Description of the video:

All right, so this interview is co sponsored by the Bias Center. And given your professional experience and given the co sponsorship of the Bias center, I want to ask you some questions about leadership, okay? And make the first one an easy one. How do you define leadership? How do you know when you see it? That's really a good question. I think for me what it is is that you become identified with a set of values and principles. That when you walk in the room somebody says, ah, she's all about graduate education. Therefore, you have an identity that you can draw others into and get actions out of them. Because they know where you're going and what you're trying to do. They agreed to some degree or another. I see it as a, as a process of sort of aggregating people to your cause by being well identified with your cause. So you mentioned values. What kind of values are at the core of your leadership being I, I don't know how to lie, I'm not good at it. So I think you have to be perfectly honest. If there's no hope for a proposal and the faculty person that's earnestly pitching it to you, you have to say there's no hope. You just have to be honest. You have to value the openness of communication. You have to value, well, given my family history, it would be dishonest not to say there's quality in all kinds of people. Poor families, black families, white families, whoever opening up graduate education was important to me. That's a value that I feel strongly about. I came out of a situation where it was not obvious that I should be in graduate school, but somebody took a chance and I want to do that for others. Values that. Honesty, openness, integrity, hard work. I think you have to outwork everybody to really get identified with your cause. Do you think that hard work or work ethic is a learned behavior or people born that way? That's a really good question. I think there's a tendency born in people, but work takes different forms and I'm thinking of my own two children, one of them is a peripheral learner. If he's in a room with six conversations going, he'll walk out and know what said in every one of those conversations. Did he work at it? That's just the way he felt. He's good at that. It comes across as if he had worked. My daughter is the kind that focuses and works till things are just exactly the way she wants them and then moves on. Is it born Well, to an extent that was for their personality, but they both have learned to use their skills in different ways. So where do you fit on a scale between peripheral learner and laser focus? I have a bit of both. I do pay attention to people. I do pay attention to what's going on around me. I pick up clues and what have you, and I synthesize from it, but I've also been known to work straight through 36 hours to get a grant proposal out in a book written. This is the sort of thing that you do, you know, to get that to happen. So yeah, I can do both. Following up on that a little bit, what do you in general think are the essential qualities of an effective leader? We talked about you, but I mean in a, in a more general sense, I, I do think honesty and identifiable values and don't think a leader should be a dictator. I think a leader needs to be someone who inspires people to do what it is that they share as a goal. I think I also think honesty is important. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to inspire people? Well, it, it sneaked up on me. I had a conversation with David Wilkes in the school Medicine. He had been brought in, he's a black scientist and physician. He'd been brought in to run a diversity program, and I immediately began helping him. He just he was too good a researcher to be thrown into something like that, so we developed a friendship, had a conversation with him a few years down the line. He said something to me that just really surprised me. He said, you are a charismatic leader I said, no, I'm not, I'm not, that, I'm not that at all. He said, well you are because when you walk in a room, everybody knows what you're about. I thought about that and I thought, okay, it's not me, it's the principles I stand for, and that is what people are seeing. So I can buy that, I don't buy that I'm charismatic, but I do buy that you can project the values and principles to the point that people are attracted to it. So a leader has to stand for something. Stand for something, right? So, do you remember a point in your professional development when you began to realize that you were a leader? I'm not asking for like a particular day, but I mean a point in the career trajectory. Yes. I had been, excuse me. I've been asked to chair some committees in the department. And that's the department of Map? No, Department of Pharmacology. Okay. In the school. Okay. Sorry. Right. And they were committees like graduate education. We're looking at the curriculum admissions that kind of I found out that I could look at efficient ways to do these things and then persuade my colleagues to change, to do them this way. Because the systems that existed were pushing pieces of paper from office to office and taking forever. And Jill lost them, and we had started over. This was the thing that was going on. I realized that I could see better ways to do things and I could persuade people to do them that way. That was probably the first really king. So do you think that the ability to persuade people to your point of view or the ability to persuade people to share your vision is an important quality of leadership? It is, yes, it really is. And I think you have to base it on logic and it can't become a personal issues my way or the highways. This looks like it's going to work better. Let's try this. It's persuasion. As you were climbing the career ladder, so to speak, and taken on various leadership roles, were there any leaders who you admired or who influenced your own understanding of what it meant to be a leader? I had read the Sandberg biographies of Lincoln. So I had admired Lincoln forever. And ever I read many other biographies, but those particular volumes are wonderful. I guess Lincoln would be the example I shared with you, the book Lincoln on Leadership. That came later when I was really thinking about trying this professionally. But yeah, this was the person that I probably thought of as as an ideal leader. Anybody in your professional environment that you admired? I admired. I see Gonzales. It's he was one of a kind. There was no way to emulate him. But what I admired was again, he was totally identified with what he stood for. He was a scientist, he wanted the pure experiment. If it went awry and gave you an unusual result, he would throw his hands back and laugh and say, this is an opportunity, we're going to learn something. So this kind of behavior was a good role model. So he was, he was a good model for how you run a laboratory leading that way. So years ago when we, I had a peripheral role in developing the Debia Center with Jerry Beco and some other people, we developed a set of standard questions that we don't always use anymore, but listen to your talk. Reminds me of one of those questions. And the question was, do you think leaders should read? Leader should read, yes. Oh, absolutely. So, I noticed that outside your field. Well, that's what that's where I was going with this. I noticed the things that you mentioned that you read don't have much to do with directly with medicine or pharmacology. No, I read plenty of that during the day. No, I've read history all my life. I love it. Um, Henry the second, Eleanor VaquertinI, Mean these are people you know, you read about and they're fascinating. Fascinating. So, yeah, I think you need to read. You've had a long career in the academy and a significant part of that was in leadership positions, whether it was committees or administration, as your career was developing. Did you have mentors who kind of guided you along the way? I mean, you could start with your higher education, but I mean, we were there are people who mentored you and showed you the way at one time or another. Yes. In college, I had two mentors. I would identify. One was a Professor of chemistry, Jack Perdu. Jack was a petroleum chemist by training, and he worked with pyxotropic clays, clays. And if you don't do anything to them, they look solid. But if you put, if you hit them, they turn liquid. So he talked about that kind of stuff and he talked about his career. And just in general, he was a good guy. So it was, it was good to get to know him. The person that probably did more in directing me into her seeking a higher degree was Alan Holt, who was another chemistry professor. He was young, had a young family, which I actually liked. I liked seeing that family life could be compatible with career. And he came from the University of Illinois, got his degree there, and so he saw potential in me. He encouraged me to apply for a wider Wilson Fellowship, which I got, which was unusual for a scientist. And encouraged me to apply at the University of Illinois and a lot of other top programs. So he was definitely a mentor. I had a very large role in my being able to do what I did. So for the benefit of somebody who might read the transcript or listen to this interview and not know much about the Academy, what is a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at that time, excuse me, was focused on training people to be teachers in higher education, or supporting the process involved an application where you were nominated by somebody from your faculty, and then if your application was strong enough, you got invited to an interview. Well, I had to borrow $100 to fly to Kansas City for the interview. And everybody told me, you're not going to get it because it's not given to non scientists. I mean, just scientists, it's all for non scientists. I had no particular worries about it. I was going to go for the experience and enjoy it and sat down with the interview committee. And the first thing somebody asked me was, what was the last book you read? Well, it happened to be the screwtape letters. They asked me about that, and I talked about the screwtape letters. And then they asked me a little bit about some of the other things. I walked out happy as a lark. I had a good time. We talked about some good stuff, we got to publish it. So that was very strong. It helped me get into graduate school, there's no question about it. I mean, that's another one of those sort of peer well, nice. I guess at that point you wouldn't be your peers but it's no faculty. It's a faculty reviewed. Awarded. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The interview committee was all faculty from various places. And I don't think there was a scientist in the room other than me, but I was fine. Is there anything okay. So we talked a little bit about the statement, the self reflective statement that you wrote on being an administrator and being a woman and male dominated graduate programs, that is faculty and what you described as a good old boys club in the School of Medicine. Right. Did any of those experiences influence the way you understood and practiced leadership? Yes, yes, I understood that women needed to be included at the highest level. So I did look at gender balance and where I could at ethnicity to try to keep balance. I think more fundamentally, I just looked at fairness. Are the right people in the room, are the people who can do the job in the room. And that wasn't always the case in some of those early years in the School of Medicine. People were excluded for silly reasons. So I think probably in that way, fairness and getting the right people in the room that that was an influence. So drawing on a lifetime of experience, do you think that there are differences in the ways that most men and most women understand and practice leadership? There are probably all the women over here and all the men over there is going to be overlap. There is overlap, right? I've known some very aggressive leaders who happen to be female, and I've known some very sympathetic and attentive leaders who are male. But I think there is it, I'm sure it's culturally put in place, but yeah, I think men are more comfortable and giving orders. I always thought it was a failure. If I got to the point that I had to order somebody to do something, I thought that if I could let people understand my reasoning and what I was trying to accomplish, that they would sign on and move forward. Now, they may not always understand exactly the path to get there, and they might ask advice on that, that's fine. But I didn't have to order them to head toward the goal. If I had to order them to head toward the goal, that that was not a success. And I think men are in general a little more comfortable with that kind of thing. So now that you're retired, we've retired for a few years. I haven't had a chance to reflect back on your career. If there were, if it were possible to have a duo for, heaven forbid. And there isn't obviously other things that you about your leadership style or approach that you would change. No, I did evolve into it because I had no leadership training. But what I came to was very comfortable for me, it fit my personality. It was successful with a number of people, it was not successful with everyone. But eventually those people moved out and we moved on. I don't think I could change it a lot without changing my personality. I think it fit my personality. So you mentioned you had no leadership training. Do you think that it's possible to train leaders or leaders born or are they made a, uh, educational process? Well, I think you can train to a degree. Certainly, my reading on leadership helped me move more quickly to some of the things that I came to. But I think if you don't have the commitment and desire to accomplish the goal, whatever it is, I don't think you can train that. I don't think hired guns are quite the right way to go. I think you have to have people who are believers. I believed in graduate education. I believe in graduate education. So it was an easy thing for me to get others pointed that direction. But if you had put a different goal in front of me, I, I don't know that I would have been as effective as a leader. So do you think that a quality, even effective leaders, the ability to, to frame and articulate goals? Yes, I think that's critical. They can be little goals, they have to have a big goal. In my case, it was after about a year I figured out we really needed Phds on this campus. Okay. That's the big goal, folks. Everybody in the room knows that that's what we're after. That means we've got to help faculty, we've got to help students, we've got to help administrators. We can't dilly dally around. We've got to look at what we're doing in the context of, this is where we want to go, and we have to have the infrastructure in place to do it.

