UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #786
CRAIG, ELIZABETH

Narrator: 	Craig, Elizabeth
Interviewer: 	Sandy Pfahler
Date: 		2006
Location: 	Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History#:	786
Series: 		Women in Science and Engineering

00:00:00	Start of First Interview Session

Sandy Pfahler (SP): Today is Friday, June 30, 2006. My name is Sandy Pfahler. I am an interviewer with the University of Wisconsin - Madison oral history project. Today I am interviewing Elizabeth Craig, Professor of Biochemistry and current chair of the UW Madison Department of Biochemistry. Good morning. 

Elizabeth Craig (EC):  Good morning. 

00:00:23 

SP:	Let's start this interview with your childhood. If you could talk about where and when you were born. Talk about your childhood and your early schooling. Talk about your family. Any family members or teachers or others who encouraged you in your studies when you were in elementary school, in high school. 

EC:	I was born outside of a small town in New Hampshire; a town of about 1500, one older brother. Both my parents were involved in elementary education as professions so education was always an important thing. Probably one of the most important things was both my parents -- and particularly my mother, my father also -- was anything my brother got to do, I got to do too. So I wanted to learn how to play baseball, my father taught me how to play baseball. When someone called me up to see whether or not my brother wanted some money mowing lawns and he wasn't available, my mother suggested maybe I did because it paid five times more than babysitting. In that subtle level I sort of grew up thinking I can do that. When I look back I think that was really important. It was very subtle but it was very important. 

	I can remember listening from upstairs during an argument -- not an argument -- but a discussion between my parents and it thought that I should go to teachers college. My mother was arguing no, I should be able to go to university like my brother. I mean, I wouldn't be here if I had gone to the local teacher college. That was a very important decision. So I feel like I had been supported in childhood or education very well. 

00:02:30 

SP:	Did you like science as a child? 

EC:	I loved science as a child. It was just interesting. I think the luckiest thing that probably happened to me was the two science teachers I had in high school. My graduating class was 50 students from seven different towns. This is a very small rural school. For whatever reason, both were young men who eventually went on and got PhD's and actually taught in colleges, but took a few years off and taught high school science. One got biology. One set up a special advanced biology class for five of us. I even had a calculus class by television in 1964 taught by Ms. Hancock who was just ready to retire and it came from a professor at the university. So I was enormously well prepared, remarkably so from a town that size. I feel very fortunate that, that happened. 

SP:	You had to make a decision on where we were going to go to college and were encouraged to go to the university by your mother? 

EC:	Right. And I did not want to go to the University of New Hampshire. I mean, I actually had a hard time. I think especially in that time in small towns with peers in high school and being smart and an athletic girl. I mean I was what everyone would call a tomboy back then. I played every sport. 

SP:	What was your favorite sport? 

EC:	My favorite sport was basketball. I lived for basketball. 

SP:	Now, in those days, did you play full court basketball? 

EC:	No, we played half court with rovers. 

SP:	Oh yes, I remember rovers. 

EC:	The three dribble rule. 

SP:	And you still thought it was your favorite sport. 

EC:	It was fun, I loved it. But I loved tennis too. I learned to play tennis. 

00:04:44 

EC:	But it wasn't an easy high school. And the thought of going off to college with some of my high school classmates that I felt real good about. So I ended up going -- what I thought at the time was very far away -- which was the University of Rhode Island which was actually 110 miles from home. But it gave me the anonymity that I sort of craved at that point. So there I went. 

SP:	Did you choose that mainly because it was a little further away from home over were there other reasons? 

EC:	Not really. It was like a blind choice. These are the three places I applied for: the University of New Hampshire, the University of Maine, and the University of Rhode Island. I mean, in my family background one would never have considered applying to a private school. Those were off the social radar screen. So those were the three universities I got a full scholarship to the University of Maine and just a little scholarship to the Rhode Island. The more I thought about it so though, I didn't want to go to the boonies. Rhode Island was the boonies. Relative to Orono, Maine, it was not the boonies. So that was a big family issue. But I had a summer job that I could make quite a bit of money and I was able to pay most of my way through college. 

SP:	What was your summer job? 

EC:	This is the other thing that happened that made me be where I am now. So in this little tiny town, there was the MacDowell artist colony which was set up by Edward MacDowell. It was his summer far from living in New York and 30 artists, painters, writers, came in and had little sabbaticals there. My father didn't want me to work there because he thought I'd get in trouble. There's some validity in that concern. 

	I was a waitress and dish washer and so forth there for like four years; my summer after high school and my four years through college. I worked overtime and various things. It actually paid fairly well. I also got to interact with all of those people. It completely opened my eyes to all sorts of things. 

SP:	When you enrolled at the University of Rhode Island, did you have an idea of what you wanted to pursue, what field? 

