CHALK Talk: A conversation with Dr. Roger CHALKley
Dr. Roger Chalkley,D.Phil., is the Senior Associate Dean of the Office of Biomedical Research Education and Training (BRET) at Vanderbilt University. The BRET office supports and coordinates numerous activities focused on graduate education, postdoctoral training, minority affairs, career development, and educational technology initiatives for the Vanderbilt biomedical research community.The Office of Career Development ASPIRE Program and the Office of Outcomes Analysis come under the umbrella of BRET office, which works closely with Office of Postdoctoral Affairs and thePostdoctoral Association.
Dr. Chalkley got his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Oxford University, did his postdoctoral research in gene regulation and chromatin structure at Caltech, and, after two decades of experience as a faculty at the University of Iowa School of Medicine, moved to Vanderbilt University in 1986. His creative and productive research career has resulted in over 200 publications. Dr. Chalkley’s active interest in the education and the career development of graduate students and postdocs steered him towards taking those responsibilities as a full-time job. Dr. Chalkley oversees the Vanderbilt University interdisciplinary graduate program, the MD-PhD program, graduate student and postdoctoral affairs, and minority programs.
Recently, Muthukumar Balasubramaniam (Muthu), one of the executive editors ofJoLS,Journal of Life Sciences, a postdoc community initiative, and a corresponding editor with SoLS, sat down with Dr.Roger Chalkley for a candid conversation covering various topics of interest to the graduate students and postdocs. The conversation also touched upon Dr. Chalkley’s background, education, and career path. The following is a transcript of the conversation. The transcript has been edited for clarity.
Note: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and the interviewer, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the institutions to which they are affiliated.
Muthukumar Balasubramaniam (MB): What inspired you to transition from running an active and productive research lab, which also involved training and mentoring of several graduate students and postdocs, into an advocate for improving graduate education and the career development of thousands of graduate students and postdocs? Is it just a difference in the scale of involvement and effort or is there more to it than meets the eye?
Roger Chalkley (RC):Well, I was actually well-funded when I quit active research…
MB:(interrupting) Then, was it a hard decision to leave active research?
RC: Not really.And what I am doing now is still funded by grants. What happened was, I was spending more and more time on the interdisciplinary graduate program (IGP),setting up the postdoc office, doing a lot of diversity recruiting, and so on. At the same time, I was supported by the taxpayer’s money—to a fairly considerable degree—for running my lab. I just felt that if I am being supported, then I shouldn’t be having all these other things going on the side; I should do one or the other. It is a case of you can do two things OK or you can do one thing really well. I had already set up the IGP at Vanderbilt while I was still a faculty member, when, in 1997, I was asked to take up a position at the NIH in which I would have been involved in handling the large number of postdocs and grad students that NIH had at that time and in looking at the possibility of setting up a graduate school at the NIH Bethesda campus. My wife, who is a cancer biologist at Vanderbilt, and I debated whether we should, or not, move. In essence, what happened was, Vanderbilt said, “Well, if you would stay, what do we need to do?” I said that I envisage setting up a structure like what BRET office has now become. But I was also clear that I am not going to try and run a lab at the same time. So, I decided to quit the lab. I wouldn’t have quit the lab if I was at the NIH because they were offering me a lab as well. Also, my kids were at an age where moving them would have been somewhat disruptive. So,we decided we weren’t going to go. At that point, I made a decision to take up the position as the Senior Associate Dean at Vanderbilt and my future was sortof decided at that particular time.
MB:Do you miss bench research?
RC: Well, I am the sort of the person that makes a decision and that’s it. I don’t agonize over it. I see little merit in getting upset over something you have already decided. I still keep up with all of the research that is going on in my area of interest. I still teach in that area too. In terms of funding for underrepresented minorities, I still continue to have grants. And I still chauffer these kids through the hazards of the graduate school. So, I don’t feel I have lost my intellectual involvement. Also, I think, the way research is done in institutions both here and in Europe is, basically, once you have taken up a faculty position, you give up your lab work. Instead, you go into an office and you get people to do the work. Yet, the thing that took you in there was talent, ability, and the excitement of working at the bench. When I was a postdoc at Caltech, I never conceived of anything else, not even having a lab where somebody else was doing the work and I write the grant applications. I just thought working in the lab is great.