Description of the video:

All right, so this interview is co sponsored by the Bias Center. And given your professional experience and given the co sponsorship of the Bias center, I want to ask you some questions about leadership, okay? And make the first one an easy one. How do you define leadership? How do you know when you see it? That's really a good question. I think for me what it is is that you become identified with a set of values and principles. That when you walk in the room somebody says, ah, she's all about graduate education. Therefore, you have an identity that you can draw others into and get actions out of them. Because they know where you're going and what you're trying to do. They agreed to some degree or another. I see it as a, as a process of sort of aggregating people to your cause by being well identified with your cause. So you mentioned values. What kind of values are at the core of your leadership being I, I don't know how to lie, I'm not good at it. So I think you have to be perfectly honest. If there's no hope for a proposal and the faculty person that's earnestly pitching it to you, you have to say there's no hope. You just have to be honest. You have to value the openness of communication. You have to value, well, given my family history, it would be dishonest not to say there's quality in all kinds of people. Poor families, black families, white families, whoever opening up graduate education was important to me. That's a value that I feel strongly about. I came out of a situation where it was not obvious that I should be in graduate school, but somebody took a chance and I want to do that for others. Values that. Honesty, openness, integrity, hard work. I think you have to outwork everybody to really get identified with your cause. Do you think that hard work or work ethic is a learned behavior or people born that way? That's a really good question. I think there's a tendency born in people, but work takes different forms and I'm thinking of my own two children, one of them is a peripheral learner. If he's in a room with six conversations going, he'll walk out and know what said in every one of those conversations. Did he work at it? That's just the way he felt. He's good at that. It comes across as if he had worked. My daughter is the kind that focuses and works till things are just exactly the way she wants them and then moves on. Is it born Well, to an extent that was for their personality, but they both have learned to use their skills in different ways. So where do you fit on a scale between peripheral learner and laser focus? I have a bit of both. I do pay attention to people. I do pay attention to what's going on around me. I pick up clues and what have you, and I synthesize from it, but I've also been known to work straight through 36 hours to get a grant proposal out in a book written. This is the sort of thing that you do, you know, to get that to happen. So yeah, I can do both. Following up on that a little bit, what do you in general think are the essential qualities of an effective leader? We talked about you, but I mean in a, in a more general sense, I, I do think honesty and identifiable values and don't think a leader should be a dictator. I think a leader needs to be someone who inspires people to do what it is that they share as a goal. I think I also think honesty is important. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to inspire people? Well, it, it sneaked up on me. I had a conversation with David Wilkes in the school Medicine. He had been brought in, he's a black scientist and physician. He'd been brought in to run a diversity program, and I immediately began helping him. He just he was too good a researcher to be thrown into something like that, so we developed a friendship, had a conversation with him a few years down the line. He said something to me that just really surprised me. He said, you are a charismatic leader I said, no, I'm not, I'm not, that, I'm not that at all. He said, well you are because when you walk in a room, everybody knows what you're about. I thought about that and I thought, okay, it's not me, it's the principles I stand for, and that is what people are seeing. So I can buy that, I don't buy that I'm charismatic, but I do buy that you can project the values and principles to the point that people are attracted to it. So a leader has to stand for something. Stand for something, right? So, do you remember a point in your professional development when you began to realize that you were a leader? I'm not asking for like a particular day, but I mean a point in the career trajectory. Yes. I had been, excuse me. I've been asked to chair some committees in the department. And that's the department of Map? No, Department of Pharmacology. Okay. In the school. Okay. Sorry. Right. And they were committees like graduate education. We're looking at the curriculum admissions that kind of I found out that I could look at efficient ways to do these things and then persuade my colleagues to change, to do them this way. Because the systems that existed were pushing pieces of paper from office to office and taking forever. And Jill lost them, and we had started over. This was the thing that was going on. I realized that I could see better ways to do things and I could persuade people to do them that way. That was probably the first really king. So do you think that the ability to persuade people to your point of view or the ability to persuade people to share your vision is an important quality of leadership? It is, yes, it really is. And I think you have to base it on logic and it can't become a personal issues my way or the highways. This looks like it's going to work better. Let's try this. It's persuasion. As you were climbing the career ladder, so to speak, and taken on various leadership roles, were there any leaders who you admired or who influenced your own understanding of what it meant to be a leader? I had read the Sandberg biographies of Lincoln. So I had admired Lincoln forever. And ever I read many other biographies, but those particular volumes are wonderful. I guess Lincoln would be the example I shared with you, the book Lincoln on Leadership. That came later when I was really thinking about trying this professionally. But yeah, this was the person that I probably thought of as as an ideal leader. Anybody in your professional environment that you admired? I admired. I see Gonzales. It's he was one of a kind. There was no way to emulate him. But what I admired was again, he was totally identified with what he stood for. He was a scientist, he wanted the pure experiment. If it went awry and gave you an unusual result, he would throw his hands back and laugh and say, this is an opportunity, we're going to learn something. So this kind of behavior was a good role model. So he was, he was a good model for how you run a laboratory leading that way. So years ago when we, I had a peripheral role in developing the Debia Center with Jerry Beco and some other people, we developed a set of standard questions that we don't always use anymore, but listen to your talk. Reminds me of one of those questions. And the question was, do you think leaders should read? Leader should read, yes. Oh, absolutely. So, I noticed that outside your field. Well, that's what that's where I was going with this. I noticed the things that you mentioned that you read don't have much to do with directly with medicine or pharmacology. No, I read plenty of that during the day. No, I've read history all my life. I love it. Um, Henry the second, Eleanor VaquertinI, Mean these are people you know, you read about and they're fascinating. Fascinating. So, yeah, I think you need to read. You've had a long career in the academy and a significant part of that was in leadership positions, whether it was committees or administration, as your career was developing. Did you have mentors who kind of guided you along the way? I mean, you could start with your higher education, but I mean, we were there are people who mentored you and showed you the way at one time or another. Yes. In college, I had two mentors. I would identify. One was a Professor of chemistry, Jack Perdu. Jack was a petroleum chemist by training, and he worked with pyxotropic clays, clays. And if you don't do anything to them, they look solid. But if you put, if you hit them, they turn liquid. So he talked about that kind of stuff and he talked about his career. And just in general, he was a good guy. So it was, it was good to get to know him. The person that probably did more in directing me into her seeking a higher degree was Alan Holt, who was another chemistry professor. He was young, had a young family, which I actually liked. I liked seeing that family life could be compatible with career. And he came from the University of Illinois, got his degree there, and so he saw potential in me. He encouraged me to apply for a wider Wilson Fellowship, which I got, which was unusual for a scientist. And encouraged me to apply at the University of Illinois and a lot of other top programs. So he was definitely a mentor. I had a very large role in my being able to do what I did. So for the benefit of somebody who might read the transcript or listen to this interview and not know much about the Academy, what is a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at that time, excuse me, was focused on training people to be teachers in higher education, or supporting the process involved an application where you were nominated by somebody from your faculty, and then if your application was strong enough, you got invited to an interview. Well, I had to borrow $100 to fly to Kansas City for the interview. And everybody told me, you're not going to get it because it's not given to non scientists. I mean, just scientists, it's all for non scientists. I had no particular worries about it. I was going to go for the experience and enjoy it and sat down with the interview committee. And the first thing somebody asked me was, what was the last book you read? Well, it happened to be the screwtape letters. They asked me about that, and I talked about the screwtape letters. And then they asked me a little bit about some of the other things. I walked out happy as a lark. I had a good time. We talked about some good stuff, we got to publish it. So that was very strong. It helped me get into graduate school, there's no question about it. I mean, that's another one of those sort of peer well, nice. I guess at that point you wouldn't be your peers but it's no faculty. It's a faculty reviewed. Awarded. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The interview committee was all faculty from various places. And I don't think there was a scientist in the room other than me, but I was fine. Is there anything okay. So we talked a little bit about the statement, the self reflective statement that you wrote on being an administrator and being a woman and male dominated graduate programs, that is faculty and what you described as a good old boys club in the School of Medicine. Right. Did any of those experiences influence the way you understood and practiced leadership? Yes, yes, I understood that women needed to be included at the highest level. So I did look at gender balance and where I could at ethnicity to try to keep balance. I think more fundamentally, I just looked at fairness. Are the right people in the room, are the people who can do the job in the room. And that wasn't always the case in some of those early years in the School of Medicine. People were excluded for silly reasons. So I think probably in that way, fairness and getting the right people in the room that that was an influence. So drawing on a lifetime of experience, do you think that there are differences in the ways that most men and most women understand and practice leadership? There are probably all the women over here and all the men over there is going to be overlap. There is overlap, right? I've known some very aggressive leaders who happen to be female, and I've known some very sympathetic and attentive leaders who are male. But I think there is it, I'm sure it's culturally put in place, but yeah, I think men are more comfortable and giving orders. I always thought it was a failure. If I got to the point that I had to order somebody to do something, I thought that if I could let people understand my reasoning and what I was trying to accomplish, that they would sign on and move forward. Now, they may not always understand exactly the path to get there, and they might ask advice on that, that's fine. But I didn't have to order them to head toward the goal. If I had to order them to head toward the goal, that that was not a success. And I think men are in general a little more comfortable with that kind of thing. So now that you're retired, we've retired for a few years. I haven't had a chance to reflect back on your career. If there were, if it were possible to have a duo for, heaven forbid. And there isn't obviously other things that you about your leadership style or approach that you would change. No, I did evolve into it because I had no leadership training. But what I came to was very comfortable for me, it fit my personality. It was successful with a number of people, it was not successful with everyone. But eventually those people moved out and we moved on. I don't think I could change it a lot without changing my personality. I think it fit my personality. So you mentioned you had no leadership training. Do you think that it's possible to train leaders or leaders born or are they made a, uh, educational process? Well, I think you can train to a degree. Certainly, my reading on leadership helped me move more quickly to some of the things that I came to. But I think if you don't have the commitment and desire to accomplish the goal, whatever it is, I don't think you can train that. I don't think hired guns are quite the right way to go. I think you have to have people who are believers. I believed in graduate education. I believe in graduate education. So it was an easy thing for me to get others pointed that direction. But if you had put a different goal in front of me, I, I don't know that I would have been as effective as a leader. So do you think that a quality, even effective leaders, the ability to, to frame and articulate goals? Yes, I think that's critical. They can be little goals, they have to have a big goal. In my case, it was after about a year I figured out we really needed Phds on this campus. Okay. That's the big goal, folks. Everybody in the room knows that that's what we're after. That means we've got to help faculty, we've got to help students, we've got to help administrators. We can't dilly dally around. We've got to look at what we're doing in the context of, this is where we want to go, and we have to have the infrastructure in place to do it.

