Interview with Katherine Kalil

Katherine Kalil (#782) Transcript

SP: Today is Monday, July 10th, 2006. I am Sandy Pfahler, an interviewer for the University of Wisconsin Madison Oral History Project. Today I am interviewing Katherine Kalil, professor of anatomy in the UW Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

KK: Hi. Nice to see you.

SP: Nice to see you too. We'll start the interview by having you talk about your early life-- where you were born, when you were born, where you went to elementary school, where you went to high school, any people in your early in life that had a positive influence on you, on your career choices later on.

KK: OK. I spent my formative years in New Jersey and went to elementary and high school there.

SP: What town-- or many towns?

KK: Several towns. I grew up in Pompton Plains, which was a little rural sort of town and then we moved to the suburbs when I was in the middle of high school.

SP: Suburbs of--

KK: New Jersey. Everything in New Jersey is a suburb of New York, in my opinion. So being near the city was quite interesting for me and I used to go into the city and visit museums and go to the theater and so forth.

SP: Do you have any brothers and sisters?

KK: I have two sisters.

SP: Older, younger?

KK: One older and one younger and--

SP: What did your parents do?

KK: My mother was a patent attorney and has-- had-- she died recently, at the age of 92. And she had a degree in chemistry and then got a law degree and 00:02:00worked on the Manhattan Project that was responsible for-- she was responsible for patenting a number of inventions that were related to the atomic energy effort. And then subsequent to that, she went to work for Standard Oil and worked on their patent division.

My father was a chemical engineer for a chemical company in New Jersey for a long time-- spent his whole career there.

SP: Is he living?

KK: No. He died also at the age of 92, about five years ago. I have a long life ahead of me-- for good or ill.

SP: Did you go to public school?

KK: Yes, I did.

SP: How were the public schools?

KK: OK.

SP: Any of your teachers that you remember that had particular positive or negative influence on your future studies?

KK: I can't really say that much. I really did not like high school very much, for the usual reasons that you might expect. If you weren't popular and went to football games, you could forget high school. And I did very well and was at the top of my class-- and this is very unhelpful to having a good time in high school, I find.

SP: You knew all along that you would be going to college?

KK: Absolutely. From the time I can even remember, there was no question.

SP: And how did you make the decision as to where to go to college?

KK: Well, I went to Bryn Mawr, a small liberal arts school outside Philadelphia and it was a difficult decision. I'd always been interested in science and I was 00:04:00accepted at MIT-- one of only, I think, 25 women who were at that time. This was 1958 and MIT was a pretty grim place. And I went up to visit and everybody had slide rules and pocket protectors and long pants up to their waist-- like the nerd pictures you see. They looked exactly like that. And I came home and I said I didn't think it was a great idea. My mother felt like that too. So my older sister at the time was going to Bryn Mawr and I just sort of decided to go there.

SP: And did you know that you were going to study science then, when you entered Bryn Mawr?

KK: I thought that I was and actually took a lot of science. I did very well in 00:05:00math and chemistry and physics and biology. And then somehow I got little sidetracked and had always loved reading and literature and I wound up being an English major. And then-- go figure, right? And then I actually then went to graduate school in English. I went to Brown University and--

SP: I'm going to back you up a little bit at Bryn Mawr. Now was that a successful experience? Did you--

KK: Yes.

SP: Like that school?

KK: Very much. It was a small, I think relatively protected, environment and I would say, a very intellectual school where learning was truly valued. And I had wonderful professors. And one of the best skills I learned there was how to write, which has served me well.

SP: Now was it a positive thing that your sister was there while you were there?

KK: No. I hate my sister and I hate her to this day and we'll never talk about her again.

SP: OK. So when you graduated, you knew you were going down to graduate school and you said you went to Brown. Now how did you make that choice?

KK: Sort of mindlessly. I mean, being an English major, there wasn't-- I thought that-- I really thought that the ideal life would be to get my PhD in English and come back to a school like Bryn Mawr and teach there and sort of live this very cloistered life because the classes are small, it was great, idealized. I mean, sometimes we had our classes outside under a tree and you felt like this 00:07:00sort of Socratic ideal-- the acolyte sitting at the foot of the professor. And I thought that would be a really good life. So then I went to Brown and got married and had my first child at the age of 22-- not something I would recommend, but it worked out OK. I've got great children.

And then I stayed there and then--

SP: But now you went to Brown to become-- to get a PhD--

KK: Correct.

SP: In English.

KK: Wait.

SP: OK.

KK: We're getting there.

SP: OK.

KK: And I got my masters degree and I finished most of my PhD and then I moved 00:08:00to Cambridge where my husband was and he was getting a degree in neuroscience at MIT at the time. He was an undergraduate at Harvard. And so I spent one year as an instructor at Connecticut College for Women in New London and I commuted from Cambridge down to New London several times a week-- a really terrible experience. And during that year, I realized I could not stand this as a long term career. I think my joke at the time was, if I have to read papers like Staircase Imagery in Bleak House ever again, I will scream-- and nobody's 00:09:00interested in this. I mean, I had a good experience teaching at Connecticut, but I couldn't really see doing that with my life. It was already getting kind of boring.