MB:Did you imagine that you would be doing bench science for a very long time?
RC: (laughs) I guess I knew I wouldn’t be, but I wished I could be. You know, you have to be aware of what’s going on.
MB:Was it difficult to transition into the senior associate dean position? What skillsets were most helpful in transitioning into your current position? Was it more to do with people skills?
RC: I was already doing it. The senior associate dean position just validated what I was already doing. Regarding people skills, on a daily basis, I interact with a fair number of people. In terms of dealing with people, I don’t explode. I am easy going. I think I can honestly say that, in my entire life, I have never lost my temper. So, I think, you can get a lot done. Also, the fact that I was successful in the lab is a bona fide. I mean, I had the respect of the people here. I am one of the highly published and highly cited researchers in Vanderbilt and I still enjoy the intellectual side of science—the learning of what is going on not just in biology but in science in general…
MB:(interrupting) Which was not possible when you were running your own lab and your research was focused on chromatin biology?
RC: May be not so much. But it has always been part of my interest. I buy subscription to the journal Science for everybody in the 1st year class I teach, and I tell them, “Yes, you should know about the background to your own research, but there is lot of other stuff going on.” When I ask, how many have heard about the latest state of battery research, which probably is going to save civilization in the long run, half the students don’t know that. Also, when I teach, I usually try and throw in one extreme issue that most people don’t believe or think that it may be wrong. For instance, when the first reports of CRISPR-Cas came out, I picked that up and reported it to the class. I said, “This is going to, if I am right, play a big role in how you do science in, say, five years’ time.” Two weeks ago, I was talking about DNA structure to the new students, and there is an emerging notion, may be wrong, that you can actually conduct electricity down the long axis of DNA and if there is a break in the strand or loss of a base pair, then it can’t get the electron across that. So,I said that it would be a very quick way of finding out if there is damage to the DNA and that’s when one could arrange to repair it. I said, “it is fun because I don’t know if this is true, but it is obviously possible.” So, I always try and find things that are new, may be shocking, and, you know, that is intellectual involvement and that’s what is fun about doing research. When I was running a lab, I always enjoyed instances where we figured out why a particular published finding was wrong.
MB:So, your research has disproved some of the published findings by others?
RC: Yes. For instance, early on, around the time the concept of the nucleosome was beginning to get established, one of the big issues was the question of how does it (nucleosome) replicate. Do all the proteins go into one daughter strand or 50 percent on one and 50 percent on the other or they just get distributed randomly? At that time, an influential article was published arguing that it was semi conservative—just like DNA. And we were already getting our data at that time and there was no way you could interpret our data going by the semi-conservative model. We had to struggle to get our data published. But the fact is, we were right.
MB:What do the victories and achievements of the graduate students and postdocs you help in your current position mean to you?
RC: It is very gratifying. What happens all the time is, when I go to a national meeting, somebody who was a student in the program or in the postdoc activities ten years ago will come up and say, “Hey, do you remember me?” When I was at a national meeting in Seattle last week, I met about four people who were students here (Vanderbilt University) at different times. And when I was giving the talk, there were two other speakers on the stage—I had recruited both of them to the graduate school! In other words, it is like having children who goon to do interesting things.
MB: Do the trainees stay in touch with you after they leave Vanderbilt? Or, they seek your advice only when they get into trouble?
