominently on the university homepage.

• Promote good work–life balance. Scientists fear being ostracized by peers if they are perceived as undedicated because they have to devote time to caregiving tasks. Support flexible working arrangements, and make it clear that those on caregiving leave are not expected to work; this creates a culture in which science exists alongside, and not above, other responsibilities.

• Prioritize funding for innovative pilot programmes. In 2012, Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California piloted a time-banking system. Faculty members could exchange time spent on unpaid labour — such as mentoring, sitting on committees or covering a colleague’s shift — for assistance with grant writing or home activities, including childcare, housecleaning and preparing premade meals. Those who participated received, on average, 1.3 times more grant awards, totalling around US$1.1 million per person. (As of 2022, only one department, emergency medicine, retained the programme.)

• Include caregiving in union negotiations. If you are represented by a union, ask the bargaining committee to include caregiving in their negotiations with university administrators. Postdocs in the University of California system were able to secure eight weeks of paid caregiving leave, paid time off, annual childcare subsidies and lactation support at work.

• Don’t limit caregiving to childcare. Many scientists are children of people in the baby-boomer generation, who in the United States are now aged 60–78. As such, more researchers have caregiving responsibilities for ageing parents, often alongside childcare obligations. Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond met this need by establishing a family care centre on campus that provides both child and adult daycare.

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Controversial virus-hunting scientist skewered at US COVID-origins hearing

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Republicans in the US House of Representatives publicly grilled infectious disease specialist Peter Daszak today during a long-awaited hearing on Capitol Hill. In their questioning they suggested that Daszak and the nonprofit organisation he heads, EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, knowingly conducted dangerous research by studying coronaviruses with a virology lab in Wuhan, China, where the first COVID-19 cases were reported during the pandemic.

Democrats disputed that there was any evidence that EcoHealth played a part in triggering the pandemic, but did hold Daszak’s feet to the fire over his organisation’s failure to submit a progress report on time to the federal government regarding a research grant it had been awarded by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID). They also called out Daszak for “questionable conduct”: inconsistencies in testimonies previously given and documents submitted to the group running the hearing, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

EcoHealth “potentially misled the federal government on multiple occasions” in terms of being transparent and adhering to reporting requirements as a recipient of federal funding, said Raul Ruiz, a Democratic representative from California and the ranking member of the subcommittee.

At the start of the hearing, subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup, a Republican representative from Ohio, announced the findings of a report evaluating EcoHealth’s research activities issued earlier in the day. The interim report, released by the subcommittee’s Republican members, states that EcoHealth failed to disclose high-risk, so-called gain-of-function research that it conducted in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and recommended that the organisation be barred from receiving future federal funds and criminally investigated.

Daszak disputed that the work carried out by EcoHealth and the WIV meets the definition of gain-of-function research. To meet that definition, he said, an experiment would need to have a likelihood of increasing a virus’s transmission or pathogenicity, and that the virus would already have to be known to infect humans. “Because the work we were doing was on bat coronaviruses, it was not covered by those rules,” Daszak said, referring to a definition used by the NIH to evaluate grants involving pathogen research. Wenstrup, who said the researcher had been “less than cooperative”, suggested that Daszak was using semantics to obscure the definition of gain-of-function research, which more generally confers new abilities to pathogens.

The hearing’s intense scrutiny of Daszak and EcoHealth could disincentivize other US scientists from proposing collaborations with colleagues in China and other countries, a process that is considered essential for pandemic prevention and preparedness, says Lawrence Gostin, a health-law and policy specialist at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Researchers need to be able to study new viruses in the locations where they are emerging. “It is extraordinarily important for Western-based scientists in the United States, the UK and other places to have strong working relationships with scientists around the world, including in China,” he says.

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, says she was disappointed that the Democrats joined the Republicans in what she says was “essentially an attack on science”. “It’s a very dangerous situation because most scientists who are approaching any problem — whether it’s the origins of the pandemic, whether it’s anything else — are going to think twice: should I actually get involved in research that is high impact but potentially politically controversial?”

