From pikas to politics

Prof. Nancy Huntly is the scientist who almost never was. All through high school and university she didn’t feel like science was for her, but her curiosity has led her to study ecosystems as an academic, work for government agencies and more recently she's been researching how best to keep grad students in STEM programs. All that was not enough for Nancy though as she has also run for State Senate in Utah!

Join us as we chat about her unique and inspiring journey from pikas to politics.

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Follow Nancy on twitter @NancyHuntly, or @NancyUTSenate25 to learn more about her advocacy work.

Huge thanks to the artist Kilow for permission to use the track “Mothership” on this recording. It’s the soothing balm we all need. You can find more of Kilow’s work on bandcamp and all the platforms using linktr.ee/kilow.

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You can find our full length conversation with Nancy on YouTube. Subscribe now for those little extra somethings.

Episode transcript

[Background intro music playing is "Mothership" by Kilow]

Parmvir: All right, folks. So this is Parmvir coming to you again from Tampa, Florida, while we're still confined to our homes. And today's podcast guest is professor Nancy Huntley. How are you?

Nancy: I'm just fine thank you.

Parmvir: It's great to see you, we very much appreciate you speaking with us today. Particularly since you've had a very, very busy few months, I'd imagine, but I guess we'll get back to that later.

Okay. So I have as your description, a Professor of Biology at Utah State University and the director of USU Ecology Center. So that's a lot of titles and you've had a long and illustrious career. Can you tell us about your path to get to where you did? So what inspired you to get into science and why is it that you ended up studying what you did?

Nancy: Yeah. I got into science. Accidentally. I did not go to college intending to be a science. I grew up in a pretty rural place that I'd always spent a lot of time outside exploring, and I read lots of mystery books for kids. So I probably had some innate sort of explorer, curiosity there. But when I went to college, I didn't know, I had no, no professional aspiration.

So I just like learning things. The one thing I knew was that I didn't want to be a scientist because I didn't like my 10th grade biology teacher, pretty sexist and very authoritarian. Yeah. And so I had certainly bad experiences that nowadays would be explicit sexual harassment in that light, but I really did not like him.

And so I didn't know that scientists weren't high school biology teachers, you know, that, that didn't mean he was a scientist. So I I didn't want to be like, people like him. I didn't want to hang out with people like him. So I went to a small liberal arts college, Kalamazoo College, which was a wonderful place for me.

And I had to take distributional requirements, three classes in each of a variety of areas. And one of those areas was science. One was math, one was art, one was social sciences whatever. So I failed the first science class I took, it was a biology class that I took in my first semester. And it was a survey course and I was pretty shy and I sat in the back of the room and I, I just.

It's sort of, wasn't my thing. When I went to college, I really wanted to dig into things and that's probably the way I am now. I'm not very interested in a lot of superficial knowledge. And so the book we used was fine, the course was fine, but it was so it wasn't what I wanted to do. So I stopped going to class and I didn't drop the class.

So I got an F in it. That was a shock, but yeah. Honestly, I almost didn't care. I just, I went to the library and read stuff I wanted, and I hung out with people and it wasn't a very practical way to go to school. So my beginnings were were not very positive for a future in science. And then I needed to take these three classes to be my distributional requirement.

And I didn't want to take intro classes. So I talked myself into a freshwater ecology class and The person who taught it just said, well, you won't know as much as other people, if you haven't taken the intro classes, but if you're willing to work hard, it's okay with me. So I took it and it was fascinating.

And we did a research project in it and every science class, actually in almost every class I took there, we did some kind of an independent project. So it was the first class I did research in and I was, I loved it. So I continued taking science classes. I took way more than I needed but I didn't want to be a scientist still.

And I also took classes in history. I took American intellectual history classes, which I also thought was really fascinating. And again, we did research in those, so it was totally different research. And then my senior year, I had to declare a major. I had somehow avoided it until then. And this is all true.

I decided I wanted to do ecological research in part, because you could do it outside. And I guess I just liked that research more at that point in time, I had run into ecology mostly by pulling American naturalists off the shelf in the library. I used to go to the library and just look for interesting things to read.

And American naturalist was an interesting title. Swipe, plucked it off the shelf and it was full of all these just fascinating papers from the sixties and early seventies. And so I just kept, kept on reading and kept on following. So I applied to graduate school in ecology and evolutionary biology.

