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I'm the cellist on the right, playing the slow movement of Brahms'
c minor piano quartet, Op. 60, at an amateur chamber music workshop
last summer.
Born July 29, 1942.
Harvard B.A. 1964 in Chemistry
Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Bristol, England 1964-65
Harvard Ph.D. 1970 in Biological Chemistry
MIT 1970-1972 post doctorate in Biology
Brown University, 1972 - Assistant and Associate Professor of Chemistry
1988 - Associate Dean of the Graduate School
Hobbies: chamber music (cello), former sailor, occasional quilter,
birder and
gardener
I went to a public high school in New Jersey, where a new teacher,
Miss Billington, inspired me to be interested in science. She had
a Ph.D. in biology, and she had us do experiments of our own design,
to make hypotheses about the real world and figure out how to test
them. I remember that we tested some advertising claims, not biology
as such. But the idea that one could actually form hypotheses and
test them was a revelation to me. Until Miss Billington, science
classes had consisted primarily of naming things, and I didn't feel
that learning vocabulary added anything to my understanding of the
world. I'd intended to study languages, and would not have been
in that science class at all if it hadn't been for Sputnik. With
the launching of the first satellite by the USSR, any high school
student who was good at math was pushed to do more science as a
patriotic duty, and as a good girl, I complied.
At the time I entered college I wanted to be a mathematician, seeing
math as the most true, the least contingent on human prejudices
or even on human existence, of all the sciences. But having talked
my way into a sophomore honors course that was way over my head,
I looked around for something I could do better and realized that
I'd always liked the reality checks of laboratory science. So I
majored in chemistry, and more or less as a lark applied to study
biochemistry during a year abroad. The questions of biology, as
answerable in the language of chemistry, seemed so much more important
to me (after all, they are literally questions of life and death)
than those of pure chemistry, that I continued working on biological
problems. Although I have been away from actually doing science
for some years now, the achievements of modern biology are so thrilling
and powerful that I am very glad that I can at least understand
them.
I became an administrator at a time when my experiments were not
going well and I needed a change. I find that the broader view I
must have, being responsible in some sense for all of Brown's graduate
programs, is more satisfying to me than continuing to focus on more
narrow scientific problems. I tell people that I do accounting and
social work without a license for either profession. My role is
to make sure that the students who do their academic work do get
their graduate degrees, that all of life's complications don't stop
them.
The biggest challenge to being a dean is to get people - faculty,
students, and other administrators - to do the right things. It
is far from the purity of mathematics as one can get. But even as
a scientist, getting co-workers to collaborate, dealing with the
human factors, is a large part of the challenge. When students say
that they don't want to be scientists because they want to work
with people, they have no idea how much scientists actually do work
with people. At a scholarly level science is far less lonely a profession
than anything in the humanities, where individual scholars work
alone with their books.
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