 Our next speaker is Fatima Sanchez Nieto, who is also a Gilliam Award winner. And she will be speaking to us about her journey. She is now a postdoc, and so we'll hear something about that and something about her. Fatima. Thank you, Lydia, and thank you, Cody. That was fantastic. I had to turn off my camera. I was so excited. I was like, you know, to a lot of the things that you were saying. I'm a year out from my postdoc, so that's also exciting stuff. I'm now an assistant researcher here at UW-Madison. And in thinking about what I would speak to you all in these 15 minutes, I think part of what I'll model similar to what Cody spoke about, sort of my journey, but at the same time, talk about some of my experiences within an academic system that hasn't necessarily at times been the most inclusive or the most affirming of who I am. And I'll say I'm no stranger to being the poster child for things. When I was in high school, I would come home with straight A's and my father would look me in the eyes with tears and he would say he was super proud of me. And I would come home with a B plus and he would ask me what had happened or what was wrong. And I felt that same level of pressure throughout my entire life and my entire... You have frozen, Fatima. So we'll see, hopefully you will come back, Jane. And other things like creative writing and things that I was passionate about. And because of that, everyone was always really excited. Oh, it says, can you all still hear me? It says my connection is a bit unstable. You cut out for a minute or two. So go ahead and you can either recap or just add it, keep on going. Sure. So it's always felt like I've been living or sort of doing what other people have wanted me to do. And to some degree, that's just the nature of how I was raised. I come from a very traditional Roman Catholic Mexican family. I was born in Mexico and I moved to the States when I was nine. And so there were always these expectations of what I needed to be or what I needed to do. When I was leaving high school, I was voted most likely to succeed. I was always told I was gonna cure cancer or I was gonna cure AIDS or I was gonna save the world. And I carried those expectations on my shoulders. And it was really interesting when I started the Gilliam Fellowship to note that a lot of my fellow Gilliams felt very similar pressures and expectations, not just towards their families, but towards the community of other underrepresented minority scholars within academia. Because what started to happen, as Cody mentioned, is when a lot of us started to live the reality of graduate school, which can be very different to undergrad experience, or it is very different to an undergrad experience. And we start to realize that we're being molded into a very specific thing and that thing does not necessarily look like us. We start to get a cognitive dissonance that asks of us, you either conform to this idea of who you need to be in order to fit in these spaces in order to feel comfortable in these spaces, or you leave, right? Because you're holding a lot of stress. And it wasn't just me that started to experience depression and anxiety during my grad experience. For me, it also came with other things, my autism spectrum diagnosis as an adult because of my struggle with romantic relationships led to my exploration of other aspects of my identity that I had very much suppressed because of that traditional upbringing, and that is my bisexuality and my being transgender. But it was really interesting that when I started to shift away from that poster child stereotype, so to speak, when I stopped being what people wanted me to be or who people expected me to be, then I started to feel more relieved and freer in who I was. And at the same time, I started to notice that academia was not, at least biomedical academia was not for me. And it wasn't because I didn't love the experiments I was planning. It wasn't because I didn't love the things that I was doing in the lab and with fellow colleagues, but it was because more and more I started to see that if I wanted to succeed by the system's definition of success, I would have to chip away at pieces of me that were very sacred and that I didn't need to chip or didn't want to chip away at, and that eventually I would very, very slowly have conformed myself around that cognitive dissonance so much that I was going to be someone I didn't recognize and 10, 15, 20 years down the line, maybe I was going to be a full tenured professor, but I was going to be looking at people like me who were activists who wanted to change the system and telling them, put your head down, get the tenured professorship and then bring about change. Because I got those quite a bit from a lot of people throughout my career. I'll briefly mention that it was during graduate school that I took a peer support training course at Oxford University to support other colleagues of mine with mental health struggles. And that is what led me to the creation of a blog and to more engagement in Twitter on sort of academic spaces, which led me to become involved with the organization Future of Research, which was really an advocacy organization that champions for systemic and cultural changes to academia to empower early career researchers, which is ultimately what conversations like these are meant to do. And what's been interesting throughout my time as an advocate, which is what led to my engagement with the social scientists, sciences and the work that I do now, which is studying the training environments of early career researchers, specifically with regards to mentorship, is that I started to be at the table where the conversations were happening. I got invited to be on a working group by the National Institutes of Health. I was the youngest member at that working group and it was literally because I had something that my PI didn't know at the time, but I had stood up to Francis Collins in front of a public ACD meeting and complained to him and Larry Tabak that they had sort of scrapped the GSI, the Grant Selection