INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

 

Q: Tell us about yourself and your current work at upstate.

 

I'm a clinician scientist and I study glaucoma clinically, which is a disease of the eye that leads to blindness, and as far as the research side of things go I have a lab that's fully filled out with a robust basic science program where what we study how the cells of the optic nerve respond to high pressure and respond to strain.  So, if I was going to backtrack and tell you about my clinical component, I spend about 50% of my time in the clinic and in surgery, and I treat both pediatric and adult glaucoma. Then I have about 50% of my time that's research based. 

 

Q: So, as a scientist and a practicing ophthalmologist as well as running a research lab here at upstate can you tell us what it's like to balance these roles?

 

You know I've been told by my mentors that you essentially fake it till you make it. I don't think that anyone truly has everything together all the time. But you’re just doing good enough until it becomes second nature, right? In a way, one of the things about doing both clinical work and research work is that the clinic never stops even if you do. So, you say, for example, if I'm reading a paper or I'm writing a grant. I'll get text messages or phone calls from the nurses about patients that have questions that really need to be answered immediately, and that's something that's not necessarily avoidable. So there is a little bit of spasticity to my thought process, which I think I lean into -but for me to say that there is a way to balance it, I think it is a false sort of story or a false narrative to put forth. I think I’m consistently trying to make sure that I dot all my I’s and cross all my T’s, and if I don't I hope that I’m able to go back and do it later, and that there's a little bit of give in the system. But I think that good enough many times is okay. It will get you through, and it will slowly become second nature to where you can work on more nuanced aspects of your career as you're developing.

 

Q: Can you tell us about your path to medicine and research? When did you first know that you wanted to pursue a career in science, and specifically, in medicine or ophthalmology?

 

So, I am one of these odd ducks that knew sort of what I wanted to do from a very early age. I knew that I wanted to do ophthalmology because it interested me. So if I backtrack to the beginning my mom is a physician, and my father is a PhD. He's a professor of biochemistry. So I grew up listening to conversations about peptide transporters and so I think it was sort of the natural progression of things that I went into the field that I went into. When I was very young, probably when I was in early high school, I became interested in the eye, and I started doing research in a lab in where I grew up in Georgia, and I thought the Retina was just fascinating. All the structure of it is so perfect to be able to transmit light and vision, sensation to the brain. I thought it was great. So that's really where I started. When I was a finding a medical school, I said if I don't get into medical school, I'm gonna do optometry. I knew I wanted to do vision before I decided to do medicine. 

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I got into the MD/PhD. Program, which was good because I wanted to pursue this science aspect of things. But I didn't know exactly how much was going to be science, and how much was going to be a clinical component. And so much of your career, I think, is dependent on who you meet and who your mentors end up being. So I did my 2 years of medicine, then I worked in a lab. I did a rotation in a neuroscience lab, actually, because I thought I could spin it into being related to ophthalmology, and it just wasn't a great fit. So at the end of that summer I did 2 rotations. I did a rotation between first and second year, and then I did a rotation after second year. It ended up not being quite a good fit and I ended up in Sylvia Smith's lab, who is really a translational scientist. She does cell biology. But she mentors a lot of medical students, and she knew how to put me on track. We hired a new clinician scientist around that time who had submitted a K award while I was there, and she was a glaucoma clinician scientist, and I was like, you know, that's what I want to do. And the questions in glaucoma, there's so much that's not known. It was so fascinating to me that I was like, okay, this is what I'm gonna do. And then you slowly, kind of meet somebody and you say that's what I want to do, and then you go and you do it. I don't know that seems like a very silly way to map out your life, but I think often times that's how it is.

 

Q: Did you have any particularly important mentors that helped you along your career? And how did these mentors influence you?

 

So this is a heavy question, Right? First, I would be remiss to say right that my earliest mentors were not my parents, obviously because they came from a scientific background. And this whole concept of work, life, balance, I think, as immigrants coming to a country and then developing career in a new country you tend to have to balance things differently. And I grew up in the lab, right, like I would go harass the postdocs all the time when I was little, because I didn't want to do my homework, and this was back in the day when they were mouth pipetting radioactive materials. I probably shouldn't have been on the lab, but I was. So I think that my passion for science and my passion for the clinical side of things probably comes from my parents, and I would say they're my earliest mentors.

