Caroline Strömberg

Caroline Strömberg is a Swedish-American paleontologist and the Estella B. Leopold Professor of Biology at the University of Washington, where she also serves as an adjunct associate professor in Earth and Space Sciences and Curator of Paleobotany at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Her research explores the deep-time evolution and ecology of plants, using the fossil record alongside modern analogues to understand how plant communities responded to climate change and how these shifts influenced the evolution of animals.

Strömberg received the Alfred Sherwood Romer Prize, the Isabel Cookson Award, and the Charles Schuchert Award. She has also held a Fulbright Scholarship and maintains an active, internationally collaborative research program.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:02

Hello, and welcome to the Scientess Podcast, where we talk to women with successful scientific careers about the joys of science. I'm your host, Karen Levy, an environmental health scientist at the School of Public Health at University of Washington in Seattle. I'm excited to share with you the stories of some pretty incredible women on this podcast. My hope is that these interviews will show aspiring young scientists that a career in science is not only possible, but can also be extremely rewarding and a whole lot of fun. Let's jump in with today's featured Scientess.

Speaker 2 0:37

Dr. Caroline Stromberg is the Estella B. Leopold Professor of Biology at the University of Washington and the curator of Paleobotany at University of Washington's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, where we're sitting right now recording this interview. She is also adjunct faculty in Earth and Space Sciences. She has held positions at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the U.S. National Museum of Natural History, and as a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution in Panama. Caroline is a paleontologist, but she doesn't study dinosaurs. Instead, she studies the evolution of plant communities in deep time. I kind of thought that deep time sounded like something out of a sci-fi novel, so I had to look it up. And here's what I found on Wikipedia. Deep time is the concept of geological time that spans billions of years far beyond the scale of human experience. It provides the temporal framework for understanding the formation and evolution of Earth, the development of life, and the slow-moving processes that shape planetary change, which I think is very cool. So Caroline looks into plants in deep time by studying the fossil record. She is a leading expert on phytoliths, which are microscopic deposits of silica and other materials. They have unique traits that can be used to identify plant fossils. For more than two decades, Caroline has been on the leading edge of using phytoliths to reconstruct paleoenvironments and track vegetational change, specifically the evolution of grasses and grassland ecosystems. She also looks into how organisms have responded to global climatic perturbations during major earth warming and cooling events historically, and how changes in plant communities may have affected animal communities. This research provides insights into how ecosystems might change in the future. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and collaborative as these questions require input from geochemists, geologists, ecologists, phylogeneticists, and vertebrate paleontologists. Caroline's research has been recognized with many awards, including the Alfred Sherwood Roomer Prize from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the Isabel Cookson Award from the Botanical Society of America, the Charles Schuschert Award from the Paleontological Society, and the University of Washington Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. She's a fellow of the Paleontological Society and the Geological Society of America. She has led many grants from the National Science Foundation and is an associate editor at Paleos and Paleobiology. Carolyn is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and regularly publishes in prestigious journals such as Science and PNAS. I will also mention that she is an accomplished artist. Early in her career, she had to make a choice between pursuing a career in art or a career in science, which hopefully we will hear more about. She ended up choosing science, but she is now using her artistic prowess to support the Scientess podcast by drawing portraits of each of the scientists we feature on the show, which you can see on our website. So, Caroline, welcome to the Scientists Podcast. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. I have one more fun tidbit to share, which I feel is a testament to both your long-standing interest in paleontology and your being a Renaissance woman. I learned recently from a secret source that as a teenager you played saxophone and sang backup vocals for the Swedish band called Homo habilis, named after an extinct species of archaic human from the early Pleistocene. Can you confirm or deny this rumor? I can confirm this rumor. But yeah. That was a long time ago. Long time ago. But you know, it's still a claim to fame. Okay. So my first question is: how does one become a paleobotanist? Can you tell us a bit about your journey to how you got to where you are today?