And I was writing my PhD thesis which, in the event, I never finished. No great loss for humanity, I would say. It was on George Eliot, which was really quite interesting, but I just didn't care about it and then I had my second child, my daughter right after that year finished.

KK: And so during the year, I talked to my husband and he thought that I would really like neuroscience and I used to go to the lab and sit in on experiments 00:10:00and got more and more interested. I'd always loved biology and really, that was kind of my original intention and English was sort of a long side trek. So he persuaded me to apply and I thought I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell, but I think they were sort of intrigued with the idea of somebody coming back to school in a completely different field.

SP: Now this is applying at MIT?

KK: Yes. Yes. I mean, I was living in Cambridge anyway. So I interviewed there when I was about six months pregnant and I had a very long sweater on. I hoped that nobody would notice, which apparently nobody did. And so I got in and then 00:11:00I never went near the place until I had my daughter because I thought-- they were asking me questions like, how do you think you're going to go to graduate school? You have a six-year-old. I thought, if you only knew. Because none of the other students were married or had children, nothing.

SP: Were you interviewed by men?

KK: Yes, exclusively. As you can well imagine, this was MIT in 1969-- not what you would call the most enlightened place in the world. Although I think they treated me quite well actually.

SP: And your husband at the time was still in graduate school at MIT.

KK: He had finished and was doing a post-doc while I got my degree. And I have 00:12:00to say, the whole experience was-- looking back on it now, it was extremely stressful. We commuted in from the suburbs where we were living and we had my mother-in-law taking care of our children. I don't really want to go into that, but you can sort of guess-- but anyway, I just worked like a dog. I mean, I worked from nine in the morning until midnight every day. And--

SP: Did you work with good people?

KK: My major professor was a very distinguished neuroanatomist who put me on 00:13:00this extremely dull project and really didn't pay very much attention to me. And the work that was most interesting to me was with a younger professor. So I really did two projects at the same time because this was in neural development, which I found very interesting.

So in my third year-- and most people take six years or so to get a PhD-- in my third year, I said to my husband-- he's my ex-husband now, but we were married certainly at the time-- I said, if I have to work on this stupid project one more year, I'll lose my mind. I'm finishing in a year and we're getting out of here. So I finished in four years, starting from zero. I knew nothing about the nervous system-- absolutely nothing. And I did have to take some courses on 00:14:00things that I really was unfamiliar with, like computer science and molecular biology. Anyway, somehow or other I bumbled my way through and got my degree.

SP: Very impressive.

KK: And so literally the day after I defended my thesis, we were in our moving van, coming out here because Ron had gotten a job as an assistant professor. And I noticed one of your questions is, why did you come here? Did I have a choice? So they sort of fixed up a post-doc for me here, but in point of fact, I pretty much worked by myself and decided on the project and got the money for the project and kind of did it.

SP: What was the project?

KK: It's really not important. I'm not doing that sort of work anymore. But 00:15:00actually, I had also started to work on development, which is my area now. And in terms of getting a job here, there were no women in this department-- except for there was one woman on a sort of side track-- was not medical students or anything. It was occupational therapy or one of those-- shall we say, parallel tracks. I was actually offered something like that and I just said, no. If I'm going to have a position, it's going to be a regular position, not teaching occupational therapists or something like that. I mean, I knew it was second 00:16:00rate and they were trying to foist it off on me because I was a woman and I was perfectly well aware of that and I wasn't having any. So I just said no. And then a position opened up teaching, of all things, gross anatomy-- about which I knew absolutely nothing. And so I said, well, how about if I apply for that? They said, well, we suggest you actually take the course before thinking you were going to teach it. I said, oh, yeah, that-- OK. So I took it with the medical students and it was really very hard for somebody that had no background in human anatomy or physiology or anything. I mean, I really knew from nothing and I was also-- I'd never seen a dead body before and was terrified of what was 00:17:00lurking in the tank.

Anyway, so I took the course and I didn't realize until the last week of the course that I was expected to take the final exam with the medical students. And your entire grade was based on this final exam. And I sort of had this attitude of, OK, I'll work away, but wasn't taking it hugely seriously because I was working on my post-doctoral projects and also developing some other areas of research interests. They gave me a little closet for a lab that I just outfitted as best I could. So I recall the week before this exam, I literally stayed up 00:18:00practically all day and all night, cramming the entire semester of gross anatomy into a couple of days and managed to get a B.

