UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #863
CZAJKOWSKI, CYNTHIA

Narrator: 	Czajkowski, Cynthia
Interviewer: 	Sandy Pfahler
Date: 		2007
Location: 	Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History#:	863
Series: 		Women in Science and Engineering

00:00:00	Start of First Interview Session

Sandy Pfahler (SP): Today is Wednesday, May 2, 2007. My name is Sandy Pfahler and I am an interviewer with the University of Wisconsin Madison Archives Department Oral History Project. Today I'm interviewing Dr. Cynthia Czajkowski, Professor of physiology in the UW Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. She is also affiliated with the UW Madison Center for Neuroscience. Hello. 

Cynthia Czajkowski (CC): Hi. 

00:00:31 

SP:	We're going to start this interview by asking you if you would talk about your early in life. Where and when you were born, if you would describe your childhood, your early schooling. Talk about anybody in your life-- your family, friends, teachers-- who might have influenced you on your career path. 

CC:	Yeah. I was born July 1, 1957 in New York City in Queens, the borough of Queens. And I had two older sisters and a mom and dad. So we were a family of five. I went to school in parochial Catholic schools, so I went initially for grammar school. First, Our Lady of Fatima but then another school-- St. Joan of Arc. We were raised Catholics and these were Catholic schools mixed at this point-- boys and girls. 

	And I can remember in -- my fourth and fifth grade teacher-- her name was Mrs. [Traviere ?] and that was the first time I got science classes that were-- she was great. And we did science projects and were building what was happening under the sea and building continental drifts and also continental shelves and having all these projects, different science projects. So I would say, she was one of the first people who-- really I liked science and I did well in it-- she really instilled this exploring. 

CC:	And then my dad was always very involved in us, doing things. He had three daughters, but he instilled in us that school was very, very important and that from a very, early age we were told that were going to college no matter what. 

SP:	And what did your father do? 

CC:	My father was a truck driver. And so my parents are first generation from Poland, on both sides. And my grandparents on my father's side came over on a boat and went through Ellis Island and they settled in Brooklyn, in Greenpoint, which was very Polish at that time. And they owned the deli. And my mother's family, who also came from Poland-- different area in Poland, their last name was [Brzezinski ?] versus Czajkowski-- they owned the candy store across the street. So Mom and Dad met there. 

	And so they both went to Polish school. Actually, they spoke Polish only until they were in first or second grade. And they learned English once they started. 

SP:	Now did your mother work? 

CC:	My mom didn't work. She stayed at home with the kids. And my sisters are-- my oldest sister is seven years older than I am, and then my middle sister is four years older than I am. My mom had me when she was 30. 

	I can remember my dad, he was a truck driver and delivered bread for it was called Silver Cup. It's sort of like Tasty Buddies, based in New York City. So it was called Silver Cup. So he get home at 3 or 4 o'clock and meet us after school. 

SP:	Did he help you with your homework? 

CC:	Oh, yeah. He helped us with our homework. And so that was really good. And both of them-- unfortunately we never learned Polish because I see that first generation gets really difficult about whether they want you to assimilate totally. And so it was very different from my generation now where we're all trying to teach our kids another language at the same time. 

	But it was good. And we lived in Queens. 

00:05:04 

SP:	And did you say, did you go to a parochial high school, too? 

CC:	Yes. Then after grammar school, then I went to an all girl Catholic high school. Yeah, St. Agnes Academic High School. And there were pluses and minuses to that. Looking back, in the way back now, many years later, it's mostly pluses in that you were the focus. You didn't worry about competing with other women to compete for men's attentions kind of things. And the basketball team, the women's basketball team wasn't second fiddle to the men's basketball team and this and that. 

	So in that way it was great. It was small-- each class was about 200 students. It didn't have all the bells and whistles of some of the best public high schools in New York like Bronx Science and a couple of other places. But at the same time it did have a fair amount. I was in the math club and the science club. I had some very good science teachers there and math teachers. I actually really loved math. And I think because it was an all women's school, you didn't feel insecure at being good at skills that in a lot of ways, later on, you would worry about being good at. In that you were better than a guy or this and that. 

	In retrospect that was actually a really great place even though high school, no matter what anybody says, that whole age is just like, who would ever want to repeat that ever in their life. Never again. Because it's awkward, you don't like yourself. Bit in retrospect, I think it gave me the sense of being very independent and feeling comfortable in being smart and knowing these are the things I like and like to do. 

	And I was valedictorian in my high school. So I gave a little speech, that was kind of fun. And then from there went to NYU, to New York University. 

00:07:50

SP:	And how did you choose that? 

CC:	It was mostly financial reasons. Both my sisters had gone to St. Agnes, and so because we were four and three years separated, we were all-- and one of my sisters skipped a grade-- we were all every four years-- none of us were there at the same time, but for a stretch of 12 years they had a Czajkowski there. So they knew us well. And I won several scholarships to different schools. 

	Both my sisters had gone to city colleges, to Hunter and also Queen's College, which were a lot more financially feasible for my family. So I ended up getting a fairly substantial scholarship to New York University. So it was like, well I could go to City College or I could go to New York University or I could go to St. John's University. So I ended up going at NYU. I liked the idea that it was in the Village and in Manhattan and it was a very good school and on the sort of Ivy League schools. So I ended up going there. I commuted. I couldn't afford a dorm and stuff, but there was a bunch of people who commuted, but that was fine. 

SP:	Did you go with the idea that, I'm going to be a scientist? 

CC:	No. I went with the idea that I was going to-- actually, as a fairly, pretty young-- I loved Jacques Cousteau and all those shows and Animal Kingdom. I'm still a sucker for Animal Planet. I could get sucked into those shows really fast. I thought and I would tell people when I was eight or nine that I was going to be a mammalogist and study wolves. I was going to be the Jane Goodall of the wolves. And now if you look at what I do, I study protein and I'm a protein chemist. As far removed from the ape as you get. But I'm still fascinated with that and I still follow up on wolves and animals and behavior things. 

	And I just said that's what I was going to do and people were like, what eight year olds-- especially and eight year old from Queens. So I sort of morphed into, of course, as most people do as they go to college and stuff who are interested in science, saying that I'll go to medical school. I'll be a doctor. And there was not a lot of pressure, but there was definitely daughter be a doctor. Make sure you have a living, da da da da da. 

00:11:02 

CC:	So I took pre-med courses. And it was a rude awakening. Like all of a sudden, OK, so I went from an all girl Catholic high school in Queens to NYU. In the Village. And all of a sudden you're not the smartest person, or even close to that smart. Everybody, you're like, wow, these people are really smart. And then there were men and so there was a huge distraction going on there initially. Which was fun. It was great. 