EC:	I put down my major as biology. I clearly had some sort of idea of what I was interested in. That came from the teachers I had in high school. 

00:07:45 

SP:	Well talk about that experience, your undergraduate experience. Was it a positive one? The right choice as far as you were concerned? 

EC:	Overall, I think the university worked very well for me. I made a decision and I can't believe I was that astute at 19 years old. 

	I first majored in biology and so I took my zoology courses and it was lacking something for me. The way I sort of felt about it, it was mushy. I took one microbiology course and I said, I like this so much better. It was the fact that you could ask different types of questions instead of sort of doing anatomy and looking at something. With microbiology at that time, it was 15 or 20 years after the first molecular experiments had been done. It was a much more molecular type of analysis, not quite what we consider it today. So I switched my major to bacteriology. But then I was worried about a job and so I decided I was going to major in medical technology. Then I got to my senior year and you had to go away to Providence and do a year of internship. I then though, I don't really want to do this. So I stepped back from that and just became a plain old bacteriology major. 

	I do not recall why I did is but I started doing research in a lab. I can't remember how the opportunity came about but I did it and that was it. I found my life. Then the most important thing, as I was talking to my adviser, Paul Cohen, and he asked me what I was gonna do. I said, go find a job and bring home the money. I can still see myself standing in his office and he said, they pay you to go to graduate school. What? I said OK. In my generation, I had no thought of, I'm going to become a professor or I'm going to do this or that. It was, I can keep doing this and make enough money to live so why not. Then I applied to graduate school. 

00:10:24

SP:	Where did you apply? 

EC:	For no reason [laughs]--I did, again, this life changing decision. So I had lived in a town of 1,500 and I had gone to the University of Rhode Island. The school had like 5,000 and the town was a population of about 1,500. I was afraid of cities. I thought I should go to graduate school in a city. If I don't live in a city, I'll spend the rest of my life avoiding cities. So I applied to Johns Hopkins, Case Western Reserve, and the University of Washington in St. Louis. I ended up going to -- Did I say the University of Washington? If anybody's a Washington University alum, I'm sorry. Washington University in St. Louis. [laughter] I chastise other people for that. So I made the decision to go to Washington.	 

SP:	What kind of package did you get? 

EC:	I think it was $1,800 stipend. 

SP:	And that was good. 

EC:	That was great. Especially because of this deal with my parents, I mean, I had, had no money. I mean I had no money in college. Buying a new tube of toothpaste was an exciting shopping experience. And so I had no problem. And there was health insurance. 

SP:	And what was their reaction to your decision to go to graduate school and to go to the big city. 

EC:	Not so great. They didn't really understand. I mean, I wanted to do it was OK. But it was a long ways away. They were in some ways disappointed, in some ways proud, but they didn't quite understand what I was doing. 

00:12:38 

SP:	Talk about your graduate experience. Were there people that influenced you there and put you in the direction that you wanted to go in? 

EC:	Yes. The first couple of years were very painful. I mean, this decision in theory was very good, in practice it was a very painful experience. I almost dropped out of graduate school intitally. 

SP:	What happened? 

EC:	I was homesick. I lived in a dorm that had six floors in it and it took me a month and a half to figure that there were actually buttons on the elevator to push to go upstairs because I had never been in an elevator before. So I used to just stand there and wait. This was the level that I was at. So it took me a good year to start feeling comfortable in that situation. 

	I joined one research lab and that turned into a not very good experience and I changed that. I landed in a lab with the most wonderful man, David Schlessinger. He really helped me develop into a scientist. I remember this with my students. He would sort of bring me into his office and talk to me. I had no clue what he was talking about for the first numbers of months. Then gradually we started having a conversation. I remember when I couldn't start writing my first paper and he said, well why aren't you writing? I said, I just don't know how to start. The next day he came in this rough draft and just handed it to me. 

SP:	Did he find you or did you find him? How did you connect with him? 

EC:	He was in the same department and my advisor over the first two years had gone to a Gordon conference -- which is, small scientific Gordon conferences -- and apparently had talked about my work. He didn't tell me that. David, who was in the same department, came up to me and he said, your advisor talked about the work and people, they're really excited about it. That made me feel really good but on the other hand, that was sort of like, to me, this isn't going anywhere. Because I didn't even know that my advisor had done this. We don't probably need to go into all of those stories. But it became clear that this was not going to help me get anywhere. So when I made that decision he was one of the people that I went to and said, can I join your lab. So I had known him from that interaction. 

SP:	What were you working on? 

EC:	I was working on messenger RNA degradation in bacteria and E. coli as a model system. So I had stuck with the microbiology. I had applied to microbiology graduate programs. 

SP:	So from that point on then, graduate school was a success. 

EC:	Graduate school was a success. I was happy. 

SP:	And you were going right for your PhD. 

