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Girl, Decoded

As she sat in a taxi headed to Cairo International Airport in September 2001, Rana el Kaliouby remembers thinking, “Am I really going through with this?” A married woman and hijab-wearing Muslim, she would be on her own for the next 3 years, pursuing her...

Can postdocs be job creators instead of job seekers?

As Ronan McGovern was finishing up his Ph.D., he was eager to commercialize the energy-efficient seawater desalination process he had developed. He had already done some legwork to find a market and had found an interesting lead—but he had also hit some roadblocks. Like most...

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....