	It was a great time, but as I started going through classes, I did well-- I did very well-- but I was sort of like, hmm, not sure. And then I got involved with doing research as an undergraduate. Which is something I love here at UW because there are lots of—I have, in my own lab I have a lot of, usually undergrad-- at least 100 to 200 graduates doing research in my lab. 

	But I found a laboratory-- I was taking a class-- and I found a lab where I actually started doing research in my senior year and realized that, wow, this is it. I was a biology major and also an anthropology major-- I was a double major-- and my anthropology teacher was like, well, are you going to continue? Do you want to go to Africa? Do you want to go do this dig? Da, da, da, da, da. 

SP:	Is that what the research was about? 

CC:	Yeah. Well, no. That was something totally different. Then I was doing neuroscience research in this other lab, who they could actually pay me. Because obviously, the anthropology people couldn't pay you anything. And the neuroscience people over here had funding from NIH and from other sources-- versus the anthropology kind of set grant kind of thing-- were actually giving me money to do some work. And so I'd loved doing anthropology and I loved studying it. I was really fascinated by it, but for me to get to this dig, I had to pay for it. And there was no way in my family that I could get to Africa. 

	And so I'm sort of torn, and then I ended up just working more in this-- it was a neuromuscular junction lab where they were looking at development between neurons and the muscle and doing EM and looking at effects myasthenic syndromes and degeneration of that neuromuscular junction. And I was doing EM and looking at the pictures. Mostly, I was tracing pictures and doing things as an undergraduate. 

	But it was fascinating and I really loved it. And it was a little different than now which even in high school there's a lot more pressure on people to know what they're doing now. I was in my senior year and I was still like going, well, I'm not applying to medical school, but what am I going to do? 

00:14:16

SP:	Why did that drop off? The medical school. 

CC:	The medical school? I'm not sure. I just didn't feel that I would-- well, at that point, and that was 1979, it was incredibly competitive. And my head grades were very good, but they weren't 4.0's. And so how committed was I really to do it? I didn't think I was all that committed. And what I always really like was sort of this idea of doing research that I had been seeing all this time. But I hadn't spent a lot of time, actually. It was the trying it out. So this little exposure at the end of my junior year, beginning of my senior year sort of pushed me over. I went, oh, this is what I want to do. So I applied very late to graduate schools, because all of a sudden I'm like, oh, that's what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm supposed to be applying to graduate school. 

SP:	Were there faculty at NYU that were helping you? 

CC:	Professor Gennaro, this was the person who was running this lab. And he was like, well, Cindy, apply to graduate school but you're kind of late. It's like February. 

SP:	So you were in your senior year? 

CC:	Yeah. And I was like, yeah, I know. And at the time I was actually teaching. I had almost finished all my classes and I was also teaching in a small high school, very private high school in the Village. I was teaching labs, chemistry labs and stuff. I wasn't much older than some of these high school kids, but there I was. I was doing that and then doing some lab work because I had done most of my course work, I had almost finished all my credits. And I was like, well I could teach for a year. And they said, yeah, you could stay and teach for the whole year. They were paying really quite well. It was a very expensive private school. 

	But he was like, I know some people in a couple of different places in the city. And the beauty of living in New York City is that there are so many different institutions. I had a lot to choose from to still sort of figure out where to go to graduate school. So he said, apply late to these places and I'll just sort of make a phone call to the chair, because I know a couple, to see if it pans out. 

00:16:59 

SP:	And what panned out was Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. And I ended up going there. And I thought I was going to work with the chair of the department, who was doing muscle research. Because I was sort of interested in this neuromuscular junction and the degeneration of the muscle during this. And he was working on-- his name was Fishman, Donald Fishman-- he was working on different isoforms of this protein that's found in muscle called myosin. And I was like, oh, this is perfect. This sounds kind of interesting. 

	And so I got accepted into the program and there I was, lo and behold, I'm there. And then the part of the program, which was very good-- so it was the Anatomy and Cell Biology Department. He had just become chair of the department pretty recently. And I started in his lab doing rotation on stuff. And I was like, huh. But they said, you should do a couple of rotations just to make sure this is the right place. And I ended up in a really pretty young assistant professor's lab-- David Farb-- who was working on GABA receptors in neurons. And I did my rotation there and it was like, I'm going to stay here because this was what I wanted to do. 

	It was kind of very weird how I got to where I am. And I tell people in my lab I consider myself a neuroscientist, I like the idea of studying something that's going on in the brain, but basically I'm really interested in how proteins work. Specific proteins, signaling proteins, things that bind something and do something. I could see myself, if I sort of got onto a different path, maybe being a virologist, who's studying how viruses actually get in. Because in many ways it's the same kind of story. But there I am. I'm a neuroscientist and I study receptors. 

00:19:15 

CC:	And so I spent a while in graduate school, though. It took me a little bit of time. It took me seven years to get through graduate school, which is a long time for a PhD. Partly, my first project didn't work, so two and a half years down-- I had to start all over again. Which was a drag. Which was a bit of a drag and you second guess yourself along the way-- is this the right path? And I think now that experience has helped me a lot as a mentor because I recognize that somewhere around year three, every graduate student has this crisis of like, I don't see the end in sight and what am I doing here? And you have to sort of get them through that and just go, everyone has that. It's perfectly normal. It's OK. 

	But in the end I had a very productive graduate career. I had lots of papers. I think I did some significant work that was recognized as being significant. And it became my first love. I was working on what I work on now—GABA-A receptors, which are these neurotransmitter receptors found in the brain. And at the time there were several breakthroughs that were occurring just because molecular biology was exploding and we were learning how to clone things and do things. 

SP:	So this was in the early '80s? 

CC:	I graduated with my PhD in 1987, and so it was just at the heyday when things were just getting-- and the kinds of proteins I was interested-- were even just getting cloned and getting expressed and figuring out how we can now manipulate them in ways we never could before. 

00:21:22 

CC:	I ended up deciding to go for my postdoctoral work-- I ended up staying in New York. So I was a true-- like you know, did all my training in New York City. I just moved from institution to institution and never moved. So I ended up going to Columbia University and working with Dr. Arthur Karlin working on the nicotinic acethylcholine receptor. 

	And I chose that because still at that time the GABA receptor hadn't been cloned. The nicotinic acethylcholine receptor had been, and also he was one of the world renowned experts on doing protein chemistry to try and really figure out, what are the moving parts of this protein? How does this protein really bind to this tiny little neurotransmitter-- or this chemical, this signaling chemical that's in your brain-- that then causes your neuron to fire? Which is exactly how communication happens. The way your brain transfers information is by these little proteins and the members that-- neurons-- that are communicating with each other, opening and closing in response to these chemicals. And it's happening on an incredibly fast time scale. And I really wanted to understand on just this protein level, how did it work? How did this sort of nanomachine-- you could almost think of-- take this tiny little signal of a chemical and transfer that into a pretty big motion that opens a hole in a membrane and allows ions-- or electricity, you could almost think of-- to cross upon it. 

