UC Santa Cruz Review Summer/Fall 1995

The Trials and Triumphs of an Assistant Professor by Robert Irion

Day in and day out, the life of a young faculty member is a frenetic but rewarding juggling act

The first thing many people learn about Olof Einarsdottir is the origin of her name. In her native Iceland, she explains time and again, the father's given name­in this case, Einar­becomes the first half of each child's surname, followed by "dottir" for girls or "son" for boys. Olof's 7 sisters and 2 brothers have 27 children among them; each one carries the name of his or her father, as will Olof's first child, yet to be born.

"It makes it a bit difficult to trace family lines from generation to generation," Olof observes.

Not so hard to follow, however, is the path of Olof's professional success. As an assistant professor of chemistry on the verge of earning tenure at UCSC, she has thrived in the stressful world of academia. In this era of public accountability and shrinking funding for research, the demands on university scientists have never been greater. Yet few people are aware of just how many duties a new faculty member must confront, how many strings pull her to and fro.

"Every aspect of your life is hectic in your first few years," says David Kliger, professor of chemistry and dean of UCSC's Natural Sciences Division. "For the first time, you have total responsibility for teaching courses. You have to set up a research lab, starting essentially from scratch, and find students to work with you. You have to write research proposals and obtain funding. Not to mention that you have to get results in a finite period of time if you want to keep your job.

"Olof has met all of these challenges," Kliger says. "She's done remarkably well."

In the spring of 1995, Olof marked the end of her sixth year at UCSC. Opening a small window on her world reveals scenes that could feature any young scientist at today's University of California.

"The bottom line is: Organize your time well," Olof says, writing the last four words on the blackboard with two exclamation points. The first lecture in Biochemistry 110 is just ten minutes old, and already the class has a taste of Olof's teaching style: fast and furious.

"You must keep detailed notes in your lab notebooks," she says. "Someone else should be able to read your notebook, understand what you did, and be able to repeat it. If someone can't do that, your notebook is not satisfactory."

This is Olof's second year of teaching Biochem 110, a required course for juniors and seniors majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology. For most of the quarter, students will learn how to isolate and study a protein from the heart of a cow. Biochemists do that all the time in the real world, and it's not easy. The rugged lab procedures ambush a few students; almost every week, Olof emphasizes the need to plan ahead.

A glance at the schedule shows that Olof lectures on Tuesdays, 10 to 11:45 a.m. For the course to succeed, however, she must devote far more time to it than that. Preparing for lecture takes hours, usually on the weekend, as Olof reads about changes in her field and tries to enliven her lessons. She visits the instructional lab four days a week, sometimes lingering an hour to see each student and talk with the teaching assistants. She leads a discussion group on Mondays to review homework problems. She meets with the TAs and lab coordinator every Friday to keep the class on track. She holds office hours for students, reviews their reports, and writes and grades the exams.

"When I teach, I spend quite a lot of time on it," Olof says. "We're paid to teach, and that should be one of the primary missions of the university. I never view spending time with students as an imposition."

Even after six years, Olof still loses sleep before lecturing and gets nervous about standing in front of a class. Indeed, teaching did not come naturally to her. Olof recalls her first quarter in the fall of 1989, when she taught physical chemistry, as the most nerve- racking time of her life. "It had been ten years since I'd taken a physical chemistry course, and I was scared to death," she says. She tried to cope by preparing reams of notes, but she ended up writing far too much on the board, a tendency she still combats. When it was over, many of the anonymous evaluations from students were critical but cited her promise. As is often the case, however, a few stooped to cruelty. "She should only do research work," one wrote. "Whoever hired her to teach is a moron."

Most feedback is more constructive, and Olof has used it to work on her teaching. The results show. In the biochemistry class, she still crams the board with information, but it's clear and organized. She sprinkles her lectures with relevant examples, such as how the body adjusts the blood's pH during exercise or why protein in urine is a warning sign. She shines in her visits to the instructional lab, engaging the students with an attentive and friendly gaze. "Most students won't speak up in class, so I try as much as possible to talk to them one on one," she says. "That's when I can really probe and find out what their problems are."