Speaker 3 4:40

Sure. So I was not exactly a paleobotanist sort of as a child, or even didn't even know what that was. As a kid, I was interested in nature. I was interested in dinosaurs. I was a dinosaur girl. And I, yeah, generally interested in evolution, ecology, those kinds of things, and geology. I had a very influential high school teacher in biology who also taught us about the local geology, and that was very cool. So when I went to college, I was, like you were saying, also interested in art, but within science, I gravitated towards geology and biology. So I studied both. And then I waffled between art and science, did some various art things and illustrator things. And then finally I got a scholarship to go for a year to UC Berkeley. I was born and raised in Sweden, so this was a major adventure for me. And there I took some classes where I really just fell in love with terrestrial paleontology or paleoecology, looking at terrestrial ecosystems, how they have evolved through time. And a major player in that is plants. I was originally mainly interested in vertebrates. Like I said, I was a dinosaur girl, but I started becoming interested in the relationship between animals and plants and how plants have shaped the evolution of animals and terrestrial ecosystems. So then after going back to Sweden and getting a master's, because that was a requirement, in something totally different, looking at a marine extinct organisms called conodonts, I applied for full right to go to UC Berkeley for a PhD. And I had decided at that point that I was going to study fossil plants.

Speaker 2 6:34

So the fellowship you first got was just to spend a year at Berkeley without any degree. Yeah. You weren't pursuing a degree. It was just to study there. Yep. And take classes or just work with a classes.

Speaker 3 6:46

No, I took classes and then I stayed the summer after the year and I did some research with faculty there, but it didn't really amount to much except that they helped me get in. They wrote me a letter of recommendation to come for a PhD.

Speaker 2 7:01

And probably they got familiar with you and knew that they were excited about working with you as a PhD student. Presumably. And you came back and worked and did your PhD with those same faculty members?

Speaker 3 7:13

So yeah. So there was a new faculty member, a paleobotanist, who needed grad students, and I took a seminar with her, and that's one of the things that I I got very inspired by her and her work.

Speaker 2 7:25

That's great. And so can you think of a specific moment that really solidified your interest in paleobotany? Like when did you decide to go from the dinosaurs to the plants?

Speaker 3 7:38

It was that seminar that I took with Ananda Aaron's was her name, and some other faculty that studied vertebrate paleontology. It was a seminar about terrestrial ecosystems. So like through time. So looking at how ecosystems, both from the perspective of plants and animals, have changed through time and how that depends on the evolution and interactions between the different organisms. And for me, that was just like, wow, that is so cool. Like how it all fits together. And yeah, that clicked for me very much. But I didn't know much about plants at the time. Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2 8:16

Because I think of you as such a botanist now. So and will you talk a little bit about how interdisciplinary paleontology is and what are the different fields that you need to be familiar with for your work?

Speaker 3 8:31

Yeah. So all of paleontology sits in between biology and geology. So you have to know a lot about geology to interpret the fossils that you see because they are shaped by how they are preserved, in what context they're preserved, and also the age of the rocks. And then on the other hand, you also have to know uh what a plant looks like, what it does, how it functions, and how that influences shape and stuff like that. So in order to understand being able to interpret a fossil, you have to know both some geology and some biology. Yeah, those are the main fields. Then, of course, there are things like phylogenetics, like you have to understand how to reconstruct relationships. You maybe have to understand something about biomechanics, to understand how different parts function in in nature. I would think also chemistry would be important. Oh, yes, very important. Especially for studying these plant silica fossils that we have to understand where they are preserved and where they're not preserved, and especially their preservation, I would say, is influenced by the context. Those are the phytoliths. Those are the phytlets. Yes. You are the queen of the phytoliths. That's very kind. But maybe queen of the very old phytoliths. Okay.

Speaker 2 9:48

What what are the newer phytoliths?

Speaker 3 9:50

So phytoliths were mainly originally studied by archaeologists. And that was a field that they were very much used because they are very diagnostic of grasses. And so to look at the domestication of grasses, people have long used phytlets.