	And he was a great mentor. My PhD adviser was very good. He was very savvy. He told me the beauty of spin. Like how to make your research interesting. 

SP:	Oh? 

CC:	To others. Which is a key point, or how to make it accessible to lay people. My postdoc adviser really instilled in me the beauty of a really well controlled experiment. 

SP:	How did you get connected with him? 

CC:	He came to Downstate and gave a talk when I was probably maybe a fourth year student. Or fifth year. And I remember turning around to my friends and other graduate students and stuff. And I was turning to them and I was like, I'm going to work with that guy. And they all went, yeah, right. And I said, trust me. I'm going to work with him. 

	And this is one thing about Arthur. He never had one of these huge mega-labs. He's always had a smaller lab. He believed very much-- there are two different philosophies with postdoctoral training. One is that you bring someone on to learn something totally new and you let them go with it and if they're smart, they'll figure it out and you help them do that. It's a little slower for your research progress, because it's going to take time for that person to get up and running. The other sort of style is you bring in people who sort of know what they're doing who can generate lots of things. And it might be a related field. Not quite the same, but you plug someone in who knows all the techniques. And those are just two different styles. 

	He was definitely the former. Because I had no idea how to purify a protein or run a column. I was pretty much a cell biologist at that time, not a protein chemist. So I was like, whoa. But he was incredibly willing. Like I went up there and-- I had called or sent a letter just saying I was going to be graduating, da, da, da, I was really interested in his work-- and he had me come up and then offered me the position. And I was like, huh. And I had interviewed at Erik Kandel's lab, a couple of other very high profile places. And most places said, you know, if I want it. But there was something about Arthur's approach, much smaller lab, he was more there, that I decided to go to his lab. I wanted to work on molecules at that level, more at the protein level and try to figure out how this worked. 

00:26:37

CC:	So it was great, so I ended up going there. And Arthur, he's a perfectionist, so you either got along with him pretty well or you didn't get along with him very well. There were people who were pretty successful in his lab, and other people who were not as successful. I was, thank god, one of the former more successful people, so my relationship with him was very good. But again, I spent a long time in his lab, too. I was postdoc for three or four years, and then a scientist for three years. 

	At the time, as I was going through this I was going through a divorce like in about a year four. And that was right around the time when I would have been probably looking for jobs and stuff. And we both said, it wasn't worth it. I was just better for me to stay at the time. And actually, it was great because I sort of totally switched-- I then started doing electrophysiology and more molecular work and brought that into his lab. Which was just sort of starting out. And so I sort of did two very different projects. And that was incredibly successful. And I think it was the combination of learning and doing both of those things that ended up me landing jobs. 

SP:	Now, why did you leave? Was the scientist job a temporary? Or could you have stayed there? 

CC:	Well, a scientist job, it's an interesting sort of road where you have to decide and make a split. A scientist position, what's great is in general, you don't have the pressure as an assistant professor or professor where you're not expected to have to teach and to do some other things. You are expected as you get up in the scientist track to bring in money, to maybe write grants and stuff. But your really job is just science, purely doing science. And that's incredibly attractive. Like the part about being a postdoc, it's just great compared to being a graduate student. Because you really know what you're doing at this point. You're good at it. And you can just focus on the science and it is really, really fun, those years. And you can just immerse yourself in that. 

	And then all of a sudden you get thrown back into like being an assistant prof. So you asked me, what's the choice? But the independence, and I liked, also partly, teaching. I did do some teaching in graduate school. I was in the anatomy and cell biology, so we had to take gross anatomy with the medical students and take a lot of other courses with the medical students and then you had to teach. And I had taught also when I was in the end of my undergraduate. I had taught and stuff and there was part of me that enjoyed that. 

	And then the other part was you want to be the one who's calling the shots. And it's an amazing job to be paid to think and to come up with ideas and get paid to do it. You're like, oh, OK. 

	And at the time the idea of like, other options, other things to do, you didn't have that as much as you do now. Like I think in graduate school now, we really trying to focus on giving students ideas of like what else you can do with your PhD besides the sort of traditional or classical track of going and being a professor in a research institution. 

00:31:08 

CC:	So by the time I was finishing up at Columbia I was pretty sure I wanted to apply for assistant professorship. 

SP:	And where did you apply? 

CC:	I applied all over the country. At that point I didn't have any really geographical ties. I was single. I did pretty much stay away from the south. And I was from New York City, so I was kind of a snob and was really mostly applying to the coast. But my very good friend-- and he was also doing a postdoc with me in Arthur's lab. His desk was right across from my desk. And we're looking through signs, and I'm like, oh, the advertisements. And I'm like, oh, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He's like, oh, that's great. Go there. And I was like, it's in the middle of nowhere. He's like, no, no, no. He said, it would be good practice anyway. Apply. Just apply. Just send out one of your applications. 

	So I must've applied to maybe like 20 and 30 different schools. And I was very lucky. I got a lot of interviews. I had a lot of interviews, and Wisconsin called, da, da, da. And they wanted interview. So basically I applied because I knew it was a school. I knew the department was good. At the time I applied, actually, the department was the Department of Neurophysiology. Neurophysiology merged with physiology maybe about 10 years ago. So I was the last recruit, actually for the Department of Neurophysiology here. 

	It was very funny-- actually I had interviews at Columbia, Cornell-- in two different departments in Cornell and Cornell Medical Center-- University of Miami in Florida, and University of Vermont. And none out on the west coast. I applied all to the UC schools. And here. And University of Chicago. 

	Yeah, no. It was a lot. I had a lot of interviews. And I had offers from many schools. So I was in a very good position because I could really sit and make a decision about where I wanted to go. 

	I remember, though, initially when I was coming to the University of Wisconsin Madison, I called and said, is there an airport or do I have to have to drive from Milwaukee or Chicago? And they're like, oh, my god. Who is this woman coming from New York City? I was like, nice. They're like, no, no. You can fly here. And I was like, OK. 

	It was a hard decision. It actually ended up being a really tough choice between here and Chicago and Cornell. I didn't want to stay at Columbia because Columbia eats their young. No. It's interesting-- there are some really great schools for graduate school, for being an assistant professor, and there are great place to do postdocs and to be other people. It's sort of that nurturing quality versus like, at Columbia and also Cornell, they sort of gave you the, here's your money, here's your space and we'll see you in four years. And make sure it happens. And we're expecting you to do really good things. But we're not going to help you along the way kind of thing. 

	I got a very different feeling when I interviewed here. It was much more open. And partly it's like, all the doors were open, all the labs were open, the buildings are open, it's more open. Just because it's a safer place in certain ways, but that's just that atmosphere. And the department was very, very good. I was really surprised at how many good people were here and how big it was. 

