August 2012

Focus - Work life balance

When Jerry Strauss, M.D., Ph.D., started his scientific career in the 1970’s, no one was talking about the notion of a work-life balance. Research was a monastic tradition of long hours and little glory, and Strauss accepted that.

“I worked like crazy and my family life was a blur -- I don’t even remember my children growing up,” said Strauss, dean of the school of medicine at the Virginia Commonwealth University. “But it was worthwhile because I was trying to achieve something, to solve medical problems through my work in the laboratory.”

A Place at the Bench: Women in Biomedical Research

In 2009, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund commissioned a series of articles by science writer Marla Broadfoot to look at the landscape for women in the biomedical sciences. Broadfoot was given free range to explore the subject area, and the articles were published in the Fund’s FOCUS newsletter. The first article appeared in July 2009 and was circulated through social media. Given the popularity of the articles, it was decided to compile them in the hope that they would inspire more thought and discussion.

Awardee Profile - Kent Hill

Dr. Kent Hill is professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at UCLA. He received his B.S. degree from Northern Illinois University, with a double major in Chemistry and Biology. He worked as a product development scientist at Abbott Laboratories in Chicago and subsequently received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at UCLA. He went on for postdoctoral studies at the University of Iowa, and then he returned to UCLA to set up his own lab in 2001. He was named a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases in 2008, with the five-year award funding his research into cell-to-cell communication and social motility in the pathogenesis and development of African trypanosomes.

Awardee Profile

When you think of a typical high school science class, the names Jeffrey Dahmer and Son of Sam probably don't spring to mind. But this is no typical science class. And Tamica Stubbs is no typical educator. And those serial killers in the curriculum? They are just the tip of the iceberg.

Stubbs, a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Science and Mathematics Teachers, teaches a forensic science class at Phillip O. Berry Academy of Technology in Charlotte. The set-up for the class, which she has been teaching since coming to the school last year, is unlike most. Instead of a day-to-day lesson plan, Stubbs operates on a weekly schedule organized around hands-on, investigative case studies.