KK: And the other thing that happened-- this was right before they were going to make a decision about whether to hire me as an assistant professor. And I had also applied for an NSF grant-- from the National Science Foundation, which you probably know. And the day before they were going to make the decision about whether hire me, my grant came in. I got my grant. So getting a B in the course and getting my grant-- because of course I knew that I was not going to spend most of my time teaching. That was just a requirement for the position. I knew 00:19:00that I wanted to be a researcher, but also I realized very early on that being on a non-tenured track-- things that women very easily then-- and even now-- get side tracked into, like permanent research associate. I knew that was completely nowhere. So I was very adamant about getting an independent position that would allow me to do research, apply for funds, and so forth.

SP: So did you compete for the position or you had to be interviewed? You got your B and you've got your grant.

KK: They interviewed some other people, but I think I was so way better than 00:20:00them, it wasn't even close. I mean, at that time, they often hired people to teach gross anatomy who were really not going to be researchers.

SP: This was a full time faculty position, right?

KK: Absolutely, yeah. No question. So then-- so I had my NSF and then I started developing this other project on rural development and then I successfully wrote my NIH grant. That was in 1978 and I have the same grant. I have renewed it for the last 30 years, almost-- not quite. 20, 26 years or something.

KK: So again, I mean, just to-- most of the people in the department have much 00:21:00lighter teaching loads than I do. I started out teaching the entire gross anatomy course.

SP: And what did that entail? It's all medical students.

KK: It's all medical students. It was three hours a day, nine to 12-- and sometimes teaching independent study students in the afternoon, running my lab, having two grants, having two children, and then my husband decided he had another agenda. We won't go any further than that. And just decided that's what he was going to do. So on top of all that, then I was a single mother.

KK: So--

SP: I'm almost afraid--did you have any-- talk about the tenure process.

KK: I worked like a dog. That's all I'm going to say. And after awhile, they-- because some of us-- another person was hired who was more of a researcher and we kind of protested about the back breaking teaching load. I mean, there were people who were-- my former husband taught ten lectures. That was his entire job and I was teaching all the time plus having a lab plus having graduate students.

SP: How many years did you teach that class?

KK: 10 years. And I mean, now when new people come in, they don't even teach that. They don't even teach anything the first couple of years. I mean, 00:23:00everything is really different. And I very strongly believe in that and I don't have this attitude-- well, I suffered and dammit, you're going to have to suffer too. I really feel very strongly about-- so I published, I got my grants, I did my teaching, I did everything that I was supposed to do, and I thought actually quite well. I thought that it was-- within the department, I-- being the only woman was somewhat isolating. I really had nobody to talk to and talk about mentoring. Nobody ever told me anything. I had no committee, no nothing. And I think I'm very, very happy that that has changed for women.

Plus our chairman at the time when I was getting tenure-- don't get me started. 00:24:00Just horrible. Totally unsympathetic, unsupportive, awful person. So my current chair got the position right the year that I got tenure, 1982. And there were no extensions, no nothing for women-- and actually, probably just as well. I don't think these extended tenure clocks are-- I mean, I think for having children, OK, or major catastrophes in your life, OK, but it's not-- in science, it's not particularly helpful to string that out and kind of in a sense get off track with your peers and your male compatriots.

And there were still-- there were no women in this department until I'd been on 00:25:00the faculty for 15 years. Now we have more in the last five or six years, but really, the medical school is pretty much like that.

SP: So the culture has changed in this department?

KK: Yes.

SP: Can you talk about that a little bit?

KK: Well, I think-- as everybody points out, when-- for any gender or race or anything that's in the minority, everything changes when there's sort of a critical mass. But people coming in then were just-- were assistant professors. They were not my peers at all, in terms of the time when we were hired. So--

SP: Have you worked here in this building, in this office?

KK: Not in this office.

SP: But in this building?

KK: We've moved around a little bit, yes.

SP: And your lab is next door?

KK: My lab is here and then I have more space over there.

SP: Would you talk about your research?

KK: Sure. Basically in a simple way, I work on how neurons-- which are nerve cells in the brain or over the spinal cord-- make their connections with other brain cells during development. They send out these long processes, which are called axons and they have-- I think if you looked at my website, you can watch the movies of the growth cones and-- kind of-- I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory. That's what we study-- some of the intracellular events that allow these motile growth cones to find their targets in the nerve system. And I mostly work in tissue cultures isolated nerve cells. I don't work on it in the 00:27:00animal, although I used to.

SP: And what is it that has-- what is it about your research that has made NIH give you funding for 30 years? I mean, that's really-- that's great.

KK: I guess that I would say that it has moved ahead constantly with the times and I've been on many study sections. And I think some people just kind of run out of steam and stop developing new techniques. And I think that technically, in terms of the kind of microscopy and live cell imaging that we do-- and I don't know whether you've looked at any of on the website. You can play the 00:28:00movies very easily.

SP: I did look at it, but I have to tell you that I'm not good at science.

KK: Well, I don't think you have to be in order to appreciate the visual impact.

SP: That's true.