RC: Well,usually, when they want a letter of recommendation. If they got into trouble,(laughs) they probably wouldn’t want me to know. Every now and then, I will get an email saying, “I am coming through town, I am really busy, but is there sometime when I could stop by and talk with you?” So, that, I would say happens about every other month or something like that. If I am at a meeting, somebody will come up and say, “Hey, Roger, how is it going?” Well, I know that if they say “Roger,” then I should know them. Many times, I do. If they have changed their appearance, for instance, if they have cut their hair, I might still get their voice. I am good at remembering voices, and that helps me. Each year,there are about 80 to 90 new students who come on board and they know immediately who I am because I am involved in their orientation activities. So,if I am outside and if some young woman or guy passes me, I am like “I have seen them.” So, I just nod and say “Hi” to everyone. Sometimes, there are some people with the puzzled expression of “Who’s that guy?” (laughs). I am just friendly with everybody because I can’t remember all of them. But, by the end of the semester, I know most of them, if not all.
MB:Is there a feeling among your trainees that you are still invested in their success even after they leave this institution?
RC: I think that they are aware of that. But I don’t think it’s a big deal. They don’t go around saying, “Wow, I was with Roger Chalkley” (laughs).
MB:Changing gears here, many postdocs and senior graduate students I interact with these days say that they are planning to move away from bench research and are actively exploring alternate careers. Most of those choices did not seem to be cases of sour grapes or guided by negative experiences. Instead, the decisions or deliberations appear to stem more out of practical considerations. And I am starting to believe that this is becoming an epidemic.
RC: It’s not an epidemic. In 2008, there was an article in the journal Science titled “Then,there was one.” What that article was about is, the author followed the career paths of 26 graduate students who were enrolled in the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Ph.D. program at Yale and had graduated in 1997 or 1998. The general expectation was that, a lot of them will do a postdoc, get a faculty position, and will become professors. However, what the author found, which was no surprise to me because I have seen it over and over, was that there was one—only one of them had a tenured position in academia in 2008. Also, just five among them were doing academic research while the rest of them were doing jobs all over everywhere. What I gather from talking to colleagues in academia, industry, and other areas, is that there are certain skills that you have to have in spades to do well in graduate school and during postdoc—having patience being one of them. Those(skills) are useful whether you are working in a government lab, in a pharmaceutical company, or as a program officer. The other thing is that there is a little bit of winnowing out. If you get into a position where you become responsible for several other people, in other words, if you are a typical administrator, it pays more. Lot of the students who selected a career in the last 5 years did it probably because it is going to be reasonably well paying.The training and the skillset, I mean, being able to do a western blot, is not going to get you a great job in a big banking company. But the thought processes that are involved in analyzing what’s going on while being calm and rational, that is useful. So, I think the Ph.D. degree in a sense identifies somebody who might have those traits. Also, we have done studies over the last few years where we have looked at the career paths of the trainees and it is no different from what it was years ago.
MB: The term “translatable skills” seems to have recently acquired a negative connotation. I have come across articles essentially saying that one doesn’t need a Ph.D. to acquire the translatable skills. For instance, one may have spent up to seven years in graduate school, followed by three to five years of postdoc. When that Ph.D. graduate applies for a job outside of research, what stops the employer from choosing someone else with a bachelor’s degree, who is creative and competent enough to develop the requisite skills on the job, if he or she doesn’t already have some related work experience. In that case, that someone not only bags the job but also has saved about twelve years of heartbreaks (from experiments not working) even while earning money from a real job (not the postdoc kind).