EC:	Yeah. That was right at the time that most biology or molecular biology type programs that were starting up did not have any masters degrees. 

SP:	Talk about your dissertation process. How does that work in the sciences? 

EC:	In the sense? 

SP:	Well, your dissertation is based on your research, correct? Did you research change over the years that you were in graduate school. 

EC:	Fortunately, for me, the lab that I was first in and the lab that I was in second, the fundamental problems they were working on was very similar. 

SP:	I see. 

EC:	So I did not have to drastically change what I was thinking about. So that was really good. You develop a research project and you carry out experiments and you write a paper. Then you take those results and try to build on them, ask another question, get the results so you can write another paper. Then you write all that up as your thesis. 

00:17:27 

SP:	Did you know early on that you wanted to continue in academia or had you really made that decision? Were you looking for a teaching job, research job in a university? 

EC:	I was clueless. I was looking for nothing. The idea that I would become a professor never entered my head. I probably thought of myself more as, the model that I could see is people working as technicians in labs. So that I think, I thought, was what I would do for a long time. 

00:18:20 

EC:	So then, of course, you graduate. And I got my degree in four years which even then, was fairly a short period of time. You don't know much after four years. In the meantime I had gotten married and my husband was graduating. My then husband was graduating from medical school. The possibility, especially with the mentality of the times of finding something in the same cities and so forth, it's was just impossible. We ended up making the decision to stay in St. Louis for his internship. So I found a post doc position in the same city. 

SP:	How long were you there? 

EC:	I have to think here. Three years it must have been. About three years. 

SP:	And then what happened? 

EC:	Well I took a wonderful six months hiatus that never shows up on my CV, which is a bicycle trip throughout Europe for six months. I'm so glad. I always encourage people to do something like that if they can. Then there was residency for my husband. He grew up in California and wanted to go back there for at least a while. So I looked around the San Francisco Bay area and I actually moved into the post doc at UCSF, University of California, San Francisco. I applied for a fellowship and got one. 

SP:	At that point did you have an idea of what you wanted to do? 

EC:	I knew I liked doing what I was doing. Clearly I had been doing well because I was getting these fellowships. I could get a fellowship that would pay enough money. We had one child by that time. There was some flexibility that came with being a post doc that doesn't come with a real job. You can leave at 2 in the afternoon or change your working hours to whatever you want. So it fit the situation very well. But no. No idea then. It had not occurred to me at all. 

SP:	With the post doc, is that primarily research or do you do some teaching too? 

EC:	In our type of business and you have a fellowship, it's all research. I had done a small amount of teaching when I was a graduate student but not very much. I was in the medical school so there were not undergraduates there. I had TAed part of a medical student lab at one point, not a particularly enjoyable experience. 

00:21:41 

SP:	Was it after San Francisco then that you came to Wisconsin? 

EC:	Yes. So I don't know why at some point -- I had my second child -- and I don't honestly remember. So then there had to be a discussion. Residency was ending for my husband. It was time to sort of grow up and have a real job. Where were we going to go? Where were we going to end up? I think the person whose lab I was working in, in San Francisco said, aren't you going to apply for faculty positions? I said, do you think I could? It seemed like a good idea and my husband was sort of game. So I applied to a bunch of places and he'd looked into position type jobs in those places. I got interviews everywhere I applied for. 

SP:	And that surprised you? 

EC:	It shocked me because I had never thought about this. In retrospect, if I look at it, it's totally understandable. I mean, I was in the fortunate position that there were three or four young scientists on the job market that year that knew how to do recombinant DNA, and I was one of those. When I'd moved to San Francisco I had gone into a lab that was like one of two in the country that was just starting the combinant DNA. I learned that and I perfected part of the technology. So if I look at it now it's like, duh. 

SP:	So how did you choose Wisconsin? 

EC:	I still didn't like big cities a lot. I loved San Francisco but in general. I had two little kids. I couldn't imagine for example, raising those kids and having a job like being a professor in a large city. That was important, to have an environment. I did not want to move to a place -- I'd been thinking about this after I applied for the jobs -- that if I did well, well enough, that I felt like I was having fun and being successful, that tenure was an issue. So I turned down a job interview at Johns Hopkins. I turned down a job interview at Yale. I didn't apply to Harvard. I made a very conscious decision not to go there. I knew Wisconsin had excellent science and so forth but I knew there was one slot, one person. If you did well, you would get tenure. It wasn't three people, one slot, which is what happens at some other places. 

00:25:24 

SP:	What was the interview process here? 

EC:	I was not in this department at the time. I interviewed in the department of what was then called physiological chemistry in the medical school, which is the other biochemistry department on campus. It's actually quite similar to what an interview would be now. You come in and you have a discussion with every faculty member or most faculty members in the department. You present a seminar of your work. You present a roundtable discussion with the faculty of where your research is going. You can tell I'm deciding whether or not to tell a story. I'll tell a story. 