Speaker 2 10:05

So, you know, cereals, corn, oh so that's so that's all in the human time.

Speaker 3 10:11

Yeah.

Speaker 2 10:12

Exactly. What you study is way before the humans. And deconstructing the ecosystems beforehand. Yes, exactly. I didn't realize they were used for more recent reasons. Yes. Yes, they are. So what excites you the most about your science and how has that changed over time?

Speaker 3 10:32

Well, I would say that always discovery is one thing that is exciting, and I think that's true for every scientist, probably. In my case, and the case of paleontologists, it's seeing that never before seen fossil. And actually for me, this is regardless of what kind of fossil it is, like just realizing that you're the first person that sees this thing that lived millions and millions of years ago, and just sort of imagining the landscape, the setting, and thinking about evolution or the the history of life on Earth. And to me, that's still like I get heart palpitations. Just yeah, I definitely get excited very about that. Cool. How many times has that happened to you? I mean, it's almost every time I'm in the field. I'm so the things I study are microscopic, so we don't see them when we're in the field. That's a downside. But I am often working with vertebrae paleontologists, and they might find some fossil, or we come across leaves or something like that. And so just uncovering them, yeah, gives me goosebumps because I'm like, wow, this is so amazing. So I still feel that in the field, but in terms of the discoveries, you see something under the scope or you analyze some data and you're like, wow, this was unexpected, that is very exciting as well. That's, you know, discovery. And that has now shifted more to my students and postdocs and things, like because they are the ones that do much more of the data collecting than I do these days. So do you still go to the field?

Speaker 2 12:09

How much of your time is spent going to the field versus looking at a microscope versus writing papers versus doing administration? Oh dear.

Speaker 3 12:18

Yeah. I still go to the field every year, but I can't always go for the entire time that is necessary for a project. So I might go with my students for a week or something and then they continue for several more weeks. So I would say I probably do field work two, three weeks per year, or sometimes m a month or something, but it's much less since I had kids. And then microscopy, sometimes I spend I mean I just don't have that much time, but I still do microscopy. I love doing microscopy, I love looking at the fossils. So I do some of that still, but those two are m less time than writing papers or editing student papers, and then service. I mean, it does feel these days that service is a big chunk, I have to say. So that you always have to struggle and prioritize to get research time in. But yeah, probably most of the time it's the writing.

Speaker 2 13:18

Yeah.

Speaker 3 13:19

In terms of science.

Speaker 2 13:20

And what is the best part of your job? I mean, and that could be like what you're spending time on or just bigger picture.

Speaker 3 13:26

The best part again, it is sort of adding to the knowledge is very exciting and changing our view of something. But practically I I I love doing microscopy. I love going to the field and I love working with students and collaborating, talking science with people, thinking about data together with people. Yeah, I love that part. That's probably m yeah, some of my favorite things.

Speaker 2 13:50

Cool. So on this podcast, we focus on the successes more than the challenges facing women in science. So can you point to a time when you had to overcome a challenge that's commonly faced by women in science and describe how you overcame it?

Speaker 3 14:05

I I guess this is so hard for me because I feel like I guess the problem here is that a lot of these challenges, I don't feel like I've really overcome them. So, for example, in a a room with lots of men, like a meeting or something, I still f often feel that I say something and no one pays attention, and then two minutes later some guy says it and everyone's like, Oh yeah, that's a great idea. And I wouldn't say that I have overcome that. I was trying to think of some other challenges. I guess a challenge is deciding when to have kids or balancing having kids versus progressing in your career, and I feel like I overcame it by brute force, in the sense that I was in a situation where I was old when I decided to have kids, or when we were able to think about that, and I was told I couldn't have kids, and at that point I was just like, okay, I am gonna have kids. And so then I was like, I don't care if I don't get tenure at this point, this is what I want. And so I sort of did the things that I had to do to get in better health or a better mental state or something like that to be able to get pregnant. And I did that, and at the time I was in early tenure track, and I just decided that this quarter the only thing I'm doing is teaching and this taking care of myself, and I don't care if I don't publish or whatever. How old were you? I must have been 38. And so I I had a kid. I had two kids. And I don't know, I just continued working hard and just sort of persevering, and it worked out. So I guess I just basically put my blinders on and just went full steam ahead with the things that were important to me at that time.