A long-standing collaboration

Daszak has been a lightning rod in the COVID-19 origins debate, in which some researchers have argued that the SARS-CoV-2 coronovirus passed to humans naturally, from animals, and others have suggested it could have escaped from the WIV. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, EcoHealth, which aims to identify pathogens that could trigger pandemics and find solutions to them, had been collaborating with researchers in China for more than 15 years, studying coronaviruses in bats.

However, once the COVID-19 pandemic was in full force, in April 2020, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated a grant it had awarded EcoHealth for research in this vein. The WIV was a subawardee on this grant — a partner that was given funds to carry out some of the research proposed by EcoHealth. The termination was announced shortly after then-president Donald Trump, who had been publicly implying that China was to blame for the pandemic, told a reporter at a press conference that the government would stop funding the WIV.

Peter Daszak (R), Thea Fischer (L) and other members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on February 3, 2021.

Daszak visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in early 2021 as part of a team assembled by the World Health Organization to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.Credit: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty

About five months earlier, Daszak and 26 other scientists published a letter in the scientific journal The Lancet1, attempting to dispel rumours about China’s involvement in the pandemic. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the letter said. Although the letter declared the authors had no competing interests, critics would later point out Daszak’s close ties to scientists in China and suggest that this letter stopped the scientific community from truly considering the lab-leak hypothesis early in the pandemic.

Later that year, his ties to China would once again become an issue when Daszak was selected by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be part of an investigative team exploring the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Observers at the time worried that his relationship with Chinese researchers would endanger his ability to impartially conduct the investigation, which took place in early 2021.

At the hearing, Ruiz pressed Daszak about The Lancet letter and why he hadn’t declared competing interests. Daszak said that the letter was attempting to address specific conspiracy theories circulating early in the pandemic, including that SARS-CoV-2 contained snake DNA, rather than trying to cut off any exploration of the lab-leak hypothesis. He also pointed out that competing interests were added to the letter. They indicated that his salary is paid by EcoHealth and that the organisation works with a “range of universities and governmental health and environmental science organisations” in China – without naming the WIV specifically.

Biosafety questions

Another issue raised at the hearing was a grant proposal submitted in 2018 by Daszak and colleagues, including those at the WIV, to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal of the project, which DARPA did not ultimately fund, was to ‘defuse’ the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses by engineering the viruses to infect humanised mice and assess their capacity to cause disease. On the basis of a draft of the proposal obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, politicians at the hearing suggested that Daszak attempted to downplay the role that Chinese collaborators would have in the project to increase its chances of being approved. Daszak denied this and said that he contacted DARPA to check that it was okay to include the WIV on the proposal.

“A lot of the discussion about what was written in the marginalia of the early draft of that proposal could probably apply to anybody’s grant proposal for any agency,” Rasmussen says. “That’s the normal process of grant writing. And it’s sort of shocking to me, but also kind of hilarious, that people are reading so much into these notes.”

Republican representatives repeatedly questioned Daszak about whether the WIV had the appropriate biosafety levels to conduct the coronavirus research specified in the un-funded 2018 proposal.

Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, says that the response to biosafety concerns in other countries shouldn’t be to avoid working with those countries, but to partner with them to provide training and promote better practices. “If we want US science to be the standard-setter for safety, for security, for social responsibility, then we have to be a leader. And that means partnering with countries to help solve their public-health problems.”

Anthony Fauci, who was head of NIAID when EcoHealth received its grant to study bat coronaviruses with the WIV in 2014, will testify before the subcommittee on 3 June.



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How bioinformatics led one scientist home to Lithuania

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Portrait of Juozas Gordevicius giving a lecture, holding a microphone.