	And I was really drawn. I had done all my training in medical schools that were separated from the main campus. They were all really small where the graduate students made a really tiny minority of the population. And the idea of being on a campus, a full campus, was really quite attractive. So then it ended up being between here and Chicago. And both were very good departments. Chicago felt very familiar for me because it was a big city. And I was like, oh, I could do this really pretty easily. 

	And it was very funny when I was recruiting here, the chair of the department at the time, John Brugge-- the second visit they were trying. They didn't know I wasn't married or this and that. And they were like just saying, well, Chicago's only like two and a half hours away and da, da, da. And I was like, you gotta do better than that. I said, basically I'm getting an offer at Chicago. And they were like, we'll it's a great place to raise kids and stuff. And I said, naw, I'm single. So you've got to figure out another angle here. 

00:37:06 

CC:	And to make a very long story short, I ended up coming here. And as I put it, as part of my start-up package, the administrator of the department that I was being recruited to-- my husband Pat was the administrator-- and he's the one who, actually they put me up at the Mansion Hill Inn here, and he sort of orchestrated that on my third visit or something and took me on a tour and everything. And I ended up coming here. And then later on we ended up dating and ended up getting married, and here we are. So I always joke that part of my start-up package was not really the money, but my husband. 

	Doesn't matter that we're close to Chicago, doesn't matter if it's a nice place to raise kids, but we can get you a husband. 

	Husband. Here you go. And I was like, oh, my god. So they went above board to try to recruit me. They did. I one of the larger start-up packages at the time from the med school. 

	So you had learned how to negotiate. 

	I had learned. Well, I was in the position to negotiate. I was in a very good position to negotiate because I had other offers. If you don't have other offers, you're not in the position. I had other offers, and then I also had my really good friend Jonathan Javitz, who was telling me how to do it in New York whose family, everybody was very business oriented group. And most of all my friends weren't scientists, in New York. And they were all investment bankers and this and that. And so everyone was going, OK, this is exactly what you say and how you do it. Just say, yeah, you understand that the cost of living is different, but money is money. And Chicago is this, and this and that. And you need this. You need to stick to your guns. And they said, it's not really that big of a difference because you would be pretty happy going to either place. And I was like, yeah. Pretty much. And they were like, just do it. 

SP:	Did it meet your expectations? The campus? The department, everything? 

CC:	Yes. They did everything that they said they were going to do for me. I think they didn't come up totally with my salary. I think they were off by like $5,000 or something like that, but they tried really, really hard. And basically they couldn't make it any higher just because of what was going on at the level of medical school because everyone has to be sort of at the same level or else then they have to bring everyone up and that would have just been-- they just couldn't do it. And I believed them. And after coming here I recognized that it was true. 

	The space was fine. And they were and have been incredibly supportive. I felt very taken care of. 

00:40:24 

SP:	Is it collaborative, the department? 

CC:	Yeah. I think the neurophysiology department was a small apartment. It was about eight or nine people at the time. And then before my tenure decision we merged, which was a little bit tricky because I was hired by another department. And like the chair of the physiology department was stand chair, but he didn't have any voice in my hiring, so that was a little worrisome. And also, all these people are going to vote who didn't really hire me or vote on it, but pretty much everyone was on board. And I think the merger went-- I think there have been a couple little hiccups and things. 

	As far as collaborative, yes. Like I have joint papers with multiple people in the department. I think being in the department-- I actually chose the physiology department because I wasn't a card-carrying physiologist-- I was more of a protein chemist-- but I recognized that we were trying to answer the same kinds of questions and I needed these people. So now, scarily, I do a lot of electrophysiology. And less protein chemistry. 

	I think if I had been in a different department I would have moved the other way. And I was recruited before I had tenure to Vanderbilt. And I had seriously thought about it because the chair there was an incredibly dynamic woman that I would've really liked to have worked with, Lee Lindberg. And there I would have moved into a much more structural place just because of the people around me. Bottom line is I just couldn't see myself living in Nashville. If it was in another city, I couldn't maybe done it. I was like, I can't go here now. 

	And so for Madison, it was a big transition going from New York City to here. But for a small city is has a lot going on. 

00:42:33 

SP:	Well, talk about the tenure process. 

CC:	The tenure processes, it was tough. It's a little scary, and originally you don't realize how fast it's going to happen. Because they tell you it's seven years, but it's really not seven years at all. Because one of those years is chopped off because if you don't make it, they have to give you a year notice. So it's six years. And then to actually make it happen in six years, your package has to be sort of ready at like five and a half or five and a quarter. It would've really been nice to have known that up front, that timeline. 

	Like I--now I'm chairing some mentoring committees and we have a timeline like that. Like, here you go. This is when it's going to happen, so you need those five papers here, which is at about year four and a half, five, your papers have to be almost accepted and submitted, like close. Because, is the magic number five? If it's a science paper or it's this or that, it can be somewhat different. And then you have to be getting grant money because basically, or at least in the med school, you know my appointment mostly research. Like I'm getting tenure on research. And then excellence in research. It's research and then teaching and service. but mostly research. You have to be really good at teaching, but you're not innovating new teaching methods, let's just say. You're not getting tenure for doing that. 

	So somewhere around year three, three and a half, it dawned on me. And I was like, oh, my god. But I was doing fine. The department was always incredibly supportive. They were always like, you're going to do fine, you're doing fine, everything's OK. They protected my time early on from a lot of teaching. I think women in general don't have as much protected time just because they need people to be on committees and other things, so you end up sopping up time doing that. 

	But overall, they had these mentoring committees and basically, sometimes it was like, well, Cindy you have to publish. And I was like, yeah, no kidding. Help me like figure out how to do it. 
	
	I think actually what was incredibly helpful was very early on at one of the initial faculty welcoming meetings-- or whatever when you became a faculty person on campus-- I met a woman, Nansi Colley who was a brand new assistant professor, also. In ophthalmology. And she started organizing a women's sort of group of assistant professors that we still meet. Now, none of us are assistant professors anymore. And there was some associate professors, but we were all going through it within a year of two of each other. Process. and we would meet once a month and we've been doing it now I guess for 14 years. 

	Ann Kelley is one of those people who is in this group. And so now we're just very good friend. Most of the time we don't talk science, we just talk about our [unintelligible]. But I think we do still touch on, what are our problems? Personnel problems, how to manage labs, how to get papers through. It never dawned on me to like argue with a editor if my paper wasn't accepted. 

00:46:45 [End side 1; begin side 2]

CC:	I think that group has been incredibly helpful to get through the tenure process. Having that support group. The medical school is trying to sort of implement that. I think it's hard to sort of force it to happen. I think it sort of generates, but I do think having women in those roles to help other people and treat people is important. 

