 Well, I had lived and traveled in Latin America mostly before coming back to the United States for graduate school, and I decided during that time that my background in literature and history wasn't going to really give me the tools that I needed to find meaningful work in the developing world, which was one of the aspirations I had. So I returned to the United States with a kind of mixture of interest in agriculture, in nutrition and food supply, and in health, not necessarily in medicine, but in health. And that range of interest converged on the field of agriculture, specifically the field of rice, as a staple food that was the understory for a lot of the nutritional, both problems and deficiencies that we see in the developing world. I actually didn't know that I would be able to study anything so specifically. I came to graduate school at Cornell after my first child was born. I entered as an older person because I had actually transitioned through my husband's career preparation first. And we were thinking very hard about how we could architect a life that would get us back into working in the developing world, and I met Ronnie Kaufman when I was a staff technician here at Cornell on a trip for International Ag 602, which is a very well-known course taught here at Cornell. That takes you with a group of interdisciplinary people out into the field to see agricultural problems and production and economics and health all mixed up with a group of students. And during that time you get to interact and think a lot about what type of preparation might actually prepare you to contribute to some of the processes that were taking place elsewhere. And it was through conversations during that course that I came to the conclusion that I wanted to study plant breeding. It had not occurred to me before that, but it fit very well with some of the interests and preparation that I had in plant pathology and other things coming in. So I applied to the field of plant breeding, and I should just tell this anecdote because I think it's historical. I was the first applicant to the field of plant breeding here at Cornell, where a female with a young baby was applying to become a graduate student. And several of the professors found that hard to believe that I would ever work in the field. I think they felt that maybe I was going to come in, get an education, and never work. So I was not accepted to the field of plant breeding initially. I was accepted on probation. I had to prove myself, despite the fact that many of the men in the field had young babies at home. That was not considered to be a condemnation of their professional aspirations. But anyway, that was in 1985. And I entered the department, and I worked through very diligently, and I think I demonstrated a serious commitment. But I was really fortunate because the Rockefeller Foundation's program on rice biotechnology had started in 1985. And Ray Wu, Ronnie Kaufman, and Steve Tanksley here at Cornell had put forward a proposal to do some molecular biology on rice. And Steve Tanksley and Ronnie had put forward a proposal to develop a molecular map. In those days, it was an RFLP map. And so as I entered the department and found my way through the various opportunities that presented themselves for PhD projects, this was the one that stood out in my mind. And I was told I didn't have the qualifications to take on that project at the beginning, but I slowly worked my way into it and was eventually selected for a fellowship. So my PhD program was largely funded by Rockefeller Foundation under that program. And I became a full-fledged graduate student in 1986. And during that time, worked very closely with two Chinese colleagues who were also Rockefeller-funded scholars that the threesome, those two scholars and myself, really put together that first RFLP map of rice, which we published in 1988. And it was a great achievement. It was a great achievement of a teamwork. We learned a lot from Steve Tanksley. This was his first foray into rice and into cereals because he was a tomato geneticist. The RFLP technology was, as many of you know, is cumbersome. It's really tedious. It involved a lot of radioactive work. It involved almost a 24-hour routine that we took on in this lab. We worked day and night, and we developed this map. And it consisted of what looked like a great accomplishment in its day, 135 markers when we published it in 1988. Anyway, it was the first, and that was historic, and we were very excited. And I think my first trip to Erie was when I went to present the results of that map. And that first set of experiments. And I remember going to Erie and thinking I was stunned by the number of people in diverse fields, all of whom concentrated on rice. I guess I had known that's the way it was, but I couldn't have imagined it. So I was excited by it, and I think people were equally excited by the work we were doing here, and there was a very good synergy. And I think that first visit was the thing that cemented the relationship that would then evolve into a job opportunity when I finished in 1990. So in 1990, I got my PhD degree here at Cornell. And I had just given birth to my second child, and we moved when my second child was about six or eight weeks old. And my family moved to the Philippines to take up a position, a staff position as an internationally recruited staff at Erie, to set up a marker lab, a molecular marker lab. And that was the first, so that was quite historic. We were moving the edge of the technology from