Juozas Gordevičius says that Lithuania has a large pool of scientific talent.Credit: Asta Balčiūnaitė-Gordevičienė

Voices from Lithuania

In May, Lithuania marks 20 years of European Union membership. The Baltic country is keen to develop its global presence in the life-science and biotechnology sectors by retaining home-grown talent, persuading scientists working abroad to return to the country, and attracting researchers from other nations. Nature spoke to three scientists who have chosen to develop their careers in Lithuania. Here, Nature talks to Juozas Gordevičius, founder of Vugene, a bioinformatics data-science company in Vilnius.

I was born nine years before Lithuania gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. I was part of the first generation that did not have compulsory Russian lessons at school. In 2004 — the year that Lithuania joined the European Union — I undertook a master’s degree in computer science at the Free University of Bozen–Bolzano in Italy, and stayed there for my PhD, during which I worked for the former online-news-aggregation company Thoora. The news service worked out the most important events in a given time period, and the mathematics and algorithms that it used turned out to be very relevant in bioinformatics.

One evening, I was out drinking beer with some other Lithuanians in Toronto, Canada, where Thoora was based. One of them was Arturas Petronis at the University of Toronto, who studies genetics. I explained that I was really into computer science, but that I didn’t want to work for Google or the like. Instead, I wanted to do something that contributes to human health (my older brother and sister are both physicians). He said, try bioinformatics, it’s the future.

My first foray into health was in 2011, as a visiting postdoc working with Petronis at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada’s largest mental-health teaching hospital. I worked there as a biological data-science consultant and travelled back and forth between Canada and Lithuania for years because that year I was also appointed as a bioinformatics researcher at Vilnius University’s Institute of Mathematics and Informatics. I was literally working night and day.

A move to business

In 2019, I joined the Van Andel Institute, an independent biomedical research institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as a bioinformatics scientist. I realized that the work of a bioinformatician is very limited in academia. Universities have lots of people who do the experiments and typically hire only one bioinformatician. You have to do everything in the lab: run the servers that do the computation, manage the data and write the code. Every project becomes very lengthy. It can take a year or two to arrive at a result that is publishable. It’s interesting in the beginning, but after a while, you feel lonely. I thought that if I had a team of people working with me, and I could optimize these processes, it would be much faster.

So, I started a company in Grand Rapids in 2021 to do just that. I called it Vugene.

Having a base in the United States made it possible for the institutes that I was working with to have a contract with Vugene. I certainly didn’t have to explain where Lithuania is — it was a gate opener.

By this time, the COVID-19 pandemic had hit and I had decided to return to Lithuania with my wife to build the company there. At first, I was doing everything alone.

Vugene in Lithuania is based at the Sunrise Valley Science and Technology Park in Vilnius, close to the University’s Life Sciences Center, with a second office in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city. The company offers bioinformatics data science as a service, specializing in biomedical research, bioinformatics, machine learning and software engineering.

Our clients include research laboratories looking at the origins, causes, treatments and diagnostics of various complex disorders, such as cancers or neurodegenerative diseases. Vugene manages large data sets, performs quality control, processes raw data and does statistical analysis.

Work and study

It has always been my dream to do something that could be used in medical practice. Vugene is concentrating on early diagnostics. The company works a lot in the neurodegeneration field, mostly sequencing epigenomic data sets. Currently, 30 projects are running in parallel.

The first hire was a big step. I am very lucky with the people who joined me. Milda Milčiūtė, then a third-year genetics student at Vilnius, came first, in 2021. I became her supervisor for her dissertation and we worked together on her thesis on the expression of endogenous retroviruses in Parkinson’s disease. She worked part-time for Vugene, programming and building models. She’s now doing her master’s while working here.

Working at a company while studying happens in Lithuania a lot. I’ve taken on four students — three undergraduates and one doing a PhD. This is in addition to two postdocs, and a chief executive and a designer.

I think the biotech and life-sciences community in Lithuania is special. We have the right ingredients: a long-standing history in the life sciences; very good infrastructure in terms of computer science and the Internet; and a significant pool of talent owing to the high quality of education. Students going into these fields are the highest achievers. They have the desire to do their best, and to go and see the world as previous generations did. We are also a small country, it’s easy to get what you need, and the government is supportive. Now, for us as bioinformaticians, the task is to put all of this together.