KK: That that makes sense. And so we got actually to be, I think, very much in the forefront of neural imaging brain cells or brain preparations with high resolution digital imaging. And I think-- I guess I would say the significance of the question-- the technical expertise which was developed by many of my graduate students-- I mean, in this area, you don't get in there and do it all by yourself. But we have kind of continued to move forward where the research 00:29:00took us, rather than saying, well, I don't know how to do that. We would just figure out how to do it. I've learned-- I certainly didn't start out as a cell and molecular biologist, but have evolved over the years and I do think the ability to continually learn and grow constantly has been a big help.

KK: Going back to my training, I would say the other strong point is-- and I'm only saying because I've been told many times by study section-- that my grants are extremely well written. They're always very clear, organized. In fact, my last review, somebody said, this grant is beautifully written and a delight to read. Having been on study sections, most grants are hardly a delight-- in fact, 00:30:00usually a chore. I think that if you're able to write clearly so that what you're doing is understandable and persuasive-- I always tell my students, the name of the game is tell me in 25 pages or less why you should give me a million dollars. That's it in a nutshell. And I think our papers have always appeared in good journals, I think for a very similar reason. The work is good, but also people are persuaded because-- I guess after all these years I can admit that I probably write better than many other people. I'll just say that much.

SP: When I look at your website and I look at other websites of scientists on campus and I hear you talking, you always say 'we'. It almost sounds like your 00:31:00team is almost like a family. How do you develop that team? How do you find your students and how does it come together so that everybody works so well?

KK: That's an interesting question. Usually-- I mean, students find you. They apply to the program and they sometimes do--

KK: I think to me, that's one of the things that's so much more interesting than had I stayed in English literature. You're the lonely scholar working away. I certainly don't have an enormous lab by many standards. I have had as many as nine or ten. Right now I have three or four. But I do think it's the job of the leader-- me-- to really motivate people and to-- also to nurture them and to pay 00:32:00attention to them. And I really do look out after students. And I have to say that I have earned a good reputation as a good trainer over the years- and in point of fact, in our program-- the neuroscience training program, I think I've trained more students than any other person on the training committee.

My students all do very well because I don't permit anything else. Two of my-- actually, one of my students just got tenure and another of my students is coming back in September as an assistant professor after they did post-docs. And my students do not drop out. They all went on and pursued scientific careers and 00:33:00I'm very proud of that.

SP: Are there-- is there a good number of women that are--

KK: I'm sure. You know something? People ask me that and I have to just-- I have to actually count. It's not something I pay any attention to. I treat men and women exactly the same. Sometimes people have said, well, how many women do you have in your lab? I go, let me see. How many is that? It's always been about 50/50 and I treat everybody the same. I don't think there should be any difference at all.

SP: And I didn't mean it as a question of how they're treated. It just-- when you said you came there, you were the only woman and I just wondered if that's changed over the years, if there are more women going into this profession, into this field.

KK: Well, there are more women graduate students, which doesn't-- as you probably know, doesn't always translate to an equivalent number of faculty. And 00:34:00of course, as you go up the ranks because of history, I think the number of full professors who are women is pretty low. I mean, you can look those numbers up yourself. I don't know what that is, but--

SP: Is collaborative work something that is encouraged in your department, on this campus? I'm sure nationally-- are you involved in a lot of collaborative work?

KK: I have collaborated with people over the years. Maybe I should say something about this now. You may not be aware, but I was an associate vice chancellor for three years-- from '96 to '99 and-- this is going to be archived. I can say this. I was completely responsible for the cluster hiring initiative. That was my thing. Of course, David Ward takes credit for it. John Wiley takes credit for 00:35:00it. And that's probably as it should be, if they are leadership-- although I had to do some persuading to get them on board. In my opinion, it's been a very successful program. I'm only bringing it up because you asked me whether I believe in collaboration. I believe in it so much, I think that I changed the culture of the campus to some degree.

SP: Talk about it a little more, How did you get it going? How did you convince the rest of these people that this was--

KK: Well, because I belonged to an interdisciplinary program and I realized how difficult it was to do recruiting in a coherent way. Departments can recruit. Programs can't.

The other thing that was sort of a formative experience was I was on the Hearn committee, which sort of had made a blueprint for biology. This was in early '90s. And we identified a number of problems in biology, which was hiring people that could work with other people, building interdisciplinary research buildings-- which is all now come to pass and I actually wrote the report that came out of that. It was two years of work and I do distilled it into 15 pages so people would actually read it and Donna Shalala thought it was great. And it's very rewarding to me that many of the recommendations that we as a committee recommended and I put into a coherent form actually came to pass. And 00:37:00the ability to hire interdisciplinary type people in the sciences was one of those things. So I'd been sort of thinking about it for a long time and then when I got the position as associate vice chancellor, part of it was to-- I forget what the words were. Something like reorganize biology on campus. So I said, well, we should do some of these things that I've been thinking about for a long time-- be able to do interdisciplinary hiring and so forth.