And then somehow I became a faculty member. It was just sort of: walk down the path, interesting things. And I enjoyed it. I consider myself really lucky to bumbled into something that I really like doing and that I can do well enough to be successful at it. So it's been just a really good luck run for it.

Parmvir: That's awesome. And I, I think I've said this before in our podcasts, but I am always quite envious. The American system allows you to be much more flexible as an undergraduate. Like there's no way I would have been doing history classes or language classes, and that's the kind of stuff that I feel that I missed out.

Nancy: I was curious about everything. So it was a good, I did much better in a small liberal arts school than I would have done. Well, I, I just would have left if I had had to do only one thing. I don't think I would have had to find another way to find things I enjoy.

Parmvir: Actually, this might be a good place to introduce the concept of a small liberal arts school.

So this is something that perhaps people outside of the US don't know what it means necessarily because I didn't hear the term until I got here.

Nancy: Huh. Well, they are usually four year schools though. Some do have. Some graduate degree programs now. So they focus on undergraduate education. They have a really high faculty to student ratio.

So you get a lot of personal face time with faculty members. You generally are able to do a lot more of your own research, your own writing, and have feedback on that. Most though, not all of them require you to take classes in a variety of areas. And they often give you a lot of choice of which classes you take.

So there were only maybe two required classes I had to take within the biology curriculum and the rest were all pick and choose. I had to spread them across levels of organization in biology to have some breadth in biology. But other than that, they were a hundred percent my choice. And that that probably works for many scientists were kind of independent thinkers, I think by.

Parmvir: So going back to your kind of career path, one of the things I was looking up was your Wikipedia page and it mentions that you did your PhD on a little painfully cute, critter the pika. Can you tell us more about that? I love the description, which was, they're kind of like rabbits, but with roundy ears and you look at the pictures and they're pretty accurate.

So why was it that you studied that particular animal?

Nancy: Well, I studied it because it was a good model for exploring ideas about herbivory. And I was interested in how herbivores affect plant communities. And I had a lot of ideas about how to take apart a plant herbivore community, but most of them weren't very practical, you know, doing selective removals of lots of different kinds of herbivores.

So you could look at individual effects and community effects and I bumbled onto pikas because there's central place, foragers, meaning they have some place where they live and they forage out from it and come back. And because of that you would expect them to create a gradient of herbivore pressure.

And so they graze more closer to home because the reason that they have a central place is usually the need for protection. So pika is live talus piles, rockpiles relatively high-end mountains usually. And They hide down under those, which protects them from predators, like especially birds that might take pikas.

And so I had a single animal that created a range of levels of recovery. And so I could ask, I could, I could test how different. Intensity of herbivory affects that particular plant. So that's fun. I looked at pikas and they are charming. They're really cute. They make wonderful noises. And I won't try to make that noise though I used to be able to do it. I'm not sure I can now, but it's totally unconfusable with anything else. It's very distinct and they are they're rabbits, they're Lagomorpha they're in the family, rabbits are in but they're in a separate sub family. And they have no, no visible external tail. They were also interesting because they're little and they're not very abundant.

And so people tend to think that things that are small or rare don't have much effect on the rest of the world. And they're a little early before that does. Very cool.

Parmvir: David says, how much have your interests changed as you moved from place to place?

Nancy: Well, my interest has always been pretty general in, in particular questions about how the world works or general questions about sort of central ideas in ecology.

So I studied pikas because they were an herbivore. And I was interested in herbivory as a one interesting area of community ecology where you could study coexistence and how much an organism on one trophic level affects another trophic level, what it looks like. So herbivores and plants so I can work in a lot of different places and find it really satisfying. Coexistence, ecology. I should never have brought that up. It's an abstract idea. So. And it makes no sense to people who don't have any background in population biology things like it seems very silly that one would worry about it. But from the early days of thinking about. Communities sort of all the, all the plants and animals and whatever that are in a place and trying to use mathematics and models to formally understand them and understand how they work.

There's been this idea that coexistence, well we know that coexistence requires distinct ways of being in the world, such that for some places that's big enough to support a viable population. Each, each species is the best the best competitor does better than any other similar organisms in that place.