Speaker 2 15:56

At that time, was there something that shifted that said, okay, now I have to focus on having a family? Was there a moment where you're like, oh wait, I better do this?

Speaker 3 16:07

Yeah. I mean, so so I was pretty old, and my husband and I had been in different places. He's also an academic, and so we were finally together. We'd just gotten new jobs here at UW. And so we're like, okay, time to start a family. And I wasn't that I really wasn't, I wasn't not a kid person.

Speaker 2 16:25

Maybe I still not am a kid person, but I happen to know Caroline's kids, and she's a wonderful mother.

Speaker 3 16:31

So I thank you. But I hadn't thought about it very much. So I actually got pregnant and kind of freaked out because I was like, oh my gosh, what if this ruins my career? Like, am I ready? I don't know if I'm ready, but here I am pregnant. And then I had a miscarriage, and that led to a bunch of visits with endocrinologists and the this and the that, and finally someone saying at an IVF clinic, actually saying, You will never be able to have your own kids. And at that point, I was just like, no, I do want to have my own kids. And yeah, so then I was very determined.

Speaker 2 17:11

This is an amazing story for a couple reasons. One is just I think throughout many of these interviews, uh there's a certain trait of just determination that this exemplifies that you just decided, no, no, no, I'm I'm gonna do this, and you set your mind to it and you did it. I also think it's just I think it's a really important story because many times there's this story like, oh, I always wanted to have kids and everything worked out perfectly, and it was all this sort of dream life. Like you can look at it, and if somebody met you today, they'd say, Oh, she's got these two great kids. She's she and her husband are both academics, it all worked out. It must have been all smooth sailing the whole way along, and you must have been so sure of what you were doing. And it's really useful, I think, to share these stories where there were questions along the way and major challenges along the way.

Speaker 3 18:06

And I should add that I wasn't just determined, I was also very mad because the IVF, the specialist that told me this, a man, he had saved this one up. We'd had a meeting where we checked various values, and he was like, Well, I have to give you my inconvenient truth speech. And then he said, You will never be able to have your own kids. And I was like, Are you kidding me? You think this is a time to joke, to make like a fun, you know, sort of witticism? Exactly. It's like, you, I think you just don't like women. You know, who uh who wanna have the audacity of wanting both careers and families and getting to the family part later in life. So I was very mad.

Speaker 2 18:53

Wow.

Speaker 3 18:54

And uh yeah.

Speaker 2 18:56

And you just lit a fire in your ovaries and yeah, there you go. Made it happen. Yeah. I love that. This is a great that's that's awesome. So uh here's another question, another flip on the question is are there ways that being a woman has positively impacted your career?

Speaker 3 19:23

I find this so hard to answer because I don't know what about me is shaped by being a woman. I've never thought of myself as a woman first. I've thought of myself as a person first. I don't know what of my traits are because I'm a woman or I'm Swedish or I'm just me, a person with the various traits. For example, I think that one thing that's helpful makes it maybe makes it easy for me to interact with people is that I really like to listen and I like to get to know someone. And I think some people find that they like to be listened to. So it's a good it's a good trait for networking, I think. But I don't know if that's uh uh necessarily because I'm a woman.

Speaker 2 20:11

Sure, there's a lot of men who are great listeners. And yeah. But I think it's a great answer. Like, how do you decide which aspects of the whole of you are related to being a woman versus just being you and your lived experiences? So I think that's a great answer. And actually I was gonna ask about your own lived experience. How has coming from another country, coming from Sweden, are there ways that you see things differently than some of your colleagues based in the US or other colleagues from other countries?