RC: You mentioned something that a lot of people think is correct. It is not. That is,you said, three to five years of postdoc. What we see, and we have looked at people for almost twenty years, is that, there is a split in postdocs. There is a bigger fraction and then there is a smaller fraction. The bigger fraction,may be 70 percent, have a half-life of being a postdoc of about two years—quite short term. These are the people who get a job in other careers. With this crowd,you can’t apply the economist argument of losing earning power for an extended number of years. Then, what about the ones that go for the longer-term postdoc?They tend to end up doing a five- or six-year postdoc. And the reason is, it takes a long time to publish. You can’t get a faculty job just by saying, “Hey,I might be a good teacher, and I think I might be OK in the lab, and I hope I could get some students.” Because, the faculty search committee would ask, “But,what have you published in the Cell or the Science?” There is a significant number of postdocs I have talked with who have gotten material fora nice paper; but they don’t publish it and they say that they need to get some extra data so that they can publish it in a higher quality journal. Those postdocs also say that they need a couple of first author publications in high impact journals and, may be, three other publications wherein they are part of the author list. And you know perfectly well that you can’t do that in a year and a half. So, basically, if you want to throw your hat in the ring to get a faculty position, then you are going to stay longer as postdoc. If you are driven that much, that’s fine, more power to you. Some postdocs also—and I have seen this quite a bit—want a job at a good institution, may be one better than they have already been at. So, they have to have even more publications, which is going to take even longer. Consequently, you run the risk of spending time as a postdoc for seven years. So, that’s a problem. The other thing that comes up is that you have to have a pedigree. If you got somebody who did five years of postdoc and got three publications at a top tier institution, and there is another person who did postdoc for exactly the same amount of time and got exactly the same number of publications at a mid or lower tier institution,then it is usually the former candidate who gets recruited. That, I think is a problem. But, instead (of a faculty job), if you are using the postdoc to, sort of, get ready to go to the next position, then the employers don’t care if you have got five first author papers; they just want to know whether you get along well with people, whether you are creative, whether you work in a team, and soon. We see that all the time. We have about 75 to 80 students, in total, coming in each year. The attrition is very low; so, eventually there will be 70 or 75 graduates going out into jobs. And if they weren’t getting a job, then we will see the unemployment level in our survey. But what we see is that the unemployment level is low.
MB:When postdocs come and talk to you these days, do you get a sense whether they still think they would be branded a failure if they don’t land a faculty position?
RC: No, not anymore. I think there are those people who really want that, and if they haven’t gotten that, they probably do feel frustrated. But I think a lot of the postdocs, after looking around to find positions for the skills that they have,are aware of the ground reality. Even the faculty are now saying, “Well, I don’t know anything about these other jobs, and I can’t even advice my postdoc.” But a lot of schools now have offices, like we have here, for giving career advice.
MB:Would it help if there’s an institutional committee of dedicated and battle-hardened volunteer postdocs who are more aware of the changing career landscape and who are willing to help or guide graduate students in their career decisions?
RC: I don’t know how much experience the postdocs would have. I think it’s always good to have someone to talk with, to toss ideas around. When we set up our postdoc office in 1997, I think there were about three of us (postdoc offices) in the country; within ten years there were may be a 100, and maybe 250 now. In the same way, in the late 90s, if you went to a University and asked about career development activities, they’d say, “That’s in the undergraduate campus.” But,by 2005–2006, it became clear that most of our Ph.D.s were not going to be faculty members, that we valued them for what they did, and, so, we should help them identify how to get jobs and help them develop skills to get jobs. I would bet money now that if you looked at the top 100 schools in the country, I think they would all have some sort of activity for guiding the graduate students and the postdocs into how to look for jobs, what jobs are out here, how to prepare themselves, how to interview, and so on. So, I think there’s been a huge change and it’s come because people realized that everybody can’t be a faculty member and were wondering what’s going on here. Earlier we didn’t pay much attention to this but now we want to be seen as having the wherewithal to help people get jobs. And they are getting jobs because it’s a knowledge economy and people who are highly trained will move into jobs. The other thing we notice is, in contrast to a lot of faculty who had been faculty for eons, people who are coming out of our programs now and who are not going into faculty positions move about every four or five years. Moving is considered a good thing to do and not, “Oh my god, I failed, I am in trouble now.” That hasn’t been my style though; I was in my first position at University of Iowa for twenty years and I’ve been here (in Vanderbilt University) for over thirty years.
MB:Who were/are professionally happier: your colleagues when you were starting out as a junior faculty or the faculty you interact with these days? What do you think has changed?