Description of the video:

All right, so this interview is co sponsored by the Bias Center. And given your professional experience and given the co sponsorship of the Bias center, I want to ask you some questions about leadership, okay? And make the first one an easy one. How do you define leadership? How do you know when you see it? That's really a good question. I think for me what it is is that you become identified with a set of values and principles. That when you walk in the room somebody says, ah, she's all about graduate education. Therefore, you have an identity that you can draw others into and get actions out of them. Because they know where you're going and what you're trying to do. They agreed to some degree or another. I see it as a, as a process of sort of aggregating people to your cause by being well identified with your cause. So you mentioned values. What kind of values are at the core of your leadership being I, I don't know how to lie, I'm not good at it. So I think you have to be perfectly honest. If there's no hope for a proposal and the faculty person that's earnestly pitching it to you, you have to say there's no hope. You just have to be honest. You have to value the openness of communication. You have to value, well, given my family history, it would be dishonest not to say there's quality in all kinds of people. Poor families, black families, white families, whoever opening up graduate education was important to me. That's a value that I feel strongly about. I came out of a situation where it was not obvious that I should be in graduate school, but somebody took a chance and I want to do that for others. Values that. Honesty, openness, integrity, hard work. I think you have to outwork everybody to really get identified with your cause. Do you think that hard work or work ethic is a learned behavior or people born that way? That's a really good question. I think there's a tendency born in people, but work takes different forms and I'm thinking of my own two children, one of them is a peripheral learner. If he's in a room with six conversations going, he'll walk out and know what said in every one of those conversations. Did he work at it? That's just the way he felt. He's good at that. It comes across as if he had worked. My daughter is the kind that focuses and works till things are just exactly the way she wants them and then moves on. Is it born Well, to an extent that was for their personality, but they both have learned to use their skills in different ways. So where do you fit on a scale between peripheral learner and laser focus? I have a bit of both. I do pay attention to people. I do pay attention to what's going on around me. I pick up clues and what have you, and I synthesize from it, but I've also been known to work straight through 36 hours to get a grant proposal out in a book written. This is the sort of thing that you do, you know, to get that to happen. So yeah, I can do both. Following up on that a little bit, what do you in general think are the essential qualities of an effective leader? We talked about you, but I mean in a, in a more general sense, I, I do think honesty and identifiable values and don't think a leader should be a dictator. I think a leader needs to be someone who inspires people to do what it is that they share as a goal. I think I also think honesty is important. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to inspire people? Well, it, it sneaked up on me. I had a conversation with David Wilkes in the school Medicine. He had been brought in, he's a black scientist and physician. He'd been brought in to run a diversity program, and I immediately began helping him. He just he was too good a researcher to be thrown into something like that, so we developed a friendship, had a conversation with him a few years down the line. He said something to me that just really surprised me. He said, you are a charismatic leader I said, no, I'm not, I'm not, that, I'm not that at all. He said, well you are because when you walk in a room, everybody knows what you're about. I thought about that and I thought, okay, it's not me, it's the principles I stand for, and that is what people are seeing. So I can buy that, I don't buy that I'm charismatic, but I do buy that you can project the values and principles to the point that people are attracted to it. So a leader has to stand for something. Stand for something, right? So, do you remember a point in your professional development when you began to realize that you were a leader? I'm not asking for like a particular day, but I mean a point in the career trajectory. Yes. I had been, excuse me. I've been asked to chair some committees in the department. And that's the department of Map? No, Department of Pharmacology. Okay. In the school. Okay. Sorry. Right. And they were committees like graduate education. We're looking at the curriculum admissions that kind of I found out that I could look at efficient ways to do these things and then persuade my colleagues to change, to do them this way. Because the systems that existed were pushing pieces of paper from office to office and taking forever. And Jill lost them, and we had started over. This was the thing that was going on. I realized that I could see better ways to do things and I could persuade people to do them that way. That was probably the first really king. So do you think that the ability to persuade people to your point of view or the ability to persuade people to share your vision is an important quality of leadership? It is, yes, it really is. And I think you have to base it on logic and it can't become a personal issues my way or the highways. This looks like it's going to work better. Let's try this. It's persuasion. As you were climbing the career ladder, so to speak, and taken on various leadership roles, were there any leaders who you admired or who influenced your own understanding of what it meant to be a leader? I had read the Sandberg biographies of Lincoln. So I had admired Lincoln forever. And ever I read many other biographies, but those particular volumes are wonderful. I guess Lincoln would be the example I shared with you, the book Lincoln on Leadership. That came later when I was really thinking about trying this professionally. But yeah, this was the person that I probably thought of as as an ideal leader. Anybody in your professional environment that you admired? I admired. I see Gonzales. It's he was one of a kind. There was no way to emulate him. But what I admired was again, he was totally identified with what he stood for. He was a scientist, he wanted the pure experiment. If it went awry and gave you an unusual result, he would throw his hands back and laugh and say, this is an opportunity, we're going to learn something. So this kind of behavior was a good role model. So he was, he was a good model for how you run a laboratory leading that way. So years ago when we, I had a peripheral role in developing the Debia Center with Jerry Beco and some other people, we developed a set of standard questions that we don't always use anymore, but listen to your talk. Reminds me of one of those questions. And the question was, do you think leaders should read? Leader should read, yes. Oh, absolutely. So, I noticed that outside your field. Well, that's what that's where I was going with this. I noticed the things that you mentioned that you read don't have much to do with directly with medicine or pharmacology. No, I read plenty of that during the day. No, I've read history all my life. I love it. Um, Henry the second, Eleanor VaquertinI, Mean these are people you know, you read about and they're fascinating. Fascinating. So, yeah, I think you need to read. You've had a long career in the academy and a significant part of that was in leadership positions, whether it was committees or administration, as your career was developing. Did you have mentors who kind of guided you along the way? I mean, you could start with your higher education, but I mean, we were there are people who mentored you and showed you the way at one time or another. Yes. In college, I had two mentors. I would identify. One was a Professor of chemistry, Jack Perdu. Jack was a petroleum chemist by training, and he worked with pyxotropic clays, clays. And if you don't do anything to them, they look solid. But if you put, if you hit them, they turn liquid. So he talked about that kind of stuff and he talked about his career. And just in general, he was a good guy. So it was, it was good to get to know him. The person that probably did more in directing me into her seeking a higher degree was Alan Holt, who was another chemistry professor. He was young, had a young family, which I actually liked. I liked seeing that family life could be compatible with career. And he came from the University of Illinois, got his degree there, and so he saw potential in me. He encouraged me to apply for a wider Wilson Fellowship, which I got, which was unusual for a scientist. And encouraged me to apply at the University of Illinois and a lot of other top programs. So he was definitely a mentor. I had a very large role in my being able to do what I did. So for the benefit of somebody who might read the transcript or listen to this interview and not know much about the Academy, what is a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at that time, excuse me, was focused on training people to be teachers in higher education, or supporting the process involved an application where you were nominated by somebody from your faculty, and then if your application was strong enough, you got invited to an interview. Well, I had to borrow $100 to fly to Kansas City for the interview. And everybody told me, you're not going to get it because it's not given to non scientists. I mean, just scientists, it's all for non scientists. I had no particular worries about it. I was going to go for the experience and enjoy it and sat down with the interview committee. And the first thing somebody asked me was, what was the last book you read? Well, it happened to be the screwtape letters. They asked me about that, and I talked about the screwtape letters. And then they asked me a little bit about some of the other things. I walked out happy as a lark. I had a good time. We talked about some good stuff, we got to publish it. So that was very strong. It helped me get into graduate school, there's no question about it. I mean, that's another one of those sort of peer well, nice. I guess at that point you wouldn't be your peers but it's no faculty. It's a faculty reviewed. Awarded. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The interview committee was all faculty from various places. And I don't think there was a scientist in the room other than me, but I was fine. Is there anything okay. So we talked a little bit about the statement, the self reflective statement that you wrote on being an administrator and being a woman and male dominated graduate programs, that is faculty and what you described as a good old boys club in the School of Medicine. Right. Did any of those experiences influence the way you understood and practiced leadership? Yes, yes, I understood that women needed to be included at the highest level. So I did look at gender balance and where I could at ethnicity to try to keep balance. I think more fundamentally, I just looked at fairness. Are the right people in the room, are the people who can do the job in the room. And that wasn't always the case in some of those early years in the School of Medicine. People were excluded for silly reasons. So I think probably in that way, fairness and getting the right people in the room that that was an influence. So drawing on a lifetime of experience, do you think that there are differences in the ways that most men and most women understand and practice leadership? There are probably all the women over here and all the men over there is going to be overlap. There is overlap, right? I've known some very aggressive leaders who happen to be female, and I've known some very sympathetic and attentive leaders who are male. But I think there is it, I'm sure it's culturally put in place, but yeah, I think men are more comfortable and giving orders. I always thought it was a failure. If I got to the point that I had to order somebody to do something, I thought that if I could let people understand my reasoning and what I was trying to accomplish, that they would sign on and move forward. Now, they may not always understand exactly the path to get there, and they might ask advice on that, that's fine. But I didn't have to order them to head toward the goal. If I had to order them to head toward the goal, that that was not a success. And I think men are in general a little more comfortable with that kind of thing. So now that you're retired, we've retired for a few years. I haven't had a chance to reflect back on your career. If there were, if it were possible to have a duo for, heaven forbid. And there isn't obviously other things that you about your leadership style or approach that you would change. No, I did evolve into it because I had no leadership training. But what I came to was very comfortable for me, it fit my personality. It was successful with a number of people, it was not successful with everyone. But eventually those people moved out and we moved on. I don't think I could change it a lot without changing my personality. I think it fit my personality. So you mentioned you had no leadership training. Do you think that it's possible to train leaders or leaders born or are they made a, uh, educational process? Well, I think you can train to a degree. Certainly, my reading on leadership helped me move more quickly to some of the things that I came to. But I think if you don't have the commitment and desire to accomplish the goal, whatever it is, I don't think you can train that. I don't think hired guns are quite the right way to go. I think you have to have people who are believers. I believed in graduate education. I believe in graduate education. So it was an easy thing for me to get others pointed that direction. But if you had put a different goal in front of me, I, I don't know that I would have been as effective as a leader. So do you think that a quality, even effective leaders, the ability to, to frame and articulate goals? Yes, I think that's critical. They can be little goals, they have to have a big goal. In my case, it was after about a year I figured out we really needed Phds on this campus. Okay. That's the big goal, folks. Everybody in the room knows that that's what we're after. That means we've got to help faculty, we've got to help students, we've got to help administrators. We can't dilly dally around. We've got to look at what we're doing in the context of, this is where we want to go, and we have to have the infrastructure in place to do it.