Index, which some of you may remember from 2016-17 without really consulting any early career researchers. And so I got put on this working group and what I realized is that I had really been put on the working group more as an optics issue, more as, hey, look, we've got someone, we've got someone that's queer, we've got someone that's trans, we've got someone that's Latinx and an early career researcher on this panel, her voice is getting heard, but the reality was that one of the favorite things that people in leadership love to say, and this goes back to what Cody was saying, it's not just faculty, it goes even further higher up than that, is, oh, but that's not up to us, right? You ask administration or departments, right? To hold PI's accountable, particularly the racist ones or the abusive ones or the misogynist ones that everyone knows about and they go, oh, well, that's really not up to us. They're bringing in the grants and they're doing good science. You talk to folks at NIH and they say, oh, well, that's really not up to us. We can't hold mentors accountable on R01 grants because that's outside our congressional mandate. We can only hold them accountable to mentorship practices if their postdocs or trainees are on T grants or on F grants, right? And so the can keeps getting kicked down the road because what really is happening is we're bringing in as radical young early career research activists, we are bringing in changes or suggesting changes that we want the system to have and we're told that our voices have a place and that they can fit in until we suggest the actual changes and then people are like, oh, no, not like that. That's too radical or that doesn't work or not in that way. And I've experienced this at all levels. I mean, I'll say the Gillian Fellowship is fantastic. It's phenomenal. It's wonderful. It gave me a sense of community like Cody was mentioning and a sense of solidarity with folks, especially as a lot of us we're making a transition out of academia. But at the same time, there have been times where we as Gillian Fellows have wanted to bring about different changes to HHMI and we've been told a similar thing in different ways, right? HHMI supports us and they care about us but then when it comes to like, well, this is what we actually need and then it's too radical or too different or there's not enough evidence. And so it's not a problem specific to HHMI or to the Gillian. It's a science-wide issue. And it really is an issue of people being uncomfortable with change, with the kind of change that needs to happen and people being uncomfortable with the reality that the academy as a whole is built on exclusionary white supremacy, culture and practices that have kept a lot of us out for a really long time. And so I'll flip it because I don't wanna end on a sort of hopeless note by saying that there is a lot of opportunity for change and that there currently is a lot of promising things that are happening, particularly because we as an overall society are coming to terms with the reality that our society as a whole and academia as a part of it are based on all of these sort of inequitable structures and a lot of people in leadership are coming to terms with these issues in ways that they haven't before because before disabled people would come in would say, oh, we need accommodations and people would say, oh, we can't do that. You can't work remotely and still be engaged. And now with a pandemic, everyone's working remotely and it's like, well, that excuse didn't really fly, did it? And so a lot of really creative solutions are happening right now. And we are, it takes, I think it takes crises to shake things up, particularly institutions and systems as established as those of academia. And there is a lot of taxpayer money that goes into academic science and there's a lot of industry that is based off academic science. And it's an important component of our society. And because of that, it had been very comfortable in the way that it had been. COVID has given us an opportunity as a culture, as academics and as a system to really ask ourselves, what do we want to do? What do we want to be a part of? What do we want to continue supporting? And what do we feel comfortable with? I'll end, because I've got two minutes left by saying during one of these listening sessions I said to Francis Collins, I can't stay within academic science because it goes against everything I stand for. I can't be a part of the system. And he looked at me and said, oh, don't say that. And I said, well, you're the leader, you're the head of the NIH, I am saying this to you because you need to hear it from those of us who are leaving because it's not sustainable to keep pretending that unless something radical happens, we're gonna stay. And so I'll add to say that I see myself as a survivor not just in a metaphorical sense, but also in a literal sense. I had an HHMI colleague of mine kill herself two years ago or three years ago. And it's one of the reasons why this, I believe, Cody, this is the one you were referring to this program at HHMI got started. This is taxing us to a degree that it really shouldn't and that taxing interferes with our creativity, interferes with our productivity, but more importantly is interfering with our sense of human, our sense of self and who we are. And a lot of times our science identity is very much tied into that. So my hope is that as we go into these conversations, we remember not just that we're part of a system and a culture, but that we're all individuals and human beings too. And that we're really struggling with the changes that COVID-19 is bringing about on us. But we're also facing a reckoning that gives us a lot of opportunity to rethink, reimagine and rebuild academia, particularly the training environment in a way that serves everyone honestly, and that really is inclusive of people who are like me, people who are like Cody, people who are like other panelists who has spoken earlier today. So again, thank you for having me and I'll hand it back over. Thank you.