Outside work, life is good here — we have fast Internet, free education and good health care as standard. On top of that, many people have a strong desire to do good things. The country is changing very quickly and for the better, so it feels great to be here.

Sailing has always been very important to me, and it’s very popular in Lithuania. It’s a good antidote to my work. In a race, I have to concentrate and stay alert for an extended period of time under extreme physical stress — it takes 100% of my mental capacity, there’s no time for anything else.

Jacqui Thornton’s travel and accommodation were provided by Go Vilnius, a tourism and development agency.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This article is part of Nature Spotlight: Lithuania, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content.

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Londoners see what a scientist looks like up close in 50 photographs

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Nature’s Where I Work photo-essay section has profiled more than 200 scientists so far, working in settings that range from Vatican City to the University of the West Indies. Now, 50 of the published images are appearing in an outdoor public exhibition in London.

The selection of portraits, which are also collated online, features working researchers in diverse and important fields. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Argent, a retail-management company based in London.

Memers of the public look at a photo in an outdoor exhibition of portraits of scientists

Two passers-by pause at one of the display boards. On the side facing the camera is a portrait of biotechnologist Sara Abdou, who explores the genetics behind ornamental-flower colours.Credit: John Sturrock

The images, commissioned especially for the journal, are on display in the King’s Cross area, near to Springer Nature’s corporate offices in the United Kingdom. The free exhibition aims to inspire younger generations to consider a career in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, and to challenge stereotypical preconceptions of what a scientist looks like and does. The portraits will remain on display until June 2024.

The exhibition is dedicated to Karen Kaplan, the senior careers editor who launched Where I Work in 2019, to mark Nature’s 150th anniversary. Karen died in November 2023.

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‘There is no cookie cutter female scientist’

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Julie Gould 00:0

Hello, and welcome to Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. I’m Julie Gould. We’re starting off a new series of episodes where I’ll be sharing stories from female scientists in Latin America.

Working as a scientist in Latin America comes with its challenges, whatever gender you identify with. There’s a severe lack of funding for science. There are difficulties in getting reagents. And there’s a lot of political instability in many countries in the region.

And yet for women, there are many other difficulties. And sometimes the women that I’ve spoken to feel that they are invisible.

Yet in the face of the challenges that they have, female scientists in the region are making it work. They are forming alliances nationally and internationally to support each other so that they can each follow the career path that they’re on.

In this series of episodes, I’m going to share some of the ways in which female scientists in Latin America are finding things difficult. But also I want to look at how they are facing these challenges head on.

To start the series, I’m sharing part of a conversation that I had with Monica Stein.

Monica Stein: 01:29

So my name is Monica Stein. I’m the Vice Rector for research partnership and collaboration at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, based in Guatemala City.

Julie Gould 01:40

Monica works closely with people all around the world to try and strengthen science and technology ecosystems in Guatemala and the region.

I reached out to her after I listened to a roundtable discussion hosted by Nature in 2022, about female scientists in Latin America. Monica spoke during this roundtable about the different frameworks that exist for supporting science and scientific research.

I wanted to find out more about what frameworks exist in Guatemala, for women, and how she believes that they can and need to change to offer further support for the female scientists that work there.

The interview starts with Monica giving us an overview of how the frameworks right now are not supporting women in science, and are creating an unequal playing field.

Monica Stein: 02:23

Frameworks are complex. If you want to develop both vocations, careers and success in science and technology.

So in order to have a vibrant and productive scientific community that encompasses different ethnicities and different genders, you need to be able to have funding for science. So that’s the people the one people always think about.

But you need to also have the administrative framework to assign that funding. You need to have talent that can access that funding and infrastructure to be able to work within.

And that all sounds nice. But let’s start with the talent part. If you want to do science, you have to start inspiring people and demonstrating to people that that’s achievable from a very young age.