 

Sylvia Smith was my PhD mentor, who is just a phenomenal scientist. Really, her background is in anatomy and cell biology. So she is a true retinologist in the sense that she starts from the retina. And then she asked the questions of what happens in disease, and what happens both in diabetes and Glaucoma and I think the way that I view the eye and the neurons within the eye is strongly informed by her. I told you about Catherine Bowlinger who was a clinician scientist whose path I sort of followed along the way. I think that it's very important to identify people who will support you early on. She actually wrote a letter for me and I collaborated with her on our first publication. Actually, she was studying optic nerve head astrocytes, and I said, oh, let me come back there and learn how to do this from you. So it's nice to be able to keep in touch with the folks that you make a connection with early on, and then in residency I would say there are some strong, it's almost like a group of mentors, that focus on how they teach you how to become a strong clinician that Ithink I value and then, of course, my coworkers here, right. I've got a very strong scientific group here that I really rely on.

 

Q: So, now as a successful woman in science, what do you feel are the biggest challenges for women aspiring to have a successful career in STEM?

 

I would say, and I’m being completely blunt and honest, that we have come quite far over the last few decades. But that it's still difficult to prove success or prove worth as a female in male dominated field. Sometimes, so I think that the biggest challenge to overcome is knowing that sometimes you cannot do it all, and that has to be okay. And once you say this is what I’m capable of doing, and this is how much I will give, I think that that has to be an understanding in the field. Not that the only women that succeed are “superwomen” right? that they're not. I remember, sometimes I think I did it wrong. I waited to have children until my last year of residency, because I didn't want to inconvenience you know the program, and I didn't want to inconvenience my co-residents, and I literally had my son 2 weeks before I ended residency and sort of crashed into fellowship. But I had the opportunity to have a wonderful fellowship mentoring group who were very supportive. I mean, I pumped throughout fellowship. I was able to learn and focus on becoming a glaucoma specialist. But I had the support of my husband, and my mother. My mother came and lived with me for a year, which I don't know how I would have done it without that, but I recall at the end of a fellowship one of my mentors gave me a bottle of wine and said “You did a great job. You were really fast, efficient, you did really well. And when you stopped pumping, you were even faster. And just you know you just all around were strong fellow”. And I remember thinking like this is great, but what message am I sending about what to do to be great? You have to be able to pump off like in patient rooms or in the OR shower in between cases, and then run back and then do the case, and then that you have to have the semblance of being able to do everything that you're supposed to do plus some to be okay, and I don't know that that's the best message to send. So I think the first thing I would say is own what your responsibilities are, and give what you're willing to give to both of them. And the second thing is don't do things because you think that's what everyone else wants you to do. Answer to yourself, because everyone else will forget in about 5 minutes, so don't sacrifice for others. I don't know if that's if that's the question that you asked, but that's my answer.

 

Q: So speaking of women in stem and some of the challenges that you've faced, what prejudices have you had to face so far in medicine? If any? and how are you able to overcome these?

 

So I think, as a woman right in medicine there is sort of bias that may be you are not taking this seriously sometimes right? And I think when I talk about adjusting, in the past I have adjusted my behavior for the purpose of convincing everyone that I’m serious about this right, and part of that is waiting to have kids, for example, or wanting to focus on learning this trade. That is so important to the rest of my career. But saying that you know I won't, I will compromise on learning this trade to do the other things I wanna do with my life, actually spend time with my family or actually you know have children, or whatever it may be. I think that the prejudices are not overt. I think that everyone wants to be supportive, generally. I don't know that I’ve ever seen a hostile environment, which is different and lucky, right? But that's not to say that there's not a hidden bias right? So, in Residency, where I trained there had not been another resident, another female resident, to have a child in the last 12 years since I was there. And I got to residency, I was in a class with 3 males, and all of them had children in residency, and I remember thinking, well, I guess I'm just gonna go ahead and do this, cause I’m not gonna be faulted. It's just the idea that I’m putting my life on hold while everyone else is not right, but as far as the prejudices go there were definitely attendings who I don't think would have been supportive, it's an unspoken thing, right? It's not that anyone had ever said anything to me but there were attendings that I did not want them to know that I was pregnant, and I remember joking with my program director. He was like, I’m just gonna tell them a graduation that Preethi swallowed a watermelon, and I was like, that’s fine, you know. I just went through the clinics. I did not say anything. I remember one of the nurses asked me how pregnant I was, and I was like 6 months, and she was like, “Oh, I thought you were gonna say 3”. I would just like Layer, I mean it's the winter in Cleveland. You just layer and layer. But I do think that if I had the courage maybe to stand up and be more vocal about it, maybe the outcome would have been different, or it would not have.. My fear of prejudices would not have been realized, or my fear of prejudices would have been realized, and I would have regretted not playing by the rules. Yeah, so I was just playing it safe, but that being said I’ve had wonderful sort of women mentors and wonderful supportive male and female mentors who have helped me along the way. So it's not to say that it's a hostile environment at all. It's just that some of it is in your head right, some of the prejudices are in your head. But some of them are real, and you have to decide what battles you're willing to fight if those are real prejudices.