RC: The junior faculty these days are not happy. Yes, the reason may be constant worry about grant money. One of the things I’ve been pushing for at the national level is a revamp of the current system of awarding grants, which I think is flawed.Because, when you apply for grant support—at the moment, you have about a ten percent or twenty percent chance of getting a grant funding—you get a certain percentile score, and everybody up to a certain percentile score gets the grant funding and beyond that they don’t. That’s it. For instance, you could be in the 14.1 percentile and you get the grant, but if you are in the 14.2 percentile, then, sorry, you didn’t get it at all. Nothing. Zero. But you put all that effort in. And we all know that there is absolutely no difference between 14.1 and 14.2. Which is the better? I’ll tell you in five years’ time. In fact, I would even argue that someone who gets in the 5thpercentile is no better than someone who gets in the 25thpercentile. So, what I think they should do is have a graduated series of awards. Say, between the 1st percentile and the 6thpercentile, you might get the full grant; between the 6th and 12thpercentile, you might get 80 percent of the grant; between the 13thand the 18th percentile, you might get 60 percent of the grant; and,then, even out to the 25th percentile, you might get 40 percent of the grant. Yes, I have proposed this to the NIH but it’s something you have to keep telling people. I know, there’ve been times when I didn’t get a grant, but I still had a previous grant that helped keep the lab going with much reduced funding. We were even sterilizing our own tissue culture flask. Who was doing it? All of us in the lab: myself, students, everybody. It’s doable, but it’snot ideal. You might have to let a technician go. But you can still keep your research moving so that if, in a year and a half, you come up with a really exciting result and you are able to develop it a little, then you can turn it into agrant application. Whereas, if you lost the grant five years ago, in five years’ time you are dead. It’s gone. You are never coming back.
MB:You are a strong proponent of increasing diversity in graduate education. What does diversity mean to you?
RC: Well, there are two definitions of diversity. One is the obvious one—the NIH definition.Then there is the definition which reflects the background and the opportunities of the individual. So, for instance, take a kid who comes from a very deprived background, who is not encouraged to take AP courses, maybe can’t even afford to take AP courses, where learning is not valued, and where getting a laboring job is one of the goals. Compare that kid with someone whose mom and dad are both Ph.D.s, are reasonably well off, and can afford to pay for a tutor to make sure their kid’s SATs are OK. The latter is having a leg up. Yet, both of those kids may be equally creative. So, my commitment to diversity is really basedon different backgrounds and different experiences, and, essentially,what we are really looking for is the creative person.
MB:(interrupting) How would one determine that one person’s life experience is lesseror superior to another person’s life experience?
RC: Yes, it’shard to put a number on it. But I have seen it in my own life. I was brought up by a single mom, lived with my grandparents, and we had basically no resources.Nothing. I didn’t even see a flushed toilet till I was ten years old, and we had an outside toilet. We had no electricity in the house. There was gas only for the stove in the kitchen. No showers and no hot water. So, a shower to me,until I was about ten years old, would be boiling some water on the gas stove,putting it into a bowl, getting some soap, sitting there and swabbing down.There were no books in the house. I would tell my grandparents or my mother that I have heard of this or that and I would ask them questions, for instance,like “What does a geologist do?” But they had no idea. I remember asking my grandfather one time if he thought I could be a lawyer. He held a long silence;he really didn’t know what lawyers do—he never had any experience with them,and he didn’t really want to have any experience with them (laughs). So, I was in a very difficult position to find out things and to plan where I was going.We didn’t have money and so I couldn’t pay for college. I couldn’t borrow money because they wouldn’t loan me the money. So, I had to work for a whole year,and I worked in a brick-making factory. And I would generate enough money thereto pay for my college. But at the end of the first year in college, I had used up all my resources. Because this was in England and we had long breaks in the summer, I would work from the day we finished school the beginning of June until we go back to the college about the middle of September—seven days a week and twelve hours a day. I was back in my hometown and my mother would complain that I was eating too much, because I was so hungry (laughs). So, that was how I got through. My friends were all doing some interesting stuff in the summer breaks—going off to Europe or going to some outward bound thing. What was I doing then? I was working in the brick factory! And you know what, I loved those guys who were working there. They were rough and crude, but they worked hard, and they weren’t treated well and were miserably paid. So, that sort of taught me a lot in terms of dealing with people. Even by that time, I had figured out that I was not going to end up working in a brick factory all my life. Also, I had found that I could read very fast and that I like doing it.So, I would do it for pleasure as well as for learning. It was reading that got me wherever I got to, because I would read all the time and it was just the key to getting out of the background that I was in. But these other kids had lot more background knowledge than I did, and their life awareness was much greater than mine; it took me years to catch up.