Olof's ratings from students have climbed every year; now, they're near the top. "The intensity which she brought to the classroom was wonderfully invigorating," one wrote recently. "Surely, one of the best teachers I've had." And, from another student, in concise surf-speak: "Olof is RAD."

Not all goes swimmingly in the biochem lab. Students misplace or mislabel chemicals; pumps and spectrometers act up; a few groups putter and fall behind. A demonstration for the discussion group goes awry; Olof sprints from the room, laughing, carrying a flask overflowing with bubbles. One afternoon, a batch of dialysis tubing sprouts holes, costing some students hours of work. "It never fails­at least one catastrophe a day," says Julie Braatz, one of Olof's two TAs.

Olof takes it all in stride. "There were problems yesterday that I'd really like to avoid," she says firmly to a cluster of students, tying a dialysis bag with nimble fingers. "I've never seen so many defects. Test your bags! And fill them over an empty beaker so you don't lose your entire sample."

"What happened yesterday was no different than what every graduate student faces every day in the lab," says Beau Willis, who oversees the chemistry teaching labs. "It's par for the course. "Running a research lab is like running a small business," says biochemist David Deamer, Olof's husband of three years. "You are the leader of a team of people. You must have the ability not only to be creative yourself, but to direct your team and inspire them to do their best work."

In a short time, Olof's team has gained notice for its research on cytochrome oxidase, an important enzyme in the cells of all animals. The enzyme helps convert food and oxygen into the energy our bodies need to survive. It's a complex bit of the cell that demands tough experiments and a group, like Olof's, that is willing to try new things.

Olof's cosmopolitan team includes postdoctoral researchers Artur Sucheta of Poland and Istvan Szundi of Hungary, and graduate students Stefan Paula of Germany and Jennifer Brooks of California. Deamer, who retired from UC Davis but now runs a lab at UCSC, advises informally. They all meet regularly to critique the work of others in the field, share progress, and brainstorm. Because of her other duties, Olof does not spend as much time doing hands-on work in her lab as she once did. But the lab remains her domain, and she sets the tone.

At one group meeting, Brooks and Paula describe their plan to study cytochrome oxidase inside a membrane made out of lipids, or fats, that mimic the cell. Olof likes the idea but urges caution. "You really should check to see how much Peter Nichols has done on the permeabilities of these lipids," she says, referring to another researcher. "We need to make sure these things are not already in the literature so we don't waste our time repeating it."

The episode reveals two of Olof's strengths. One is an encyclopedic knowledge of related work by other scientists. With ease, she tosses off the names of authors and the years in which they published results. Second, she guides her group with a firm but collegial hand.

"Olof's 'no's' are pretty famous," says Sucheta. "When you think you've done something earth-shaking, she'll be the first to ask, 'Are you sure?' But it's never meant personally. We do question ourselves, very deeply, and that's how science should operate."

Managing the lab is an ongoing adventure. "It's a challenge to find the best way to interact with people, to find out what makes each person tick," Olof says. "Sometimes, you have to make difficult decisions." For instance, when a recent postdoc was unable to keep up the pace of research that Olof expects, she asked him to leave after one year.

More typical was the experience of Katy Georgiadis, Olof's first graduate student, who finished her Ph.D. last year and had a hand in four scientific papers. "It was exciting to join Olof's lab, because she was new when I came to UCSC," says Georgiadis, now a postdoc at Cornell. "We spent a lot of late nights working together. I found her very generous and understanding. She was a real favorite of the students."

Several undergraduates also have blossomed under Olof's tutelage. Ryan MacArthur, who graduated in 1994, worked on a new way to spike a chemical system with a rapid pulse of oxygen, using a laser. The idea was Olof's, but she saw MacArthur's talents and let him run with it. Now, he is first author on a paper to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences­almost unheard of for an undergrad.

"Olof gave me a lot of leeway," says MacArthur, a graduate student at Yale. "I was coming up with all sorts of crazy stuff that I don't think a normal adviser would have let me try. She had high expectations, but she didn't push too hard. She made it clear that if I wanted to accomplish something, it was up to me."

Pam DeMarois, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, says her senior year in Olof's lab changed her ambitions. "I had no intention of having a career in research," she says. "But once I was exposed to the rush of discovery, it was very seductive. Olof made me feel like I was working on a very important problem, and that my project was real."