And there're, so many kinds of plants and animals and microbes in the world that it's, it's hard to imagine that many ways of being different and when you use simple linear additive models, which is the kind of models that were used for a very long time really mostly until we had computers and simulation and the ability to solve harder problems that involve variation and on non-linearity, which makes things much more interesting and are much more biologically realistic. Those kinds of models suggested that the world was mysteriously diverse and that it, it wasn't clear that it could even work. So it's a big question in ecology, even now to most people who haven't dug into that body of theory, you think, but what's the big deal. Of course, there are lots of species in the world. Get over it. You crazy scientists

Parmvir: But I mean, does this then relate to your current research because again, your Wikipedia page includes some choice terms like biodiversity and food webs. Can you explain what these are and why it is that you're interested in researching them?

Nancy: Yeah. Well, biodiversity is really what I've just been talking about. It's The large number of kinds of different species that you find in a place. And so that's a different way of saying I'm interested in coexistence. You can look at at diversity from an evolutionary viewpoint, how do those, all of the species evolve or from an ecological viewpoint, which is more well, how do they work together so that they can stick around in the places where we see them? And food webs really is another way of talking about the same idea, except it's based on a different way of analyzing them and trying to understand them. Who eats, whom is the base idea in ecology.

So all organisms require energy. I'll overgeneralize it. Yeah, because there are ways of getting energy besides biting things and swallowing them, but everything requires energy and we mostly eat other living things because that's where the kind of molecules we need to stay alive, come from. And so eating and or being eaten are big important processes in biology and ecology.

It's basically like, you know, birth and death and gaining energy to stay alive and grow or be eaten and losing, losing part of yourself or losing all of yourself. So a food web is just a list of all the species and a place and with lines drawn between them showing who eats whom. And there are lots of interesting things you can do to analyze a food web, which is a special kind of network.

So it's basically a network way of looking at things.

Parmvir: So do you have a specific research question that you're trying to answer right now?

Nancy: I I think the answer is no, I think what I'm doing now is really different. So I I'm half an administrator and I also am becoming much more engaged in public service and I am, so the research I do now is to some extent, collaborative research on what makes a great graduate training program.

What do you do to give graduate students the experiences and the tools and the freedom that will allow them to be successful in whatever the future that we're coming into looks like which will be pretty different than the world I grew up in in many ways. So I do that and then I've been collaborating with David and some of the people he works with on infusing some of the ideas that caught my interest way back at the beginning of my career at being an ecologist on how some of the things that fall outside of much of the modeling we do, affect these ideas of what gets to survive and what doesn't. So what kind of species and so in the case of what I'm doing with David and other people it's cells, and cancer cells versus normal cells, different kinds of cancer cells. So I've gone back to thinking about why the world is so diverse and collaborating with modelers and cancer biologists to say why are cancers so diverse and how does the cancer- human body ecosystem work and do some of these ideas about coexistence that involve interesting behaviors and variable environments and things that you model in ways that came along later in ecology. Can you apply those to cancer and get any mileage that would help you understand it better and be able to treat it better?

And then in one of the graduate programs I have responsibility for, partial responsibility for, is in climate adaptation science. And so that program was funded by the National Science Foundation on their research traineeship program. And the idea there is to put it into practice ideas that are generally vetted. So you expect them to work, but to combine them in such a way as to build a, a new kind of graduate training program and make that available to students, evaluate it, adapt it and try and make American graduate education better and more suited for the challenges of the 21st century.

Parmvir: Yeah. So you actually preempted one of my questions, which is what is the history of this particular program? I presume it came about from the, an obvious needs. Whenever we've spoken to grad students, they always mentioned the difficulties that they have in trying to get through graduate school. And it's not one issue.

And I'm wondering if this was to address the kind of struggles that students.

Nancy: Yeah, absolutely. It came out of a series of reports that were done looking at the very, very high, a failure to graduate rate in science, technology, mathematics engineering programs in general, and to think about what really makes a great education and try to evolve education in the US so that it, it's not so. Non-diverse because the dropout rates of students from from many groups that are underrepresented in science are much higher. Many of them begin pursuing science, have interests in science when they're younger, but disappear somewhere from being an undergraduate to being a graduate student.

So I think that the graduation rate in the sciences, the completion of a PhD in particular is only about 50% on average. It's lowest in engineering. It's higher than in some areas in biology, but it's really high across the board. People of color disproportionately disappear from those programs. Women disproportionately disappear from those programs. And often people disappear late. Like lots of people start graduate school and then find that they may like science, but they don't like being a scientist. And so they go do something else and there's nothing wrong with that. That's just fine.

