Episode 07 - Meg Urry

I’m ecstatic to have on the show today Meg Urry, the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Meg’s extensive and varying accomplishments are far too numerous to recapitulate, but highlights include serving as Chair of the Physics Department from 2007 to 2013, being elected President of the American Astronomical Society from 2013 through June of this year, and earning the 2015 Edward A Bouchet Leadership Award for her efforts in recruiting and supporting women and minorities in science.

The Urry lab studies the evolution of supermassive black holes and the active galaxies that surround them, and has published over 270 peer-reviewed articles. When she’s not peering into dark reaches of the universe with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes, Meg has a second career working towards increasing the number and representation of women in science: from organizing the first conference on Women in Astronomy in 1992 to writing numerous articles in Nature and Scientific American, Meg has been a tireless advocate for underrepresented groups in STEM.

In spite of all my wow’s, ugh’s, and oh!’s in disbelief, Meg starts the interview by recalling breathtaking examples of overt sexism and discrimination against women in physics and astronomy. Meg gives us her take on the importance of intersectionality in efforts to diversify astrophysics, the critical responsibility of students to be the change in their departmental cultures, and her (yet untested) theory about what draws women into subfields of physics (in short: women shy away from fields dominated by the “singular genius” culture).

Near the middle of the episode, Meg gives us her take on why scientific cultures are sometimes the most difficult to change:

“There are two things that make science a particularly difficult community [in which to effect change].

One is that scientists are supposed to be objective—if you’re not objective, that implies you’re a ‘bad scientist.’ And so when I’m telling people they’re not objective, they’re hearing, ‘You’re a bad scientist.’ But now we know that we are all not objective, and we need to own up to that.

The second thing that makes it hard is that scientists love to say, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ That’s kind of how we think about things: you give me your idea, I tell you it’s wrong, you tell me why my objection is incorrect, and then eventually we’ll come to some agreement.

But in an argument where a person of color is telling me that they get pulled over by police all the time on the highway, for example, white people often think, ‘Well, they must have done something wrong! They must have changed lanes without signaling, because why would a policeman pull you over? The policemen never pull me over.’

Scientists act from their learned experience and intuition. And then they make leaps that are incorrect.”

- Meg Urry

Links

Urry group website - http://urrylab.yale.edu/

American Astronomical Society website - https://aas.org/

Notable women mentioned

Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space

Vera Rubin, first woman allowed to observe at the Palomar Observatory and one of the first scientists to provide evidence for the existence of dark matter