	The former chair of that department is a very respected scientist, P.P. Cohen, was sitting around the table and was one of the ones that was interviewing me. At the end of this he says, my guess is we should let Dr. Craig go. Dr. Craig looks a little tired. She probably needs to take a nap. Do you usually take a nap in the afternoon? [laughter] 

	And it just happened to be that I actually knew his son quite well. I heard many, many stories about P.P. Cohen and how tough a guy he was and so forth. His son, who was actually in medical school when I was in St. Louis was much more of a laid back guy. You know, this was the sixties. I looked at him and I said no, I don't, but I think Milt does. [laughter] 

	So, I walked out of this room saying, I don't know. I just thought it was so inappropriate and I don't know what possessed me to say this. I mean, I didn't have to have this job. I got the job. But it was a very foolish thing to say. It was a foolish thing for him to say too. 

SP:	So you knew right away that you wanted to come here. 

EC:	No. In fact, I didn't. I left not interested. [laughter] The reason was it that was a very small department and when I interviewed I only talked to people in that department. At that point, I didn't know very much about Wisconsin and I came away with the idea that this is a very small place. But I was walking down the hall and at UCSF and a person named Christine Guthrie was a faculty member there and stopped me in the hall and said, I heard you interviewed at Wisconsin. It's a great place. She had gotten her degree at the enzyme institute. I sort of looked at her and I said really. And then she sort of talked about it. But when the call came that we want you to come back for the second visit, I said yes. I made an issue of talking to other people on campus. But when I left, no. I actually had no interest. 

SP:	What year was it when you came here? 

EC:	I came here in 79. 

00:29:11 

SP:	Did it take long to understand the culture of the department? Were you comfortable with it? Was it a cooperative group, collaborative group? Was it easy to meet people in other departments and work with people in other departments? 

EC:	Let me answer the second one first. The answer to that one is yes. Jim Crow, bless his heart, sent me a letter welcoming me. I was working on fruit flies at that time, and of course, Jim Crow, that's this thing. I was welcomed into the vesicular, the fruit fly community and that was wonderful. It was just a wonderful thing. Fitting into the department was harder. There were no other women. That made it a little difficult. I give the chair at the time, Harry Karavolas enormous credit. He tried very hard to treat me like everyone else. I can remember the first time we were going through a door. He started to let me go through and then he walked through. He called every faculty member by their last name and he called me Craig. I really appreciated it because he worked very hard to treat me like everyone else. 

	There were numbers of things that happened that I look back on. I tried to decide is this so uncomfortable because I'm a woman or is it uncomfortable because that's the way assistant professors are treated? After many years I decided that a lot of it, and most of it, was that's how assistant professors were treated but it was hard. 

SP:	When you came in you had to do some negotiating I'm assuming? Do you feel you did a good job? 

00:31:32 [End side 1; begin side 2]

EC:	So they said something about equipment needs so I reached into my pocket and I pulled out my list. 

SP:	Smart. 

EC:	I think I was very well prepared. I can't remember. At UCSF I didn't really talk very much to my adviser but there was a then young faculty member named Keith Yamamoto who is vice something-or-other now at UCSF. He was a UCSF postdoc and he transitioned into a faculty position there. He had gone around and gotten jobs at MIT and Harvard and so forth. So I went to him and said, what should I do? Those conversations prepared me quite well. So I didn't feel like a lot of people, especially women sometimes feel. They're sort of clueless as to what to do in the situation. 

SP:	How were the lab facilities? 

EC:	For the time, I think again, they weren't bad. But I inherited three rooms that was P. P. Cohen's retiring rooms and his space had been decreased at the time. So these three labs, when I walked in, were piled to the ceiling with ancient equipment. My job was to clean it out. 

SP:	How long did that take? 

EC:	Well I got one room working very rapidly. I had no office. I had to set up a little desk and a lab. P.P. Cohen kept us office and it was right inside, essentially, my lab space. 

SP:	What building was that? 

EC:	That's in like SMI and Bardeen, the old hospital building. It was built in the 50s. 

00:33:48

SP:	Would you talk about the tenure process? 

EC:	Yes. For me it was very easy. I got tenure within four years. I hardly thought about it. I was very fortunate. My research just took off when I got here. From the situation I was in at UCSF I brought an ongoing project. A young post doc that had joined that lab decided they wanted to come with me. They came six months later. You must have brought money with you then. I wrote a grant before I came. I spent all my start up -- which weren't very big -- in the first six months and my grant started six months later. I am a little organized I guess but I brought everything with me. So in fact, I did an experiment within two weeks of arriving in Madison. I even bought water. Because biochemical experiments really can be dependent on water. I didn't consider myself organized but I actually [overlapping voices]. If I'm going to do this I'm going to do it. 