00:47:16 

CC:	I can now switch into this thought. So funding has been this interesting-- 

SP:	Yeah, that's a question I would really like to talk about. 

CC:	When I first started here, which was-- now I'm trying to remember-- 1994, funding was tight in IH. There were funding, the National Institute of Health was funding at maybe the 12th percentile. It was a little tight, maybe at the 14th percentile, but it wasn't horrible. I have been funded. Basically when I first started I had a lot smaller grants. I had a March of Dimes Basil O'Connor award for new investigators. I had a Burroughs Wellcome New Investigator award. So I was pretty much-- what was great about the department when I came is they identified many different fundings, these smaller foundations and said, just go for it. 

	And so I initially wrote many grants, but then all of a sudden I started getting hits. And that was great. And so it was $25,000 here, $50,000 there, but it added up. And it also gave you a sense of understanding how to write the applications and getting it through. So once I got to the point where I was applying to NIH, I was feeling more confident. But my first try didn't get funded. And my second try, because the funding climate was pretty tight, even though it was like a 15th percentile, it didn't get funded. And I said like, oh, my god, what can I do now? 

	And finally because I was a new investigator in Council at the next level-- and it was very interesting-- a woman, Dorothy Penn who is head of Council, happened to be in the lab across from the lab where I was a postdoc. And this is where networking counts. And I used to help her when I was in Arthur's lab. Occasionally she would come in and say, I need something Cindy. Could you give me some material or something, da, da, da. Instead of having one of her techs or someone do it, I would just end up doing it and just give it to them because it was simpler. And so she pulled my grant. She recognized me, pulled my grant up, and funded it. 

	It was close, it was a percentile point off. And at the same time, it was a new investigator so they were trying to fund more of those grants. But I think partly it was she recognized who I was and pulled it out. And I was, oh. It was the first lesson in realizing that part of this is actually-- it's not where you're going to fund bad science or something, but it's also knowing and getting your story out there and really being a colleague with people is helpful. So I was like, oh, I should remember this. 

	And since then I've been continuously funded from NIH. And I've had other grants from other foundations along the way. And more recently I've been involved in a contract, which this is the first time I'm doing this and it hasn't quite come through yet. Like we haven't completely signed, both of us, but when I was at the biophysics meeting a couple of years ago-- no, maybe a year and a half ago-- Sepracor, which makes Lunesta, the sleep aide, approached me about maybe doing work with them, which would be more—

00:51:27

CC:	--what I work on, and now I can morph into that a little bit. But part of the research that I've been doing is I've been at the UW, I went back to get the A receptors, and these are all the same proteins in the same family as what I did at my postdoc. And then they bind neurotransmitter, and their job is to take that neurotransmitter, that chemical single, and open a channel. 

	What's interesting about these GABA-A receptors is that they control all the inhibition that's going on in the brain. So what they do is they quiet the brain and prevent over-excitation. And so mutations in these receptor leads to epilepsy at somewhere. 

	And in addition, the receptor is a target of a ton of drugs that are used clinically. So one whole class of drugs are called benzodiazepines, where there's a site on this protein, on the GABA-A receptor, which binds these drugs. And a common on that everyone would know would be Valium. 

	But these sleep aides, Ambien and also Lunesta also bind to that same sight. And so this benzodiazepine binding site, or this drug binding site, the drugs have very different structures, but they all sort of fit in there, and what they do is they don't control the opening and closing of the channel, of the protein, but they just make GABA, the natural transmitter work much better. So they augment the ability of this channel to work. And because this channel is important for inhibition, to quiet the brain, they're really good at that. Then they help the brain. You get more bang for your money. So the same amount of GABA might be circulating in your brain, this natural transmitter, but now you take this drug and it makes it just even better. 

	So right now, I had done some work on Ambien. I had published a couple of papers. And not at all affiliated with any drug company-- I was just very interested in how do these drugs, which very different structures-- like Valium looks very different than Ambien, but they both sort of dock into the same place-- but I was interested in really defining that binding pocket. Because if we could really understand what that binding pocket looks like, we can make a much better drug. 

	And so for the past few years we've been working on that a little bit. One side of the lab, one part of the lab has been looking at that. And we published a few papers, so they came-- so Ambien's direct competitor is Lunesta. The lunar moth. And so they came to me at this meeting and they just said, would you be interested in coming and giving a talk? And helping us out with consulting and this and that. 

	And so I went and talked to them a little bit about what they were doing and I talked about my stuff. And then they said, you know, we do give out grants and stuff to do sort of basic science research. And we would love for you to do what you did with Ambien, but with our drug. I was like, oh. Hmm. We can always go down that road, anyway, basically, I think we might actually be getting some money from the drug company. 

	And why it's sort of a mixed bag is like, do you want to go down that road? And do you have conflicts of interest or this and that? But the contract is written very broadly in that it's very basic science research. This isn't really patentable kind of stuff, but they would like to know how their drug works better. It's amazing. We use these drugs, but do we really understand exactly what they're doing? No. 

	So one little part of my research program is trying to define these drug binding sites. And so other drugs that bind, beside this class of benzodiazepines, which would be Ambien and Valium and those, are volatile intravenous anaesthetics, most of all the clinical effects. Like how they work are due to their binding, to this receptor that I'm studying. And also a lot of the effects of neuroactive steroids. Metabolites and progesterone and estrogen work by binding here. In addition, many of the effects of alcohol-- not all of them, but a lot of the effects of alcohol-- are mediated by its interaction. 

	So in one way, we're interested in how drugs cause conformational changes or structural how they make movements in the protein to make GABA work better. I'm kind of looking at it down the line. And then also how they just dock on. And it's sort of the opposite of what a drug company does because a drug company keeps changing the structure of a drug. And what we do in lab is we look at the protein, and we tweak that structure and then we say, what makes a drug bind better or worse? And what would be the ideal drug that would actually fit? So we're more working on this end than the together end. But they're both complimentary, I would say. And so we're sort of working at that. 

00:57:41 

CC:	And then the other whole part of what we're trying to understand is just basically, how does GABA do it? How does GABA make this thing open? And in there, actually I guess one of my claim to fame is work that I did as a postdoc where I actually defined that the way these natural transmitters or chemicals in the brain work-- and not just GABA receptors, but in almost all this whole class of families is that-- these proteins are made up of multiple parts. And there are five of these different parts that have to come together to make the channel. And what I found out is that this little chemical, actually, has to bridge between two of the parts of protein. And it's that bridging at this interface that key to how they work. 

	And then we're still sort of puzzling over that. Working on that a little bit. And to understand how something very small could cause a really big conformational change. And the reason why that's important is that these proteins are so essential that many of the mutations in many different diseases are associated with mutations in those proteins. 