Speaker 3 20:48

I d definitely think that some traits, like some behaviors or conventions around how you behave are different. So for example, it is not okay to brag and think you're better than someone else in Sweden, whereas in the US, I think that's very much like people rewarded, huh? Yeah, it's rewarded to sort of like really advocate for yourself and kind of show off a little bit. And so uh initially when I came, that was very uh intimidating to me because I was like, oh, I must be so bad because they are all feeling so good about themselves. And then it didn't necessarily correlate with you know that the the person who spoke the loudest wasn't necessarily the smartest or whatever. So it definitely has influenced how I have felt about and how I have had to work on being assertive and getting a job, speaking, getting interviewed and stuff like that. Absolutely. But I don't know that it has influenced anything about my science. Yeah.

Speaker 2 21:50

It's interesting because in academia to succeed, you do have to sell yourself and so many different points in getting a job and selling your science at a college. Conference. So is that difficult to not necessarily value that I'm going to go brag on myself?

Speaker 3 22:08

Yeah, I had to practice. Like when I was going to go to a job interview, my now husband, we did practice runs where I had to over and over answer certain questions because I just could not help but talk badly about myself. And those questions about, ooh, what's your strongest accomplishment or something? I would say something like, No, nothing really. Because uh yeah. And then he would train you. Yeah, we'd be like, no, no, you have to say something. I read somewhere that, or someone told me that you just have to pretend that you are someone really great. Like you have to pretend that you are the person that they want to hire. Even if you don't feel like you are that person, you just have to take on this person. Not that you're lying, because you're not lying about the facts, but like you're lying maybe about your confidence.

Speaker 2 22:59

I think that's really helpful to hear that the this idea that it doesn't necessarily have to come naturally to you, that you can train for it. You can get coaching, it's a learned trait, and you can learn it in order to get to that successful level that it's a required trait, especially if you're a US-based academic where it's something that's valued, but that you can practice. And practice makes, as my kids say, practice makes better. There is no perfect. Yes, absolutely. So we've talked about this trait of bragging on yourself or promoting yourself and having this confidence. What do you think is the most important trait that it takes to make it an academia?

Speaker 3 23:53

I think perseverance, working hard and not giving up even when it's not going well, whether that's data collecting or publishing or getting a job or something like that. I mean, of course, creativity is very important as well, but I think absolutely persevering and being resilient. Can you point to a time when you in your own career had to just have that trait? Yeah. When I was partway through my dissertation, my PhD work, my advisor left for another job. And so I was sort of an orphaned academic and was taken in in a different lab, but it's a lab that did something completely different. So I was pretty much by myself in a lab. And certainly there were a lot of people that supported me in different ways, but I had to be in charge of my own dissertation. And I did a lot of work, and then it turned out that something wasn't working, and so I had to go back and redo it, and so a lot of hard work with feeling a bit lost because I didn't really have an advisor. And and also fundamentally, I didn't know if my project was going to work out initially. And I was very naive at first and very happy-go-lucky, and unfortunately it did work out in the end. But it there was just a lot of uncertainty and sort of false starts, or not false starts as much as realizing, oh, I should have done it this way, but there was no one else who had done it before, so it was kind of yeah, I was learning on the job or that sounds really challenging and also potentially was it uh confidence building?

Speaker 2 25:33

Because ultimately you had ownership.

Speaker 3 25:35

Yeah, I think so. I think in the end it was confidence building that I came through it with a lot of really rich knowledge and knowing that it can work, you can make it work.

Speaker 2 25:48

Yeah, and you can carry that through to many future experiences. It's like I've never been a marathon, but I hear that if you do, you feel very empowered. You can do anything if you got through that.

Speaker 3 26:00

Yeah, I can see that's similar, similar feeling.

Speaker 2 26:04

So you talked about your children. Does being a parent inform your work at all? And if so, how?