00:35:13

SP:	Well talk about your research. Has it changed over the years? 

EC:	I'm still working on the biological problem I brought with me. And it's turned into, although I didn't know at that time, an extremely interesting basic biological problem. So I feel I've been extremely lucky. Because I started working on what was simply a phenomena and been able to take it -- not myself obviously, other labs work on it -- but bring it into something that's not in textbooks. So that's been extremely fun. 

SP:	Is the fruit fly still part of your research? 

EC:	No. Working on the same biological problem, I changed from fruit flies to yeast as a model system. I had both systems going throughout 10 years and then I decided it was just too much. I can't do it. I've stocked mainly the yeast system. 

SP:	Would you talk about the biological problem that you're working on? 

EC:	I'll try. The phenomena that we started with was from an observation that someone had made in fruit flies back in the 60s. That if you do something bad to them, like increase the temperature or put a chemical on them, they could see, when they looked at what's called polytene chromosones, a huge change in structure. A few years later people figured out that this was an induction of transcription and therefore new protein is being made. I was interested in that initially because this was a nice system to study this sort of induction gene regulation. 

	Then we made an observation right before I came here that started to give the impression that one, these proteins were not made just in these times of stress. There were related proteins there all the time. The most startling to me was that these proteins has been conserved. Well that first observation was in San Francisco. Then in my first six months here we found that those proteins were very similar in fruit flies and in yeast. Then in another few months we found that they're also in bacteria. That now would be OK. But back in '82 that was shocking. What it said to me as fundamentally a biologist is, these have to be doing something incredibly important because they wouldn't be in everything. Then my project became what are these proteins that nobody knows anything about doing? 

	Now we know that they're a protein which has the name, molecular chaperone because they're important for helping all the other proteins in the cell get into their final confirmation. Back in 1972 a man Anfinsen won the Nobel Prize for, deservedly so, for finding that as approaching is made, it's made in a linear chain. But in order to be functional it has to get folded up into a very complex confirmation. He did the experiment that you take a protein and you unfold it and it can go back into that same complex confirmation. There are hundreds of other ways that it could going into a three dimensional structure. 

	What our findings in our field is saying, yes that's true, under certain circumstances in a test tube. But once you get inside a cell, things are much more complicated and much more constrained. That's not the way it happens. You have these other class of proteins that chaperones these newly synthesized proteins into their final confirmation. So that's a very fundamental thing that's present in all cells. What keeps this exciting, I think, is the fact that in the past few years, it's become clear that many of the neurological diseases, Huntington's diesease, Parkinson's disease are really protein folding diseases. They're diseases in which particular proteins, different in each case, fold incorrectly. So there's a lot of interest in how these molecular chaperone's proteins can alter those folding states and maybe even be used as some sort of treatment eventually. So that's how it's evolved over 25 years. 

00:40:34

SP:	How easy is it or how difficult is it for you to get funding for your research? 

EC:	Knock on wood. I've had the same two NIH grants since the first year and the third year that I've come. So they're in their 26 or 27th year. So I've been very fortunate. I hope it continues. 

SP:	That isn't the story I normally hear. I think it's more than being very fortunate. 

EC:	I've thought about how to do that of course but I feel fortunate as well. 

SP:	And your lab is next door? Or one of your labs? You have more than one lab? 

EC:	No. I have this lab and then I have a parlor lab across the hallway. But every part is all on this floor. 

SP:	How many people are working in there? 

EC:	16. 

SP:	Are they graduate students, post docs, and scientists? 

EC:	A combination. 

SP:	Is that primarily how your research is funded, through the NIH? 

EC:	Primarily. I have a grant from the muscular dystrophy association as well. 

SP:	Are there other scientists on other universities that are working on these same issues? 

EC:	Yes. Lots. 

00:42:01

SP:	Do you do collaborative work with them? 

EC:	I do with some, yes. 

SP:	What about on campus? Do you work collaboratively with other faculty? 

EC:	Not so much, unfortunately. There's some areas that are more well represented than others and mine is not particularly well represented. That's one of the few regrets I have about Wisconsin. It doesn't have people that sort of fit into that generally. I wish there were more. 

00:42:42
SP:	You said that when you were doing your graduate work you didn't do a lot of teaching. Do you teach now or have you taught since you came here? 

EC:	I have taught a lot. I became chair of biochemistry last year and I had no time. So I do a seminar class and that sort of thing but I dropped my classroom teaching. 

SP:	Do you enjoy teaching? 

EC:	I enjoy some teaching. I think I'm a clear teacher. I don't think I am a charismatic teacher. That has sort of become more and more necessary as the years have progressed. So I have a hard time with large lectures. I mean, I get OK. 

SP:	You teach undergraduates then too? 