But that should happen really early, it shouldn't happen after four or five or six years and perhaps borrowing money. It's just not a good thing. The attempt was in part to improve that. And then in part you just envision, how what skills do students need to be more successful if they go outside of academia?

Which is the, I guess the assumed career path of many graduate programs, especially PhD programs and has been for a very long time. But the truth of it is that when I finished my PhD, which was 35 years ago Students did not go into academic jobs even back then. So that's really

Parmvir: interesting. I didn't realize that.

Nancy: Yeah.

Parmvir: So David had had a question on whether you think academic and scientific careers have changed in the last two to three decades. What do you think is better or worse now?

Nancy: So David you are, what you had in mind was this change in emphasis on bringing in a lot of money and publishing a lot of papers. Is that what you had in mind?

Parmvir: Yes, he said.

Nancy: Okay. So that's been going on for a long time. I don't think that that is what the job was like at all for my advisors, but it has been what the job has been like for everyone I graduated with, I think, and it has become increasingly emphasized. And I think most of us don't like it.

I don't like being evaluated. I have always felt it was wrong to evaluate people by the amount of money they raised for the university or by the sheer number of things that they published. And I think when people want feel they must have many publications or they must get many grants. They don't feel the luxury to take the time to do things that they believe are really important. Because those things often take more time to find funding for and more time to do. So I guess I've resisted that. And I haven't been punished for it. So so I think you don't necessarily have to follow that, but it's a problem. It makes the job much less attractive. I didn't become an academic because I cared about money or fame.

I became an academic, a scientist because I cared about understanding things and learning things. And doing things that were of value to students and to other people. Have there been positive changes in academia? Yeah, I think so when I was an undergraduate, my advisors were almost all men and the faculty were primarily male.

There were two women who were hired in the biology department that I ended up majoring in while I was there. And neither one of them got tenure. They were both denied tenure shortly after I left, when I went to graduate school, there was one woman. When I started in a department of, I don't know, probably 30 or so 30 some and she did not receive tenure at the end of my first year.

There, there was another woman who was the halftime lecturer after I finished my PhD. Her job became full time tenure track, and sure enough, five years later she was denied tenure. So there were very few women. There were very few African-American even students in the college I went to and I think there was one African-American faculty member in the entire university than I can remember.

So universities have become more diverse. There's been more opportunity from people from all backgrounds to find their way into programs and to find mentors who may look and act and appear to be more like them. So I think that's a very positive change. We're we're a long way from having solved the problem entirely, but the doors of academia have come open a great deal in the time that I've been around.

Parmvir: Yeah. And actually that's, that's well encapsulated. I don't know if you've seen the documentary Picture A Scientist. Yeah. Which I think was a brilliant kind of look into particularly the difficulties that women have had in stem fields. And the work that, you know, women have already laid down to, to improve the situation for others, which I, if you get the opportunity to watch it, I think it's a great, great film.

Nancy: Yeah, I did.

Parmvir: I guess I'm talking generally to audience as well. Although I don't know if it's, it's easy to get access to it. At least the opportunities I had were through kind of societies holding events for us. But so clearly you're not just satisfied with being a scientist as your more recent activities will kind of attest to.

And it's really interesting. We've spoken to two women's scientists from UTA and both of them very interested in politics. The other was our guest Dr. Amy J. Hawkins. Although I think hers is much more local. Tell us about your recent state Senate run.

Nancy: Yeah, well, I was the democratic candidate for Utah Senate district 25 of which is something that in the middle of March, about three days after our university had shut down for the first time, while we reorganized putting all of our classes online. So we canceled classes for three days and went to all virtual and on the last day that we were turning over, I went down and registered to run for the seat.

I didn't really know how to run for office. I thought I could be a good Senator. I knew I could be a good Senator. I would be a good Senator. And I thought it was really important to have other voices and people running for office who would help us get by the political dysfunction we have in America right now.

And I'll only talk about America because that's, that's where I live. So that's where I have the firsthand knowledge. It's. Are happening in many places, outs are happening here, but I just find it I found that 2016 election cycle soul crushing for a year and a half, it was angry and empty of any real discussion of real problems.