Description of the video:

All right, so this interview is co sponsored by the Bias Center. And given your professional experience and given the co sponsorship of the Bias center, I want to ask you some questions about leadership, okay? And make the first one an easy one. How do you define leadership? How do you know when you see it? That's really a good question. I think for me what it is is that you become identified with a set of values and principles. That when you walk in the room somebody says, ah, she's all about graduate education. Therefore, you have an identity that you can draw others into and get actions out of them. Because they know where you're going and what you're trying to do. They agreed to some degree or another. I see it as a, as a process of sort of aggregating people to your cause by being well identified with your cause. So you mentioned values. What kind of values are at the core of your leadership being I, I don't know how to lie, I'm not good at it. So I think you have to be perfectly honest. If there's no hope for a proposal and the faculty person that's earnestly pitching it to you, you have to say there's no hope. You just have to be honest. You have to value the openness of communication. You have to value, well, given my family history, it would be dishonest not to say there's quality in all kinds of people. Poor families, black families, white families, whoever opening up graduate education was important to me. That's a value that I feel strongly about. I came out of a situation where it was not obvious that I should be in graduate school, but somebody took a chance and I want to do that for others. Values that. Honesty, openness, integrity, hard work. I think you have to outwork everybody to really get identified with your cause. Do you think that hard work or work ethic is a learned behavior or people born that way? That's a really good question. I think there's a tendency born in people, but work takes different forms and I'm thinking of my own two children, one of them is a peripheral learner. If he's in a room with six conversations going, he'll walk out and know what said in every one of those conversations. Did he work at it? That's just the way he felt. He's good at that. It comes across as if he had worked. My daughter is the kind that focuses and works till things are just exactly the way she wants them and then moves on. Is it born Well, to an extent that was for their personality, but they both have learned to use their skills in different ways. So where do you fit on a scale between peripheral learner and laser focus? I have a bit of both. I do pay attention to people. I do pay attention to what's going on around me. I pick up clues and what have you, and I synthesize from it, but I've also been known to work straight through 36 hours to get a grant proposal out in a book written. This is the sort of thing that you do, you know, to get that to happen. So yeah, I can do both. Following up on that a little bit, what do you in general think are the essential qualities of an effective leader? We talked about you, but I mean in a, in a more general sense, I, I do think honesty and identifiable values and don't think a leader should be a dictator. I think a leader needs to be someone who inspires people to do what it is that they share as a goal. I think I also think honesty is important. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to inspire people? Well, it, it sneaked up on me. I had a conversation with David Wilkes in the school Medicine. He had been brought in, he's a black scientist and physician. He'd been brought in to run a diversity program, and I immediately began helping him. He just he was too good a researcher to be thrown into something like that, so we developed a friendship, had a conversation with him a few years down the line. He said something to me that just really surprised me. He said, you are a charismatic leader I said, no, I'm not, I'm not, that, I'm not that at all. He said, well you are because when you walk in a room, everybody knows what you're about. I thought about that and I thought, okay, it's not me, it's the principles I stand for, and that is what people are seeing. So I can buy that, I don't buy that I'm charismatic, but I do buy that you can project the values and principles to the point that people are attracted to it. So a leader has to stand for something. Stand for something, right? So, do you remember a point in your professional development when you began to realize that you were a leader? I'm not asking for like a particular day, but I mean a point in the career trajectory. Yes. I had been, excuse me. I've been asked to chair some committees in the department. And that's the department of Map? No, Department of Pharmacology. Okay. In the school. Okay. Sorry. Right. And they were committees like graduate education. We're looking at the curriculum admissions that kind of I found out that I could look at efficient ways to do these things and then persuade my colleagues to change, to do them this way. Because the systems that existed were pushing pieces of paper from office to office and taking forever. And Jill lost them, and we had started over. This was the thing that was going on. I realized that I could see better ways to do things and I could persuade people to do them that way. That was probably the first really king. So do you think that the ability to persuade people to your point of view or the ability to persuade people to share your vision is an important quality of leadership? It is, yes, it really is. And I think you have to base it on logic and it can't become a personal issues my way or the highways. This looks like it's going to work better. Let's try this. It's persuasion. As you were climbing the career ladder, so to speak, and taken on various leadership roles, were there any leaders who you admired or who influenced your own understanding of what it meant to be a leader? I had read the Sandberg biographies of Lincoln. So I had admired Lincoln forever. And ever I read many other biographies, but those particular volumes are wonderful. I guess Lincoln would be the example I shared with you, the book Lincoln on Leadership. That came later when I was really thinking about trying this professionally. But yeah, this was the person that I probably thought of as as an ideal leader. Anybody in your professional environment that you admired? I admired. I see Gonzales. It's he was one of a kind. There was no way to emulate him. But what I admired was again, he was totally identified with what he stood for. He was a scientist, he wanted the pure experiment. If it went awry and gave you an unusual result, he would throw his hands back and laugh and say, this is an opportunity, we're going to learn something. So this kind of behavior was a good role model. So he was, he was a good model for how you run a laboratory leading that way. So years ago when we, I had a peripheral role in developing the Debia Center with Jerry Beco and some other people, we developed a set of standard questions that we don't always use anymore, but listen to your talk. Reminds me of one of those questions. And the question was, do you think leaders should read? Leader should read, yes. Oh, absolutely. So, I noticed that outside your field. Well, that's what that's where I was going with this. I noticed the things that you mentioned that you read don't have much to do with directly with medicine or pharmacology. No, I read plenty of that during the day. No, I've read history all my life. I love it. Um, Henry the second, Eleanor VaquertinI, Mean these are people you know, you read about and they're fascinating. Fascinating. So, yeah, I think you need to read. You've had a long career in the academy and a significant part of that was in leadership positions, whether it was committees or administration, as your career was developing. Did you have mentors who kind of guided you along the way? I mean, you could start with your higher education, but I mean, we were there are people who mentored you and showed you the way at one time or another. Yes. In college, I had two mentors. I would identify. One was a Professor of chemistry, Jack Perdu. Jack was a petroleum chemist by training, and he worked with pyxotropic clays, clays. And if you don't do anything to them, they look solid. But if you put, if you hit them, they turn liquid. So he talked about that kind of stuff and he talked about his career. And just in general, he was a good guy. So it was, it was good to get to know him. The person that probably did more in directing me into her seeking a higher degree was Alan Holt, who was another chemistry professor. He was young, had a young family, which I actually liked. I liked seeing that family life could be compatible with career. And he came from the University of Illinois, got his degree there, and so he saw potential in me. He encouraged me to apply for a wider Wilson Fellowship, which I got, which was unusual for a scientist. And encouraged me to apply at the University of Illinois and a lot of other top programs. So he was definitely a mentor. I had a very large role in my being able to do what I did. So for the benefit of somebody who might read the transcript or listen to this interview and not know much about the Academy, what is a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at that time, excuse me, was focused on training people to be teachers in higher education, or supporting the process involved an application where you were nominated by somebody from your faculty, and then if your application was strong enough, you got invited to an interview. Well, I had to borrow $100 to fly to Kansas City for the interview. And everybody told me, you're not going to get it because it's not given to non scientists. I mean, just scientists, it's all for non scientists. I had no particular worries about it. I was going to go for the experience and enjoy it and sat down with the interview committee. And the first thing somebody asked me was, what was the last book you read? Well, it happened to be the screwtape letters. They asked me about that, and I talked about the screwtape letters. And then they asked me a little bit about some of the other things. I walked out happy as a lark. I had a good time. We talked about some good stuff, we got to publish it. So that was very strong. It helped me get into graduate school, there's no question about it. I mean, that's another one of those sort of peer well, nice. I guess at that point you wouldn't be your peers but it's no faculty. It's a faculty reviewed. Awarded. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The interview committee was all faculty from various places. And I don't think there was a scientist in the room other than me, but I was fine. Is there anything okay. So we talked a little bit about the statement, the self reflective statement that you wrote on being an administrator and being a woman and male dominated graduate programs, that is faculty and what you described as a good old boys club in the School of Medicine. Right. Did any of those experiences influence the way you understood and practiced leadership? Yes, yes, I understood that women needed to be included at the highest level. So I did look at gender balance and where I could at ethnicity to try to keep balance. I think more fundamentally, I just looked at fairness. Are the right people in the room, are the people who can do the job in the room. And that wasn't always the case in some of those early years in the School of Medicine. People were excluded for silly reasons. So I think probably in that way, fairness and getting the right people in the room that that was an influence. So drawing on a lifetime of experience, do you think that there are differences in the ways that most men and most women understand and practice leadership? There are probably all the women over here and all the men over there is going to be overlap. There is overlap, right? I've known some very aggressive leaders who happen to be female, and I've known some very sympathetic and attentive leaders who are male. But I think there is it, I'm sure it's culturally put in place, but yeah, I think men are more comfortable and giving orders. I always thought it was a failure. If I got to the point that I had to order somebody to do something, I thought that if I could let people understand my reasoning and what I was trying to accomplish, that they would sign on and move forward. Now, they may not always understand exactly the path to get there, and they might ask advice on that, that's fine. But I didn't have to order them to head toward the goal. If I had to order them to head toward the goal, that that was not a success. And I think men are in general a little more comfortable with that kind of thing. So now that you're retired, we've retired for a few years. I haven't had a chance to reflect back on your career. If there were, if it were possible to have a duo for, heaven forbid. And there isn't obviously other things that you about your leadership style or approach that you would change. No, I did evolve into it because I had no leadership training. But what I came to was very comfortable for me, it fit my personality. It was successful with a number of people, it was not successful with everyone. But eventually those people moved out and we moved on. I don't think I could change it a lot without changing my personality. I think it fit my personality. So you mentioned you had no leadership training. Do you think that it's possible to train leaders or leaders born or are they made a, uh, educational process? Well, I think you can train to a degree. Certainly, my reading on leadership helped me move more quickly to some of the things that I came to. But I think if you don't have the commitment and desire to accomplish the goal, whatever it is, I don't think you can train that. I don't think hired guns are quite the right way to go. I think you have to have people who are believers. I believed in graduate education. I believe in graduate education. So it was an easy thing for me to get others pointed that direction. But if you had put a different goal in front of me, I, I don't know that I would have been as effective as a leader. So do you think that a quality, even effective leaders, the ability to, to frame and articulate goals? Yes, I think that's critical. They can be little goals, they have to have a big goal. In my case, it was after about a year I figured out we really needed Phds on this campus. Okay. That's the big goal, folks. Everybody in the room knows that that's what we're after. That means we've got to help faculty, we've got to help students, we've got to help administrators. We can't dilly dally around. We've got to look at what we're doing in the context of, this is where we want to go, and we have to have the infrastructure in place to do it.