EC:	Right. I moved into biochemistry like four years. So if I've been here 26 years I was 22 years in the department of the medical school. And even though it's in the medical school, almost all my teaching was undergraduate teaching. Well and by definition non majored teaching. Teaching biochemistry, all their favorite courses to nursing students, medical technologists, physical therapists, to be students. 

SP:	What about the teaching you do with your graduate students in the lab? That's more of a one on one. 

EC:	That's more of a more on one. 

SP:	Do you enjoy that? 

EC:	Let me tell you about my favorite classes because it makes it sound like I don't like teaching at all. But I actually taught summer school to 25 students for the most basic level of biochemistry where you don't need any organic chemistry. I enjoyed that class tremendously. You taught them every day. It was like 25 people. You could get them to buy in. It was great. 

	Actually, in that class, a significant proportion were returning students. You know what I mean? They were interested. They wanted to understand something. 

SP:	What summer did you teach that? 

EC:	Oh I taught it from probably 83 through 90 something. Every summer except 91 or 92. 

	I have a nephew who came here for summer school. He decided he wanted to go back to dental school and he had to get some basics. He'd been going to San Jose State and he wasn't able to get organic chemistry when he needed it. So he came here to summer school and took that and he just loved it. Just loved it. You could have been his teacher. 

	I could have. I took my child to the ER and the person there was talking to me about biomolecular chemistry 314. That was very nice. You saw these students that sometimes really struggled in that class and then you saw what they did in the ER. It was very rewarding that you helped that person get to this stage that they could do this. It's not the people that go on to graduate school and not the people that become physicians. That was, to me, very rewarding teaching. 

SP:	I think you've touched on this. What are the most significant developments in your field of study? 

EC:	I think I have touched on that. 

SP:	Pretty much what you were talking about. What's being done right here. 

EC:	And others. 

00:46:43

SP:	Would you talk about your involvement in faculty governance, in committee work and other campus activities? I know you said you're department chair now. Maybe talk about that. What are the positive things about being the department chair? Are there any negative things with being the department chair? 

EC:	I mean the positive things are you can facilitate things. You can facilitate change, which is hopefully good. You can maybe get things to work better. Which can range from graduate programs to undergraduate education. So I think if things work well and if you're effective it's a really important position. You can help create a certain environment. It can be extremely frustrating and demanding and insomnia generating. Because there's everybody's problems and it can be overwhelming sometimes. 

SP:	You were a department chair in the medical school also? 

EC:	For six years I was a department chair in the biomolecular chemistry alias, zoological chemistry from 1996 to 2002. 

SP:	Is there a big difference doing it now? 

EC:	Well the departments are very different. I mean that's a small department. At the time, 10 faculty members in a medical school. Here's a faculty of 36 associated with huge salaries, the NMR center, structural biology center. A staff of three or four over there, a staff of 15 over here. They are so different in scope. 

SP:	What about other activities on campus? 

EC:	So recently most of my energy has been in that level. I was chair of the biological divisional committee. 

SP:	What does that entail? 

EC:	The main job of that committee -- although it did other things at the time -- was sort of passing on tenure issues for the biological division. So that was really the first thing that I did and I did didn't intend to do it. It sort of put me in a position of having to lead something and having to deal with people on difficult issues. 

SP:	That must have been a stressful situation also. 

EC:	That was stressful in the sense of never having been in that sort of situation and sort of learning how can one do that and have it come out as best as possible. 

00:50:02

SP:	Would you talk about the climate for women here? How does it help or hinder the participation and advancement of women on the campus? 

EC:	That's a hard question. I think the climate is not great, not bad. I think the climate is a really complex issue. Excuse me. One of the things I've struggled with the last number of years is it's much easier if you're in a position as you're an advocate for like, the climate is bad. The situation is bad. How can we make it better? Being in a situation of being a department chair where you have to be everyone's advocate, in some ways you can accomplish much more. But it's much harder to say oh, the climate's terrible. Part of it is you're a part of it perhaps. I think it is a very complex issue. 

	I think it is much better than it was 25 years ago. Just in that there are more women. There were very few women in biological sciences when I came. I remember in cell and molecular biology program that had 103 trainers and I was the third woman as a trainer in that program. But that doesn't mean we don't have a long way to go. 

SP:	Do you see yourself as a mentor? 

EC:	Oh sure. Usually not formally but yes. I've been a mentor certainly to the women that are hired in biomolecular chemistry. When I was still there the faculty was 30% women. That's only 3 out of 10. 

SP:	That's good for the medical school. 

EC:	That's pretty good for a medical school. Yes. I think their success is in part due to the fact that I mentored them. So absolutely. 

00:52:45

SP:	Are there networks on campus for women to interact, particularly women in science? 