what we developed here at Cornell, trying to implement it at Erie and put the molecular marker work into action in the context of plant breeding and in the context of rice improvement for the developing world. And so for me, it was sort of this wonderful dream of combining science and the excitement of the new kind of science that was just emerging in its day with the frontier of trying to actually develop new varieties that would encourage better utilization of the resources that people had in the developing world. And would, of course, the other underlying theme was could we use genetics to minimize the amount of pesticide, minimize or improve the fertilizer efficiency. And now we're much more interested in water use efficiency as well. But all of this came together in that wonderful career opportunity that I had. And I think my family really appreciated what it meant to me after four years in the PhD program to have that chance to go to Erie and try to implement what was here only. Really, it was a thought process here and there it was something that required as much interpersonal and political will as it was scientific. Because there was a lot of resistance in the early days to spending time and money on using molecular markers to do something that the breeders thought they already did very well. And so there's a period of time where new technology is both embraced but resisted and a little bit resented. And I was right at that edge. So I interacted and did my best to try to introduce the technology in ways that would bring others into the excitement that I felt. And to create the excitement of the discovery that was possible using these markers to identify genes that themselves controlled the traits that breeders selected on. And so really throughout the last 20 years that's what I've spent my life doing. And we've continued to use a participatory approach. We've tried to bring people from diverse backgrounds into the process and share the excitement with them of what the science has meant to me. And at the same time to try to learn from others where the most pressing problems lie and to try to then take up those problems and use the germplasm that's of most interest to them in a combined effort to use genetics wisely for plant improvement. I think the greatest achievement was really developing that first marker lab. I think it's called the Genome Mapping Laboratory still. It's been modified and it's been enlarged and now it has a very central place in the breeding program. But just thinking back to what it was to pioneer a program, I remember the very first look I had at what the space would be. There were no windows. It was just brick building and it was underneath was just a garage. And this building was offered, this space was offered to me. And the first thing I said was at Cornell I had to work in a brick building with no windows. I think the first thing we need to do at Erie is open a window so we can look out on this beautiful volcanic mountains in the background and see the rice paddies. And indeed we insisted on that and I still walk into that laboratory and remember the decision to put in the windows and build that lab and design that lab and to see it functioning and working and booting out good science and good products today is probably the biggest reward. The other is I think the joy, the biggest joy is really the interaction with the Filipino staff and the people that I train and the many international scholars that came to my lab or that I've known through this collaboration for many years. And training people then enables you to sort of keep extending the sense of family because people go back to their countries or they continue to work in the international arena and having participated especially in those early days in an emerging program was really a source of a kind of family bonding that we still have today. I mean the hardest thing for me was that my spouse was unable to acquire a work visa. In 1990 spouses didn't have work visas and my husband was a veterinarian and he had a practice here and he had expected, I think, to be able to work. He was paying back his student loans and foregoing a normal salary line and yet he was a skilled person with a skill set that would have been useful. I think the greatest frustration was that he couldn't work and that over the time we were there, the family integrity, we didn't live on the compound we chose not to because we wanted to actually get more involved with the community around us. And that was a very good thing, I think, but the frustration was mostly that he found it very difficult to break into a meaningful professional relationship and that is in fact why the family moved into the shuttle research relationship that we had for the last three years of that five-year contract was because there was no work opportunity for my husband. Well, one of the stories that I have always enjoyed is the fact that there were only two female internationally recruited staff or IRS at the time at Erie. So it was rare to be female in the scientific arena and my colleague Rebecca Nelson and I were the two females. Well, Rebecca is, other than the fact that I suppose we both are Caucasian, she has dark brown eyes, I have blue eyes, she has very curly hair, I have very long straight hair and during one of those entire years she was pregnant. So about the time that she was nine months pregnant walking around with a big belly with her curly hair and her brown eyes and me with my long straight hair and no belly, I can remember