MB:Did those difficult experiences, like lack of guidance or mentoring, play a role in your transition to your current position so that you could help or mentor others?
RC: I wish say it was. But I think I basically can trace everything I did to last minute decisions. I actually went to a good high school where a reasonable amount of academic performance was expected, and in order to get to that I had to pass the eleven-plus exam. It was more of an IQ-based exam and I didn’t practice for it. Going there, I began mixing more with people who I never had mixed with before because we were really working class. At the school, I was mixing with, I guess you would call, lower middle-class or middle-class kids.Their mothers would be at home- at that time it would be frowned on if she should work, their dads would have the job and provide for the family, they would go on summer vacations, and they had certain, what you would call,middle-class propensities. And I was going around and finding out all kinds of things that I didn’t know about life. I guess, I was a pretty good sponge. I was about seventeen then, and someone asked me, “Are you going to go to college?” I didn’t think I could do it because I didn’t have any money. But I knew that I was very much interested in chemistry. As it turned out, I was good in math and physics as well. So, I went to one of the teachers and asked, “I am thinking of going to college and how can I handle it?” She said, “You could get a grant and you could get some support that way.” She knew where I was coming from. So, I asked, “Where should I apply?” She asked, “Where do you want to apply?” I said, “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.” Of course,at that time in England, there weren’t that many colleges. So, I remember just saying, “Maybe I will apply to Oxford and Cambridge.” She said, “You would have to spend an extra year at high school to catch up to the level of expectations in those colleges.” My parents agreed that I can take the extra year. At that time, besides Oxford and Cambridge, I also started applying to other colleges.First of all, I got into the Royal military college of science at Shrivenham. It was a military college that trained you to get a degree, but you are also in the military service—I didn’t understand it that well at that time. I just took the test, did well in the test, and was selected. I was told that I will be both a student and a captain. I thought, oh, wow, pretty neat (laughs). I then took the tests at Queen Mary College, London. By this time, I was toying with the idea of astrophysics or physics, probably because it sounded exciting. And I got the scholarship to Queen Mary College too. Next, I took the Oxford and the Cambridge exams. Lo and behold, I got into Oxford as well. My mother was saying, “Well, this is fantastic. Where are you going to go?” I said, “I don’t know. I suppose Oxford is the best.” She asked, “Why is Oxford the best?” I had no idea and I said, “Because it sounds good.” So, I went to Oxford and, after three years, I got my degree.
When I was talking with my advisor there, who was in the physical organic chemistry department, he asked me, “Well, are you applying for jobs? Where are you going?” I said, “I really don’t know.” He asked, “You haven’t applied?!” I said, “I need to do that.” He said, “Well, I am looking for a graduate student to join my lab. Would you like that?” I said, “Yeah, I will do it.” That was indeed the amount of engagement! So, I joined his lab.And it was one of those textbook stories of when something worked right—right at the beginning—and it just opened up. I got out with a Master’s and D.Phil.in three years. About half a year away from graduating, my advisor asked me, “Well,what are you going to do now?” I said, “Well, I think I know more about the area that I have been working on than anyone else in the world. But the problem is, nobody else in the world cares. So, I want to do something for people, and I would like to do cancer research.” And I asked, “Who do I go to if I want to do it?” He had no idea. I thought, well, I have to solve this problem myself. I thought at that time that cancer might have something to do with protein synthesis. So, I checked the “American men of science”—yes, it was American“men” at that time—and looked for people working on protein synthesis. I wrote to six people, and three of them got Nobel prizes afterwards. One of them,James Bonner at Caltech, offered me a postdoc position with a salary of, at that time, $6500 (per year). For somebody who had zero money at that time, that sounded like a whole ton of money. But I was worried, because Caltech is California Institute of Technology and at that time in England there were Institutes of Technology where you learned to be a mechanic of, say, fixing a car. So, I thought, I have really made a big mistake and I am going to a technical school. But it was too late to back out and there was also the $6500. So, I came out to this country.