	So part of what one graduate student has done in the laboratory is we've really ended up trying to figure out what the effect of this mutation was. So in the human population, we knew this one amino acid in the GABA receptor-- just one-- was mutated. But how did that result in the phenotype of epilepsy? And so what you can do now is we can-- in a pure protein, we can just say, OK, we can make that mutation and see what does it do to the function of this protein? Does it affect the way GABA opens and closes the channel, or does it affect the way these five parts have to come together to form the channel? Or does it affect how it gets into the membrane? 

	And in a really nice set of experiments, this Feyza Sancar who just finished her PhD, she described that the mutation's effect was really a trafficking problem. It was an assembling, trafficking problem. Like the mutation caused the five parts not to come together very well, or get to the surface. So then you just had less GABA receptors. With less GABA receptors you get less inhibition. Less inhibition, more firing. There you go. 

	It has to be repeated in a neural sub-background and in mice and with this mutation and this, but it tells you that you can go through these kinds of mechanisms and sort of learn how the protein is working. Because those mutations must also pinpoint into us, what are these central parts of the protein? Because all of a sudden if you realize that they all map to a single portion, that points you to an important part of the protein. 

	So that's the other part of what we've been doing. So the big, I guess, question is, how does signaling occur in the brain? And this is one of the major signaling proteins. And so we're trying to understand at a level of not a circuit, but just how this one tiny piece works in that. And then fill that in. 

01:01:50

SP:	You've touched, I think, on some significant developments in what's happened at least since you've started working with these proteins. Are there other significant developments in your field? 

CC:	Yeah. I think crystallization, we've gotten to the point where these proteins are embedded in the membrane. And that's been very hard to try to get a really good picture of, to actually crystallize something to the point where you could see every atom. Soluble enzymes and some other are much easier to do. So we've always sort of been working in the dark. We kind of know a little bit. These structures are now just coming out. We're getting breakthroughs in that where we're understanding how these membranes proteins, per se, can look. I think that's taking us to the next level. 

	I also think mapping the genome, the human genome, is really pushing us to the next level. Because now it's not just cloning things. I remember as a graduate student, monochromal antibodies were a big thing. Just making one would be a paper. And now, that's like [dismissive sound effect]. Cloning something in the '80s and '90s was a paper announced. And now we don't even have clonings and, you know, like, yeah. 

	So I think where we are now is we have the book, let's say. We have the code. But now we've got to understand how they're put together. How does this protein signal to that protein? What's the significance of a pathway? Because now we don't even know what most of those proteins do that we now have this code for, we're at the point where you need protein chemists and other things to say, what does this do? So these "omic" words, which I can't stand, like genomics and proteomics approach, and yeah-- systems biology. In some ways this is traditional physiology. It's trying to understand how the system works, or the whole thing works together. And how it changes in response to a stimulus of some kind. 

	I do think, though, we're at the crossroads where we can begin asking some bigger questions. I think the field of neuroscience, we are beginning to really-- we have no idea how the brain works, still-- but we are at a level where we're getting closer to figuring out some small circuits and small ideas like, whether you'd want to call it consciousness or just some of the molecular substrates of memory. 

	Whether that's the whole story, I don't think so. But I think we're at a better to place to move things at least at a level, for society, where more medicine that's really more geared for the individual-- individualized medicine will be something that will probably happen more in the next probably 20 to 40 years. Where people are going to be mapped for specifically what kind of cancer you have or what exactly kind of drug would work best for you than maybe someone else. That will be very expensive, though. so how that would all get paid out, I'm not sure. But that's sort of where I see the biggest things that have happened. 

	And staying on top of that and changing is always the challenge. It's like you need to reinvent yourself. Like right now I'm going through that, where I feel that I need to do something else. Do something new. Or I need a new approach. And I think that happens. And I think those successful scientists do it. And they recognize that. And so that's the beauty of the job is that you're constantly learning. You're constantly forcing yourself to be on the edge of what you know. And that's good and bad because you always feel not very smart. 

01:07:38 

SP:	Well, you're constantly learning and you're constantly teaching. Would you talk about your teaching responsibilities? 

CC:	Sure. I mostly am responsible in teaching a graduate level course, which is cell molecular neuroscience. I've been doing that now, I'd probably say, for 12 years. And that's a every year, fall course and I teach-- it's team taught. There are like four major people teaching. And the class has gotten bigger and bigger every year. We now have like 40 or 50 people in it, which is a lot for a graduate level course. There's always a few undergraduates in the class-- it's become quite popular. But it sort of changes the venue a little bit. 

	I also do some teaching in pharmacology in a graduate level course. Medical school teaching, I mostly have taught small groups in the first year medical physiology class, where they do excitable membranes and stuff. And we have small groups with faculty. So there, you'll be meeting with maybe 20 to 30 students a couple a times a week, going over problem sets and questions and things from lectures. And that's pretty good. 

	With undergraduates, all my teaching has been mostly just students doing senior thesis in my lab, or research in my lab. Research credits. And that's been incredibly successful. A lot of my students have won awards and have gone on to graduate school or medical school. Many of them are authors on papers, co-authors on papers, or have abstracts and things. So that's been actually, really a lot of fun. And am I missing anything? And then it's just mostly the graduate level training. 

SP:	Yeah. Talk about that. Do you have postdocs in your lab, too? 

CC:	Yes. 

01:09:51

SP:	What's it like working with graduate students and postdocs? 

CC:	Graduate student training is great. I love graduate student training. It's great to watch them go when they all of a sudden just really get it. And right now I'm in the midst of graduating a bunch of students. One student just graduated in January, Feyza Sancar and another student, Jose Mercado is graduating in August. We've set his date. And then I'll have another student, Sri [Venkatachalan] graduating I bet by January. 

	So when you see them in that last year just become a colleague, like where they're questioning you, where they're coming up with their own ideas, were they're truly excited about what they're doing and needing to go and do something else, you know that, wow. Hey. And they went from someone who was kind of scared and didn't really recognize all the controls and their experiments didn't work and they were like, oh, my god. This is never going to end. And they were smart, but you were trying to wonder like, why did you do the same experiment seven times in a row when it wasn't working? What? 

	I take it pretty seriously. I spend a fair amount of time with my graduate students. I try to meet with them at least once a week, each of them privately. We have lab meetings then. 

SP:	Do you have to teach them how to write? 

CC:	Yeah. That's really hard. And I am a good writer, but a really slow writer. And my writing doesn't come easily, and it's coming even less easily now. And I think it's been hard for me to actually teach that. 

	I think we do it by the way I was taught. And both my mentors, pretty much, I would give them a draft and they would give it back all red. And then I would give them back a draft and then they would give it back. That was my PhD advisor, who was an excellent writer, excellent command of English. 