that numbers of people would see me passing and say, hi Rebecca, and they'd see her passing and say, hi Susan, because I think to them we look very much the same and we laugh about that even today. I would wager that people still ask me when I go visit, how is my husband Johnny, who was of course, Johnny was Rebecca's husband because they still confuse us. So that just strikes me as something that we always found very human. So I worked with a number of wonderful colleagues. The plant breeding department was of course all male, except for me and I can remember very fondly many of my colleagues sitting around the table in the plant breeding meetings but I want to just acknowledge Dr. Sanadira who's no longer with us. I was very fond of him because he lived up near the Syracca housing near where my family lived. And so we actually, as people who didn't live on the compound, we had a bit of a bond. I had a very dear friend, Riyoshi Keita, Dr. Keita from Japan, who became a dear friend and I see him now occasionally, most recently at WADA, he's been at WADA for the last four or five years. So he's a man with whom I've maintained loyalty and friendship over many years. There were many wonderful colleagues. I worked with Dave McKill, of course Girdiff Kush, Darshan Braher, many people that have become long-term colleagues and friends. But I also want to mention the wonderful array of postdocs and technicians that made the lab such a joyful place. I think we had four or five marriages out of my lab and I was only there less than two years. So there was a lot of romance and goodwill and fun. And I remember all of those people so fondly, Nanette and Taka, who now live in Japan. Ben Juan Gina, who live in Belgium. Olivier and Edna, who live in France. I saw Marco Woparais, who's now the Director-General for Research at WADA. And Myra, his wife, I saw them recently at Erie. Many of the people that I knew there have sort of are part of this wonderful sense of joy. And one of my very dear friends, Lleva Abenes, who's now in San Francisco and has been there for quite some time. And when I go back, I see Ruthie, who's now married to Ken McNally. I see Tita Miao occasionally. And there were a group of us that, and Ben Albano, we all had September birthdays. And so we used to gather in September and have all kinds of celebrations. They seemed to go on and on. So every time my birthday rolls around, we exchange greetings and remember fondly all those good times in the genome mapping room. I think the national staff is what really makes Erie tick. I think that we have had a number of people who came through various programs. They're now PhDs and professors in the United States. I saw Benny de Los Reyes recently. He's now a professor in the University of Maine. I, of course, want to acknowledge Yoli Yanguren, who is my secretary, who's recently passed away. I feel very blessed, actually, to have started my career in an organization that had such a talented group and a dedicated group of very loyal and very, very competent people, because the PI, or the IRS, is only as good as the staff that work with them and make everything happen. So of course, my learning curve, when I first went to Erie, learning curve about Asia and learning curve about rice and learning curve about many of the things that I now do professionally, started with the knowledge that was transmitted to me by the national staff. Yeah, my situation is a little bit unusual in that I came into the scientific career quite late in life. And as I say, I already had a child when I started my PhD and I had a second one before I took the job at Erie. So although I was a recently minted PhD, I had these two children. And I think that made it both easier in some ways and more difficult in others. Easier in the sense that I never had that kind of univision luxury of just being a graduate student and thinking only about my graduate work. From the days I first started graduate school, I was always juggling family and career. And I never questioned that I had the children to care for at the same time that I was trying to pursue this career. So I think in my own way, I had to really get in shape mentally and emotionally to be able to handle both. And when I went to Erie, as I had mentioned earlier, the hardest thing for my family was that the spousal employment opportunities were so limited. And I think maybe it's not that that's any more important if you're female and your spouse is male. But in those days, it was taken for granted that the scientist worked and the spouse was somehow able to make do in an environment that did not involve professional employment. And I think as more and more women have come into the field, it's become more and more apparent, not just to Erie, but to many overseas organizations, that the employment of the second partner in the relationship is equally important to the well-being of the whole. And I know that Bob Chandler as the first DG recognized this. But clearly, the living environment is most conducive to the well-being of a family if both spouses are happy. And so in my case, the upheaval was that my spouse was not well accommodated in that environment. And that eventually caused us to leave Erie. But I do think that on the other hand, the challenges of being female in science are really just in finding the right blend for that complex little society that is your family. And it's the same whether you're in the United States looking for a job where the two of you are trying to accommodate two different