Speaker 3 26:13

I don't know if it informs my work, but I will say that it adds another dimension that I think probably makes me a better scientist because I think about something else and do other things and learn new things through my kids that very indirectly influences how I do things or even just that I feel very inspired. So like I felt that when I had kids, I had one thing, my job that I loved so much, and then I got this other thing that I loved so much, and and so both got more fun, both make each other more fun. But I don't know that it informed anything in how I do my science. I know a lot of people talk about how they become so much more efficient. I don't know that I've become more efficient, unfortunately. How about mentorship? Does it inform your mentorship? It does inform mentorship. Oh yes, thank you for bringing that up. Having kids, I've read a lot about emotional coaching, and I think that is something that applies everywhere in any relationship with your mentees, your partner, whatever, and that is this idea of empathy and finding solutions and yeah, how to give criticism and being more aware of how that other person might think or feel. So, yeah, absolutely. In the mentorship realm, I think it has definitely influenced how I do things.

Speaker 2 27:37

One thing I like to ask about, you know, we're talking about women in science, but many times people have male colleagues or men in their lives who are allies and who have supported their careers. And so I'm curious, you mentioned your husband and how he helped coach you for your interviews. Do you have any comments on times when men have been allies or helpful in your career?

Speaker 3 28:03

Yeah, in fact, many, many times. I from helping me get access to field sites or helping me in the field to helping to coach me for giving talks and nominating me for awards or believing in me enough that they gave me a postdoc or work with me on my first grant or some other grant and coach me through that. And one thing that I really appreciate are the men who have given me a little bit of tough love, which is that they've while being very supportive, they have just been very straight about criticizing, for example, giving a talk at this one conference, and there was a man, a senior scientist, who basically said, No, you should not talk about it that way. He was very straight and slightly aggressive, but that's just how he is. And I was just like, Oh no, he just ripped me a new one. But I was like, okay, okay, I'm gonna calm down and then I'm gonna take his advice and I'm gonna redo my talk this way.

Speaker 2 29:08

And then Was it about the style or about the substance of the talk?

Speaker 3 29:12

It wasn't the substance. It was more like how I presented it and addressing certain weaknesses or alternative hypotheses or something like that. So it wasn't about necessarily how I had gone about doing the study. It was how I presented it, what kind of information, and how I gave that information. And once I'd taken his advice into consideration, I went to the conference and I won this award. So afterwards, I was like, yeah, I just need to take this advice. Like I cannot be hung up about the fact that it it hurts in the moment. But that was really good advice.

Speaker 2 29:46

And yeah, yeah, I had a senior colleague once, right after I got tenure. I went to talk to him and I said, uh, oh, what should I do next? What should I be going for? Like leadership positions or whatnot. And he looked at me and said, Well, you need to get some more grants first, and you need to get full. And I was glowing from getting tenure, and he just took me down a notch. And then it was such great advice and tough love because I was like, okay, I have to put my blinders on and I need to keep my head down and and get these grants so that I can be full because nobody's gonna take me seriously for a leadership position until I'm even further advanced. So uh, and it was actually a helpful piece of advice because then I kind of had fun. I was sort of like a new postdoc again. Like I got to just put my head down and do research for a while without thinking about the other things. So there are these ways that tough love can be extremely helpful. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. You mentioned you and your husband are both academics and you know have kids. Uh, what do you do to split up home management or how do you divide the labor between the two of you?

Speaker 3 30:54

Yeah, I think it's for things like cooking and cleaning and those kinds of things. We try to do it down the middle. I probably do a little bit more cooking. And then I I think my ideal and what I told my husband when we first started living together was that it has to be 50-50 exactly. Okay. And we have to both do all the same things. Like it can't be that you just do the car mechanic stuff or whatever, although I think I'm better at that, but whatever. You know, stereotypical. But I do think that w we do slightly different things outside of that. And so, like when it comes to the kids' activities, he is more often taking care of our son because our son plays soccer and my husband loves soccer, whereas I often take our daughter to her things. But we I mean it's pretty even, and we have a dog, so we try to split that up equally as well. I think it's fairly equal. There are some things that I end up doing because I worry about them more, like bills and stuff like that. I think it's maybe a little bit stereotypical, I'm not sure, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 32:06

Bills are maybe stereotypical the other way. I don't know.

