AAI Committee on the Status of Women: Resources & Links

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“I am a very action oriented person," said Dr. Laurie Glimcher in a recent interview with Lori Covey and Jennifer Punt as part of a new Committee on the Status of Women effort to tap into the experience of women immunologists at multiple stages in their careers. It is doubtful anyone would disagree. The recent telephone interview with Dr. Glimcher, past AAI president and current Harvard Medical School Professor, focused on her creative NIAID-sponsored initiative to provide funds for technical support for post-doctoral fellows who are primary caregivers of dependents. “Let’s be realistic, ninety percent of the time the primary caregiver has two X-chromosomes.”

This initiative was inspired in part by Dr. Glimcher’s own personal experience as a scientist and mother of three, the youngest of which is 17 years old. She felt family pressures acutely in her early career; her first child was born within a month of arriving as a fellow at the NIH (after receiving her MD from Harvard and completing her training in Internal Medicine at MGH), and her second child six months before she started as an independent investigator at Harvard with her first RO1. These were the most difficult years of her career and she cited the stress of always working against a clock as a constant in her life. Dr. Glimcher observed similar pressures on her own women post-docs and fellows, who were at that stage in their careers where, arguably, the pressures of parenthood and livelihood combine most intensely – and the stage in career development when women tend to leave science. Fortunately, her lab was well funded, Dr. Glimcher said, and she was able to provide primary caregivers in her lab with their own technicians, an opportunity that inspired increased productivity and the development of valuable supervisory skills.

While it was clear that she was deeply appreciative of the support provided by her post-doctoral supervisors, Harvey Cantor and Bill Paul, the encouragement she received from her former husband and fellow scientist, Hugh Auchincloss, and the example set by her father, a physician-scientist, it was equally clear that Dr. Glimcher had no women role models in her early career. Little attention was paid to the unique challenges she faced as a woman in science - she had to pave her own way. Rather than assume that the next generation should do the same, she has taken it upon herself to make changes.

Dr. Glimcher convinced NIAID to fund a one-year national pilot program for post-doctoral fellows who are primary caregivers of dependents. The idea, which seems particularly timely, has received a great deal of support and press, but it is still in its infancy. Although the funding provided was small ($500,000 – an amount that, realistically, can only support about five grantees) Dr. Glimcher is encouraging other NIH institutions to adopt the idea and also hopes to inspire private agencies and institutions to act. She is currently on Lawrence Summers task force at Harvard University, where her originality as a problem-solver is bound to have an influence.

Dr. Glimcher also provided unique insight into her own success as a scientist. “Efficiency,” she said, “is, and was one of my most important characteristics.” Given that her time as a researcher was often strictly bracketed by day care and school schedules, she found she had to adhere to her own schedule to get things done. She had no time for chatting and while she looked on with some longing at those who could schmooze science over coffee in the NIH cafeteria, she still established her own connections, made things happen at the bench, and spent time with her family on weekdays and weekends. “We have something to learn about efficiency,” she said when referring to the American tendency to work around the clock. While she spent time at home on the weekends when she was a post-doc, she recognizes that her post-docs and fellows tend to spend many weekend hours in the laboratory. This trend disturbs her. Europeans seem to be able to make critical breakthroughs at the bench, while still fostering a rich life outside the laboratory, and she suspects that efficiency has a great deal to do with this ability to balance life and work.

However, Dr. Glimcher made a critical distinction between efficiency and perfectionism. “I am efficient, but I am not a perfectionist,” she said, “…except about data.” She speculated that the woman who is a perfectionist in the laboratory and at home is most vulnerable to the trends of attrition in science. There is no need to write the perfect grant, the perfect review, the perfect paper – the time it takes to get every word right is time away from more worthwhile endeavors.

When asked what scientific finding she was most proud of, she answered that the unraveling of the molecular basis for the differentiation of T helper cells into separate lineages was very satisfying. In response to whether she had experienced a “eureka moment” in her career as a scientist, she pointed to a time when she was struck by the possibility that the immunological synapse could initiate T helper cell differentiation. “They thought I was crazy,” she said of her post-docs and colleagues. But she managed to inspire one candidate with the idea and he took it all the way, showing that localization of key cytokine receptors to the synapse was a critical event in Th cell differentiation in a recent Nature publication.

Despite her immense success as a scientist, Dr. Glimcher, a very youthful 54, does think about other challenges. “Science is a young person’s endeavor. By the time you get to my age there have to be other things that assume importance.” For her, mentoring is immensely gratifying and she takes pride in the young women and men that have left her lab and gone on to establish their own research programs. However, she has not ruled out a completely new but undefined second career. “I don’t think I want to be in the lab when I am 70,” she added. “I’d love to do something entirely different but I’m not sure exactly what that will be.”