In general, many Latin American countries have trouble inspiring vocations in science and technology, because math is an issue.

And that is very disparate between men and women in Latin America and in the entire world. So there’s cultural norms and perceptions. That’s one first issue, where women shouldn’t be scientists or women don’t have the talent to be scientists.

And so in whatever framework that you want to achieve this high end goal of women doing scientific research and publishing, etc, you have to start years before inspiring women and role modeling, through women that are already in science, that it’s achievable, that it’s fun, and that all women can be scientists, engineers, or what have you, if they want to.

So that that is a whole piece of work that has to do that has to happen during school. And during college.

Once you have those, those vocations, you’ve inspired enough people, you have to make them aware of the opportunity. So there’s an access issue.

So we already did cultural norms and perceptions. And now we’re talking about access.

Do women have equal access to education as men do in some countries? They do. In some countries, they don’t. What does access mean? Is it only that the university accepts men or women and they don’t discriminate?

No, it doesn’t mean that. It means you know, are there other roles in terms of caretaking or work or what have you that are different between men and women. Are their preferences for a family to invest more in the education of a son than a daughter?

Or do you, as a student have to pay for your own education? And how easy is it for a man versus a woman to get a job, and what’s the pay gap?

Most of our students, for example, work to pay for their studies. So if there’s a pay gap, which there is in Guatemala, between men and women, and if it’s easier for men to have a job over women, then it’s easier for men to study than women. So that there’s that access issue.

And then. let’s say that you finally inspire people, you’ve got access, they’re graduating. Now you really get into this systems, regulations, whether they’re legal, or, or other types of regulations that promote the success of women in science.

And what you see in the United States, and you’re starting to see in Latin America, and the statistics support that, is that we’re getting more women graduating from university than men. Also, in Latin America, as an average.

It’ll vary from country to country, but then less women in graduate school. In Latin America. In the United States, I think women in biological sciences are very high up in graduate school, but then there are very low and tenured professor positions.

And what happens is you get married and you start having kids. And there are no support systems in Latin America for child caring, no robust support systems, certainly not in Guatemala, and much less in scientific systems where there’s a tenure system, and you’re expected to maintain certain productivity in order to gain certain rewards.

And that reward could be a position, or it could be just maintaining your job, or it could be going up the ladder.

So we had, for example, interesting conversations with Argentinian scientists, where they have in some universities a tenure system. And they don’t stop the clock, when a woman has a child.

So the moment that you have a child and your responsibilities are split, which they shouldn’t be split. You should be able to care for your child for a little bit. But your responsibility, so split, men will have an advantage because they’re producing science more consistently, and the clock doesn’t stop for women.

So things like that are things that, if you have a framework of regulations, and and support systems at the scientific, you know, production level productivity level, when you’re already a working scientist, would help women achieve more success in science.

And then I think, finally, there’s data and evidence that sometimes women’s contributions or production gets ignored in, in collaborative research, or whether having a woman as a primary author gives you advantages or disadvantages.

There was a survey in Central America regarding how many women scientists had positions and were publishing.

And the big surprise was that in Guatemala it was pretty equal between men and women. But it wasn’t so in El Salvador, Honduras and other Central American countries.

So for some reason, in Guatemala, at the level of scientific production, meaning how many papers you’re publishing and and whether women have jobs as scientists, we’re doing pretty well, which, which was a surprise.

But I know that in other countries, there are more positions filled by men and more papers published by men.

Julie Gould 08:48

Thank you so much for that overview of the current situation. But what do you envision for the future?

What do you think these future supporting frameworks should look like? And how would you put them in place?

Monica Stein: 09:00

Well,I think that it’s all part of an educational journey. So if science and technology organizations want to create that framework, they have to collaborate with other instances, like in Guatemala ministries of education, or in the United States, education secretaries, etc.

So what do I dream of? I dream of a system that collaborates with educational institutions to inspire and promote scientific vocations. Whether it’s for women, for low income students, men or women for different ethnic groups.