 

Q: As a successful woman in stem, what advice would you have for aspiring women in science, how to find mentorship or how to be successful in their careers?

 

I mean I think that mentorship is important in all aspects. So when you're looking for mentors, I think you want to look for mentors for each aspect that you are interested in growing in, right, so your personal career mentor may not be the same person as your scientific mentor, and your scientific mentor may not be the same person as say your educational, or whoever it may be. And I really think it's a group of mentors, really. So here I rely on my coworkers, who have done the science track before me, and they are my mentors. I have life mentors, both my chair, Rob Fletcher and our Vice Chair of research, Will Brunken. I say they're like my 2 dads and I like can ask them anything, and that I can get an honest true answer. I've got great colleagues who are both strong family-oriented individuals as well as colleagues, who are very scientifically strong. And I think that that's important, it's finding a group of people who will help you along the way, and it may not be just one, it will never be one person. It will be a group of people that you call on for different things, and sometimes mentorship is like friendship where it's temporary, and that's okay, too. That you have a mentor for a certain stage in your life and then, they go on and do their own thing and you do your own thing. But you know that they've impacted your life positively and that's okay, too.

 

Q: For those who might be just starting their careers or journeys in a stem field, what skills should they have, or what advice would you sort of give them as they're starting off on this journey?

 

Don't give up. Don't give up even if it's hard. Because I mean, I really think that all careers, all fields, are difficult. The stem field, both in science and in you know, sort of the laboratory type investigative part of it, as well as the application part of it. When we talk about the clinical medicine component there will always be hurdles that have to be overcome. But those that succeed kind of put their head down and just keep doing it, right. We talk about in medicine that that C equals MD. Right like you just keep going and the same is true for graduate school in a way that that you're learning, even if you don't think that you're learning, right, you're absorbing skills. And you're improving, even if you're running the same experiment over and over and over again. There is change that's happening and growth and development that's happening in that. So I think the biggest thing is when you have these little ruts that get you down, that you know what your self worth is, what your strength comes from. And say, Okay, I can still push through and push on because it will get better.

I think the biggest barrier to success for women and for men in stem is self-doubt. Right? Is  that we question whether we belong or we question whether we're good enough. Or we question whether you know well, I’m not doing it the same way as so and so next door, and I think that is just noise in your head that's gonna keep you from getting there. I mean you keep pushing for it, if you push for it, and you keep going, you will get there, you know.

 

Q: Where do you see your career going in the next coming 10 years?

 

Oh goodness. So, simply put, I would like to do more of the same. So, if I think of what I enjoy the most about my career and this is going to sound extremely cheesy because I'm talking to you guys right now. But it's then relationship aspect right. So in academia, the relationships are really foraged with your colleagues, with your trainees, with your mentors, and just talking about science. Talking about discovery, but it's also talking about life, right? There's room in it to talk about life. So when I think of mentoring this is fun because, I get to be a little part of your growth, right? Both of you in a way, but it's that time to really go through and discover things together, that I find really, really, really fun. So I would like to continue the research aspect, the academic aspect, because of the environment that I love.

 

Clinically, these relationships are patient to physician right and they’re longitudinal over time. So when  Glaucoma surgery can be a bit of a you know, I’ll see him every week, and they have their post-ops. But you know you form connections with patients and they'll tell you about their life, and maybe their grandkids, or you know, what they did. You know they went to Lake Placid last weekend, and they tell you, give you little tidbits about their life. And that relationship is what makes me continue to do the things that I'm doing. So if this is a cop out, answer, I would say that I would like to do more of the same right. Yes, I would like to have an R-01. Yes, I would like to publish papers. Yes, I would like to have 2 sane and hopefully grounded children. I mean, these are all the things that I would like but you know, on the day to day I’d like to keep doing what I’m doing because it's fun. 

 

Q: Is there anything else that you want to comment on, or anything you want to say for anyone who might listen to this? or anything to add? You’ve given us some really great information and advice, and told us some really great stories so we're really happy about that. But anything else? 

 

I mean stories are just stories, you know. I always say I like to give advice and it's worth as much of the cost. So it's free. So it's worth just about nothing but you know I think this is a really good forum, because you want to develop a sense of community. I think, for anytime anyone's going through an arduous process, such as you know whether it's medical school, graduate school, whatever the thing may be. But I think it's good to have a sense of community. I think that touching on mentorship is important because that helps you figure out what your path may be. And I think find the things that ground you to help you get through it. So if it's connecting with friends, if it's, you know, don't lose yourself in this desire to become a career person and to advance your career. Continue to keep the person that you are, whatever that may be, right. If it's your family, your friends, your hobbies. Whatever it is, because that's what you fall back on in times of need. I think that's it. that's all I have to say. It was amazing talking to you.

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