EC:	Yes, I think there are. I think the WISL opportunities are very helpful to younger women. I think there is enough of a critical mass of younger women faculty now where connections are made. I can sort of see it happening. In some ways I was very fortunate. Carol Gross got a faculty position. I think it was a year and half after I did. And Judith Kimble -- I think I was on her search committee -- three years after. And so those are the three people that I sort of talked to the most and we all ended up in the national academy. We didn't talk to each other all that much but it really was a very nice core to sort of play things off of because we all had pretty high standards and expectations. Although there were very few, I was pretty fortunate. 

	I've seen a lot in the last 26 years. I think the climate works well for a good portion of the women. I think a portion find it very hard. I think, on average, it's much easier for a young male to come in and find a place they're comfortable and deal with the structure and that sort of thing. I think it's much harder for a really significant segment of women that come in. I don't quite understand that. I can't figure out what makes it harder and not. Certainly, I think you need a certain degree of flexibility and decide you're going to let run off your back and not, and how to handle situations. I think the better you are at that the easier it is. Is that fair? Probably not. But it's the reality. The trick is how to get the group of women that it's not so easy for, how to really make it easier. And how long it will take to have that happen. 

00:55:37

SP:	Do you see more women coming into your program? Into doing graduate work here? 

EC:	Yes. Those numbers have increased dramatically over the last 15 years. Of course, what hasn't so much increased is going from a post doc type of position to going into faculty positions. 

SP:	Why is that? 

EC:	I think it's a number of reasons. The reality is that it's not easy. The balance of family and professional life is not an easy one. I see a lot of women just don't want to do it. Life decisions. I still think there's this big divide. The number of women like myself who are just obsessed right. They love this stuff. And they're fine. And then there's another group that it's pretty good, it can do that and are really interested in doing it. Then there's another group that likes science and likes doing this sort of stuff but no, they want balance in their life. And that group is never going to be part of academia unless academia somehow changes. Child bearing years are either during your graduate years, your postdoc years or your assistant professor years. There's no getting around it. 

00:57:28

SP:	I'm going to finish this interview by asking you about your balance in your life but first I wondered if you would talk a little bit about the awards and honors that you've received. I know you mentioned above the national academy of sciences. If you could talk about that experience and then others that you'd like to share. 

EC:	For me personally, that's the one that has meant by far the most to me. It has been, I think, the most important professionally for me. It's sort of like the gold seal of approval. You've done well and you do really good science it's nice. It's very nice. I think professionally for me, I'm actually a very shy person. It's hard for me to put myself forth particularly in groups and in somewhat difficult situations. Being a member of the National Academy, you say something to a provost or something and that's a better chance that they'll listen. So that gives one more of a voice that is listened to when trying to get important issues where change should occur. I've mentioned this to other women and they said yup. 

SP:	What was the experience in like when you were elected? Do you go through a ceremony? 

EC:	You go through a ceremony and that was actually not very exciting. You walk up on stage and you sign a big book. You have to worry about what you're going to wear. That was OK. That was the pomp and circumstance. I mean, when you find out that's the experience. I found out 10 minutes before I needed it give a two hour lecture. It was interesting because I was trying to figure out how to get some of this active learning things into this sort of session. I was really nervous about it. I thought a little bit about it in my head. I hadn't really thought about it. I just went in there and I did this completely new thing. I was so going on adrenaline. It was great and it changed the whole that course had been taught. But then we came on to the break. And there were this whole bunch of people standing out there ready to congratulate me and give me hugs. So then the students there. That was fun. That was nice. 

SP:	Are there other awards and honors that you could talk about? 

EC:	For example, getting the Romnes award early on was nice. Because again it was sort of saying, you're doing well. I would say the same thing for the University professorships, the WARF professorship and the Steenbock professorship of microbiology. I got those right before my star was rising. However you want to say that. Those were important to me too. The other side scientists on campus sort of recognized that you're doing good. so those were important to me. And after the Hilldale Award, it was actually very important to me. That's sort of the seal of approval in the sense that you've done good other than your science. It came to me at a very important time because it came to me when I was in the process of leaving the biomolecular chemistry and transferring over here. It was a very traumatic period for me and to have a group of scientists at the university level to give me that award -- I'm almost getting teary -- was very meaningful at that point in my life. That was important. 

01:02:09

SP:	You mentioned earlier about the importance for women of balance in their lives. Would you talk about the balance in your life? What you do when you're not working. Talk about your family. What your hobbies are. What you do to relax. What you do to keep healthy. To keep energetic. 

EC:	Balance is hard. My kids are grown. 

SP:	What do they do? 

EC:	One is a lawyer who has decided he wants to live his life in Madison which is making me very happy as a mother. The other one is actually in Turkey right now but he's just finishing his undergraduate work in criminal justice which amuses me. 

SP:	No scientists?

EC:	No scientists. My elder son did a high school project in the lab and I remember he said, I'm sorry mom, but this is bo--

01:03:29 [End tape 1; begin tape 2]

EC:	We live close to campus. 