Description of the video:

All right, so this interview is co sponsored by the Bias Center. And given your professional experience and given the co sponsorship of the Bias center, I want to ask you some questions about leadership, okay? And make the first one an easy one. How do you define leadership? How do you know when you see it? That's really a good question. I think for me what it is is that you become identified with a set of values and principles. That when you walk in the room somebody says, ah, she's all about graduate education. Therefore, you have an identity that you can draw others into and get actions out of them. Because they know where you're going and what you're trying to do. They agreed to some degree or another. I see it as a, as a process of sort of aggregating people to your cause by being well identified with your cause. So you mentioned values. What kind of values are at the core of your leadership being I, I don't know how to lie, I'm not good at it. So I think you have to be perfectly honest. If there's no hope for a proposal and the faculty person that's earnestly pitching it to you, you have to say there's no hope. You just have to be honest. You have to value the openness of communication. You have to value, well, given my family history, it would be dishonest not to say there's quality in all kinds of people. Poor families, black families, white families, whoever opening up graduate education was important to me. That's a value that I feel strongly about. I came out of a situation where it was not obvious that I should be in graduate school, but somebody took a chance and I want to do that for others. Values that. Honesty, openness, integrity, hard work. I think you have to outwork everybody to really get identified with your cause. Do you think that hard work or work ethic is a learned behavior or people born that way? That's a really good question. I think there's a tendency born in people, but work takes different forms and I'm thinking of my own two children, one of them is a peripheral learner. If he's in a room with six conversations going, he'll walk out and know what said in every one of those conversations. Did he work at it? That's just the way he felt. He's good at that. It comes across as if he had worked. My daughter is the kind that focuses and works till things are just exactly the way she wants them and then moves on. Is it born Well, to an extent that was for their personality, but they both have learned to use their skills in different ways. So where do you fit on a scale between peripheral learner and laser focus? I have a bit of both. I do pay attention to people. I do pay attention to what's going on around me. I pick up clues and what have you, and I synthesize from it, but I've also been known to work straight through 36 hours to get a grant proposal out in a book written. This is the sort of thing that you do, you know, to get that to happen. So yeah, I can do both. Following up on that a little bit, what do you in general think are the essential qualities of an effective leader? We talked about you, but I mean in a, in a more general sense, I, I do think honesty and identifiable values and don't think a leader should be a dictator. I think a leader needs to be someone who inspires people to do what it is that they share as a goal. I think I also think honesty is important. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to inspire people? Well, it, it sneaked up on me. I had a conversation with David Wilkes in the school Medicine. He had been brought in, he's a black scientist and physician. He'd been brought in to run a diversity program, and I immediately began helping him. He just he was too good a researcher to be thrown into something like that, so we developed a friendship, had a conversation with him a few years down the line. He said something to me that just really surprised me. He said, you are a charismatic leader I said, no, I'm not, I'm not, that, I'm not that at all. He said, well you are because when you walk in a room, everybody knows what you're about. I thought about that and I thought, okay, it's not me, it's the principles I stand for, and that is what people are seeing. So I can buy that, I don't buy that I'm charismatic, but I do buy that you can project the values and principles to the point that people are attracted to it. So a leader has to stand for something. Stand for something, right? So, do you remember a point in your professional development when you began to realize that you were a leader? I'm not asking for like a particular day, but I mean a point in the career trajectory. Yes. I had been, excuse me. I've been asked to chair some committees in the department. And that's the department of Map? No, Department of Pharmacology. Okay. In the school. Okay. Sorry. Right. And they were committees like graduate education. We're looking at the curriculum admissions that kind of I found out that I could look at efficient ways to do these things and then persuade my colleagues to change, to do them this way. Because the systems that existed were pushing pieces of paper from office to office and taking forever. And Jill lost them, and we had started over. This was the thing that was going on. I realized that I could see better ways to do things and I could persuade people to do them that way. That was probably the first really king. So do you think that the ability to persuade people to your point of view or the ability to persuade people to share your vision is an important quality of leadership? It is, yes, it really is. And I think you have to base it on logic and it can't become a personal issues my way or the highways. This looks like it's going to work better. Let's try this. It's persuasion. As you were climbing the career ladder, so to speak, and taken on various leadership roles, were there any leaders who you admired or who influenced your own understanding of what it meant to be a leader? I had read the Sandberg biographies of Lincoln. So I had admired Lincoln forever. And ever I read many other biographies, but those particular volumes are wonderful. I guess Lincoln would be the example I shared with you, the book Lincoln on Leadership. That came later when I was really thinking about trying this professionally. But yeah, this was the person that I probably thought of as as an ideal leader. Anybody in your professional environment that you admired? I admired. I see Gonzales. It's he was one of a kind. There was no way to emulate him. But what I admired was again, he was totally identified with what he stood for. He was a scientist, he wanted the pure experiment. If it went awry and gave you an unusual result, he would throw his hands back and laugh and say, this is an opportunity, we're going to learn something. So this kind of behavior was a good role model. So he was, he was a good model for how you run a laboratory leading that way. So years ago when we, I had a peripheral role in developing the Debia Center with Jerry Beco and some other people, we developed a set of standard questions that we don't always use anymore, but listen to your talk. Reminds me of one of those questions. And the question was, do you think leaders should read? Leader should read, yes. Oh, absolutely. So, I noticed that outside your field. Well, that's what that's where I was going with this. I noticed the things that you mentioned that you read don't have much to do with directly with medicine or pharmacology. No, I read plenty of that during the day. No, I've read history all my life. I love it. Um, Henry the second, Eleanor VaquertinI, Mean these are people you know, you read about and they're fascinating. Fascinating. So, yeah, I think you need to read. You've had a long career in the academy and a significant part of that was in leadership positions, whether it was committees or administration, as your career was developing. Did you have mentors who kind of guided you along the way? I mean, you could start with your higher education, but I mean, we were there are people who mentored you and showed you the way at one time or another. Yes. In college, I had two mentors. I would identify. One was a Professor of chemistry, Jack Perdu. Jack was a petroleum chemist by training, and he worked with pyxotropic clays, clays. And if you don't do anything to them, they look solid. But if you put, if you hit them, they turn liquid. So he talked about that kind of stuff and he talked about his career. And just in general, he was a good guy. So it was, it was good to get to know him. The person that probably did more in directing me into her seeking a higher degree was Alan Holt, who was another chemistry professor. He was young, had a young family, which I actually liked. I liked seeing that family life could be compatible with career. And he came from the University of Illinois, got his degree there, and so he saw potential in me. He encouraged me to apply for a wider Wilson Fellowship, which I got, which was unusual for a scientist. And encouraged me to apply at the University of Illinois and a lot of other top programs. So he was definitely a mentor. I had a very large role in my being able to do what I did. So for the benefit of somebody who might read the transcript or listen to this interview and not know much about the Academy, what is a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at that time, excuse me, was focused on training people to be teachers in higher education, or supporting the process involved an application where you were nominated by somebody from your faculty, and then if your application was strong enough, you got invited to an interview. Well, I had to borrow $100 to fly to Kansas City for the interview. And everybody told me, you're not going to get it because it's not given to non scientists. I mean, just scientists, it's all for non scientists. I had no particular worries about it. I was going to go for the experience and enjoy it and sat down with the interview committee. And the first thing somebody asked me was, what was the last book you read? Well, it happened to be the screwtape letters. They asked me about that, and I talked about the screwtape letters. And then they asked me a little bit about some of the other things. I walked out happy as a lark. I had a good time. We talked about some good stuff, we got to publish it. So that was very strong. It helped me get into graduate school, there's no question about it. I mean, that's another one of those sort of peer well, nice. I guess at that point you wouldn't be your peers but it's no faculty. It's a faculty reviewed. Awarded. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The interview committee was all faculty from various places. And I don't think there was a scientist in the room other than me, but I was fine. Is there anything okay. So we talked a little bit about the statement, the self reflective statement that you wrote on being an administrator and being a woman and male dominated graduate programs, that is faculty and what you described as a good old boys club in the School of Medicine. Right. Did any of those experiences influence the way you understood and practiced leadership? Yes, yes, I understood that women needed to be included at the highest level. So I did look at gender balance and where I could at ethnicity to try to keep balance. I think more fundamentally, I just looked at fairness. Are the right people in the room, are the people who can do the job in the room. And that wasn't always the case in some of those early years in the School of Medicine. People were excluded for silly reasons. So I think probably in that way, fairness and getting the right people in the room that that was an influence. So drawing on a lifetime of experience, do you think that there are differences in the ways that most men and most women understand and practice leadership? There are probably all the women over here and all the men over there is going to be overlap. There is overlap, right? I've known some very aggressive leaders who happen to be female, and I've known some very sympathetic and attentive leaders who are male. But I think there is it, I'm sure it's culturally put in place, but yeah, I think men are more comfortable and giving orders. I always thought it was a failure. If I got to the point that I had to order somebody to do something, I thought that if I could let people understand my reasoning and what I was trying to accomplish, that they would sign on and move forward. Now, they may not always understand exactly the path to get there, and they might ask advice on that, that's fine. But I didn't have to order them to head toward the goal. If I had to order them to head toward the goal, that that was not a success. And I think men are in general a little more comfortable with that kind of thing. So now that you're retired, we've retired for a few years. I haven't had a chance to reflect back on your career. If there were, if it were possible to have a duo for, heaven forbid. And there isn't obviously other things that you about your leadership style or approach that you would change. No, I did evolve into it because I had no leadership training. But what I came to was very comfortable for me, it fit my personality. It was successful with a number of people, it was not successful with everyone. But eventually those people moved out and we moved on. I don't think I could change it a lot without changing my personality. I think it fit my personality. So you mentioned you had no leadership training. Do you think that it's possible to train leaders or leaders born or are they made a, uh, educational process? Well, I think you can train to a degree. Certainly, my reading on leadership helped me move more quickly to some of the things that I came to. But I think if you don't have the commitment and desire to accomplish the goal, whatever it is, I don't think you can train that. I don't think hired guns are quite the right way to go. I think you have to have people who are believers. I believed in graduate education. I believe in graduate education. So it was an easy thing for me to get others pointed that direction. But if you had put a different goal in front of me, I, I don't know that I would have been as effective as a leader. So do you think that a quality, even effective leaders, the ability to, to frame and articulate goals? Yes, I think that's critical. They can be little goals, they have to have a big goal. In my case, it was after about a year I figured out we really needed Phds on this campus. Okay. That's the big goal, folks. Everybody in the room knows that that's what we're after. That means we've got to help faculty, we've got to help students, we've got to help administrators. We can't dilly dally around. We've got to look at what we're doing in the context of, this is where we want to go, and we have to have the infrastructure in place to do it.