"When I can be a role model for one of my students to continue in science," says Olof, "I find that very satisfying."

Money for research, never easy to come by, is growing more precious. In February, Olof submitted a new proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary funding agency in her field. The proposal asks for $545,000 over five years. Some of it would buy equipment; most would pay salaries for Olof's lab group, plus a summer salary for herself. In 1992, Olof won a five-year, $350,000 grant from NIH under a slightly less stringent program for new faculty members. Now, as she awaits word on her effort to secure more permanent resources, she fears she may have to try again.

"This grant business is really quite stressful," Olof says. "There's a general tightening of budgets, and senior colleagues are losing their grants. Without the grants, you can't support personnel in your lab and you have more difficulty attracting students."

Nor can researchers attract grants without parading their results. Olof has a good track record of publishing her research in scientific journals, although the small size of her group limits her to two or three papers a year. Recently, she wrote an invited review of her specialty­a prestigious but daunting honor. Olof's tome ran some 25 pages and featured 240 references.

Also time-consuming are her reviews of articles or grant proposals from other biochemists, which she receives a couple of times a month. "I spend much more time on this than I should," she says, lamenting a recent weekend lost to a particularly boring paper. "But when I send out an article, I expect my reviewers to look at it closely, so I operate with the same mentality."

Then there are administrative demands from the campus. Weekly faculty meetings in the department can last hours, especially when personnel issues arise. Olof also has worked on various committees: a planning group for a new chemistry building; a panel that grants modest funds to UCSC scientists; a team that screens students who wish to study for a year in Scandinavia.

When young faculty members come up for tenure, their colleagues review this entire constellation of service. But their endeavors to strengthen the backbones of the UC system, teaching and research, merit the most careful scrutiny. Popular opinion holds that the only critical factor is research prowess. Materials in Olof's file, however, take just as much care to laud her teaching skills.

"To some extent, it makes sense to look at research very closely," says science dean David Kliger. "You are trying to judge the quality of a person's mind and their ability to make new contributions. But if that person has an attitude that teaching is not important, then I worry a lot about granting tenure.

"Too often," Kliger adds, "research is pitted against teaching. With the training of students that goes on in the lab and our efforts to teach the most up-to-date information, those two things should feed on each other in a positive way. That's the nature of the university."

Further, notes chemistry department chairman Thomas Schleich, measures of research success are more subjective than people might think. "We don't look at X number of publications or X dollars of grants," he says. "What is important is that the research makes an impact. To Olof's credit, she has made contributions that make people sit up and take notice, in what has at times been a very contentious field."

The letter from Chancellor Karl Pister comes to Olof's office in early May. "I am pleased to extend congratulations to you on your promotion to the rank of associate professor," Pister writes. Thirty years after UCSC opened, Olof will become the first tenured woman in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, as of July 1. Colleagues drop in, extending their hands. They all knew she was a lock for tenure, they say; Olof sighs, her broad smile only hinting at the road she has traveled.

A cake appears in Olof's lab. David Deamer teases his wife that in the coming years, the bureaucratic tentacles of her profession will tighten their grip. "When I made associate professor, I had a list of ten ways to say 'no' next to my phone," he says between forkfuls of icing. "I'll get it for you. You'll need it, because people will start asking you to do even more things."

Olof's arrival is no surprise to those who know her well: her nine siblings in Iceland, who all have higher degrees; her colleagues at other institutions, one of whom called her a "rising star" in a recent letter; her students and coworkers at UCSC; and her mentors, who saw her potential all along.

"The one quality of Olof's that truly stands out is her determination," says William Woodruff, her postdoctoral adviser at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "She has always had the fire in her belly to do her own concept of science, and to do it well."

Postscript: On June 19, Olof and David welcomed their child: a nine- pound, four-ounce girl. Her name, only half of which was a closely guarded secret, is Asta Davidsdottir.

If good things come in threes, one might have expected a thumbs-up from NIH after Olof's promotion and her baby. Alas, her proposal ranked in the 37th percentile; funding went to those in roughly the top 30 percent. Olof will reapply in October­little more than a year before her current grant runs dry.