When Dr. Carla Shatz coined the phrase “cells that fire together, wire together,” in a 1992 Scientific American article, she synthesized the Hebbian Theory that the timing and placement of electrochemical signals between neurons in the developing brain determine which synaptic connections survive and which die out. Overall, her research has illuminated the early workings of the mammalian visual system and helped us to better understand neural circuit formation. But Dr. Shatz’s career has also proven pioneering beyond her scientific findings.

From graduating as the first woman to earn a PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard, to becoming the first woman to earn tenure in the basic sciences at Stanford and serve as Harvard’s Neurobiology Department Chair, her career has paved the way for women in neuroscience and academia. Now, Dr. Shatz has returned to Stanford, where she works as director of Stanford Bio-X while continuing to run her own lab.

I was fortunate to attend Dr. Shatz’s “Growing up in Science” talk at Stanford last spring. Dr. Shatz’s stories of misidentification and strategically cultivating her hairstyle and clothes to earn basic male esteem struck me with just how far female participation in STEM has come over the past 40 years. She also touched on themes that resonated with me as a young woman beginning her own career in neuroscience, such as navigating disparate passions and balancing work and family.

I left Dr. Shatz’s talk wishing for greater access to the types of advice and insights she had to offer. Inspired, I started this blog aimed at providing just that to women and girls interested in science. I’m honored to have gotten to sit down with Dr. Shatz to discuss her story, and I’m excited to share pieces of that story with you today.

How would you describe your current role as a PI and director of Stanford Bio-X? What is the best part of your job?

I have two full-time jobs, two roles. One is as somebody who does research in neuroscience and runs a lab, which I love. I train students and postdocs, make discoveries, and really contribute to the research enterprise. And the other is as the director of Bio-X. That role is equally wonderful because it creates opportunities and resources for thousands of Stanford faculty, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students. We have three major programs that offer fellowships and grants: the 10-week summer undergraduate research opportunity, the Bio-X Fellowships for PhD and MD-PhD students to do their PhD research, and the Bio-X Seed Grant Program. These initiatives foster interdisciplinary research at the intersections of biology and biomedical research with chemistry, physics, computer science, and engineering. It’s a wonderfully collaborative, interdisciplinary effort.

We give out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and I love that we can support so many people. There are about a thousand faculty members in Bio-X, and we fund slightly more than 60 fellowships and 75 summer students every year. We can only do this because of incredible philanthropy. That’s another fun part of my job: asking visionary donors if they would support these efforts at Stanford.

I wish we had more money to give out. We don’t. But because Bio-X is almost 25 years old now, our efforts to make resources available to our campus have also stimulated other programs, like the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and helped incubate the Bioengineering Department. Bio-X has then also driven those organizations to create their own versions of seed grant and fellowship funding. So, even though we don’t have as much money to give out as we would like, these other organizations have successfully raised funds to make even more resources available within the university. And I think that is something really wonderful and unique. I don’t think there are many places lucky enough have the wealth of resources that we do.

So, both jobs are wonderful, both Bio-X and the lab. I just wish I had more time. Unfortunately, I need my sleep.

When did you know you wanted to pursue a career in neuroscience research? What inspired your interest in the field?

I was just one of two women to major in chemistry in my class at Harvard. My junior year, I had to choose a topic for a senior honors research project. I went to my chemistry advisor and told him, “you know, I’m not sure I really like chemistry.”

What I really said was that I didn’t imagine continuing to do chemistry as a career. My advisor was great. He asked me, “Well, what do you like?”

At that time, I was taking almost as many courses in art and design as I was in science. I had just taken an amazing course called ‘Art and Visual Perception’ from a famous psychologist named Rudolph Arnheim, who was interested in how we see. I also took a wonderful course from George Wald. Not long before, Wald won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the chemical reaction that occurs in the eye when the chromophore rhodopsin absorbs light—so really, the beginning of visual transduction. And that class was fun because it was right up my chemistry alley.