I think that’s very important because we are not going to be able to solve these really complex social problems that we have in Central America and other Latin American countries, if you don’t have a diversity of perspectives.

I firmly believe that science can inform complex social problems because evidence-based decision making is the best kind of decision making. So we have to include people, I dream of a system that will facilitate access to education. =

And it’s not only whether I don’t discriminate in my admissions, it’s whether I am providing the pathways. For example, here in Guatemala, in the highlands, where there’s a larger indigenous population, our university has a high school, and you can get your scholarships from the high school level, so that you’re prepared and to go to university, and that transition is less difficult.

But that there’s geographical aspects to that, too. And parents naturally don’t want to send their kids far away for high school. They’re okay with university, but they’re not okay for high school.

So can we use technologies to facilitate access? How can we raise the level of science education in high school so that people don’t have to leave their homes to get an education. So how to facilitate access.

And then we can get into, you know, legal norms or regulations within our system of science and technology that will permit different groups to have more equitable standing, and a fair evaluation and assessment so that you can keep going up, whether it’s in your birth, your workplace, or in a science and technology system.

And then comes funding. Like, honestly, what we found is if we have talent, the funding will come. And it’s really nurturing that talent that were really, really bad at.

Julie Gould 11:33

That was really interesting, because I’ve almost heard the exact opposite, that you can’t attract the talent if you haven’t got the funding. So could you explain your thoughts a little bit more, please?

Monica Stein: 11:43

Okay, so yes, you can’t get the talent if you don’t have the funding, because you need the funding to make these, you know, broad level changes.

But what we have found at UVG, is that it’s not that much money that you need to make the changes. It’s, it’s willpower. And it’s time. And yes time is valuable.

So for example, taking the time to measure how many women are in your programs. We have this really successful women in engineering summer course, that started as an experience for 25 young women from Guatemala City to come and learn about engineering.

And after the pandemic became this big 600-woman course all over the country, where we send them their boxes of material that is made in our MakerSpace. And we do it virtual.

And sometimes we invite professors from MIT or other places to give them talks. And that’s $15,000.

Now, that may sound like a lot of money to some people, but in the grand scheme of an institution, it’s not that much money to inspire 600 women, or more every year.

We have a lot of help from donors. So I think one of the secrets of success of this university is partnering.

So being isolated is not a way to build a system. If you’re going to build a system and an ecosystem, you have to collaborate, you have to be open. And so we have donors that help along the way.

So I think that there’s a lot of little steps you can take to inspire people, and make them realize that they have a vocation, and get interested in science that are not very expensive.

Then there’s the issue of access. Yes, of course, you need scholarships for access. And I think it is a government’s responsibility to be able to provide access to education.

But as a university, you can advocate for access. You can also participate in how you structure that axis. You can connect donors.

And when I say I don’t think money is the problem is that really, when you get a lot of people together, and they each add a little bit, then the money comes.

If you have a vision that you can pitch, the money comes. For example, we have this amazing new program with MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And it’s a $15mi program funded by USAID to strengthen the university science technology ecosystem and entrepreneurship and innovation as well.

And how do you get that? By having a vision and by having these little success stories that show that there’s things you can do that are replicable, and that have an impact and are measurable, and then the funding comes? That’s my view on it.

Julie Gould 14:34

I love your positivity on this. But I know that not all institutions in Latin America are in a position where getting funding is as simple, especially those that are in countries where the political climate isn’t favoring science and education, or at least not favouring it as much as you’d hope.

So what advice would you have for them to build an ecosystem and to find funding and to build the infrastructure to support the scientists that are doing there.

Monica Stein: 15:01

I would like to clarify that the Guatemalan government is not giving the support that is necessary and that when you compare investment in science and technology, we are at point zero 3% of GDP.

So we’re one of the lowest in Latin America. I think that different Latin American countries have different regulatory frameworks. And that’s a big challenge.