Description of the video:

All right, so this interview is co sponsored by the Bias Center. And given your professional experience and given the co sponsorship of the Bias center, I want to ask you some questions about leadership, okay? And make the first one an easy one. How do you define leadership? How do you know when you see it? That's really a good question. I think for me what it is is that you become identified with a set of values and principles. That when you walk in the room somebody says, ah, she's all about graduate education. Therefore, you have an identity that you can draw others into and get actions out of them. Because they know where you're going and what you're trying to do. They agreed to some degree or another. I see it as a, as a process of sort of aggregating people to your cause by being well identified with your cause. So you mentioned values. What kind of values are at the core of your leadership being I, I don't know how to lie, I'm not good at it. So I think you have to be perfectly honest. If there's no hope for a proposal and the faculty person that's earnestly pitching it to you, you have to say there's no hope. You just have to be honest. You have to value the openness of communication. You have to value, well, given my family history, it would be dishonest not to say there's quality in all kinds of people. Poor families, black families, white families, whoever opening up graduate education was important to me. That's a value that I feel strongly about. I came out of a situation where it was not obvious that I should be in graduate school, but somebody took a chance and I want to do that for others. Values that. Honesty, openness, integrity, hard work. I think you have to outwork everybody to really get identified with your cause. Do you think that hard work or work ethic is a learned behavior or people born that way? That's a really good question. I think there's a tendency born in people, but work takes different forms and I'm thinking of my own two children, one of them is a peripheral learner. If he's in a room with six conversations going, he'll walk out and know what said in every one of those conversations. Did he work at it? That's just the way he felt. He's good at that. It comes across as if he had worked. My daughter is the kind that focuses and works till things are just exactly the way she wants them and then moves on. Is it born Well, to an extent that was for their personality, but they both have learned to use their skills in different ways. So where do you fit on a scale between peripheral learner and laser focus? I have a bit of both. I do pay attention to people. I do pay attention to what's going on around me. I pick up clues and what have you, and I synthesize from it, but I've also been known to work straight through 36 hours to get a grant proposal out in a book written. This is the sort of thing that you do, you know, to get that to happen. So yeah, I can do both. Following up on that a little bit, what do you in general think are the essential qualities of an effective leader? We talked about you, but I mean in a, in a more general sense, I, I do think honesty and identifiable values and don't think a leader should be a dictator. I think a leader needs to be someone who inspires people to do what it is that they share as a goal. I think I also think honesty is important. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to inspire people? Well, it, it sneaked up on me. I had a conversation with David Wilkes in the school Medicine. He had been brought in, he's a black scientist and physician. He'd been brought in to run a diversity program, and I immediately began helping him. He just he was too good a researcher to be thrown into something like that, so we developed a friendship, had a conversation with him a few years down the line. He said something to me that just really surprised me. He said, you are a charismatic leader I said, no, I'm not, I'm not, that, I'm not that at all. He said, well you are because when you walk in a room, everybody knows what you're about. I thought about that and I thought, okay, it's not me, it's the principles I stand for, and that is what people are seeing. So I can buy that, I don't buy that I'm charismatic, but I do buy that you can project the values and principles to the point that people are attracted to it. So a leader has to stand for something. Stand for something, right? So, do you remember a point in your professional development when you began to realize that you were a leader? I'm not asking for like a particular day, but I mean a point in the career trajectory. Yes. I had been, excuse me. I've been asked to chair some committees in the department. And that's the department of Map? No, Department of Pharmacology. Okay. In the school. Okay. Sorry. Right. And they were committees like graduate education. We're looking at the curriculum admissions that kind of I found out that I could look at efficient ways to do these things and then persuade my colleagues to change, to do them this way. Because the systems that existed were pushing pieces of paper from office to office and taking forever. And Jill lost them, and we had started over. This was the thing that was going on. I realized that I could see better ways to do things and I could persuade people to do them that way. That was probably the first really king. So do you think that the ability to persuade people to your point of view or the ability to persuade people to share your vision is an important quality of leadership? It is, yes, it really is. And I think you have to base it on logic and it can't become a personal issues my way or the highways. This looks like it's going to work better. Let's try this. It's persuasion. As you were climbing the career ladder, so to speak, and taken on various leadership roles, were there any leaders who you admired or who influenced your own understanding of what it meant to be a leader? I had read the Sandberg biographies of Lincoln. So I had admired Lincoln forever. And ever I read many other biographies, but those particular volumes are wonderful. I guess Lincoln would be the example I shared with you, the book Lincoln on Leadership. That came later when I was really thinking about trying this professionally. But yeah, this was the person that I probably thought of as as an ideal leader. Anybody in your professional environment that you admired? I admired. I see Gonzales. It's he was one of a kind. There was no way to emulate him. But what I admired was again, he was totally identified with what he stood for. He was a scientist, he wanted the pure experiment. If it went awry and gave you an unusual result, he would throw his hands back and laugh and say, this is an opportunity, we're going to learn something. So this kind of behavior was a good role model. So he was, he was a good model for how you run a laboratory leading that way. So years ago when we, I had a peripheral role in developing the Debia Center with Jerry Beco and some other people, we developed a set of standard questions that we don't always use anymore, but listen to your talk. Reminds me of one of those questions. And the question was, do you think leaders should read? Leader should read, yes. Oh, absolutely. So, I noticed that outside your field. Well, that's what that's where I was going with this. I noticed the things that you mentioned that you read don't have much to do with directly with medicine or pharmacology. No, I read plenty of that during the day. No, I've read history all my life. I love it. Um, Henry the second, Eleanor VaquertinI, Mean these are people you know, you read about and they're fascinating. Fascinating. So, yeah, I think you need to read. You've had a long career in the academy and a significant part of that was in leadership positions, whether it was committees or administration, as your career was developing. Did you have mentors who kind of guided you along the way? I mean, you could start with your higher education, but I mean, we were there are people who mentored you and showed you the way at one time or another. Yes. In college, I had two mentors. I would identify. One was a Professor of chemistry, Jack Perdu. Jack was a petroleum chemist by training, and he worked with pyxotropic clays, clays. And if you don't do anything to them, they look solid. But if you put, if you hit them, they turn liquid. So he talked about that kind of stuff and he talked about his career. And just in general, he was a good guy. So it was, it was good to get to know him. The person that probably did more in directing me into her seeking a higher degree was Alan Holt, who was another chemistry professor. He was young, had a young family, which I actually liked. I liked seeing that family life could be compatible with career. And he came from the University of Illinois, got his degree there, and so he saw potential in me. He encouraged me to apply for a wider Wilson Fellowship, which I got, which was unusual for a scientist. And encouraged me to apply at the University of Illinois and a lot of other top programs. So he was definitely a mentor. I had a very large role in my being able to do what I did. So for the benefit of somebody who might read the transcript or listen to this interview and not know much about the Academy, what is a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at that time, excuse me, was focused on training people to be teachers in higher education, or supporting the process involved an application where you were nominated by somebody from your faculty, and then if your application was strong enough, you got invited to an interview. Well, I had to borrow $100 to fly to Kansas City for the interview. And everybody told me, you're not going to get it because it's not given to non scientists. I mean, just scientists, it's all for non scientists. I had no particular worries about it. I was going to go for the experience and enjoy it and sat down with the interview committee. And the first thing somebody asked me was, what was the last book you read? Well, it happened to be the screwtape letters. They asked me about that, and I talked about the screwtape letters. And then they asked me a little bit about some of the other things. I walked out happy as a lark. I had a good time. We talked about some good stuff, we got to publish it. So that was very strong. It helped me get into graduate school, there's no question about it. I mean, that's another one of those sort of peer well, nice. I guess at that point you wouldn't be your peers but it's no faculty. It's a faculty reviewed. Awarded. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The interview committee was all faculty from various places. And I don't think there was a scientist in the room other than me, but I was fine. Is there anything okay. So we talked a little bit about the statement, the self reflective statement that you wrote on being an administrator and being a woman and male dominated graduate programs, that is faculty and what you described as a good old boys club in the School of Medicine. Right. Did any of those experiences influence the way you understood and practiced leadership? Yes, yes, I understood that women needed to be included at the highest level. So I did look at gender balance and where I could at ethnicity to try to keep balance. I think more fundamentally, I just looked at fairness. Are the right people in the room, are the people who can do the job in the room. And that wasn't always the case in some of those early years in the School of Medicine. People were excluded for silly reasons. So I think probably in that way, fairness and getting the right people in the room that that was an influence. So drawing on a lifetime of experience, do you think that there are differences in the ways that most men and most women understand and practice leadership? There are probably all the women over here and all the men over there is going to be overlap. There is overlap, right? I've known some very aggressive leaders who happen to be female, and I've known some very sympathetic and attentive leaders who are male. But I think there is it, I'm sure it's culturally put in place, but yeah, I think men are more comfortable and giving orders. I always thought it was a failure. If I got to the point that I had to order somebody to do something, I thought that if I could let people understand my reasoning and what I was trying to accomplish, that they would sign on and move forward. Now, they may not always understand exactly the path to get there, and they might ask advice on that, that's fine. But I didn't have to order them to head toward the goal. If I had to order them to head toward the goal, that that was not a success. And I think men are in general a little more comfortable with that kind of thing. So now that you're retired, we've retired for a few years. I haven't had a chance to reflect back on your career. If there were, if it were possible to have a duo for, heaven forbid. And there isn't obviously other things that you about your leadership style or approach that you would change. No, I did evolve into it because I had no leadership training. But what I came to was very comfortable for me, it fit my personality. It was successful with a number of people, it was not successful with everyone. But eventually those people moved out and we moved on. I don't think I could change it a lot without changing my personality. I think it fit my personality. So you mentioned you had no leadership training. Do you think that it's possible to train leaders or leaders born or are they made a, uh, educational process? Well, I think you can train to a degree. Certainly, my reading on leadership helped me move more quickly to some of the things that I came to. But I think if you don't have the commitment and desire to accomplish the goal, whatever it is, I don't think you can train that. I don't think hired guns are quite the right way to go. I think you have to have people who are believers. I believed in graduate education. I believe in graduate education. So it was an easy thing for me to get others pointed that direction. But if you had put a different goal in front of me, I, I don't know that I would have been as effective as a leader. So do you think that a quality, even effective leaders, the ability to, to frame and articulate goals? Yes, I think that's critical. They can be little goals, they have to have a big goal. In my case, it was after about a year I figured out we really needed Phds on this campus. Okay. That's the big goal, folks. Everybody in the room knows that that's what we're after. That means we've got to help faculty, we've got to help students, we've got to help administrators. We can't dilly dally around. We've got to look at what we're doing in the context of, this is where we want to go, and we have to have the infrastructure in place to do it.