So, I said, “I’m really interested in the visual system, but I don’t know how I could study more of it.”

My advisor told me about two new professors at Harvard Medical School named David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, and he suggested that I ask to do my senior honors thesis with them. No one had ever approached Hubel and Wiesel for undergraduate research, so they were intrigued. In 1981, Hubel and Weisel received the Nobel Prize in physiology or chemistry. But I was in their lab before then, so it was incredibly exciting. Once I started to watch their experiments and read papers, I found myself captivated by what was, at the time, the mystery of what information is sent from the eye to the brain.

So, part of my interest in neuroscience started with some really good advice from a chemistry tutor and two wonderful courses that merged well together. Before then, I could never really decide what I should do. Should I go more into design, or to architecture school? Or should I do more science? I could never figure it out until that year.

Your career has been so full of firsts. Can you tell us a little more about your path from Radcliffe to tenured professor?

In 1969, I was part of the first class from Radcliffe College to graduate with a Harvard degree. Before, everything for men and women was kept separate. And there was no such thing as neurobiology. Neuroscience did not exist in 1969, but the Neurobiology Department had just been founded at Harvard Medical School. If there had been an undergraduate major in neuro at the time, I probably would have done it. But there wasn’t.

My next step after undergrad was another great example of mentors looking out for you. I did very well as an undergrad, so it turned out I was eligible to compete for a Marshall Scholarship, which I won.

With the Marshall Scholarship, I went to University College London (UCL) in England and learned biology and physiology. I had never taken a biology course in my life, so I didn’t know anything. I spent two years taking final year advanced courses with people who had already declared a major in physiology or who were going to medical school. These classes were kind of like Cold Harbor courses—all lab-based and on a very fast learning curve. But it was incredibly fun, and by the end I had met more fantastic scientists.

I planned on going to Rockefeller University to do my PhD work, but one of the scientists at UCL said that I should go right back to Hubel and Wiesel at Harvard. And how did I know? I had only ever been in one lab. But luckily, I wrote to them, and they said, “Sure, come back!”

Then, I became the first woman to graduate with a PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard. My first position was at Stanford as an Assistant Professor, where I was the first woman hired in the Department of Neurobiology. Later, I also became the first woman promoted to tenure in the basic science departments in the School of Medicine.

But when I arrived, I was hired alongside two other women: Helen Blau and Anne Arvin. We found out later that we were experiments. There were no women in any of these departments. So, the Dean at the time offered an extra faculty position to any department in the medical school that was willing to hire a woman. But it was interesting that only three departments really took the Dean up on the offer. I guess they thought, oh my god, it’s really dangerous to hire a woman. You don’t know that it’s going to work out.

Instead, all three of us earned tenure, and all three of us got elected to the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine. But anyway, I’m very grateful. Eric Schuster was my department chair at the time, and Stanford was a very supportive place to grow up and get tenure.

What would you say is the greatest challenge you have faced as a woman in a male-dominated field?

The biggest challenge always—and I think it’s still a challenge for women and other minorities—is being seen and being heard. It’s a really simple concept, but I think it applies to everything. It applies to your presence in a department, or at a faculty meeting where you say something and you’re not sure anybody heard, but then ten minutes later a guy says the same thing and everyone decides that it’s a great idea. But it also extends into the actual science, in terms of doing something novel and pioneering and then wondering if people actually notice. I think particularly if you’re traversing several fields, people don’t feel like they have to recognize your work, even if it contributed to a breakthrough. So, I think being seen and being heard applies not only to your physical presence, but also to your publication record.

Not that long ago, I applied for an NIH grant, and one of the reviewers said I needed a mentor because I didn’t know anything about glia. I don’t think that person actually looked at my CV, or maybe they didn’t look far enough back. And a number of years ago, we had just been looking at the very first spontaneous activity in the visual system and retinal waves. I applied for a grant because we needed to buy some new electrophysiology equipment, but a reviewer said, “you know, she hasn’t done this before.” But that kind of work was my whole two years at UCL. Men may have the same problem, but I feel like being seen and being heard is a very real complaint that we have.

