Science

Home > Science

Curiosity Rover Driver

The first motorized vehicle that Vandi Verma ever operated was a tractor. “I must've been 11 years old at the time,” she told Science. During school vacations, she visited her grandparents, who lived in a village in central India. At their farm, her uncle let...

Reflections of a Pioneer Woman Scientist

In her career as a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus, who is now 83, has researched the electronic structure of carbon in its myriad forms. Dresselhaus was in Oslo for the Kavli awards ceremony this year. I caught up with...

Consulting Careers for PhDs

It doesn’t matter all that much what your Ph.D. is in—the important thing is the analytical approach you bring, writes Brian Rolfes, partner and director of global recruiting at McKinsey & Company, in an e-mail. “That said,” Rolfes adds, “we are delighted when new hires...

Some Virtues of Virtual Panels

Douglas Fisher, an associate professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University, started his 3-year rotation as program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2007. That fall, he convened and chaired in-person panels to decide the fate of NSF grant proposals in information sciences....

Elite Male Faculty Employ Fewer Women

Jason Sheltzer is a graduate student in cancer genomics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He works in the Amon Lab, where the principal investigator (PI), half the graduate students and half the postdocs are women. Sheltzer was astonished when a friend at...

Many Strikes, Never Out

In 2009, Chandrakala Puligilla, a young biomedical researcher who studies cell fate specification in mammals, won the prestigious K99 award—the postdoctoral half of the prestigious transition award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—on her first attempt. In 2011, she became an assistant professor at the...