Description of the video:

All right, so this interview is co sponsored by the Bias Center. And given your professional experience and given the co sponsorship of the Bias center, I want to ask you some questions about leadership, okay? And make the first one an easy one. How do you define leadership? How do you know when you see it? That's really a good question. I think for me what it is is that you become identified with a set of values and principles. That when you walk in the room somebody says, ah, she's all about graduate education. Therefore, you have an identity that you can draw others into and get actions out of them. Because they know where you're going and what you're trying to do. They agreed to some degree or another. I see it as a, as a process of sort of aggregating people to your cause by being well identified with your cause. So you mentioned values. What kind of values are at the core of your leadership being I, I don't know how to lie, I'm not good at it. So I think you have to be perfectly honest. If there's no hope for a proposal and the faculty person that's earnestly pitching it to you, you have to say there's no hope. You just have to be honest. You have to value the openness of communication. You have to value, well, given my family history, it would be dishonest not to say there's quality in all kinds of people. Poor families, black families, white families, whoever opening up graduate education was important to me. That's a value that I feel strongly about. I came out of a situation where it was not obvious that I should be in graduate school, but somebody took a chance and I want to do that for others. Values that. Honesty, openness, integrity, hard work. I think you have to outwork everybody to really get identified with your cause. Do you think that hard work or work ethic is a learned behavior or people born that way? That's a really good question. I think there's a tendency born in people, but work takes different forms and I'm thinking of my own two children, one of them is a peripheral learner. If he's in a room with six conversations going, he'll walk out and know what said in every one of those conversations. Did he work at it? That's just the way he felt. He's good at that. It comes across as if he had worked. My daughter is the kind that focuses and works till things are just exactly the way she wants them and then moves on. Is it born Well, to an extent that was for their personality, but they both have learned to use their skills in different ways. So where do you fit on a scale between peripheral learner and laser focus? I have a bit of both. I do pay attention to people. I do pay attention to what's going on around me. I pick up clues and what have you, and I synthesize from it, but I've also been known to work straight through 36 hours to get a grant proposal out in a book written. This is the sort of thing that you do, you know, to get that to happen. So yeah, I can do both. Following up on that a little bit, what do you in general think are the essential qualities of an effective leader? We talked about you, but I mean in a, in a more general sense, I, I do think honesty and identifiable values and don't think a leader should be a dictator. I think a leader needs to be someone who inspires people to do what it is that they share as a goal. I think I also think honesty is important. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to inspire people? Well, it, it sneaked up on me. I had a conversation with David Wilkes in the school Medicine. He had been brought in, he's a black scientist and physician. He'd been brought in to run a diversity program, and I immediately began helping him. He just he was too good a researcher to be thrown into something like that, so we developed a friendship, had a conversation with him a few years down the line. He said something to me that just really surprised me. He said, you are a charismatic leader I said, no, I'm not, I'm not, that, I'm not that at all. He said, well you are because when you walk in a room, everybody knows what you're about. I thought about that and I thought, okay, it's not me, it's the principles I stand for, and that is what people are seeing. So I can buy that, I don't buy that I'm charismatic, but I do buy that you can project the values and principles to the point that people are attracted to it. So a leader has to stand for something. Stand for something, right? So, do you remember a point in your professional development when you began to realize that you were a leader? I'm not asking for like a particular day, but I mean a point in the career trajectory. Yes. I had been, excuse me. I've been asked to chair some committees in the department. And that's the department of Map? No, Department of Pharmacology. Okay. In the school. Okay. Sorry. Right. And they were committees like graduate education. We're looking at the curriculum admissions that kind of I found out that I could look at efficient ways to do these things and then persuade my colleagues to change, to do them this way. Because the systems that existed were pushing pieces of paper from office to office and taking forever. And Jill lost them, and we had started over. This was the thing that was going on. I realized that I could see better ways to do things and I could persuade people to do them that way. That was probably the first really king. So do you think that the ability to persuade people to your point of view or the ability to persuade people to share your vision is an important quality of leadership? It is, yes, it really is. And I think you have to base it on logic and it can't become a personal issues my way or the highways. This looks like it's going to work better. Let's try this. It's persuasion. As you were climbing the career ladder, so to speak, and taken on various leadership roles, were there any leaders who you admired or who influenced your own understanding of what it meant to be a leader? I had read the Sandberg biographies of Lincoln. So I had admired Lincoln forever. And ever I read many other biographies, but those particular volumes are wonderful. I guess Lincoln would be the example I shared with you, the book Lincoln on Leadership. That came later when I was really thinking about trying this professionally. But yeah, this was the person that I probably thought of as as an ideal leader. Anybody in your professional environment that you admired? I admired. I see Gonzales. It's he was one of a kind. There was no way to emulate him. But what I admired was again, he was totally identified with what he stood for. He was a scientist, he wanted the pure experiment. If it went awry and gave you an unusual result, he would throw his hands back and laugh and say, this is an opportunity, we're going to learn something. So this kind of behavior was a good role model. So he was, he was a good model for how you run a laboratory leading that way. So years ago when we, I had a peripheral role in developing the Debia Center with Jerry Beco and some other people, we developed a set of standard questions that we don't always use anymore, but listen to your talk. Reminds me of one of those questions. And the question was, do you think leaders should read? Leader should read, yes. Oh, absolutely. So, I noticed that outside your field. Well, that's what that's where I was going with this. I noticed the things that you mentioned that you read don't have much to do with directly with medicine or pharmacology. No, I read plenty of that during the day. No, I've read history all my life. I love it. Um, Henry the second, Eleanor VaquertinI, Mean these are people you know, you read about and they're fascinating. Fascinating. So, yeah, I think you need to read. You've had a long career in the academy and a significant part of that was in leadership positions, whether it was committees or administration, as your career was developing. Did you have mentors who kind of guided you along the way? I mean, you could start with your higher education, but I mean, we were there are people who mentored you and showed you the way at one time or another. Yes. In college, I had two mentors. I would identify. One was a Professor of chemistry, Jack Perdu. Jack was a petroleum chemist by training, and he worked with pyxotropic clays, clays. And if you don't do anything to them, they look solid. But if you put, if you hit them, they turn liquid. So he talked about that kind of stuff and he talked about his career. And just in general, he was a good guy. So it was, it was good to get to know him. The person that probably did more in directing me into her seeking a higher degree was Alan Holt, who was another chemistry professor. He was young, had a young family, which I actually liked. I liked seeing that family life could be compatible with career. And he came from the University of Illinois, got his degree there, and so he saw potential in me. He encouraged me to apply for a wider Wilson Fellowship, which I got, which was unusual for a scientist. And encouraged me to apply at the University of Illinois and a lot of other top programs. So he was definitely a mentor. I had a very large role in my being able to do what I did. So for the benefit of somebody who might read the transcript or listen to this interview and not know much about the Academy, what is a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at that time, excuse me, was focused on training people to be teachers in higher education, or supporting the process involved an application where you were nominated by somebody from your faculty, and then if your application was strong enough, you got invited to an interview. Well, I had to borrow $100 to fly to Kansas City for the interview. And everybody told me, you're not going to get it because it's not given to non scientists. I mean, just scientists, it's all for non scientists. I had no particular worries about it. I was going to go for the experience and enjoy it and sat down with the interview committee. And the first thing somebody asked me was, what was the last book you read? Well, it happened to be the screwtape letters. They asked me about that, and I talked about the screwtape letters. And then they asked me a little bit about some of the other things. I walked out happy as a lark. I had a good time. We talked about some good stuff, we got to publish it. So that was very strong. It helped me get into graduate school, there's no question about it. I mean, that's another one of those sort of peer well, nice. I guess at that point you wouldn't be your peers but it's no faculty. It's a faculty reviewed. Awarded. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The interview committee was all faculty from various places. And I don't think there was a scientist in the room other than me, but I was fine. Is there anything okay. So we talked a little bit about the statement, the self reflective statement that you wrote on being an administrator and being a woman and male dominated graduate programs, that is faculty and what you described as a good old boys club in the School of Medicine. Right. Did any of those experiences influence the way you understood and practiced leadership? Yes, yes, I understood that women needed to be included at the highest level. So I did look at gender balance and where I could at ethnicity to try to keep balance. I think more fundamentally, I just looked at fairness. Are the right people in the room, are the people who can do the job in the room. And that wasn't always the case in some of those early years in the School of Medicine. People were excluded for silly reasons. So I think probably in that way, fairness and getting the right people in the room that that was an influence. So drawing on a lifetime of experience, do you think that there are differences in the ways that most men and most women understand and practice leadership? There are probably all the women over here and all the men over there is going to be overlap. There is overlap, right? I've known some very aggressive leaders who happen to be female, and I've known some very sympathetic and attentive leaders who are male. But I think there is it, I'm sure it's culturally put in place, but yeah, I think men are more comfortable and giving orders. I always thought it was a failure. If I got to the point that I had to order somebody to do something, I thought that if I could let people understand my reasoning and what I was trying to accomplish, that they would sign on and move forward. Now, they may not always understand exactly the path to get there, and they might ask advice on that, that's fine. But I didn't have to order them to head toward the goal. If I had to order them to head toward the goal, that that was not a success. And I think men are in general a little more comfortable with that kind of thing. So now that you're retired, we've retired for a few years. I haven't had a chance to reflect back on your career. If there were, if it were possible to have a duo for, heaven forbid. And there isn't obviously other things that you about your leadership style or approach that you would change. No, I did evolve into it because I had no leadership training. But what I came to was very comfortable for me, it fit my personality. It was successful with a number of people, it was not successful with everyone. But eventually those people moved out and we moved on. I don't think I could change it a lot without changing my personality. I think it fit my personality. So you mentioned you had no leadership training. Do you think that it's possible to train leaders or leaders born or are they made a, uh, educational process? Well, I think you can train to a degree. Certainly, my reading on leadership helped me move more quickly to some of the things that I came to. But I think if you don't have the commitment and desire to accomplish the goal, whatever it is, I don't think you can train that. I don't think hired guns are quite the right way to go. I think you have to have people who are believers. I believed in graduate education. I believe in graduate education. So it was an easy thing for me to get others pointed that direction. But if you had put a different goal in front of me, I, I don't know that I would have been as effective as a leader. So do you think that a quality, even effective leaders, the ability to, to frame and articulate goals? Yes, I think that's critical. They can be little goals, they have to have a big goal. In my case, it was after about a year I figured out we really needed Phds on this campus. Okay. That's the big goal, folks. Everybody in the room knows that that's what we're after. That means we've got to help faculty, we've got to help students, we've got to help administrators. We can't dilly dally around. We've got to look at what we're doing in the context of, this is where we want to go, and we have to have the infrastructure in place to do it.