And so I thought after the election, actually I joined a political party for the first time in my life, the day after the 2016 election. And I did it with the intention of learning, how to be more involved. I could be one of those people. And at this point in my life, it would have no negative impacts on my family, it would have no impacts on my career. And so I felt like I could do it and I should do it. And three and a half years later, I did do it. So it was, it was really interesting. So I told you I'm I, my dirt story is about my fear of public speaking and So in general, I don't really like to just put myself out there. I had, I had no headshot that I could use to put up a website, which is one thing you need to do when you start running for office. And the idea of having a website: nancyhuntley.com with my face on it was just so foreign, but I did it because that's what you do to run for office, you know? So you want to run for office there are things you have to do, but I would walk out of my house every morning and I would think, did I really do this and it wasn't that I didn't want to do it. I did want to do it. And I knew that I would learn how to do it, and I would do it as well as I could. But every step of it was totally unfamiliar the running for office part.

I understand what Senators do or what a legislator in general should expect to do and be able to do. And I'm willing to work hard to talk with people and learn. Learn what they are worried about and what their issues are and learn enough background to put creative solutions on the table. So, so in that sense, being a scientist, I think is a pretty useful yeah.

Becoming a legislator or some other public official you learn how to get good information. You learn how to compromise. You learn how to vet information. You learn how to share information. You learn how to evaluate things as fairly as you can. You learn not to tune out other people's ideas. And all of those things I think would have been, useful.

But running for office. I mean, you have to have campaign signs and you have to find people to talk to. And you have to understand what to say to them. You have to understand what you write on a tiny piece of paper or in one paragraph that will be what people want or need to know about you. And I didn't know how to do any of that.

I had the person who helped me put together the website kept giving me little lectures about, and he tried to say very nicely, what you're writing is terrible, but he would say, you know: you're used to, you're used to getting all this detail and really digging into it, but just step back, just keep it simple.

And I was trying to, but I was doing a terrible job. You have to learn how to advertise. I don't know how to advertise. I'm a scientist. We don't advertise. It was just I felt so inadequate at the end of almost every day for the first five months of it. Like there was so much to learn and I kept having to do things I didn't know how to do and figure out how do them, so it was really hard, but it was also really rewarding I talked to so many people that I probably would not have met if not for this, you know. I, I made appointments with most of the mayors in a dozen different small towns. Sprinkled around Cache Valley and Ridge County. I talked to a lot of leaders of NGOs. Just, I talked to people in business.

I talked to people I could meet on the street when we happened to be outside, when I was trying to hang information on their door. And I learned a whole lot from that. And I just, I liked that part of it. Yeah,

Parmvir: It does sound difficult. And actually I was thinking something similar to what David's just asked.

I mean, you're talking about the, the trouble that you had learning all of this new stuff, but is there anything about your background as a scientist that helped you or maybe hindered you being the candidate. Was the idea that you kept going into detail and you were being told to step back? Is that something you feel is typical of a scientist and you have to overcome?

Nancy: Oh, of course. Yeah. People tell us all the time that we're terrible communicators and they're right. I mean, I gave you not very good communication about coexistence, but that, wasn't what I was thinking I would talk about. And I bumbled through it. So but we can say things. In short form and in clear form, after we get all the background and we think about it.

So I don't think that that's bad. I, I don't think you want to have off the cuff too silly slogans you want to learn. And one of the problems we have right now is just this hyperpolarization of all sorts of issues. And it seems like there are two warring factions. I keep coming back to the table. But there's actually a agreement about problems that need to be solved.

So maybe we just need some different solutions that are acceptable to all people involved or most people involved instead of ones that 50% of the people vote for. And that 50% of the people think are horrible. So I think being a scientist is useful. We question ourselves and I think that's useful in anyone, in any position of authority or any position of public responsibility.

It's a good idea to not be so sure that you already know everything and that you're right. And it's a good idea to be open, to learning that you're wrong or learning that. You've got one hand on the elephant, but there are many other hands in other places. And if you really want to understand the elephant, you need all those hands working together and talking together.

So I think, I think it's not so bad that we make things overly complicated at first. We just have to remember to get through that, and we can't take forever. Sometimes you have to do things before you really understand them. So I do know that but I mean, running, running for office, which is still unfamiliar, so I did lots of online training and it was helpful, but book learning, isn't the same as experience and online training isn't the same as somebody where you have more back and forth and more time to get to know them. So I just tried, I guess if you're a scientist, you know, it's okay to try to do things you don't know how to do. That's what we do all the time. Right? So I guess that was good practice. I mean, what do I have to lose? I've told you I've, I'm embarrassed myself and failed a thousand times. So you just try.

