When her family discovered that she was going into science, they were shocked. Dr. Judith Eisen didn’t even like science until college. “I didn’t like the way science was taught in high school,” she said. Even in college, Judith had several other majors before switching to biology, including linguistics, anthropology, and Russian. However, a college botany class changed all that. She liked learning about plants and found that she had a knack for taking things apart and putting them back together to see if it fit the data. As she took more courses, Judith found her passion for neuroscience simply by doing what was interesting to her. However, even though she had found a topic she truly enjoyed studying, it was by no means easy. “Women in my generation faced the obstacle of not being men. That meant you had to work harder and be more convincing,” she said. When asked how she overcame that obstacle, she answered in one word: tenacity. Judith went on to become a PI of her own lab, and her favorite part of the job is interacting with all the different people that she both teaches and learns from. “It’s rewarding to make amazing discoveries, whether I make them or someone else does,” she said. Although Judith has seen changes in the culture of academic science since she began her career, it’s not as much as she’d like to see. “The way labs are run is different. It’s more democratic, which is a good thing. People are also getting called out for harassment now, and that’s not something I thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s much easier to speak out now.” She also said that she’s hopeful for the future, and she’d like to see “a meeting run entirely by women, a meeting where they look at the panels and think, maybe we need to find a man.” Her advice for young scientists wanting to become PIs is to think about their skill set and how that would best be applied to a job in science. “People wanting to become PIs also need to consider getting some training. They don’t teach you personnel management in graduate school or post-doc. Try to shadow a PI you admire.” Once Judith had the faculty position, it was the other ION faculty members that acted as a support system as she started her lab. “We have a great group of people on the faculty here, and we talk to each other a lot about how to deal with problems.”
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