	Arthur did it very differently, which I've tried this. He made you sit in his office with him. And he wrote. He wrote, and you watched. And then he would re-analyze all your data and you'd have to have all your lab notebooks there and you would go talk about it and he would write. And then you would say, well, I really don't like that sentence. And he'd ask you, why? So that could be torture, though. But at the same time, there's something about that that I think I learned a lot. 

	Like, I try to give them tricks about how to organize and I call it spin. And it sounds sort of kind of flashy and stuff, but it's really important to be able to tall people why it's interesting. And it's the difference between sometimes getting very, very good work in one tier journal versus another tier journal. And nowadays with the Internet and stuff, everyone reads most everything, but still for tenure decisions, for funding decisions, for this and this and that, it's not always appropriate, but where you're publishing is important and that you are publishing. 

	I think it's been very hard to try and figure out how to help people. But most of them, I think, get it by the time they're finishing. Like we were just working on Neuroscience abstracts for a meeting and the four senior students were giving me abstracts that were really pretty good. I was just like, wow. I was like, OK. And the postdoc was-- I have a fairly new postdoc who is just great. I'm just like, oh, my god. She knows how to write. 

01:14:39 

CC:	And postdocs are different kind of mentoring than graduate students. Graduate students, you really need to sit there and help them get through it and organize them and go through the scientific process. Like really teach them the scientific process and reading critically and understanding literature and what's an interesting question, how to answer the question, how to do a controlled experiment, what do you need to answer that question-- not just this experiment, but this. 

	Postdocs, you're just sort of trying to direct into an interesting area so they can make their splash. And just say, here you go. And you can learn some new tricks and this and that and I'll help you along the way and I'll give you my advice, but you kind of let them do it on their own. And you help promote them. It's really important at meetings and stuff to make sure you are making sure they're meeting the right people and getting connected. So you try to do that, and it's my responsibility to help them find jobs and things. So you want them to be successful. 

01:16:01 

SP:	I'm going to switch gears a little bit here. Would you talk about your service activities that you've had over the years, the ones that you thought were actually worth your time and effort and others that you would never do again? 

CC:	Oh, that's bad. That's a loaded question. 

SP:	I don't mean it to be. 

CC:	I've been on a fair amount of different committees on campus. I was on the Graduate Research Committee-- that committee was a good committee-- that's where money from WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, where investigators across campus, not just from the medical school but from all across campus, could apply for grants, small grants, not big, for research. And part of it can be money to help out between grants, other larger grants. 

	I was on the Graduate Research Committee for three years where we reviewed grants. And what was great was that you actually went and visited different people on campus. And I was always assigned people not in the medical school and stuff, so you actually got a kind of broader view of what was going on on campus. And you met some really, really smart people. And I always thought, wow, I had no idea this was going on. So that was great, and we really felt that your input was important in using resources on campus. And so that level of-- it was a huge commitment, though. It was a lot of work. There were a lot of committees and actually going and talking to people, reviewing their grants, writing up little reviews. It was like a mini NIH kind of study section. 

	I was a NIH-- this was more on a national level-- I've been on National Institute of Health study sections for over five or six years. That's a huge commitment. It's very important that people are doing it. But it was three times a year travelling to NIH and then reviewing these grants which, inevitably, it took me two weeks each time. So that's six weeks right there of just total devotion to look at these grants. 

	But that was very scholarly, and I think it was probably like two years too long. The process made me a much better grant writer. It really does keep you on the edge of what's going on in the field. And I did a lot of reading. You feel like it was a scholarly endeavor. And so in that way I do think it's worthwhile. I just think either if they could kind of make it two times a year versus a commitment of three times, of going to every single one. And the five years was just definitely one year too long, and maybe two years too long. But that was actually really quite good. 

	I've been involved in faculty. Like I'm on search committees for faculty. And that, I think, has been pretty positive. I was just on a search committee for the chair of the anesthesiology department. And that was interesting being a basic scientist, being on a search for a clinical department. It sort of was eye opening. But that again, I thought essentially was good. 

	More recently on the MERC Committee, the Medical Education Research Council, which is where some of the money from Blue Cross Blue Shield is getting decided. That's a mixed bag, and that's about all I'll say. I think it's an important committee. I think it's an important committee-- I don't know how effective I've been on this committee or how effective I can be on the committee. So then it's sort of one of those plus/minuses. 

	I was acting chair a year ago of the Neuroscience Training Program, the graduate training program, with about 50 students and 80 faculty. That was really interesting. It was a fair amount of work. Actually, Ann Kelley was on sabbatical-- she had been chair for many years-- and was on sabbatical and I took it over for a year. And now Tommy and his now-chair. So I was just acting chair, but it was good. That was good. But that's one of those thankless jobs. Like, someone has to do it, you have to a good job, but partly I'm very committed to graduate education, so I felt that was a good place for my time. Those are most of the committees I've been involved with. 

01:21:38 

SP:	Would you talk about the climate for women on the Madison campus? Do you think it helps or hinders the advancement of women? 

CC:	I don't know whether I could talk about the Madison campus per se, because I think it's more departmental. I see more differences at the department level. So as a whole, do I think the University of Wisconsin is doing a good job? No. Not great. Do I think my particular department is? It's great and fine. I think I've advanced and I think the climate has been very good for women to advance. But I don't see that across the board. 

	I think the new dean of the medical school is quite aware of it. Yeah, it's interesting. Once you get to higher levels of administration, there are not that many women. And you try to figure out why. And it's not like there are not some women professors or other things. But then you go back and forth about, is there enough time to do everything? And how many women have gotten burnt out by being on so many committees before they got to the point where they could be in a different kind of leadership position, which might be a better position than doing all this other committee work. 

	So I think there's some room. I think there's definitely room on campus to move women to more positions and to make it easier, the climate easier. I still think that it's hard to recruit really good women. 

SP:	Is it hard for you in your department? 

CC:	I don't think we have ever overtly not said, like, oh, we're not going to recruit women or anything like that. It's just actually getting really qualified women to UW--specially in this last search when we were searching for this chair of anesthesiology. We're looking for a chair of anesthesiology who is a clinician researcher. How many women are out there? We were banging down the bushes to get them to apply. There weren't even that many men who were out there. So you go, oh, OK. 

	But I do think that there are some things that have to be taken into account that is really hard to do on paper when you're reading someone’s C.V. about, well, why is this woman in her postdoc for seven years and only has four papers, and this guy has 10 papers, in four years. But you don't know that she's had two kids and da, da, da, da, da. And time. And do you count that or not? And how do you count it? And how do you know that? Those are hard questions. And I think science right now is trying to juggle with that just overall on, why are women leaving? 

	And right now funding is very, very tight. And my graduate are a little depressed and even I'm a little anxious. I have a grant that got a 16th percentile and it's not getting funded because they're funding at 9%. And so like a year ago, year and a half ago it would have been funded. And I'm like, wow. And you know, I just feel like, OK, we're just going to have to go in a couple of times and this and that. But in the meantime there are people like scientists in your lab and technicians, you have people with families who are working with you and are-- you're running like a small businesses and you're like going, well, I'm not sure whether this is going to really pan out. So I think women, some women, are opting for other-- are thinking about that. 

