M
[Image Description]: An illustration of a woman with brown skin and wavy, black hair, with some hair loss, wearing a pink floral shirt. She has a larger body and is working at a desk with a laptop adorned with stickers, including a strand of DNA and a rainbow. There is a progressive pride flag in a pencil cup and a fidget block on the desk. The background has ecological food maps and two thought bubbles with a biotechnology equation and the text “insert hyperfixation of the month here”.
[Illustration]: This illustration is by Aarani Mathialagan, a science communicator and artist who collaborated with M to illustrate her many intersecting identities while allowing her to remain anonymous.
M is a computational ecologist and asked to remain anonymous.
Tell us about your STEM. What do you do, what do you love about it, what brought you to the field?
I’d say that broadly speaking, I’m a computational ecologist. I did my undergrad in environmental sciences, in a program where they really push the programming side of things. I had lots of courses in R and Python and all the related math. When I got to my Master’s I was doing a lot of remote sensing-based biodiversity work, and I had to work with big data, where I really benefited from the environmental science background. I’m now in a biology program for my PhD. I really like studying large systems: all the different work that I’ve done are thematically very different (my Master’s was on how biodiversity-productivity relationships, and then I worked on vegetation shifts, now I study food webs), but I’m always working between various scales of biological organization. We’re really lucky where I’m currently studying, because they have hundreds of species occurrence data across the entire country at a really high spatial resolution. Most other countries don’t have this kind of data. So I’m really lucky to be here and be able to do this work, because I wouldn’t be able to collect this level of information anywhere else.
Tell us about your disability. What accommodations allow you to thrive?
One of my disabilities is that I have ADHD, and one of the things that has always helped me is that I’m allowed to record meetings. I cannot write notes and also concentrate on what people are saying and also figure out how to respond to them. My supervisors have been really great about letting me record anything I want, as long as I get permission from everyone. And the way academia is set up, at least where I currently work, we have very few hard deadlines and people are very flexible. Sometimes I’ll have a really good day and I can hyperfocus and get some stuff done, and then sometimes two weeks will go by and I get nothing done (except maybe watching a TV show on repeat!), and that’s ok. I have never gotten in trouble for my varying levels of productivity.
Tell us about your experiences being immunocompromised during a global pandemic.
I’ve been immunocompromised for 15 years now. I started my first academic job, which was a research internship in February of 2020, and then the pandemic hit in March. At the time I had not disclosed any of my disabilities to my supervisor. After the first few cases on campus, I went to my supervisor and I said ‘do you have a minute? I need to talk to you about a thing’. We had a 20 minute conversation, and maybe this speaks to the fact that I don’t really do lab work or field work, so I can just take my laptop and go home, but my supervisor was happy for me to work from home. Within a couple of weeks we were able to set everything up on Teams, which we didn’t have before. As my first experience as someone being paid to do research, it was pretty great. It was very isolating, for sure, but I feel like because everyone was a bit isolated, I still had a good social support system.
I finished the internship in December of 2020 and started my PhD in January at a very competitive university. Everywhere I had been before this was pretty chill, for example my undergrad in the UK was done at an online university. I had been going through cancer at the time and I just couldn’t go to a brick and mortar university. So I was really lucky at the Open University, which is known for being really good when it comes to any kind of disability accommodation, and I felt like I was kind of spoiled.
For my PhD, things were originally fine, because everyone was still in their home offices and mostly under lock down. But things opened up very quickly here, and that’s when things started going downhill. People would ask me, ‘you’ve had five shots now, why can’t you just come in? Why do you worry about masks?’, and it’s been a struggle since then. I had to really put my foot down to make sure I didn’t have to teach a class of 800 unmasked students in-person. In this case, I’m aware it also speaks to my privilege that my funding is not connected to any teaching responsibilities, I really don’t know what I would have done otherwise.
Our current compromise is that I no longer work in the same building as my lab group on campus. I work at an institute that my PI is associated with. I feel a bit banished. I’m there with two or three other people in a group (of almost fifty) who maybe come by once a week. I feel safer to some extent, but I think it’s costing me a lot. I know that if you’re on campus, other PhD students get daily coffee breaks with their supervisors, or weekly meetings. And I only have contact through Teams. Technically, my PI is supposed to come into the research institute twice a week, but they never do, they’re never there. I’ve been working from my home office instead for a week, just to see if anyone would notice, and no one does. It’s a bit isolating in that regard, and it makes me feel like I’m not getting the support I should be getting. The only times I do have any communication with my supervisor is when they need something from me. It’s very ‘out of sight out of mind’.
What should people know about being disabled in a STEM-related field?
There are more of us than you think! There are a lot of ecologists that I talk to who I don’t think realize they’re disabled, because it seems like a dirty word to them. And that’s actually hurting disabled researchers, including themselves. I know a researcher who refuses any kind of accommodation in a very passive aggressive way. Which then makes me feel like I shouldn’t be asking for my accommodations. You’re not as protected from disability as you think you are.
There’s also a definite bias between field and theoretical researchers. We went on a lab retreat, and our supervisor wanted us to build a mind map of who we are as researchers, and a lot of people were like, ‘oh, we’re hikers! We love being out in the wild!’. I have mobility impairments, I’m not going to be hiking anywhere. I’m also super severely allergic to certain insect bites, so I can’t just be out in the field with no access to a hospital. It’s a bit sad when you hear other ecologists describe themselves as people who do stuff out in the field or in the lab. If you’re not doing empirical work, then maybe you’re not seen as so much of a researcher. But this is the only kind of ecology I can do.
What advice would you give to your younger self, or to someone considering pursuing STEM with a disability?
Get a therapist earlier!
Actually, find a mentor. One of the things that I now find very helpful is being part of this Disabled In Stem mentorship program (disabledinstem.wordpress.com). Having met someone else who’s a bit like you makes such a big difference.
I would also recommend (and I’m going to steal a line from Queer Eye), ‘go where you’re celebrated, not where you’re tolerated’. I think about my younger self, thinking where I currently study would be a great place to be, it would look so good on your resume… and now I’m just like, stop. It’s so not worth it. I’m barely tolerated here. And the association with a prestigious university is not the most important thing. One of my mentors from Disabled In Stem is at a teaching college, and is having the time of their life because their supervisor is so supportive. It’s amazing to see that prestige is not worth anything.
What questions have we missed that we should have asked you?
In my personal experience, there’s a lack of intersectionality in academia. If I find a space for Queer people, it’s not safe for People of Colour. Or maybe if it’s a safe space for Queer people and People of Colour, it’s not safe for disabled people, or at least not for my immunocompromised self. There are organizations for Queer people, for women, for racialized groups at my institute, but none of them are covid-safe. And while I would love to organize a group for disabled people at my workplace, I neither have the spoons nor the courage to point that target on myself - I already have other targets - I don’t want another.
As a disabled person, and a Person of Colour, there’s a lot more judgment: am I faking it for disability benefits or special treatment? Sometimes it even comes from fellow People of Colour. Very often I get comments like, ‘why can’t you just push through it like a good Indian girl?’ or ‘you’re making other Indians look bad’. Discrimination I face in workplace environments are also often set aside because it is hard to identify what kind it is: is it sexism? Racism? Xenophobia or ableism? Who knows so let’s just table the conversation. I don’t have the social science vocabulary to put this into better words, but I know these intersecting identities have an effect on how I’m perceived in society.