sets of interests or whether you're going into the international arena. The questions are usually different for females where it comes to child rearing and child birth. But there you just have to pick your partner, I think. And that's a negotiation between you and your partner, how you're going to handle that. Giving credit to the incredible changes that have happened, I think both socially and in the professional climate, there are more and more women in these fields. And so there's less of a feeling that you're a pioneer now. You're not that unusual. And you don't have to feel that you're out there breaking ice or somehow representing your gender. You're just now an individual. And that makes it a lot easier. I think it's much more difficult when the entire culture is only one gender and you're the odd person because you do stand out. On the other hand, sometimes it's an advantage. You enjoy it. You're special. You're automatically noticed. You get a lot more obligations sometimes because people want the female representation on their committees. And I think I did serve on a lot more committees at Erie in my day than maybe I would have to if I were there now. But on the other hand, I never felt that I was overlooked. I always felt that people really took notice and tried their best to make an arrangement that would work. So I have not experienced, I've experienced difficulties and challenges, and I think we all do. But mine haven't really been oriented around the gender issue. So really what we did was we picked up the rice production course that Erie had run for 20 years or so. That was such a rating success. And we thought about the fact that this course was no longer offered. So four years ago, I was at Erie for the strategic planning session. And Bob Ziegler had invited me up to his house for coffee one Sunday morning. And we were sitting around drinking, I think, too much coffee. And we got fired up about what we could do in the here and now to interact more closely and bring my program and some of the people I knew in the United States that were interested in rice, bring Erie more into focus for them and perhaps allow Erie to access some of this intellectual talent more directly. And I asked Bob why the rice production course had been suspended because I thought that would be a big draw. And he said that they'd already felt that they'd trained so many people now that the national programs had taken over that responsibility. And I said, you know, it's funny. All these years, you've spent so much time and attention on your national program partners that it stands out that the people in the developed world who are now very interested in rice because we have genome sequence, we have a lot more money flowing into the field in terms of science, many people know rice as a series of A's and C's and G's and T's, but they have no idea of rice in the field. And certainly none of its cultural significance, economic significance. And for me, one of the more interesting things is the sort of anthropological and historical significance of this particular crop, even its religious significance. And so I said, well, how about we resuscitate the rice production course, but we allow, we open it now to students from the developed world since you've done such a good job training all of the people in the developing world. And he said, you know, that's a good idea. So he said, if you can go forward and work with some of the scientists at Erie and come up with a plan and fund it, we'll be happy to host such a thing. And so that was really the germ of the idea. And we took the project forward, I interacted intensively with Helion about how we might bring that course back, but also put it into the context of something that would allow people coming from the molecular biology and genomic side to learn something more about the history of rice culture in its environment, about genetic diversity, about Erie, but also just about the rice growing peoples of the world and what rice meant to them. And so from that, the proposal that we drafted went to the NSF and was funded as part of a developing country collaboration, as it's called, program that's affiliated with my large NSF project on rice diversity. And so for three years we've run that course at Erie and it's hosted, it's accommodated 10 US citizens from diverse fields, recruited nationally from all over the United States, three people from the EU who've been funded by the Gatsby Foundation, and then 12 or 13 people from the developing world, including Asia and Africa. Don't think we've had any Latin Americans yet, but we've had a number of people from all kinds of different countries throughout Asia and Africa and they've blended together the group from the EU and the US and the group from Asia and Africa into one course that now seeks to network the students as much as to expose them to the different components of rice research and rice field production. And so we call this the rice research to production course. It has a life of its own. It's now, we've got a lot more applicants these days than we did at the beginning. We have aspirations to continue the course but it's been funded now on a year by year basis by the NSF and we are looking for a longer term source of funding to continue it because I think it's one of the really remarkable blends of the old Erie and the new science that Erie embraces but where Erie doesn't engender that new science. And it allows us to bring together the sort of ancient history of rice in its center of