And I remember John Wiley saying to me, well, this really won't be a credible plan unless you organize it for the entire campus. And I said, I know all that 00:38:00liberal arts stuff. I can do that. I'm trained in that. So I remember him saying to me, well, you can try, but the deans are never going to go for this. So what I did was to go around to each of the deans and persuade them that even though it would sort of cost them small amount of their resources from their own schools, that in the end they would gain from this. And it turned out way-- I don't know if you know anything about it, but--

SP: I do.

KK: Any event, it turned out way better than anybody thought it was and of course, now, people are having whole positions to just tinker with it. The first year was a question of, OK, write us a plan. And I just behaved like it was a 00:39:00study section and people were writing me small little proposals. And the original memo that went out-- I always believed from my English training, short is best. So the whole plan was two pages. I thought, people aren't going to read anything if you-- some big tome. This is just a waste of everybody's time and I insisted that the pre-proposals be no more than a page. Then we picked from that and then had people right four proposals.

KK: And the first year-- again, I don't think this is for public consumption, but basically John Wiley gave me the whole pile. It was '96. And said, you pick. I basically made the decision, but then I had to go and defend my choices to 00:40:00John and David Ward. And I think the thing that really helped was somewhere in the middle of all of this, the governor heard about this. Somebody told him about this and there was a big push then in genomics. He gave the university eight positions in biology, right in the middle of the year. I don't know if you--

SP: I remember it.

KK: So people were kind of impressed by that. And I said, look, you get money when you have an idea, when you have a plan, and you tell people what you're going to do. So-- I mean, after that, of course they had a committee and so forth, but-- so I have to say-- but I really was responsible for that. I don't 00:41:00like to brag about it, but I was very proud of it and--

SP: You should be.

KK: I mean, our department alone-- my chair had never hired in any way except in a very parochial what does our department need in terms of teaching? Which is an extremely dull way to hire. So he got out there and got on these interdisciplinary committees and eventually we were able to hire six people who had appointments in anatomy. The entire stem cell group is in the anatomy department, like Jamie Thompson, Clive Svendsen. We had a zebra fish group, that was another initiative. So my former student has a joint appointment in zoology and anatomy. Never happened before, in the 30 years I've been here. Then we had 00:42:00a biophotonics group and so my colleague next door was hired under that. So it transformed our department, I have to say.

SP: Is it continuing?

KK: Yeah. It's definitely continuing. I mean, they had some funding problems because there were a lot of sort of heavy duty science things that they were supporting, but initiatives that had never happened on this campus before, like nanotechnology and then they would hire a cluster of three that they got from a university and then they would on their own augment it. All these interdisciplinary biology buildings that are going up now-- I have to say, I'm 00:43:00not taking personal credit, but I think it grew out of this whole culture change in the university. It pointed out something which I've known for a long time. You don't have to have 100% happen in it this way, but even a small-- because people would say, this is a drop in the bucket compared with how many people there are on faculty. They've already hired 150 people under this plan who have brought in millions and millions of dollars, developed new courses, got funding for new buildings, written big collaborative grants. Everything that I said was going to happen has happened way better than anybody thought. So I have to tell you, that was my big deal that I did and I always really wanted to keep my 00:44:00research going and so for me, three years was plenty. Got the job done and then you do one big thing and before you can make a complete fool of yourself, you leave.

SP: So what you're saying is, you're probably not interested in top level administrative positions.

KK: I had a number of headhunters come after me after this. And I know John Wiley told me he was getting calls from all over the country. How did you do this? I mean, even the LaFollette School, which wanted to have an international initiative, but never was able to do it because they couldn't hire people-- I loved their plan. I said, you're in. They hired people and I know that the person who was the head-- his name escapes me-- said, you've changed the direction of our institute.

SP: Several people I've interview have talked about the cluster hiring.

KK: No kidding.

SP: Very positive.

KK: So I'm not making up this stuff.

SP: You're not making it up at all. No, no. That's just great-- and I did not know that. I knew you were an associate vice chancellor, but I did not know that you got this all started.

KK: Well, I know it's immodest to toot your own horn, but I really--

SP: Not on campus, it's not.

KK: I'm very proud of this and I think most people who were there would acknowledge-- although, of course, later in print, this is David Ward's plan. That's OK.

SP: It was a big deal and is a big deal. Congratulations.

KK: Well, it really has brought a lot of new funding and new ideas to campus. And I just-- I just think sometimes these administrative positions-- people don't-- I think they can be in those positions for a number of years and not 00:46:00really leave any traces of anything interesting. And I think that the reason that this was possible is-- I didn't have a list of things I had to do. John Wiley gave me a lot of flexibility. He said, in essence, go do something interesting and then tell me about it. OK.

SP: So did you know walking in that that is one of the things you wanted to try to get done?

KK: No. The name of the job was collaboration and reorganization in the biological sciences. That's how it was defined. And the two other finalists were quite prominent biologists on campus. I'm very happy that they gave it to me.

SP: I'm sure most of the campus is too-- or all of the campus. Anybody who was involved?

