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MS. PEGGY PRITCHARD: My name is Peggy Pritchard. I'm the
Academic Liaison Librarian for Engineering, Chemistry, and
Physics of the University of Guelph in Ontario [Canada]. The
book is called Success Strategies for Women in Science, a
Portable Mentor, and it's published by Elsevier Academic
Press in 2006.
Yes, it's a mentoring manual for women in science that was
published in 2006, a collaborative book project that was
funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The
topics contained within the chapters in the book are really
those kinds of complementary skills that help young
scientists to stay focused on their science, skills such as
mentoring, networking, mental toughness, managing time
stress, understanding aspects of career development, so they
can make appropriate choices and transitions.
My graduate students at the university. Several years ago, I
was teaching at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and
most of my graduate students in the Department of
Microbiology and Immunology were women, and they had many,
many excellent questions about their careers in science.
Now, I’m not a scientist, myself, and my thought was: the
best way for them to get this kind of information is to ask
the scientists--female scientists--who are working in
contexts that would be comparable to the ideas that they had
for their own careers. But I found I couldn't get my
students to go to the scientists, so I thought, if I can't
get my students to go to the scientists, why don’t I bring
the scientists to the students? And that was the inspiration
for my book project.
I was teaching a graduate level communication skills course,
and that course was actually team-taught. We looked at
people across the institution and brought together experts
from eight different units on campus. It was really an
excellent introduction to my work as the editor for this book
project because it was really a collaborative project.
I interviewed over 350 scientists across North America, the
U.K., and Europe, and actually traveled to the U.K. to do
some of those interviews, and then, I had e-mail
conversations and telephone conversations with people beyond
that. And through that pool of interviewees, I found 18 collaborators, and they're from
Canada, the United States, and Europe.
They are all women scientists, yes. Absolutely, but not only
the university students. I found that some senior
scientists, female scientists, have said that they wished
that they had had a book like this when they were training.
In fact, Rita Caldwell, who was, at the time of my
interviews, the Director of the National Science Foundation,
wrote a very supportive quote on the back, and she said that
had she had access to this book, this mentoring advice,
really, she would have found that her own experience would
have been helped, so it was wonderful to have that kind of
support from her.
But certainly, parents and grandparents of young girls who
are interested in science have purchased the book for their
own young people, hoping to encourage their interest in
science.