How do you overcome occasions in which you don’t feel seen or heard?

It’s hard, right? If you’re too loud, then everybody calls you pushy, shrill. My mouth does open up a lot, maybe too much. On the flipside, I’m pretty sure I was thrown off a very high-level scientific board because, as the only woman on the board at the time, the men thought I wasn’t firm or authoritative enough. I learned a lesson from that. But I think you walk a very fine line between being considered loud and pushy and being too quiet. It’s very hard to maintain your femininity and natural politeness in the face of not being heard.

What I think does work is being persistent. Just pressing, pressing, pressing forward and not giving up. And that’s not easy because it can be quite painful. But you have to keep trying. It works.

What do you think has changed most about the ability of women and minorities to participate in STEM over the last 40 years?

First of all, I think it’s extremely heartwarming to see the progress that has been made as far as participation and numbers. I mean, think about graduate school admissions. I think the classes are much more even now, from when I was the only woman. So, things have clearly improved.

At Stanford at least, now there is an encouraging number of women in leadership. I personally would have liked to see a woman as President of the university over the last 20 years. But we still have a chance for that in the future. But we have very powerful women as deans—in the school of engineering, for example—and many female chairs and women in other influential positions. So that’s good.

Where do we still need to see the most improvement?

I am still very concerned about the leaky pipeline and the loss of women, especially in academia, as you move up the hierarchy. I think the situation is related in industry but isn’t nearly as bad because both women and men see that an industry path might allow slightly more time for family. Although, I’m not sure that’s true at the highest levels.

I think the underlying problem is still the university’s inability to provide the kind of resources necessary to have a family and a reasonable lifestyle, for example well-funded and available childcare. I don’t know of many universities that can do this. While it’s good that Stanford has faculty housing now, it seems like the childcare issue continues to be very challenging.

If you think about the age women should really have children, it really should probably be during their postdoc years. So, women often come in to faculty positions with young kids. Or not, and they are trying to start a family at that point, which is kind of what I did. I tried to wait for tenure, and that was a disaster because it was too late. So, I feel like this issue of work-life balance is something we’re still quite far away from.

I don’t know if you can ever achieve a work-life balance. I do imagine that you could have something of a work-life seesaw, where there are times where you’re tilting one way or the other. Hopefully you have a partner who can help in the other direction. But regardless, I think remedying this lack of balance could go a long way toward fixing that leaky pipeline.

What piece of advice would you give to your past self or to someone just starting her career in science?

Looking back on my own career, I think the most valuable advice I could give is to make sure that you’re in a job that you’re passionate about, and that you have a big-picture goal or a question that you are working on. That way, your work constantly keeps you looking into the future and thinking about how you might get there. Of course, you’re going to dive down into the weeds. But that big question has kept me going in the past, especially when things aren’t working. Look at the things that you really love and even at your own decisions and behavior. Then, begin to extract some guiding principles that might keep you excited about your work.

Personal advice: Check your reproductive status. If you intend to have a family, you should know what it is!

A fun fact about yourself/your life outside work or something about you that people might not guess.

When I was in high school and college, I was invited to try out for the US Olympic Ski Team. I was a very, very good skier. My best events were Giant Slalom and Downhill; I was clocked once at like 61 miles per hour on a downhill course.

I think that having confidence in your ability to do things gives you the confidence to face other situations where the outcome is unknown. You never know when you start a race if you’re going to make it down, let alone make a good time.

Anyway, I love the outdoors and have loved it all my life: skiing, backcountry skiing, hiking in the summer. Being out there with nothing to distract me except the beauty and the activity to distract me is restorative. I wish I could still do the crazy stuff, but I can’t. I can take long walks.