Speaker 3 32:09

Oh, maybe, maybe, maybe. But okay, so one thing that I think might be stereotypical, I'm more worried about the kids' dental appointments and medical appointments, that kind of thing. And so I do a lot of those things, but we try to do it fairly equally, I would say.

Speaker 2 32:24

Yeah, I think aiming for 50-50, but each person's gonna have different things that they gravitate to. So I hate folding laundry, for example. So that one. Oh, I should just declare that because I'm the laundry person in my household. But often the folding doesn't happen in real time. And do you have any life hacks that you've come up with that help you in the day-to-day with these dual career?

Speaker 3 32:52

I would say when the kids were younger we had a pairs. That was definitely good because they don't just take care of the kids, they can help cook a little bit or drive kids places and be there at home when they come home. And so that was great. We also pay for cleaning because yeah, I don't have time for that. Or I mean, so I don't know if I have a lot of life hacks. I would say that out of necessity we sometimes have asked our parents to come and or mostly Greg's parents, to come and basically live with the kids when we both have field work. It's not really a life hack, it's sort of a necessity. Otherwise we couldn't do what we do. That's really nice that you have that as an option. Yes. Uh I think it'll be less so because they're getting older. Yeah.

Speaker 2 33:44

But on the other hand The needs are less now.

Speaker 3 33:46

Yes. Very true. Very true.

Speaker 2 33:48

So do you have a piece of advice that you've received along your journey as a scientist that you would want to pass along to listeners?

Speaker 3 33:58

I would say I don't know if it's a piece of advice as much as a motto as a scientist, which is that if your mentees prove you wrong on something, you have succeeded. That's great. Yeah. I like that because and this was something that a mentor of mine gave me, this old botanist who's now unfortunately dead. That was his motto, and I thought it was really inspiring. And because so many times scientists get wed to their ideas or their conclusions they've drawn instead of just thinking of it as a step in the building of knowledge. And of course, you always evaluate things based on what you know at the time, but you're not seeing the whole picture.

Speaker 2 34:44

Yeah, and you don't want to dig in your heels too much. No. Did you receive any advice along the way that turned out not to be true?

Speaker 3 34:54

I don't know that I can say that someone told me this explicitly, but I did get the sense that in order to be a leader you had to be a certain way. Like you had to be very strong and very strongly opinionated, very forthcoming. And I don't think that that turned out to be true because I think there's a multitude of ways that you can be a leader.

Speaker 2 35:16

Yeah, that's great. There's a lot of different phenotypes out there of successful leaders, and there's not just one way to do it. Yeah. You mentioned your mentor and the advice that they gave. Do you have any particularly important mentors along the way? And what did they give you?

Speaker 3 35:34

Well, I have to say that my I suppose by design she's my mentor, but my mom was really inspirational to me because she was a single mom, pretty poor, and she was a social worker when I was very little, and then she decided that she was going to be a doctor. In Sweden it's so much easier because you know, university is free and you can get loans. But at any rate, she raised me as a single mom and she went through medical school and she has done a lot of other things, and it just showed me that if you really want something, you can make it happen. And that was very inspirational to me. Other mentors or role models, there are many, but my postdoc advisor was a big inspiration to me. She's a very famous paleobotanist and just changed the face of paleobotany. But she's such a completely down-to-earth, humble person herself, and just very, I don't know, just very normal and very unble. Yeah, humble. While at the same time being a very strong leader. Very interesting that this very quiet person could be so powerful a leader. I found that very inspiring. That you don't have to be the one that yells the loudest to be a Sometimes who's the quietest because then when they speak, people listen.

Speaker 2 37:01

Yes. Because they've waited and you know that they're not gonna speak unless they have something to say.

