From Berkeley to Boston: Stories from a scientist

Interviewer: Can you talk a little bit about your career?

Sam: Well, I got a PhD in chemistry from Berkeley.

I interviewed at a bunch of companies—there was also a possibility of a faculty job in the Midwest, but I wasn't interested. 

I had a woman PhD friend, who eventually became my wife, at graduate school. She finished first, so I wanted to go to the same Boston area she went to. So I ended up getting a job at Lincoln Laboratory, which was part of MIT, and I ended up working for two years in Applied Physics, instead of chemistry, studying the properties of thin magnetic films.

She got a job at a company doing inorganic chemistry where we both had much higher salaries than graduate students, so we were able to save money for this trip. 

After we came back, we switched fields by doing postdoctoral positions in separate places. We got married, I went to Brandeis for three years in the biochem department, and my wife went to Harvard Medical School in the bacteriology department.  As time went on, I got a job at a non-profit institute at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute.

We had to apply for our own grants to support our own research. I was able to survive for over 30 years getting renewed grants. And I had a small lab with one or two postdocs, one or two assistants, a summer student, over that time.

My lab was studying how interactions between proteins regulate muscle contraction. My wife’s lab studied cell differentiation in embryo retinas.

We managed to raise two children and maintain our professional careers by sharing child care and also with the help of an au-pair young woman from Europe for a few years when our children were young.