For example, a challenge here that we have turned into an opportunity is that Guatemala is the only country in all of Latin America that does not have a higher education, supervision body.

So a quality supervision body. That’s horrible. All Latin American countries, and most countries in the world, some sort have some sort of state supervision entity that wants to improve quality.

We’ve turned that into an opportunity, because we’re able to be more innovative sometimes then other of our colleagues or other institutions, in some, especially South American countries, where it takes years to change the curriculum.

And it takes years to get a new program approved. So we’ve been able to innovate a lot easier. So I think those are the little challenges that get turned into opportunities.

Another thing that Guatemala has, because there is no government support for education (and higher education, for sure), but also high school education. Like there is in other countries.

We’ve had to look outside. So we’ve gotten quite good at writing grants for international donors. And there are a lot of colleagues that are still literally battling with their national funding system.

And if you don’t diversify your funding sources, you have less capability of saying yes or no to different things are charting your own path. And I think it’s hard to diversify your funding sources. But necessity is the mother of invention.

We’ve started. So at UVA we sell scientific cervices. And since 2010, to now 50%, of the operation of our research institute comes from sale of scientific services. Because we can survive on the overhead of grants.

We’ve been really, really bootstrapping this. And maybe that’s why I’m so optimistic. I think that challenges should be turned into opportunities. And I am very cognizant that there are a lot of hurdles in other countries where the regulatory frameworks are really, really rigid.

And Guatemala, because it is such a poor country, has more access to international funding than other countries that are more well off.

So my advice would be try to turn every challenge into an opportunity. Look outside the country, look at what that challenge can give you flexibility in another way. And, partner. We learned a lot of these things by talking to other people talking to people in developed countries, and in non developed countries partnering, this is the way to go. ,

Julie Gould 18:05

Okay, so with that in mind, what have you learned and incorporated from other countries, other institutions that you are using do work towards and build a framework that supports female scientists in your institution and in Guatemala?

Monica Stein: 18:19

Absolutely. I think one of the biggest things for us was learning from the development space, which is different from the scientific space. What a gender analysis do does, and how to do it, and how you change projects to include a gender perspective.

So they have dimensions of gender challenges, and ways of addressing them. And when we started incorporating those dimensions of gender analysis, and then actions that mitigate the effects of that disparity into what we did, we started getting results.

So we’ve learned from the development space in terms of how to streamline gender perspectives into what we do here at UBG.

In terms of regulation, I wish I could have a lot of success stories. It’s really hard to say, to change regulation. And we don’t have a merit system. In Guatemala, our national Secretariat of science and technology doesn’t even have a merit system, like in Mexico or Columbia.

So one of the things we’ve been doing as a university is trying to propose a merit system, so that scientists that have gone through more training or more projects can access bigger pots of funding, etc.

And I think that if you learn from other systems, like we’ve been learning from Colombia, from Argentina, etc. you can try to construct a better one.

You can, it’s not changing one but building one from scratch. That has been really hard. It’s been over 10 years in proposals and going back and forth and we still don’t have a clear system for measuring science output in different institutions from our Secretariat of science and technology.

We’ve partnered in some really cool initiatives. So we’ve partnered with European Union Initiatives for gender in Latin America, in educational institutions, also, with German cooperation, specifically for gender for science for STEM, Science and Technology, where we’ve been able to talk not only with the European see the European models, but talk to the different local models.

That’s been incredibly enriching. And it also creates a network of women that you can talk to and that are having the same challenges. And what most of them have done is, of course, raise awareness. So raising awareness is always the first step.

But gathering the data so that your awareness-raising is more impactful, and then piloting piloting different programs where they’re changing little parts.

So they’re changing how something is awarded, or they’re changing how they’re selecting participants, or they’re changing the topics that are approached in certain conferences, etc.

So all of that has been lessons learned. And I think it’s all very fluid and very dynamic. So we have WhatsApp groups, we have exchanges, sometimes we’ll have with the German cooperation, for example, a roundtable to keep that conversation going.