KK: But, I mean, subsequent to that, I've gotten a number of calls and I have gone out to look at administrative and I decided in the event-- this is really not what I wanted to do. I think sometimes also what happens to people in these jobs, they don't keep their labs going strongly. And so things tend to kind of fall apart and then they don't have any other choice except to keep going in some administrative track. And I was absolutely adamant that that wasn't going to happen-- and I had graduate students anyway. So I really--

SP: So research is your first love.

KK: Absolutely, but I think that having a strong commitment to research really 00:48:00helps me make that initiative come to fruition because I think many administrators get so far away from really any kind of scholarly enterprise, they get caught up in all this other crap-- if I can say that on tape. And they just kind of lose track of what's important and why there's a university here anyway. I don't have to worry about state budgets and all that other nonsense.

And I think the other thing is, when you come from a field in which having a good idea is the whole ball of wax, you don't discount ideas and you don't start thinking that everything is about process. I mean, people tried to tell me about why it wouldn't work and the process and the-- I said, forget about the process. 00:49:00Who cares? For the first year, they were talking about who's going to be on the committee and there were people who were telling me, they all have to be in the National Academy. I just said, get out. And then I finally solved the problem by saying, forget the committee. Give me the pile. I can pick the best things-- I can pick the best 12 things out of here. That's what I used to do all the time on study section. I know how to do that. Fortunately John Wiley kind of believed that. And I also said, sometimes it is better, at least at the beginning, if one person has a firm idea of what it's supposed to be all about-- makes the decisions from a sort of global point of view. It's a lot better than some 00:50:00committee who doesn't really understand what the enterprise is supposed to be about. So I think actually that was very helpful in seeing that it got off to a good start, instead of having some big ego committee, each one of whom thought that they really knew what was going on. It would degenerate into a process. Just get rid of the process. Go with the idea. That was my thought.

SP: Good for you. You talked about your teaching of that gross anatomy class. Do you do any classroom teaching now?

KK: I do none-- and I'll tell you what happened. Right after I got tenure, NIH started awarding-- I didn't even know about it-- these special seven year grants. If you got a very high score and they thought your work was really good. 00:51:00They were called Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Awards and I got one of the very first ones. And what they did was give you seven years of support. You didn't have to write a renewal or anything. And also at the same time, I had applied for a career development award, but they said, these are supposed to be for more established investigator. Career development is not consistent with that so you're not eligible for that, even though I'd gotten a very high priority score. And so I said, I really need that because I've got to buy my way out of this heavy teaching load. And I had a wonderful program officer. He said, "Now, Doctor--" (he was a Southerner). He said, "Dr. Kalil, don't you worry 00:52:00about that. We're going to take good care of you." What they did was they paid 80% of my salary for seven years, which was better than this career development, which had a cap and only paid five years. So I said, OK. Goodbye. Here's my money. I'm out of here. So that was really great.

SP: But the teaching that you do in your lab with your individual students.

KK: Yeah. I train students, that's what I do. And I don't feel guilty about this because I support my department with my contribution to salary, which is pretty hefty. And it enables them to hire lecturers whose specialty is teaching gross anatomy, which they do extraordinarily well-- way better than I could ever do 00:53:00it. And so everybody's happy. It works out very well. And this is not the sort of teaching that's in any way intellectually interesting. It's just a service course for medical students, basically. I think it's obviously important, but not something I choose to do. Now they bring in people like-- I was telling you about this young professor was hired in this biophotonics cluster. I mean, they would never ask him to teach gross anatomy, but I change that culture too, in a sense, in the department by saying, you should not be asking researchers to do this.

SP: You talked about enjoying writing, teaching your students how to write well. Is that a part of your job that you enjoy-- the whole publication process?

KK: Yes. I believe-- I'm always encouraging students to got their work to a publishable point, because if it's not published, it doesn't exist. And I know grant writing can be excruciating, but I kind of enjoy it almost as a challenge. So I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, but I--

SP: Your funding's never been in jeopardy, although you really can't defend--

KK: It's always in jeopardy-- always, always. I mean, the priority scores now-- the percentile-- they're funding maybe the top 10% or 12% at NIH and to be competitive for decades on end, I'm telling you, you're always in jeopardy. And I've got another-- I have another grant as well, from a foundation. And on a few 00:55:00occasions, I've had to resubmit my grant because it doesn't get it on the first try, but I don't think that's going to be a big deal over 30 years. It takes a lot of work to be-- to stay at the forefront of your field for this long. And many people just don't. They run out of steam. But I really like it and for me, that's sort of my job. And when I'm not able to fund my lab anymore, I'm going to just steal away into the night. I have no other reason to be here.

SP: I'm going to switch direction a little bit here. You talked about your 00:56:00success as associate vice chancellor. Have you been involved in other faculty governance, committee work, or other campus activities that you'd like to talk about?