Parmvir: So as David points out, Utah is a particularly hard place to run as a Democrat outside of Salt Lake City, right?

Nancy: That is, that is true. Cache valley is disproportionately Republican. There are very few registered Democrats and sort of the, the null expectation that is that, oh, golly. There weren't even democratic candidates on the ballot for most offices. For most of the years that I've lived in Utah.

So the last two elections, 2018 and 2020, there were two candidates for most though, not all opposites, and usually that was being a Republican and a Democrat. So yeah, that, I had lots of funny meetings in which people would say things to me: you're running as a Democrat? And sometimes they would give me healthy, helpful advice that sometimes Democrats just run as Republicans and then they can win.

Parmvir: [laughs]

Nancy: Or they would say to me, there aren't many of those around here, you're a Democrat? But we, we need multiple ideas at the table and You have two major political parties, you can rarely win office from any other backgrounds. So we do, we need them both to be viable and we need to have solutions people can accept. So now I'm out of the closet. I will never be perceived as nonpartisan again, probably.

Parmvir: Yeah. And it is difficult because I guess the, the point is that you're, you're genuinely trying to understand what people's concerns are and their concerns don't necessarily fall on partisan lines. Like if you ask people what the day-to-day issues are, they're likely to be the same on either side.

Right?

Nancy: That's right. A lot of those, the hyper-partisanship I think is has been forced upon us by misinformation and disinformation and political motivation. And we need to just stop doing that and say, no, we're going to talk about real stuff, and talk about real stuff and that we need to know each other.

I, I thought a lot when I was running about how things work, how do things work in Utah? How do things work in Cache Valley? And yeah. I knew a lot of the organizations and agencies and governmental structures that were there, but I hadn't thought carefully about how, how they work together and where they've worked well and where they don't work.

And why does responsibility for somethings reside where it does, you know, why, why, why has that evolved? And that was really interesting and instructive. So I learned an enormous amount from that. And, so the door to being a Senator at this moment in time has closed, but running for office opened a lot of other doors for me, a lot of other opportunities of ways to contribute ways to help be build healthy civic structure which I think we need to do.

We can't, we can't make all our decisions just based on soundbite ads know, we can't decide who or just based on soundbite ads and it can cost a fortune for somebody to run for office because that eliminates many voices candidates from ever being able to consider it. So I want, I want those.

Parmvir: For sure. So now that you're a seasoned candidate, would you have run differently and would you run for some other kind of office again,

Nancy: I would run for another office again. What, what I, what I would do differently. I mean, I would be much more comfortable in understanding when things were likely to come up on.

There, one of the things I've found surprising is how little control you have of the toboggan ride. So there, there are moments where people want stuff from you and they want it right away. And there are other moments that, which nobody has any interest what's going on with the campaign and you simply have to respond to them. You don't control them. I don't know if anyone controls, certainly not candidates for a state office in a relatively rural area state. The thing that made running hardest this time, and that probably had the most limit on what I was able to do was COVID so that wasn't particular to my lack of knowledge but it meant talking to people face to face was not often a possibility. And I think if you were trying to change the expectation that only one party has decent people in it or the expectation that we can actually all talk to each other even if we start out. That we have very different ideas. It's very hard to get around that any other way.

I had a full-time job. It was sort of like having two full time jobs. So I would get up really early. I would stay up really late when I started to feel like I can't possibly do anything right. I would go to sleep. And then the next morning it's all seemed much more possible again. But I think the only way out of where we are now is to have more professional conversations, work together, to talk together about everything.

I started after the 2016 election, I began to talk to people about anything that came in grocery store lines anywhere. I talked about climate change which I didn't I think talk about in just normal "well of course we will talk about this" kind of ways, but I do now. And I also talk about political things, things that are considered political, always if somebody makes a comment that leaves it openings for it, I respond to that open and I will continue.

I'm trying right now to. Well, I will help bring back to life a League of Women Voters chapter in Cache Valley. I think, I think we need that. That's a non-partisan group. And as you said, and I agree, totally issues are mostly nonpartisan, but they have the ability to, to foster public forums so that we have more events where people talk about.

