[Madeleine Kriech]: Thanks for doing this. First off, what did you do on your sabbatical? Why did you take it? What was your aim? 

[Stacey Smith]: The aim for my sabbatical was to try to develop a new area of research. I think that’s what a lot of people try to do for their sabbaticals. My lab has been studying how flower colors evolve along [phylogenetic] trees for a very long time. I wanted to basically build models of how this happens and try to connect the genetic changes to what we expect to happen across phylogeny. Based on the genetics, do we expect certain kinds of flower transitions to happen more often? Do we expect certain things to be gained or lost? What kind of patterns do we expect to happen? 

This was all a grand plan and was submitted fall 2019.Then, the pandemic came and everything kind of got turned upside down. 

I don’t think I ever even entertained the notion that I would be able to do anything that was planned. My lab, at that time, had four postdocs and four graduate students, so my number one priority was trying to make sure that whatever they were trying to get done was as undisrupted as possible because, you know, I’m not trying to graduate. I’m not trying to get a job, but they are. That’s mostly what I’ve done.

Is it weird being  back to teaching classes? Because you left when things were normal, and now you’re back and things are very far from normal. 

I really miss being in the classroom, so much. 

I really miss getting to interact with students as they work in groups and meet with students individually in my office and chat about their careers. 

I mean, I’m really glad to be back. And I physically come into the building because it puts me in the mindset and it feels like I’m teaching. If I’m in my [bed]room, I don’t have the feeling. And I wonder how it is for students; I’m sure the same thing happens where you’re like, ‘I’m trying to do the student thing, but on the other hand, here’s my dog and I could use a sandwich.’ 

Everybody’s in a different situation. Professors are dealing with something different, students are dealing with something different. Just try to roll with it and adapt as best as we can.

How has your research and your work changed since having a  child?

I’ve had a realization that it’s going to be a long time before I get back to the field. 

I love field work and I’ve spent, collectively, years of my life in the field—taking busses all over Ecuador and Peru and Bolivia, there aren’t busses in Argentina, but all over South America—collecting plants, meeting up with colleagues, describing new species. 

I know I’ll get back there one day, but I just realized that all of my notions of how it was going to work [have changed], like, ‘Oh, I’ll just bring the kid with me to Peru.’Right… I can barely handle bringing the kid to a family member’s house for an afternoon. It seems ridiculous now. 

Probably what it means is that I will focus more on training people who do the stuff in the field and they’ll go, and that’s probably a good outcome anyway. I’m old enough to pass the torch.

Loving field work and then having to stop comes with its trade offs, but what’s a pro of being home with your baby?

Trying to figure out how to restructure my life. 

It does make you say to yourself, ‘OK, I have two hours, how am I going to be the most efficient with these two hours?’ It also means saying ‘no’ to more things because I do child care every day. 

So something’s going to go—and it’s really hard to decide what goes. But things have to be streamlined and I’ve had to say ‘no’ to a lot of things [like reviewing]… and I hate it. I have been tortured by things that I said ‘no’ to because I’ve relied on other people’s reviews for years. 

I figure it all comes out in the mix. When [my son] is a little older and I am a little bit more flexible, then I’ll pay it back. I promise. 

What is your favorite part about being a mom? 

Someone who just super super is into you, whether you’re dirty, whether it’s in the middle of the night. It’s a physical way too; [kids] want to grab onto you and smush their face into your face. It’s kind of sad that we get older and that’s not a thing anymore. It’s such a special thing to have somebody that’s so connected [to you], so physically and emotionally connected. 

On the other hand, what’s your favorite part of your job?

Oh, gosh, there’s so many parts of my job. I think connecting new ideas in science, that is a lot of what gets my brain spinning. I see a talk with a method that was made for species interactions and I think maybe that could work for interactions among genes in the genome. My brain gets really excited thinking about how those kinds of questions are similar or different. When I have a student that actually is pursuing some idea that I get really excited about, it’s fun to follow along because I have more things I think would be cool than I could ever do in a lifetime. Really, I have to live vicariously because my time is super limited.

Has there been any bit of your scientific history that’s helped you become a mom? 

Only in the sense that academia is a very multitasking-sort of career. 

You are bouncing between talking to people, listening to people, reading, doing lab work, coordinating people and also working really well on your own—it’s such a diverse set of skills and you’re constantly changing tasks all day long. So, I’m very used to that way of working. 

Right now, I just work at night, that’s the weird part. The night is not the time when I think best, but that’s when there’s blocks of time that are uninterrupted. 

What advice would you want to give other scientist moms out there? 