01:27:06 

SP:	I'm going to switch gears again. Are you involved in professional associations and societies? And if so, how? What is your involvement? And do you think that that's important to your career? And if so, why? 

CC:	I'm involved in the Society for Neuroscience. And also a pharmacology society. And I had been in the Biophysical Society. And most of those are all for scientific reasons. I go to these conferences, talk about our research, present our data, meet people, talk to people. 

SP:	So it is important?

CC:	It's very important. Actually, we were having this discussion in my lab today with my students because they were all trying to write abstracts for this meeting that's going to be in San Diego. One, it's in San Diego, and they were all like, yeah. And two, I was telling them I wanted them as they put in their abstracts and stuff to sort of say, we wanted to present in a bloc. Like, everyone had posters and stuff, but I said, and I want you to say you want to be in the same session as everybody else in a lab. 

	One, it makes it much easier for me. And now that I have a two year old I can't go for that long to a meeting. So if they're all on the same day, but at the same time, I said, you'll gather a group of people that are disinterested in the lab that want to see what's coming out from our lab. And then you just sort of draw then in. And since you end up having a little constant crowd, so that there's always people around versus just one isolated person, I said, I seem to think that works better at these really large meetings. In smaller meetings you don't need that, but in larger meetings, which these are, you need something like that. 

	I tend to try to bring my students to at least one big meeting a year. And then a couple of more senior people, I'll have them go with me to a more smaller meeting. 

01:29:26 

SP:	Would you talk about awards and honors that you've received throughout your career? 

CC:	Yeah, I guess so. I’ll try to find some--

SP:	You’ve mentioned some in the previous--

CC:	Throughout my career. OK. There are a couple that I was actually-- so the Burroughs Wellcome New Investigator Award is actually really quite a-- that was quite a coup in pharmacology. So that was one of the first ones that I won when I was here. Also, the Basil O'Connor March of Dimes Award. It was another new investigator award, and it's highly competitive. And that was really nice to receive. And the more recent award was I received the College de France Distinguished Lecturer. And I ended up, in the spring of '94, going to the College de France and giving a lecture. And they awarded me this bronze medal. That's one of the oldest colleges in France. And that kind of nice. And so those are-- that's about it. Nothing else. 

01:30:55 

SP:	Well, now we come to the final questions in the interview. And this has to do with life after work. If you would talk about your family life, what you do for fun and relaxation, how do you stay healthy? 

CC:	Good question. 

SP:	How do you balance your work and family? 

CC:	A struggle. Well, it's very different right now. I went through tenure, and being partially single and then married, but without children and I didn't have Ann, my two year old, until I was 47. And so basically, that's very unusual. Wouldn't recommend it to anybody. But I sort of did it very different. And essentially, my husband and I, I didn't get married until I was here in my late thirties, forties. And then we tried and just didn't think we were going to ever have kids. 

	So we were sort of on the early retirement mode. And I mean, did a lot of traveling and worked really, really hard and put in really long hours. And generally, the day was we went to work at-- I was at work by 8 and worked until like 7, 7:30. And then we had dinner and I did it again and I worked part of the time on weekends. 

	Paris in springtime, College de France, there you go. [laughing] Paris in spring. Came home, nine months later Ann was born. That has dramatically changed things. I do have a hard time trying to-- I'm still, I think, learning how to-- she's two and a quarter or two and a half-- I'm still learning how to juggle this. Basically, I took three months off, and my husband took three months off and then we went back to work and all of a sudden I was working 8:30 to 5:50 Monday through Friday and trying to fit everything in. Basically, if she goes to bed, you work. 

	Before, free time was we traveled, we went out, I biked, I hiked, I kayaked, we went canoeing, and we did lots of things. Now I run after a two year old. And that's great-- I really don't want to miss, you know, I waited this long it's a miracle that I had a baby and she's fine-- that I am in a good position and my lab is very—

01:34:04 [End tape 1; begin tape 2]

CC:	This is chasing after a two year old. And your lab is well established. 

	Oh, I was going back to a point I made earlier was that I felt like it was time to reinvent myself, to do something new. I think if, you know, before Ann--I think I would be there now. I probably would have re-invented myself by now, or moved into a little bit of a different direction and taken the lab somewhere else. There's a part of me that's frustrated right now, and I feel that we've become a little stale. And partially, I'm worry about grant renewals and stuff because we're not really at the edge. But at the same time, we are doing some cool things, and we have things in my back pocket that I think are working. And everything seems to be clicking. It's good and I could say we spend most of our time playing with the two and a half year old, and going to visit grandparents with her, and spending time running around going to the zoo. I know the zoo in Madison really well. We go to Chicago, and it's been great. It has been a miracle. And that's really fun. Juggling is hard. I don't even have colleagues who have done it. I don't quite know how you do it when you're going through tenure. I am amazed. Or you don't enjoy it as much. I really do enjoyed her infancy. I've enjoyed her toddling. I've said that this is important and I'm just going to do it. I've gotten better at prioritizing. I've gotten better at not being as much of a perfectionist. OK. This isn't as good of a job as I could do, but it will be fine. This will work. And that's good. That's all I can say. 

SP:	Are your parents still living? 

CC:	Yes. 

SP:	Are they in New York? 

CC:	No they moved. So, my one sister, my oldest sister, is a clinical psychologist. She has a PhD in psychology. And she did her work out in Salt Lake City. And so when I moved here to Wisconsin, my dad was pretty much retiring and they ended up moving out to Salt Lake City, because my sister's kids were pretty small at the time. And my middle sister is a lawyer. And she's still in New York. And she had her children the earliest. She had her kids when she was 19. Really young. And she had her kids when they went into law school She sort of did it opposite. So her kids were sort of grown up. So my parents moved out towards the kids. So my parents were in Salt Lake City with one of my sisters and my other sisters out of New York, still. 

SP:	And you get to see them periodically? 

CC:	We're leaving on Friday to go to Salt Lake City. I haven't seen my parents since August so they're chopping on the bit to see him. So we're going to have a little vacation, and then I'm giving a talk in California. So I'm going to fly out to California from there. And Ann and  Pat are going to come with me and he has family in California. So they'll visit when I do my talk thing. 

SP:	Well. We've come to the end of the interview. I don't want to turn the tape off though if there's something that you'd like to say, that we haven't covered yet. 

CC:	I don't think so. I think I've spoke way too much. 

SP:	Oh no. This was an excellent interview. And I thank you very much. 

CC:	Well I thank you very much, too. Great. 

00:04:28	End of First Interview Session