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Rad scientists: A new wave defies stodgy stereotypes

By K.C. Cole
Los Angeles Times

	ANACLETO RAPPING / LOS ANGELES TIMES Key players on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's rovers team — showing the changing face of science — are, from left, Jamie Dyk, Kobie Boykins, Adam Steltzner, Wayne Lee and Shonte Wright.
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PASADENA, Calif. — In high school, Adam Steltzner got what he describes as a "great education. I learned how to meet girls, what drugs to take, where the best shows were." He failed most of sophomore and junior years and earned a 460 combined score on his SATs. For many years, he played bass in various bands, supporting his various habits by working in a health-food store.

Jamie Dyk tried out for the Laker Girls and "made it pretty far" before realizing that what with practice and appearances, she was going to have to choose between dancing and her day job. A cheerleader throughout high school, Dyk was raised in a Christian home in rural Montana and believes strongly that people were "brought here to give back to society."

On weekends, Kobie Boykins rides his motorcycle through the canyons with friends. "I like speed," said Boykins, who plays competitive ice hockey twice a week. It's a big change from his boyhood in Nebraska, where he grew up around lumbering farm equipment.

A self-confessed tomboy, Shonte Wright wears her hair in long minibraids and plays basketball seven to nine hours a week. She describes her current work environment as "hilarious. You should see what people wear! We always look like we're going out to play."

Her colleague Wayne Lee considers himself lucky to have a wife who bought him "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" for Valentine's Day. "On airplanes, I'm sitting there with my Game Boy, and these businessmen in their stuffy suits and their laptops, and they'll look at me like, 'So, are you going back to school?' And I say, 'No, I work for NASA.' "

If you watched the landings of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity on television, you will remember Lee as the man in charge — the one in the American-flag shirt who brought out the broom after his team made a two-for-two "clean sweep."

Steltzner — who now has a doctorate degree and a baby at home — headed the team that designed the entry, descent and landing systems. Boykins led the team that designed the mechanism to operate the solar panels, and Wright helped design the thermal systems that keep the rovers warm. Dyk was in charge of testing the landing systems during development.

"At heart, I'm a space geek who wants to put hardware on the surface of Mars," the would-be Laker Girl said.

Unfamiliar faces
 

If the images coming back from Mars looked an awful lot like Arizona, there was little familiar about the exuberant young engineers whooping it up in the control room of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena — talking on cellphones, cracking jokes, wearing funny T-shirts. (Lee even took a call from his baby-sitting father, who wanted to know how to tune in to NASA TV.)

Gone are the days when space geeks were (only) poker-faced pocket-protector guys with narrow ties and crew cuts. The rocket scientists at the JPL are surfer dudes, sky divers, rock climbers — even "Survivor" survivors. Far from the seemingly bloodless clones of the Apollo era, the young faces on the screen were as sunny, as animated, as varied as Southern California itself.

The free-to-be-me atmosphere that's creating such a sense of excitement at the JPL these days does not, obviously, extend to all scientific institutions — or even to the JPL at all times in its history.

Yet it is hardly isolated. Parts of the physics community, for example, also seem to be amid an extreme geek makeover.

Both physics and engineering are still largely "pale and male," populated by straight-A, straight-arrow students who take the standard, well-trod road. But exceptions are also increasingly visible — and with the U.S. facing a critical shortage of scientific talent, they may be what saves the scientific community from itself.

Harvard professor Lisa Randall, who has played a major role in the study of extra dimensions, gives talks wearing low-slung trousers, makeup and jewelry. At some point, she said, she realized that no matter how hard she worked to fit the reigning mold of "physicist," she was always going to be different. "It's not like they're going to be fooled," she said. So she decided not to try. (She is also an accomplished rock climber.)

Stanford post-doctoral student Stephon Alexander, who applies higher-dimensional physics to cosmology, had been advised to cut his hair, but he liked his long dreads just the way they were. "There are lots of women and blacks and Latinos who want to be invisible, and I ain't one of those," he said, laughing. "I'm sorry. I'm hip. People look at the music industry, or basketball, and say: 'That's cool.' Well, what I do is cool too."

Defying expectations

Of course, science was neither as nerdy nor as monolithic as the media made it seem. Einstein and his ilk were an adventurous lot; physics has always had its share of jocks; minorities and women have long made important contributions.

But the image has persisted even in the face of contrary evidence. Helen Quinn, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and current president of the American Physical Society, nursed two babies in the backs of lecture halls. "I wore short skirts and had long, blond hair," she said. "People would say: 'You don't look like a physicist.' Well, what did they want me to do, grow a beard?"

What may seem like essentially a cosmetic change turns out to be central to the scientific future of our country. Images shape how people see themselves and therefore how they choose careers. "Students are turned off because they think we're all these weird geeky 'Star Trek' types," said Wright, who spends time with kids trying to change these notions.

And with the United States facing an unprecedented shortage of physical scientists, it's no longer possible to ignore what physicist Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, calls the "underrepresented majority": women, blacks and Latinos as well as nontraditional white males.