diversity with high tech science where people are actually interested in understanding that diversity and how we can use it and how we can learn from it. And then understanding what people in rice growing parts of the world aspire to in terms of variety development, in terms of grain quality, in terms of not just the varieties that they might use but what participation they want in the production systems and in the evolution of a more sustainable future for themselves and their families. So I think it's been a wonderful opportunity to participate in the dialogue of what is the future of rice research and how will it affect rice production especially in terms of addressing the needs of the world's poorest people but also it introduces a large number of people to the environment at Erie and to the potential that Erie represents and I hope it gives it a sense that Erie is an institution that doesn't exist just as an institution where you get invited to come for a three week course but Erie is at some level a part of a spirit of international collaboration that people can actually make Erie's future by envisioning that and participating in creating that future. So it's not something that belongs to somebody else it's something that belongs to the people that want to participate in the development of how we use research wisely to address the needs of the world's poor. Yeah so Erie's reaching its 50th year. I think the great challenge is whether Erie is going to persist as an institution as we've known it or whether it's going to be transformed into something more virtual. That's how I envision the great challenges that lie ahead. The reason I say that is because I think that we have a reason to hold on to much of the infrastructure that's there but part of the infrastructure that's there has given way in other parts of the world and in other institutions to a kind of networking approach to research because the expertise that we need is not often we're not able to attract the expertise necessarily into a given physical location for the period of time at which we need to interact. And so I see Erie's future as becoming more and more that of a network of collaborators rather than a mortar and bricks place where you go and you are only Erie staff because you're there. I think that part of what I experienced during the last three years of my contract with Erie which was I was a shuttle researcher with a responsibility to Erie but a lab here at Cornell and a thought process that encompassed a larger perspective on how we could utilize molecular markers effectively in plant breeding. And when my contract ended with Erie and I became a Cornell professor the fact that my program did not change and in fact my loyalties never changed suggests that there are people like me out there for whom an inter-institutional working relationship might be a very productive way to envision a future. I also believe that we need to hold on to the mortar and the bricks and the seeds that are in that gene bank and that is a precious resource that we really have to have in one place that we can actually access. That's a living resource that needs to be looked after. But a lot of the computational work, a lot of the electronic communication, even a lot of the networking and scientific efforts that I participate in are done now in a much more virtual way. And I think that the Institute is looking forward to a future of increased movement of ideas and resources and also a very different relationship between the public and the private sector as funding changes the ways in which funding happens are changing. And I think we have to reinvent our institutions. It's not just theory that we'll have to reinvent itself. I think our university systems in the United States are undergoing an enforced reinvention. And I hope that maybe we can come together and think about who we train as university people or people in the international sector and how we're training the next generation of scientists and which problems we need to come together to address and then use a new institutional framework that includes colleagues in the private sector as well to try to address those needs. So I think Erie's not alone in facing these challenges. I think it's just that it would be nice to see our institutions get together and come up with something novel that would work and that would engage the world's most dedicated and brightest people and help work through some of the bottlenecks and some of the backlog that we've been unable to break through due to institutional barriers in the past. Yeah, so I was at Erie for a relatively short time and really just under two years with my family. But I've spent a number of weeks on end there since that time. But what I think of is there was really the foundation of my career. It allowed me to join that extended family that Erie has created over its 50 years and to be a participant both from within and from without. So I think that that cemented that identity. Another thing is that I really learned a lot about how difficult it is to envision what we used to call technology transfer. And I became a much more committed proponent of a truly participatory approach to research, to technology development, and to training. I think that when we want something to, when we wanna change the way we do business that that change I've learned over the many years, that change will not occur quickly if it's a profound change. When I went to Erie I was young and foolish and I thought that there was something called