Description of the video:

All right, so this interview is co sponsored by the Bias Center. And given your professional experience and given the co sponsorship of the Bias center, I want to ask you some questions about leadership, okay? And make the first one an easy one. How do you define leadership? How do you know when you see it? That's really a good question. I think for me what it is is that you become identified with a set of values and principles. That when you walk in the room somebody says, ah, she's all about graduate education. Therefore, you have an identity that you can draw others into and get actions out of them. Because they know where you're going and what you're trying to do. They agreed to some degree or another. I see it as a, as a process of sort of aggregating people to your cause by being well identified with your cause. So you mentioned values. What kind of values are at the core of your leadership being I, I don't know how to lie, I'm not good at it. So I think you have to be perfectly honest. If there's no hope for a proposal and the faculty person that's earnestly pitching it to you, you have to say there's no hope. You just have to be honest. You have to value the openness of communication. You have to value, well, given my family history, it would be dishonest not to say there's quality in all kinds of people. Poor families, black families, white families, whoever opening up graduate education was important to me. That's a value that I feel strongly about. I came out of a situation where it was not obvious that I should be in graduate school, but somebody took a chance and I want to do that for others. Values that. Honesty, openness, integrity, hard work. I think you have to outwork everybody to really get identified with your cause. Do you think that hard work or work ethic is a learned behavior or people born that way? That's a really good question. I think there's a tendency born in people, but work takes different forms and I'm thinking of my own two children, one of them is a peripheral learner. If he's in a room with six conversations going, he'll walk out and know what said in every one of those conversations. Did he work at it? That's just the way he felt. He's good at that. It comes across as if he had worked. My daughter is the kind that focuses and works till things are just exactly the way she wants them and then moves on. Is it born Well, to an extent that was for their personality, but they both have learned to use their skills in different ways. So where do you fit on a scale between peripheral learner and laser focus? I have a bit of both. I do pay attention to people. I do pay attention to what's going on around me. I pick up clues and what have you, and I synthesize from it, but I've also been known to work straight through 36 hours to get a grant proposal out in a book written. This is the sort of thing that you do, you know, to get that to happen. So yeah, I can do both. Following up on that a little bit, what do you in general think are the essential qualities of an effective leader? We talked about you, but I mean in a, in a more general sense, I, I do think honesty and identifiable values and don't think a leader should be a dictator. I think a leader needs to be someone who inspires people to do what it is that they share as a goal. I think I also think honesty is important. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to inspire people? Well, it, it sneaked up on me. I had a conversation with David Wilkes in the school Medicine. He had been brought in, he's a black scientist and physician. He'd been brought in to run a diversity program, and I immediately began helping him. He just he was too good a researcher to be thrown into something like that, so we developed a friendship, had a conversation with him a few years down the line. He said something to me that just really surprised me. He said, you are a charismatic leader I said, no, I'm not, I'm not, that, I'm not that at all. He said, well you are because when you walk in a room, everybody knows what you're about. I thought about that and I thought, okay, it's not me, it's the principles I stand for, and that is what people are seeing. So I can buy that, I don't buy that I'm charismatic, but I do buy that you can project the values and principles to the point that people are attracted to it. So a leader has to stand for something. Stand for something, right? So, do you remember a point in your professional development when you began to realize that you were a leader? I'm not asking for like a particular day, but I mean a point in the career trajectory. Yes. I had been, excuse me. I've been asked to chair some committees in the department. And that's the department of Map? No, Department of Pharmacology. Okay. In the school. Okay. Sorry. Right. And they were committees like graduate education. We're looking at the curriculum admissions that kind of I found out that I could look at efficient ways to do these things and then persuade my colleagues to change, to do them this way. Because the systems that existed were pushing pieces of paper from office to office and taking forever. And Jill lost them, and we had started over. This was the thing that was going on. I realized that I could see better ways to do things and I could persuade people to do them that way. That was probably the first really king. So do you think that the ability to persuade people to your point of view or the ability to persuade people to share your vision is an important quality of leadership? It is, yes, it really is. And I think you have to base it on logic and it can't become a personal issues my way or the highways. This looks like it's going to work better. Let's try this. It's persuasion. As you were climbing the career ladder, so to speak, and taken on various leadership roles, were there any leaders who you admired or who influenced your own understanding of what it meant to be a leader? I had read the Sandberg biographies of Lincoln. So I had admired Lincoln forever. And ever I read many other biographies, but those particular volumes are wonderful. I guess Lincoln would be the example I shared with you, the book Lincoln on Leadership. That came later when I was really thinking about trying this professionally. But yeah, this was the person that I probably thought of as as an ideal leader. Anybody in your professional environment that you admired? I admired. I see Gonzales. It's he was one of a kind. There was no way to emulate him. But what I admired was again, he was totally identified with what he stood for. He was a scientist, he wanted the pure experiment. If it went awry and gave you an unusual result, he would throw his hands back and laugh and say, this is an opportunity, we're going to learn something. So this kind of behavior was a good role model. So he was, he was a good model for how you run a laboratory leading that way. So years ago when we, I had a peripheral role in developing the Debia Center with Jerry Beco and some other people, we developed a set of standard questions that we don't always use anymore, but listen to your talk. Reminds me of one of those questions. And the question was, do you think leaders should read? Leader should read, yes. Oh, absolutely. So, I noticed that outside your field. Well, that's what that's where I was going with this. I noticed the things that you mentioned that you read don't have much to do with directly with medicine or pharmacology. No, I read plenty of that during the day. No, I've read history all my life. I love it. Um, Henry the second, Eleanor VaquertinI, Mean these are people you know, you read about and they're fascinating. Fascinating. So, yeah, I think you need to read. You've had a long career in the academy and a significant part of that was in leadership positions, whether it was committees or administration, as your career was developing. Did you have mentors who kind of guided you along the way? I mean, you could start with your higher education, but I mean, we were there are people who mentored you and showed you the way at one time or another. Yes. In college, I had two mentors. I would identify. One was a Professor of chemistry, Jack Perdu. Jack was a petroleum chemist by training, and he worked with pyxotropic clays, clays. And if you don't do anything to them, they look solid. But if you put, if you hit them, they turn liquid. So he talked about that kind of stuff and he talked about his career. And just in general, he was a good guy. So it was, it was good to get to know him. The person that probably did more in directing me into her seeking a higher degree was Alan Holt, who was another chemistry professor. He was young, had a young family, which I actually liked. I liked seeing that family life could be compatible with career. And he came from the University of Illinois, got his degree there, and so he saw potential in me. He encouraged me to apply for a wider Wilson Fellowship, which I got, which was unusual for a scientist. And encouraged me to apply at the University of Illinois and a lot of other top programs. So he was definitely a mentor. I had a very large role in my being able to do what I did. So for the benefit of somebody who might read the transcript or listen to this interview and not know much about the Academy, what is a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at that time, excuse me, was focused on training people to be teachers in higher education, or supporting the process involved an application where you were nominated by somebody from your faculty, and then if your application was strong enough, you got invited to an interview. Well, I had to borrow $100 to fly to Kansas City for the interview. And everybody told me, you're not going to get it because it's not given to non scientists. I mean, just scientists, it's all for non scientists. I had no particular worries about it. I was going to go for the experience and enjoy it and sat down with the interview committee. And the first thing somebody asked me was, what was the last book you read? Well, it happened to be the screwtape letters. They asked me about that, and I talked about the screwtape letters. And then they asked me a little bit about some of the other things. I walked out happy as a lark. I had a good time. We talked about some good stuff, we got to publish it. So that was very strong. It helped me get into graduate school, there's no question about it. I mean, that's another one of those sort of peer well, nice. I guess at that point you wouldn't be your peers but it's no faculty. It's a faculty reviewed. Awarded. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The interview committee was all faculty from various places. And I don't think there was a scientist in the room other than me, but I was fine. Is there anything okay. So we talked a little bit about the statement, the self reflective statement that you wrote on being an administrator and being a woman and male dominated graduate programs, that is faculty and what you described as a good old boys club in the School of Medicine. Right. Did any of those experiences influence the way you understood and practiced leadership? Yes, yes, I understood that women needed to be included at the highest level. So I did look at gender balance and where I could at ethnicity to try to keep balance. I think more fundamentally, I just looked at fairness. Are the right people in the room, are the people who can do the job in the room. And that wasn't always the case in some of those early years in the School of Medicine. People were excluded for silly reasons. So I think probably in that way, fairness and getting the right people in the room that that was an influence. So drawing on a lifetime of experience, do you think that there are differences in the ways that most men and most women understand and practice leadership? There are probably all the women over here and all the men over there is going to be overlap. There is overlap, right? I've known some very aggressive leaders who happen to be female, and I've known some very sympathetic and attentive leaders who are male. But I think there is it, I'm sure it's culturally put in place, but yeah, I think men are more comfortable and giving orders. I always thought it was a failure. If I got to the point that I had to order somebody to do something, I thought that if I could let people understand my reasoning and what I was trying to accomplish, that they would sign on and move forward. Now, they may not always understand exactly the path to get there, and they might ask advice on that, that's fine. But I didn't have to order them to head toward the goal. If I had to order them to head toward the goal, that that was not a success. And I think men are in general a little more comfortable with that kind of thing. So now that you're retired, we've retired for a few years. I haven't had a chance to reflect back on your career. If there were, if it were possible to have a duo for, heaven forbid. And there isn't obviously other things that you about your leadership style or approach that you would change. No, I did evolve into it because I had no leadership training. But what I came to was very comfortable for me, it fit my personality. It was successful with a number of people, it was not successful with everyone. But eventually those people moved out and we moved on. I don't think I could change it a lot without changing my personality. I think it fit my personality. So you mentioned you had no leadership training. Do you think that it's possible to train leaders or leaders born or are they made a, uh, educational process? Well, I think you can train to a degree. Certainly, my reading on leadership helped me move more quickly to some of the things that I came to. But I think if you don't have the commitment and desire to accomplish the goal, whatever it is, I don't think you can train that. I don't think hired guns are quite the right way to go. I think you have to have people who are believers. I believed in graduate education. I believe in graduate education. So it was an easy thing for me to get others pointed that direction. But if you had put a different goal in front of me, I, I don't know that I would have been as effective as a leader. So do you think that a quality, even effective leaders, the ability to, to frame and articulate goals? Yes, I think that's critical. They can be little goals, they have to have a big goal. In my case, it was after about a year I figured out we really needed Phds on this campus. Okay. That's the big goal, folks. Everybody in the room knows that that's what we're after. That means we've got to help faculty, we've got to help students, we've got to help administrators. We can't dilly dally around. We've got to look at what we're doing in the context of, this is where we want to go, and we have to have the infrastructure in place to do it.