"Who will be the next generation of scientists and engineers?" she asked. "How can we even discuss preparing for human exploration to the moon and Mars without discussing who will do the science to get us there?"

A 'silent crisis'

For now, it's a "silent crisis," she said, but conditions are brewing that will seriously compromise everything from homeland security to the country's ability to compete in global markets. Preventing those possibilities will involve a lot of things, including outreach, mentoring and more financial support for students. But "overall image is critical."

On the surface, physics and engineering do seem to be showing a new face to the world. Jackson is president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the first black woman physicist to graduate from MIT, in addition to heading the AAAS — the country's largest general organization of scientists. The entire leadership of the American Physical Society is women.

"Given that in 100 years, the APS has had only two women presidents, this is quite a remarkable situation," said Quinn, who was recently elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences as part of the largest cohort of women ever.

For the first time, the heads of most top engineering organizations are women. For the first time, the director of the world's largest single dish radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, is a Puerto Rican. For the first time, 60 percent of young astronomers are women, and the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena has its first female director, Wendy Freedman.

In some ways, however, appearances are deceiving. The percentage of female Ph.D.s in physical science still hovers around 10 percent; the percentage of blacks and Latinos ranges between 1 percent and 2 percent. "There's still probably only 30 black women with physics Ph.D.s in the whole country," said Arlene Maclin, a professor of engineering at Norfolk State University in Virginia. "But it's not just minorities. Whether they're black, brown, yellow, green, Americans just aren't going into physics."

The reasons include a host of real and perceived "yuck" factors that put physical science in the "not-for-me category" for the vast majority of people: There's the nerdy stereotype; the pressure to conform; the belief that science is too hard (or you're too dumb); that your colleagues won't be fun, or friendly; that you can't make decent money.

Image as a barrier

Image plays a major role in making science seem like hostile territory. "I have many friends from my neighborhood who are either in prison or dead," Alexander said. "I had the good fortune that physics was something I was really good at." But while his family was encouraging, social expectations for black men were not. "The message was: It's not your place to be academic; go be a basketball player."

Lee almost didn't go into engineering because of the images he saw of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's mission control in the 1960s. "It was a lot of nerdy-looking white guys with crew cuts. I grew up thinking the average person doesn't get to do that."

In fact, when Lee first went to work at the Kennedy Space Center in the early '90s, one of his managers told him he'd never make it at NASA if he didn't wear a coat and tie. On Dyk's first day at the JPL, a female colleague told her she should learn to be one of the guys and never wear a dress.

Good scientists tend to have a healthy disrespect for authority: Dyk wore a dress the next day. As for Lee, he still doesn't own a suit or know how to tie a tie.

One reason the JPL's young engineers love their jobs, they said, was that they can look and be as they wish so long as they do their jobs. "What the cameras didn't show," said Lee, grinning, "is in the control room, when I'm not doing anything, I'm sitting there with my little Game Boy."

"We had one of the highest-functioning teams in the history of the lab," Steltzner said, "and one of the strengths of the team was an environment where it was safe to bring our passions. There was no guarding, there was no card playing. You might be able to do what we do in a stodgy, stifling, environment, but I don't think so."

Randall decided to stop trying to fit the mold of theoretical physicist in large part because it detracted from her work. "The fact is, it's easier to be who you are," she said.

Or as Alexander put it, "You can't be a creative thinker if you can't be yourself." A jazz sax player, he sees strong connections between Einstein's curving of space and time and Coltrane's "bending those sheets of sound."

Cosmologist Ruth Gregory of the University of Durham, England, studies the early universe by imaging ways flat sheets of empty space-time might be stitched together like fabric to form seams, or "branes" (from membrane). "That's how I think of it, because I'm female," she said. "It's like sewing a shoulder. You make something which is curved out of cloth which is flat."

As science becomes increasingly collaborative, other traditionally female skills are suddenly getting respect — for example, the ability to nurture young people, foster cooperation and work in teams.

People skills valued

Aggressive, domineering personalities are not revered as they once were, said Pat Burchat of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, who had two children very young in her career path even though people advised her not to. "You don't have to imitate that stereotype. The ability to work with people is much more valued."

Boykins goes them one better, combining his farm experience with his interest in jazz to solve engineering problems.

"I say, 'OK, what would the jazz musician do? What if instead of running it in 4/4, for example, I run it in 5/6 or 3/2?' Then I say, 'Well, what would the farmer do? I strip everything down to the bare bones because I have to save every penny I can.' And then all that comes together to make a better product than any one approach could have."

As in all walks of life, image and reality in science play on each other in complex ways. Perhaps the most harmful image of all is the one that paints physics and engineering as stodgy, boring and conspicuously lacking in fun. That seems particularly strange, because most of the people who go into these fields say they feel enormously lucky and can't conceive doing anything else.

"When I came here, I thought, 'This is eating candy,' " said Boykins. "This is ambrosia. I love everything I do here."

In fact, many scientists say that having fun is not just appealing, it's essential. "If you're not having fun," as Boykins put it, "you can't make good stuff."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company