My Journals

Who am I?

I have a Ph.D. in psychology, but my field of specialization is called Aerospace Psychophysiology. Psychophysiologists study the relationship between mind and body. I am the director of the Psychophysiological Research Facility in the Gravitational Research Branch at NASA Ames Research Center in Mt. View, Calif. The main goals of my job are to try to understand why some people adapt better to space than others, and to find ways of helping those people adapt to space faster and then readapt to Earth faster.

What we have developed over the last 25 years is a training procedure called Autogenic Feedback Training Exercise (AFTE). AFTE is a way in which people learn how to control up to 20 of their bodily responses so that they can keep themselves from getting sick due to motion sickness. I'm also the principal investigator for a series of space shuttle experiments in which we are attempting to test this treatment as a way of keeping astronauts from getting sick in space.

My Career Journey

I took a course in graduate school that was offered to me almost as a joke. I say it was a joke because I am a psychologist, actually a psychophysiologist, and the course was being offered by the graduate school of engineering at my university. The goal of the course was to design features for space shuttle, from the point of view of a person using the equipment, (i.e., a possible future "user").

The class was full of men and they were all engineers. I didn't have the prerequisites to get into the class. So I told the professor, who was a big, hot-shot engineer physics guy, "You have to let me in this class. You have no women in this class. Everybody's designing zero gravity tables and things like that. Who's going to design the shuttle's curtains? You need a woman. You have no life sciences people in the class. Nobody is looking at what impact that environment could have on animals, such as human beings. You need a life sciences woman in this class. He bought it."

That particular course truly launched my career. In a class trip to Ames Research Center I had a chance to find out something about the biomedical problems of manned spaceflight, and I discovered the Life Sciences Library. I wrote a paper for the course about 12 possible applications of mind work that could be used for solving biomedical problems. The first one was a treatment for space motion sickness. I got an A in the course, but more importantly, I discovered Ames Research Center and have remained here ever since.

Influences

Family Members/Relatives

I had an aunt who was the only woman I ever knew who wasn't somebody's mother or teacher. She was, in a way, a role model because I had never realized that women could have careers. She had a Ph.D. in psychology. Although she studied child psychology, what I learned from her was that psychology could be a fascinating field. (My brothers and I were some of the people that she studied.) What better field is there than to study the animal that created all the other fields? I became very interested in the study of what humans have the ability to do.

I have three brothers. I was the only girl. Ever since I could read, I was interested in science fiction. However, I guess I was about nine years old when I looked around and noticed that all the good jobs were for men, and mainly for white men. (This was also about the time I met my aunt.) So here I was, a brown woman, and I rather felt like the bottom of the barrel.

So, I went to my father who, at the time, was the wisest man I knew, and he is still the wisest man I know. He told me, "No, no, no. You've got this all wrong. You're not just a short round brown girl from the Bronx. What you are is a human being, and a human being is the best animal on the whole planet."

Human beings can achieve anything through learning. I know people are always saying this, and as a scientist, I'm beginning to believe it more. Human beings need this great hunk of tissue sitting on the end of their spinal column, called the brain, to make their environment suit them, and to make themselves suit their environment.

In fact, the kind of research that I'm doing now is precisely that -- how, through learning, can we modify our own bodies to make ourselves more suitable for the environment that we're in?

Both my parents were seriously into academics as a way of getting out of the Bronx. They really pushed that and I may have resented it as a child. When going to my father's grocery store I would have to do my homework in the telephone booth so he could see me working on it. In the summer, I'd sit in the backseat of the car parked in front of the store so he could see me doing my homework. However, perhaps because of that, school wasn't that hard for me. School was pretty easy.

Teachers/Professors

When I was in college as a psychology major, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do in psychology. Crazy people frightened me and neurotic people annoyed me. So I didn't think I wanted to go into that area of psychology. But I had a professor who was teaching people how to control brainwave activity.

So, as a student, I got a job in his lab and I really got turned on to the work. I thought I'd learn how to run an EEG machine and then I could get a job as an EEG technician in a hospital when I graduated. But by the time I made it to my senior year, I was working with his test subjects, designing his experiments, analyzing his data and writing his papers. He said "You know, you don't really want to be an EEG technician. Why don't you try graduate school?" That was sort of a new concept. I hadn't even considered it.

Personal Information

I am a major Star Trek fan and science fiction fan. When I got to graduate school I figured out how to put all of these things together. My husband and I have been married for 17 years and have a nine-year-old son. Both my husband and I have been working together in psychophysiology research for over 20 years. I have three brothers. One of my brothers is a general in the army, one is a jazz musician, and my little brother is a freelance journalist.

Likes/Dislikes About Career

The best part is getting answers to questions. That may sound simple, but the reason a lot of people become scientists isn't for fame and fortune. It's because they are forever students who have questions and want to get answers to their questions. It's somewhat like being hungry. When I'm conducting experiments, it's like a game. The players compete, the points are added up and a team wins. That's the best part of the job.

The worst part of the job is seeking funding for my work and, in my field, constantly running up against skeptics who simply won't believe my results or don't think that what I am doing is real science. It's very frustrating to do work, solve a problem and then not have it accepted.

Advice

What do you do to get this job? Go to college. Go to graduate school. Carve yourself a niche. Find out what somebody needs, make yourself the expert in it, and then you become indispensable.

One of my professors told me that if I had been a normal person, I would have given up years ago. There are so many obstacles that get thrown in your face when you're a short brown woman. Worse than that, my oldest brother, who is a general in the army, said "It's bad enough you were born a short brown woman. You had to be a psychologist? You couldn't be a heart surgeon or something that people recognize as being worthwhile?" So my advice is to be stubborn. Don't give up. No matter what, don't give up. Although I sometimes feel pretty close to it. But the good that comes from the research, such as: getting answers to your questions; playing the game, even playing with astronauts; and knowing that what you're doing is going to help makes it all worthwhile. Don't give up.