Her Story
About Maria
I have been in research for 23 years since defending my PhD in theoretical cosmology in 2003. My original training was in physics, but I switched to biology after my first postdoc, and these days I focus on biomedical research. Before joining Yale University as a professor two years ago, I worked in industrial research in Switzerland. Currently, my work centers on integrating machine learning and physics-based approaches to model complex biomedical systems, with a particular focus on proteins that have significant therapeutic potential, such as antibodies and T-cell receptors. We are designing the next generation of machine learning models to better model flexible and disordered proteins, as current approaches do a very poor job of recapitulating this flexibility. At the graduate level, my role involves not just teaching but primarily mentoring students, advising them both scientifically on which research directions are most promising and structurally on which career moves might be best for their particular situations.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Maria
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to a combination of determination, drive, and persistence. My path has not been easy, but it has been a combination of resilience and just believing that I have a role to play and a voice to use. It doesn't matter that you fail at one particular situation - you get up and keep trying next time, again and again and again. On a personal level, I have been practicing Zen meditation for more than 15 years, which has been very useful for me because it has taught me to just take the present situation and not build stories around it. The present is what it is. You might have written your perfect grant application and it got rejected, which is disappointing, but we should not build the story on top of it like 'I'm not good enough.' Let's drop the story - the fact is it just got rejected, so we'll have to try again. The side story is not necessary. This is something I learned through meditation practice.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I wrote an opinion piece about the role of women in STEM careers, and one of the challenges I have observed mentoring many talented women over more than 20 years is that women are very often highly qualified, highly competent, and highly driven, but they come with a lot of self-doubt. I think there are a lot of factors in the way we women are raised - from a very early age, women are taught to be nice and polite and well-behaved, while boys are taught to be brave and courageous and take risks. I'm not putting the blame on women or saying it's our fault, but we should be aware of it. Very often, very talented women wait to be invited, while men don't. After realizing this, start taking more initiative. Maybe you're not invited, so just knock at the door - most people will just open the door and let you in. It's true that sometimes when women are courageous and take their voice and speak up, they are met with criticism or silence. It's not easy, but the fact that it's not easy doesn't mean that we have to be silenced. We have to speak up and be ready to sometimes face some criticism, but then we need to keep speaking up, because the result of not doing it is we'll continue to be silent forever and ever.
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