SP:	What does your husband do? 

EC:	He just retired. He was assistant state cartographer, so he's a geographer type person. So he now gets to cook dinners and things. 

SP:	Aren't you lucky? 

EC:	Right. So I didn't become really involved in administration, being chair administration, until the kids had left home. And I don't think I could possibly-- maybe I could have done it-- but I wouldn't have wanted to have done it, because it's extremely important to me to keep an active research program, which is part of the reason I've never gone higher in administration than department chair. And give more flexible when you get home with children at home. 

	Relaxing. We have a little cabin on a little lake up north, which is a wonderful retreat with no email. We enjoy going up there very much. And mystery books, gardening, plants, as you might be able to tell. 

SP:	I noticed some plants out there. 

EC:	Right. Most of those are mine. So growing plants from seed. Doing all of that sort of stuff is the way I relax. 

SP:	Did you continue to be involved in sports? 

EC:	I do. Unfortunately, I have an inner ear problem, which means I can't do any of that anymore. But I still jog. And that's how I keep my sanity. Very slowly, at this point. I always have enjoy being active. And it's important in keeping a frame of mind. 

SP:	And is that how you stayed healthy? Exercise and get rid of the stress that way? 

EC:	No. Sometimes I go out in the morning, and I come back. There's just problems. They're not so bad. We'll figure them out. And so, yeah. It extremely important for my mental health. I realize that if I don't do that, all of a sudden, these little things-- they're not necessarily little-- but I have a harder time keeping things in prospective. 

SP:	How about travel? 

EC:	Oh. Unfortunately, my inner ear problem doesn't allow me to travel very much. So I've, I think, quite successfully, developed a life that is enjoyable. And part of the reason, I think, I work as hard as I do is, I can walk to work. And so work is really fun. And it keeps me occupied. I have a problem that I can't ride in a car without getting sick. So if I ride in a car even a mile, I feel terrible for a minimum of four hours, and maybe 24 hours. When you have chronic things you just organize your life, and I think I've done that fairly successfully. 

SP:	Any pets? 

EC:	Two cats. One of which we just got from the pound a few weeks ago. I've almost always had cats. I enjoy them. They're nice because you don't have to take care of them quite as much as you have to dogs, so you can get involved in other things. 

01:06:44

SP:	I have to ask this question, because it's an important one to me. You work very hard. You've raised two children. Do you have time for friends? 

EC:	Sometimes. It is lonely at the top. And I think this is the thing, more than anything else, that I would say has been the most difficult for me. I noticed it when I came here. I looked around. And I think one of the hardest things for assistant professors to learn is your students aren't your peers. And you're the one that's going to be writing them letters of recommendation. So I came when I was 31 or 32. And my students were 26. You're the same. But you're not their friend. And that's extremely lonely, especially if there aren't-- I have a lot of male friends but there's something different about female friends. And so, a number of them have moved away. Carol Gross and I became very good friends, and then she left to go to UCSF in the early '90s, mid '90s. And then, let me tell you, it becomes much lonelier when you go from the faculty member to department chair because you can be in a department where you've mentor many of those women, and you've become very close friends. And all of a sudden, you're the one that's going to tell them what course they have to teach, and get on their case when they don't do something. And it changes things dramatically. I don't think at this moment in time, there may be one, but there's no sort of longstanding woman chair in science, or biological science. So, that's very hard. It's not that don't have friends but it's not as much as the time, because you can make time, it's sort of the pool. 

SP:	What about your parents? Are they still living? 

EC:	My mother is still living. She's living in the house that I grew up in. But this is starting to take more and more time, because she's 88, and lives down a dirt road. And memory's not quite as good as it used to be. 

SP:	How about your brother? Where is he? 

EC:	He lives in New Hampshire. He lives about two and a half hour drive. 

01:09:43

SP:	Well, that ends the formal questions. But if there's anything you'd like to add to this interview, please do. 

EC:	I think the only thing that I didn't say, because we sort of changed subject, was in the teaching thing. And you started asking me about graduate students, and mentoring graduate students. And that, to me, is one of the greatest joys, maybe also the greatest frustration, of being in this business. Because the greatest joy is because there's nothing better than having this student come in that really doesn't know very much. And then, five years later, they go off into-- you just see the change in them, and it's night and day. You see them in their thesis defense talking about a model or some thought that they come up with that they've never told you. And they can discuss it with the rest of the faculty. You just feel so proud. It can also be very frustrating, because part of the job is making sure that people get to the level or whatever that is best for them, and that doesn't always go easily. So that can be very difficult. But mentoring graduate students is one of the most rewarding parts of doing this. 

SP:	Well thank you very much for agreeing to interview. Much appreciated. 

EC:	You’re welcome.

01:11:15	End of First Interview Session