I had $97 in my pocket when I got off the plane in Los Angeles. James Bonner met me and took me to a motel. I was so clueless that,when I had to get an apartment over there, I didn’t realize I needed to pay the first and last month rent as down payment. The monthly rent at that time was $125,and so I needed $250. I had only $97. So, I went to James and said, “I don’t know where I am going to sleep because I can’t afford an apartment.” He gave me $500. My whole focus in the next year was to squeeze out $500 so that I could pay James back. And I did. Caltech was a great school; it was unbelievably good. I had a great time, lot of fun, and, that’s when, I got into rock climbing. After I had been in Caltech for three years—I had published couple of papers by then and things were going well—James came up and he had some papers in his hand and he asked, “Are you thinking about getting a job?” I said, “I really hadn’t thought about it. I am enjoying this and having fun.” He had two letters in his hand—one from Purdue and the other from University of Iowa—and asked if I want to go and interview. I didn’t know where Indiana or Iowa was. I asked him what exactly happens at this interview thing, and he sort of told me a little. So, I got some slides made and flew out to Iowa City. Then, about a week later, I flew to Chicago and then down to West Lafayette. I enjoyed my visits. People at Purdue said that they are going to offer me a job, but they have to first get some approval paperwork taken care of. Shortly thereafter, I got the invitation from Iowa to be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry with a pay of $13,500, which was significantly above where I was. So, I was in a quandary—which one do I choose? I didn’t give it a lot of thought because I didn’t have anybody to help me compare the two Universities. Both were state schools, both were in the middle of the country, I didn’t know Lafayette or Iowa City from kingdom come, and I didn’t know anybody at both places. When I had gone to the Iowa City, it was the end of May, probably about 65 degrees Fahrenheit,not too cold or warm, and it was raining—it felt like being in England! Nobody told me then about the temperature going to 20 degrees below zero or 90 degrees Fahrenheit or the humidity! So, I basically just decided I’ll go to Iowa, and I was then there for twenty years. The next stop was Vanderbilt University.
MB:You and your colleagues have published data showing that GRE scores are not predictive of student success in graduate school.
RC: There are two problems with GRE. One, it doesn’t predict how you are going to do once you are in the lab. Second, and the more significant concern is that, the GRE system tends to favor people who have the resources to practice the test and to get training in the test. Nowadays, it is $160 to take GRE one time. If one has to take GRE three or four or five times, then, that is beginning to be quite a lot of money. Also, with more money, one can pick and choose the scores they want sent in. So, that hurts somebody who doesn’t have any resources and a family pushing that person in that direction. I think it is particularly hard for somebody who has to work and pay their way through college, because that person typically doesn’t have the time to practice.
MB:What are the proven markers or predictors of success in graduate school and beyond?
RC: What we use to a degree but with caution is the personal statement—to see if there is enough enthusiasm for doing science. I mean, there is no point in going into science if it is boring. Then the recommendation letter from the person with whom the student has done significant research. There, what we are looking for is not the vanilla statement of “This student was regular in attendance and worked hard,” but more for the recommender to say, “This student was in the top three students I ever had in my lab, and I have had fifty students.” If the recommender says, “This student is among the top three and I have had only three students,” then that doesn’t help. But if the letter writer goes out of his or her way to say, and there is no incentive for them to lie, “This student is just outstanding,” that, for me, carries them a long way. We tend to interview more than we need to interview so that we can be a little bit choosier. Introverts,I think, don’t do as well as the extroverts. So, we do four interviews so that it’s not just dependent on one person’s interaction—personality-wise and so on.I think that is important. I wouldn’t go with just one person’s gut reaction—that’s just silly. This year we are going to have some more training of the interviewers, so that we have it more fairly scripted. Some people are good interviewers, but some people don’t want to do it, they don’t like doing it, and they don’t care if they are a little bit short. And that’s not a good way of recruiting, particularly someone from a diversity background. So, we’ll try and make the interviews a bit more uniform—we have a formula. The interesting part for me is asking the candidates questions about the work they had done, to see whether they had run into a brick wall and how they had tried to figure out what was going on.