Speaker 3 37:08

Yeah. Very true. And I think that's true for her. Also, the person whose professorship I am currently occupying, Estella Leopold, was a giant paleobotanist as well. Not not in physical size, but her legacy is giant. She also unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago. And she was also just such a mensch, but also just an amazing scientist and mentor. So did you get to a chance to meet her? Oh, yeah, yeah. So she died just a couple of years ago, but she was here as an emeritus professor before then. So I got to know her very well. And she was so kind and supportive of me.

Speaker 2 37:48

She had the money as a paleontologist or paleobotanist to endow a professorship, or was it named after her?

Speaker 3 37:55

No, she and her brother went together to to endow it. Wow. Um that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. She didn't have any kids, and I don't know. Maybe you can become rich if you save your m I don't know. Compounding your trists. Compounding your trist. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah, so she was also very inspirational because she was such a wonderful person while also being just a sort of world-renowned amazing scientist. That's really cool.

Speaker 2 38:22

So we've talked about how you love your science and you love your kids. What else brings you joy in the day-to-day? Do you have any hobbies? How do you treat yourself?

Speaker 3 38:33

Ooh. Uh I love doing art or drawing. I really have to force myself to make time for that, but I love it when I do it. So I try to force myself to take on projects that force me to do art. And I'm trying to get back into playing saxophone, even at a very rudimentary level. I used to do it when I was young, and I've just realized recently that it would bring so much joy to play with other people. So I'm gonna try to get more into that. But what I am able to accomplish is listening and reading books, and that is very fun. I also like things like hiking. I do like cooking, being out in nature, traveling, many things, seeing friends, being social. What are your tactics for making yourself do art? It is to say, for example, when I have a grad student finishing saying, I'll make the t-shirt, and then I have to do it. There's a deadline. Deadlines are very important and external pressure, very important. Yeah. The first person who's ever said that. Yeah, I know. It's ingenious. Are there ways that you treat yourself? I do exercise on a regular schedule. That is very important for me to maintain my mental sanity, my mental health. And of course, if you do it enough, you sort of become addicted chemically. Yeah. And so I do weightlifting, yoga, running sometimes, biking, a little bit of this and that. So I've been always pretty good with that. And I try to eat healthy, drink too much coffee, I have to say. And yeah. I'm not very good with the sleep. I have traditionally, like historically, been very bad at sleeping enough. But in the last couple of years, I've noticed like I've noticed that I can't function on six hours anymore. Like I have to sleep seven hours. And I used to be able to really skimp on sleep. I used to be able to go on four or five. Yeah, no. I know it doesn't matter. Yeah. So I I try to be better. Any other treats that you treat yourself? I mean, I do enjoy a beer and you know, a glass of wine with friends or whatever. Yeah. I mean, I really enjoy hanging out with friends. That is very important also for my mental health.

Speaker 2 41:08

Yeah. Okay. So last question. If you weren't a scientist, what would you do with your time? I would be a comic artist.

Speaker 3 41:16

Oh. Ooh. Yes. That's what one of the things I wanted to be when I was choosing between science and art was I wanted to draw comics or graphic novels. More adult. Not Calvin and Hobbes, but more, I don't know, and Mobius or whatever.

Speaker 2 41:34

Very cool. And I like that you didn't pause at all. You knew the answer. Oh yeah. I knew the answer. That's great. Well, thank you so much, Caroline. This has been really fun. Thank you.

Speaker 41:47

Thanks for tuning in to the Scientess Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow on your favorite podcast app. It helps more curious minds like yours discover the show. You can find additional bonus content and make a donation to help support the show on our website, www.scientess.org. That's S-C-I-E-N-T-E-S-S. You can also follow us on Instagram at @scientesspodcast. We'd love to hear from you with comments, questions, or suggestions for future interview subjects. Drop us a line at scientesspod@gmail.com. The Scientess Podcast is supported in part by the Seattle branch of AAUW, the American Association of University Women, supporting women and girls in the Seattle area since 1908. Note that this podcast is not affiliated with the University of Washington, and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Washington. We'll catch you in the next episode.