And I think that those linkages are what makes this fluid conversation advance.

Julie Gould 21:37

So I’m getting as a very prominent message under everything that you’ve said to me so far today, that networking is invaluable, both for individual women’s careers, but also for the job that you’re doing.

And that networking is one of the key tools that female scientists can have in a very large toolbox to help support their careers. Did I get that right?

Monica Stein: 21:59

Absolutely. And you said it really well. It’s not only your professional life, also your personal life, it’s not easy being a human. And it’s not easy being a woman. And I think that being able to connect with other people that are facing similar challenges, and they’re solving them in different ways, is incredibly valuable.

And we were asked recently, precisely by this German cooperation agency, who are setting up some other activities with women, female scientists, whether they should make them sectoral because of the language, you know, just Latin America, just Africa, just Asia.

And unanimously, all of us women from Africa, Asia, and Latin American said, No, we have to make them general, because we have learned so much about the different challenges different women in different cultures, face.

And in your personal life. of course, you need you need a village, you need a network of women, that it can be there for you in different aspects, even if it’s just listening, or if it’s helping out, giving out ideas. And you need to be there for them.

So we need to inspire other women, we need to mentor other women, we need to be available for conversations, we need to tell them it’s okay to say no to a project, because you’re pregnant, just giving birth, or your child is young, which is something that is so common here in Guatemala.

Women coming to me saying, If I don’t take this project, my career is dead, but I have a three month old. And being able to tell them “Don’t take the project.”

This happened to me, I didn’t take the project. And it didn’t affect you know, the the overall scheme of things and having them hear that from somebody that’s been there, gives them the courage to say okay, I’m going to set limits.

And I’m going to prioritize myself, as well as my career with the limits that I decided okay for me, because I know that in the end, I will be able to find another step or another path.

Julie Gould 24:01

So what are the other tools that female scientists should have, whether they’re in Latin America or anywhere else in the world?

Monica Stein: 24:07

Mentoiring is a big one. And it’s not exactly networking. It’s not exactly role models, but it’s a little bit of both put together. I think mentoring is very important. If you mentor a woman, or if you mentor two women or three women, you have a big multiplying effect. I think that working on axis is also very important, we already mentioned that.

And working on regulation. So you have to be able to propose and the changes you want to achieve are right, the grants that include the stipends, the scholarships, etc, that you are going to be then be able to give.

But I think motivation is the driver. I think inspiring people from when they’re very young is the biggest driver. And we can all do that.

And can I add something? We focus a lot on women But we forget the role men have in all of this. And if you role model to men and women, women in positions of power, men start recognizing that it’s normal to have women in positions of power.

If you sit women in decision making tables, then other men will start respecting female opinions more and more.

So I think there’s also work to be done in role modeling for men as well, women’s, women scientists, and also to intentionally include women in decision making roles and decision making bodies, to, to showcase that women do belong in the boardroom, in the CEO seat in, you know, the secretariat of science and technology.

Julie Gould 25:51

Okay, my final question for you, Monica, then is do you have any other advice for young female scientists?

Monica Stein: 26:00

I think the only thing left to say is that there’s no cookie cutter, woman scientist.

There’s no one single way to approach science and do science. That was a big one. For me. I thought there was a single path.

You got your PhD, you got your postdoc, you got your tenure, otherwise, you’re a failure. It’s okay to be a woman science in teaching, a woman scientist in teaching it’s okay to be a woman scientist in industry.

It’s okay to be a woman scientist in management. Because as long as you’re having impact, and that impact is fulfilling you and also contributing to building a better ecosystem, you are a woman in science.

And I think that’s very important that women internalize that there are many ways to be successful or what they want to be.

Julie Gould 26:49

Thank you to Monika Stein from UVG in Guatemala for speaking to us for this episode. There were many topics that Monica covered from funding to childcare to supporting the development and inspiration of female scientists at school level, and we will hear from women who are working on these things in the upcoming episodes.

Thanks for listening. I’m Julie Gould.

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