technology transfer where you had a good idea and you brought it essentially to people they would welcome you with open arms, take up that idea and then that would continue the process. And I see that it doesn't work that way. That was naive. I think Erie taught me that much of the resistance to new ideas that is just simply, a feature of a large, multi-pronged, multi-disciplinary institution is the buffer that's required to ensure that ideas are vetted. On the other hand, I think that one of the other things I learned about Erie was that it's very, very, it tends to be a very conservative place intellectually. It is resting on a series of relationships that have worked well in the past but that as I said in my previous comments, I think we're at the point where some of the new ideas are not able to find their way into the parlance of the institution as rapidly as they might because of maybe some structural, some structural or some organizational components that I may not understand myself what needs to be changed but I did learn that if you wanna do innovative science, Erie is probably not the actually, at least to the type of science I do is not set up for that. Erie is set up to take innovative ideas and try to transform them into very complex sociological and political realities and it is very well suited to that. So it has a place where you can vet ideas, you can bring ideas, they may be rejected for a while and accepted 10 years later but it will vet a lot of things that are brought to it and it will be very careful about how it then implements those things. It taught me that, it also taught me that we really need an international institution that does allow us to bring ideas into a forum, propose things and not expect them to be acted on immediately. We need that kind of forum and we also need these connections with the fast-paced scientific institutions where everything that's new is valued and things that are older are less valued. There's a place for each. It's the interaction and the connection between them that I've grown actually to value more and more over time. I also think that Erie does a superb job of this kind of participatory training, bringing people into the institute from many different walks of life, giving them short-term or longer-term opportunities and trying their best to create that sense of extended family over time that keeps people loyal to the cause, whether they disagree with particular decisions at any moment in time or not. I think people are very loyal to the vision and to the ideal that Erie represents. So even if I feel that we need to reinvent ourselves and we really need to reinvent many of our international organizations, I think we all keep somewhere deep within us the vision that we need the organization, even as it evolves to become something new. Well, I could just say that looking back on my career, when I first went to Erie, we were working with something we called RFLP technology, stands for Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism Technology, and it was a really encumbered technology. It was slow, it was technically demanding. We had to use radioactive substances. We had to have a whole lot of safety precautions and things in place. And the dream was that one day we would have molecular markers that would tell you in real time where the genetic differences lay that ultimately determined whether variety was able to perform well under drought stress or under high levels of aluminum or whether you got Basmati grain quality and aroma or whether you got the short sticky grains of sushi rice. We really, as geneticists and as plant breeders, have always aspired to better understand the genetics underlying the traits or the phenotypes that people actually desire and need when they're trying to produce rice to feed their families. And we've come a long way. We, in my laboratory and in others like mine, we've now got technology that we're transferring almost immediately and participating in the development of this along with our eerie colleagues that gives us no radiation, turnaround times of days rather than weeks or months, technically much easier because now it's handled by robots. So it's actually technically very complex but it's under the hood and that's now an engineering problem rather than a genetics problem. These markers are being used in medicine, they're being used in agriculture, they're being used in all kinds of biology today and by being able to look at natural variation with as much of a magnifying lens as we can now do in real time. I think my dream and maybe the most exciting thing for me is that our work is finally enabling us to better utilize the natural variation that nature has given us. The wild, the weedy accessions of rice, they are very valuable sources of genes that give us a range of opportunities to address the changes in climate and the changes in production system and the population pressures that we're gonna face in the future. So I for one am very excited about what it is, what the genetic side of the equation has enabled us to do and what I think in combination with colleagues in the social sciences, in economics, in agronomy and in a range of other disciplines are going to enable us to do to better package varieties of rice for the production systems of the future and I think if we can do that, my very small contribution will have been to enable us to do that more quickly and to better utilize the natural resources that exist both in the Erie Germ Plasm Bank and in farmers fields.