Be nice to yourself—there’s no magic answer. I know people that [became mothers] early and then had challenges finishing their degree. I waited super late which is hard to do because then you’re old and you’re like, ‘What am I doing in my 40s chasing around after a little tiny person?’ I don’t think there’s any perfect scenario. I feel very comfortable sharing where I’m at with people, like, “My kid didn’t sleep at all last night, so my brain is a little bit fried today.” I don’t try to keep up appearances, but I’m lucky because I’m pretty senior in my career—I’ve already established who I am. As a younger person, that would be a really hard trick to pull off because you’re trying to convince people that you’re competent and smart, but you didn’t sleep all night and you show up all zapped. I wouldn’t have done it differently, but I don’t think there’s an easy path. 

That’s good advice. If your son sees this interview, what do you want him to know? 

I guess just that his mom had a life before being a mom, which I think maybe a lot of kids don’t think about for a very long time, and I probably didn’t think about for my mom. She had other things going on and a lot of them had to stop. She had me when she was 26 or 28 and I remember when I was a kid thinking that didn’t seem young, but now to me that seems incredibly young. She still got a master’s [degree] when I was in high school and I look back and it’s amazing—I haven’t pulled off anything that challenging, so hats off to her. Maybe I’ll take [my son] to some of the places I’ve been in the field and say, “I hitched a ride on a motorcycle from that hill right there.”

Like you mentioned, you’re pretty high up in your field and you’ve established yourself, but people always say it’s really hard for women in STEM since it’s a male dominated field. What have you dealt with to get to where you are today?

I was really lucky all the way up through undergrad and I felt incredibly supported. There’s probably also a different experience as being a white person, so I didn’t have many of the struggles other students would have. 

What’s interesting is as you start gaining more knowledge and more interaction, all of a sudden the dynamics start to change a little bit. That zone, that graduate student/postdoc zone was a sketchy zone. There’s this really sharp power differential where you’re trying to hop to the next level. I don’t know of any female graduate student who didn’t have bad experiences in that stage of their career. 

Thankfully, I had friends and we talked about it like coping strategies. And it’s been interesting to watch it trickle off, but not to the degree that I don’t remember it. I interject myself at conferences if I see things that I think would make somebody uncomfortable—I try to reach out and be supportive. I’m kind of always looking for ways to make it less of a burden because it’s unfair; you’re trying to do your graduate school project and not insult somebody because you reject their advances. Honestly, I didn’t think about it at the time, it was like, “Okay, let’s get my experiments working, avoid advances, build collaborative networks—check, check, check, check.” I hope it doesn’t frighten anybody, but it is out there. 

You talked about how this year has exploded in your face, but what’s the best thing to come out of it? What’s been your favorite moment of this year?

One of the best things to come out of this year—I think almost every scientist will say this— is that suddenly things have become super international. If you give a seminar, you can invite your friends in Europe. Conferences used to be cost prohibitive for anybody from out of the country; [they] now can come to conferences in the U.S. It’s so exciting because even the way that we do evolutionary biology in the U.S. is so different from evolutionary biology in Europe. There’s a cultural stamp on the kinds of questions that are asked, the methods, and it really slows science down. The pandemic sort of melted that. 

Now you’re back to teaching, you have a one-year-old: what’s a normal day in your life look like? 

Get up with [my] kid, feed kid, get him off to daycare and then I like to come into the building, especially if I’m teaching, so that I can have good wifi and the screen and the chalkboard and all those kinds of things. 

My day is supposed to be 40% research, 40% teaching and 20% service. I would say it’s more like 20% research and then service and teaching and the rest of it. There’s things I do for the [scientific] societies that I’m involved in and there’s things that I do for the department that just eat up a lot of time. Once I’m done teaching, hopefully that block will now get to be research.

My final question for you is, what would you tell your 20-year-old self? 

Time goes fast. I look back and all those experiences seem super fresh in my mind and yet those times are so gone. There’s no way that I’m going to not hike for a full year and then go off on some major expedition—that’s what I could do as a 20-year-old. 

Those times are gone not just physically, but also just the lifestyle. I feel like sometimes there’s a rush to get to a career because people are always being asked: “What are you going to major in in college?”; “What are you going to do after you graduate?”; “Are you going to go to graduate school?” 

There’s this huge rush to sort of settle yourself into being settled, into having this career and this degree and this particular family setting or whatever. I feel like you have to roll with it and enjoy all those pieces and take advantage of what you have at the time. 

If you don’t have any obligations and you are able to travel, then travel. If you’re able to do work abroad and you’re interested in it, go for it. If you want to try out another career because you thought your major was actually really boring, then do it. Do whatever you can because you’ll eventually get old and more restricted in what you can do.