KK: I have been on every major committee there's to be on. I was first on the graduate fellowships committee, then on the research committee that give out internal funding from the graduate school. And again, I was shocked. I walked into the room. There were 19 men and me-- and I just was flabbergasted. This was all fields-- humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, biological sciences. And I thought, what is with this place? I mean, by that time, I had 00:57:00tenure and I just was pretty floored. And so that committee and I was the Hearn committee and I was on the BSAC-- biological sciences advisory committee. I was on the tenure committee. I mean, the whole gamut, I would say.

SP: Your comment on the research committee leads right into the next questions. Discuss the climate for women here. How does it help and/or hinder the participation and advancement of women?

KK: I would say it's certainly improved a lot since I've been here. I would say 00:58:00at the beginning, I really did not get any support from anybody. I mean, I was-- sometimes I look back and I think, we're always so-- I mean, we have mentoring committees and need to pay attention. I had nothing. And I've heard people complain, I wasn't successful because I didn't get any mentoring. Cry me a river. Nobody told me how to write a grant or what to do or anything about anything. All I knew is that you had to go and get your funding and write your papers. I don't know. Looking back, I guess it was just a phenomenal single 00:59:00mindedness that-- I don't think the medical school is a very welcoming place for women at all and I will say it has improved a lot, but I will also say that I think that this campus talks a better talk than they actually put out for women. I mean, yes, there are things that never existed when I was starting out. It was too late anyway, in terms of special leave, childcare, whatever. All these things have only come about in the last 10 years. So they were just irrelevant to me.

I guess in a way, I really didn't think a whole lot about-- and I still don't. 01:00:00I'm not a woman in science. I am a scientist, period. And I just think-- to me, it's patronizing to say, woman in science-- like, oh, you poor thing. You need some special consideration or something. I just felt like I was out there doing my job, just like anybody else. Although certainly at the time, I think, to succeed as a woman, you probably had to be better than everybody else.

SP: Do you think that-- what about for younger-- for girls in elementary school, high school. There's this push to make sure that girls get trained in science and if they want to go into that type of career, that it's available to them. Do 01:01:00you think that's a problem anymore?

KK: No. You know where I think the real problem comes-- and I've read study after study. I think it comes later. We're not doing badly. Over half of the women in graduate school in biology are women. And you really can't expect to do any better than that. We're represented according to our numbers, in fact better. I think the problems come later and a lot of studies have born this out. But graduate school is fine. Maybe the post-doc is fine-- and then with getting the job and pushing through to tenure right at the time when women are having children, it's still a big problem and I think that some women are opting out 01:02:00after the post-doc because they think that there are too many sacrifices. It's too hard. It's too much. It's too much. So I don't think the problem is back in elementary school. I think it's later, when women have most of the responsibilities.

SP: And it's not easy to get back.

KK: You can't go away and come back. It's not possible. You have to just push through the difficult years. I mean, on the other hand, OK. I'm divorced so I guess you can't say I'm some big success story. I don't think that was any of my doing, but what can I say? Maybe if I had been a little more retiring and not so-- but I felt that I always did my job and took care of my house and took care 01:03:00of my children and did all the cooking and all the cleaning and all the yard work. And I don't know what more I was supposed to do. What can I say to that? I--

KK: --talk about my children, who are just the absolutely light of my life.

SP: OK. Tell me all about them.

KK: They're so accomplished. They always been so good. My criteria are happily married and gainfully employed. They both went here. My son had a triple major in political science and economics and something else. And then he got a masters 01:04:00degree at Tufts and then went into government. And wound up as a member of Clinton's National Economic Council and was in the Clinton administration for eight years. And just did fabulous well.

SP: Now what's his name?

KK: Tom Kalil. He actually was on the front page of the local paper at one point. Local boy makes good. I always say, I'm the slacker in my family. So he's married and has two children. So I have four grandchildren.

SP: Does he live in Washington?

KK: No. He, after Clinton was over-- he's a democrat, of course,-- and so he went out to Berkeley where he works to coordinate. He's working in interdisciplinary research. He organizes these big science and technology 01:05:00centers out at Berkeley and just is a really smart guy. And gets people together to write big collaborative grants and has all kinds of consulting jobs.

SP: Think he'll ever go into politics?

KK: Knows everybody. I mean there are pictures of him with Bill Clinton. And Al Gore calls him up. And he gets him little consulting jobs from time to time. I think if the Democrats come back to Washington, you know once Bush gets out of here, I could see that he might want to do that. They really like living near Berkeley a lot.

And my children, I think, really still love their mommy. I mean sometimes I feel 01:06:00like, oh, I neglected you guys. And so my daughter, she just got tenure on the faculty at the University Of Chicago. She's in Public Policy. First person in seven years to get tenure after four and a half years and two children. She makes me look like toast.

SP: And what's her name?

KK: Ariel Kalil.

SP: And you have four grandchildren. Talk about them.

KK: What can I say? They're cute. They're smart. They're fabulous.

SP: How old are they?

KK: Six and three are my son's. And my daughter's are four and two.

SP: Girls and boys?