Or during the times that we're running for office, we have forums or something like that. We don't have to have just debates where we'll sort of attempt to stab each other with clever, clever words. We could actually just talk about stuff together. So I'm hoping to get some more civic duty kind of going on regularly, get more people talking to each other.

Parmvir: Okay. Has Nancy the scientist changed as a result of this experience?

Nancy: Probably. I mean, I, you know, I think like a scientist and I learned like a scientist. That I the skills I acquired as a scientist have been very useful to me. They're transportable in learning about anything. It's it's not only scientists who are scientists.

It's, it's, that's the way historians learn things. We tell them that they're not doing empirical work up, but they are artists use scientific thinking. So. You asked me if it changed me as a scientist. And I think it changed the subject matter that I am at this point in time and most compelled by. So I'm reading political philosophy, things like that.

Because I'm a scientist and that's the way I have to go about doing it. And when I answered and I responded to ideas that sometimes seem to like, they're pretty distorted and are misuses of words and misuse of ideas. I like to have done my homework before I say those things. So I read history, I read philosophy. I read the government and, I continue to pursue life as with my inner scientist.

Parmvir: That's fantastic.

Very good on that note, we want to say, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been really interesting to hear your very varied kind of background and career, and particularly your experience as a politician. Like I don't think I've spoken to anybody who's run for office before.

Nancy: Well, I looked up the word politician. So I would know what it meant. I look up a lot of words now because I think words are being used to mean all sorts of things. They don't really mean that it's quite confusing, but a politician is polished and experienced in the art of politics.

And I'm not sure I meet that criteria. And yet I think I'm still safely, not a politician, even though I haven't been a candidate.

Parmvir: Well, David wants, clearly wants to start trouble. What about the word doctor?

Nancy: Well, I know I read that too, and I that doctor comes from the Latin word for learning. I think I read that.

And of course that makes sense because indoctrinate is, you know, to, to provide knowledge to something. So I'm okay with being a doctor too. Absolutely. And I am when we were, when my kids were little, I do remember my son once telling us that we weren't real doctors and my husband didn't like that at all. I thought it was pretty funny. He said, well, you know, I mean, doctors who helped people and that made Richard, my husband even more upset with them. Yeah.

Parmvir: Yes. That stings a little, I have to admit. But yeah, hopefully we've dropped lots of knowledge and learning within the course of this recording keeping in line with the theme for the word doctor.

Yeah. Thank you again so much, Nancy. We really appreciate it.

Nancy: Thank you. And it's really nice to meet you. I think I heard you once on either The Moth or Storycollider, is that possible?

Parmvir: I have been on Storycollider, yes.

Nancy: I heard you on that. And I realized at the end of it, that the David you were talking about was David Basanta

Parmvir: That's exactly right.

Nancy: So it's nice to actually meet you.

Parmvir: Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. It's, I think the world certainly within science communication is very small. But that's now wrapping up science into it too. It's very odd that you heard about David in such a different context.

Nancy: It's a small world.

Parmvir: Yeah.

Fantastic.

Nancy: Good talking with you.

Parmvir: Yeah, likewise. Have a good evening.

Nancy: Bye bye.

[Musical interlude]

Nancy: It was the first talk that I gave for which I received an honorarium. I was still a graduate student and I was invited to give a talk and they were giving me $50, I think. And I was just sort of, I felt that I couldn't possibly live up to $50 and I'm not, I'm not a natural stand up in front of people and say, look at me person.

Anyway. I mean, I find it, I have high levels of negative anticipation and I've spent my life saying what you feel isn't real. Just get up and do it. So I went, I took my slides. I tried to be poised. I got to the front of the room and I started talking and the, the adrenaline circulating must have been really high because I was talking really, really, really fast. And I remember standing there, I couldn't move, my feet were glued to the ground and I was flying through my slides and I kept thinking slow down, slow down and I couldn't do it. So I gave this 50 minute talk in about 35 minutes. And it was, I was so embarrassed because I knew it was terrible and I, I just couldn't stop.

Parmvir: So that's a long time to have lived with that fear.

Nancy: Oh, yeah, like 38 years.

[Musical outro]

I humiliated myself in almost every way possible and I still do it.

Parmvir: [laughs]

David: That's the spirit

Nancy: I have a candidate story and I'll tell you maybe later, if I can bear it.