MB:Would you advocate for a dedicated career development office focused on graduate students and postdocs in every institution of higher learning? Or,should the decision be need-based or numbers-based?
RC: It depends on the size of the program and the support. It’s become essential, though.
MB:For someone in science—could be at any stage of their training or career—who is suddenly and inexplicably haunted by the thoughts of having invested their prime youth and/or the most productive years of their life in finding answers to questions that he or she is not sure would make this planet a better place, what would be your counsel? In other words, is the joy of discovering something no one knew before the only bestselling point to attract and retain the best minds in science?
RC: There is great joy in doing science. But if you put all your eggs in one basket, every now and then, the basket is going to be dropped, and it’s not a good thing. But, when you do research on a small scale (not with twenty-five people), when you do teaching, and when you do administrative stuff for the university, then, as a whole, you have a more fulfilling job. If you are interested in what you are doing, not necessarily science, then you are not bored or frustrated. It’s more like a calling.
MB:After you had been in grad school for several years or after you had become a postdoc, had there been any instances when you suddenly had qualms about your chosen career path? If so, could you recall what triggered that self-doubt and how you handled that?
RC: No, I always enjoyed playing around in a lab.
MB:The most eventful scientific publications of yours?
RC:
1. Documentation of specific binding of estradiol to nuclei(DNA) in responsive cells.
2. Proof of fact that there are only 5 general histonetypes.
3. Formaldehyde crosslinking in intact cells to identify how histones distribute in replication.
4. ShowingGRE has no predictive value in graduate school.
MB:Is there a single book/article/podcast/video that you would really like the stakeholders in the graduate education and postdoctoral training read/listen/watch?
RC: Not that I can quote. I don’t watch videos or listen to podcasts. I do tend to go to national meetings and talk with the people involved rather than just digging it out.
MB:What’s your take on the time to graduate?
RC: If you are training people just to have the Ph.D., then it could be a lot shorter…people are pretty much up to speed in about four years.
MB:Your hectic work schedule and what drives you?
RC: I have so many things to do and I have to get it done. And I enjoy doing it.
MB:Favorite fiction and non-fiction book?
RC: A lot of books over the years. “Quite flows the Don” by Mikhail Sholokhov is a great book about love, warfare, and relationships. With non-fiction, I like books on history.
MB:Favorite food?
RC: Ras malai(an Indian dessert).
MB:Favorite movie?
RC: I don’t watch much movies. But go out as a family to watch a movie during the Christmas break. Last movie I watched was La La Land.
MB:How do you unwind on a daily basis?
RC: I play the piano. I still run.
MB:What does your typical workday look like in the BRET office?
RC: Problems coming past me all the time!
MB:Any helpful pointers to trainees (or even faculty) who would like to follow your career track?
RC: I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless you find out that it is enjoyable.
MB:Your favorite non-family human being?
RC: Mahatma Gandhi
MB:Are scientist couples or spouses a good idea?
RC: As long as you actually like one another.
MB:What are some things that a non-scientist will only know or understand if he or she had been a graduate student, postdoc, faculty, or an administrator (your roles so far in science)?
RC: Progress is slow – patience is a virtue.
MB:Do your grownup kids still think their scientist dad is the smartest person they know?
RC: I have no idea. Maybe they think their mom is?
MB:Would you like to provide a soundbite—a single sentence that the graduate students and postdocs can print out and post it at their bench or desk?
RC: Be kind.
MB:Finally, feel free to share your thoughts on any topic of your choice, which will be edited to a final length of 147 words (Note: The word limit reflects Dr. Chalkley’s research focus on chromatin biology; the basic unit of chromatin, the nucleosome, contains 147 base pairs of DNA).
RC: Simple: I think the major virtues are humility and kindness.