KK: Each has a girl, and each has a boy. And I am so proud of them.

SP: Do you get to see them?

KK: Yeah. My daughter lives in Chicago. So I go there fairly often. And I've 01:07:00taking her to a lot of meets. So she knows a lot of my colleagues. And sometimes she comes with me on trips. Actually, I have a meeting in Australia. I've organized a symposium this next summer. So I said, well, Ariel, any chance you might like to come with me to Australia. Well, let me look into that. So she might do that. But, we're really very close. She's got it all. She's got a great husband/ She's very successful at her career. Multiple grants. Big lab. Travels all the time. I mean, you know, what more could anybody want? And she's not one these hard bitten-- she's a human being. Which I've tried to be over the years.

So anyway, I consider that, plus training good students, to be, to me, the major achievements of my life, outside of science.

SP: And what do you to do for fun and relaxation and to keep healthy?

KK: You know what really helps? I'm 65. And I've never taken one single day of sick leave in my entire life. I've got a pile of sick leave hours. I don't even know how much it is. But I've always felt that I have the constitution of an ox. I'm never sick. Knock wood. I do not health problems. So for fun, I have two 01:09:00miniature poodles that I walk a lot, who are totally cute, and fun, and adorable. And I have a horse. And I ride competitive dressage. I have a trainer, and try to ride a couple times a week.

SP: Do you live in the country?

KK: No. I live in Shorewood, actually.

SP: Where do you keep your horse?

KK: Out in the country. Near Black Earth. And he's a champion dressage horse. And one day, I'll ride up to his level. So he's great. And I totally enjoy it.

SP: Now, do you find time for friends?

KK: Yes. I do have friends which I consider to be important. In fact, I belong to a group of women who I've gotten to know over the past ten years because 01:10:00people like Martha Casey were in Baskin. And I know that she told me that she recommended me to talk to you, so she's been really a great friend. And I have women colleagues in other places too that I don't see so often, but I see at meetings. One of the great things about science is that it's international. So I get to travel. I just came back from Stockholm. Very nice meeting. And I used to travel and give talks a lot-- almost every month. And I do that a little less now.

SP: Do you try to add some time on?

KK: Yes. That's exactly what I do. I added five or six days on to my Stockholm, 01:11:00so I got to walk around, see the city, enjoy it. I also recently bought a condominium in Florida. So I have a warm place, in future, if I ever retire.

SP: Where in Florida?

KK: On Long Boat Key, near Sarasota. So it's been a lot of fun because I invite my children and grandchildren to come for Christmas and spring break. So that's just been the last couple of years.

SP: And you said earlier, you're organizing this symposium for Australia next summer?

KK: Well it's part of a big international meeting. But I was asked to organize a symposium. So I got in touch with three other colleagues to put this thing together. And I'll be one of the speakers.

SP: Well it sounds like you have a well balanced life.

KK: Yeah. I mean it would be nice to have a partner, but what are you going to do?

SP: Well you've got a lot of other things in your life. That's for sure.

KK: Yeah. I feel that-- and I've always felt that-- being a faculty member of a good university like this, and especially with the freedom to be creative and, essentially, do whatever you want, whenever you want, which is essentially my job, is an extraordinary privilege, which is I am very mindful of, and I don't take for granted. I really do appreciate it. I'm not one of these whiners. And I think it's just a great opportunity. I think you have to work hard at it, but it's very rewarding. And when people say oh, I can't wait to retire, why I'm not 01:13:00thinking like this? I mean I have four more years of funding at this point. And actually, the foundation where I have one of my grants called me up this morning and said when are you going to send in your renewal? Of course NIH never asks you that. They just sort of, go away, we don't need to read any more. And they're inviting me to renew my grant. And so, I thought, well, why not? We're doing well, and I think that we have of reasonable chance of success. So nobody, yet, has treated me like OK, so when are you leaving?

SP: Well that's the end of my questions. This was a great interview. If there's anything else you want add before we turn off the recorder, please do.

KK: Well I guess I would say I don't want to sound like Pollyanna-- like, "oh look at me. I'm so great. My life is so perfect." You know it's not like that. And I would say that I've had my ups and downs over the years. There certainly have been times of struggle and so forth. But I feel, at this point in my life, I feel very lucky to be able to look back and feel good about my career and my life and the feeling that, by luck of the draw, my children have just turned out 01:15:00to be so very wonderful. And I've never had any feeling of having-- I think it's terrible for women these days to make a choice between having a career or family and I think that's a very bitter choice that I wouldn't advise anybody to have to make. I mean everybody can decide if they want to have children or not. But if they do I think it's terrible for women to feel if I want to have a career, I can't have children. I do think that it's possible and desirable. And it does give you a sense of balance and perspective. When you're going nut-so because somebody didn't accept your paper or invite you to something, you go home and you get real with your family. And that's really important. So that's how I 01:16:00would conclude.

SP: Great way to end this. Thank you very much.

KK: Oh you're welcome.