| would ensure faster progress. She feels at times that she should focus more, but her focus tends to expand. This, she thinks, is partly due to the way in which she was brought up in science. Her graduate advisor, for instance, "said that a graduate student should do two different things. So in case something goes wrong with one project, you always have something in the background. And I mean I really did two different things." |
| Ann's working style is characterized by great carefulness. "You think you have something, and then when you've done it three or four times, you don't get it back, and you really didn't have it. But people publish on those first couple of times [when] it looks like there might be something there. I think there's a lot of junk in the literature because people aren't careful. So I think I'm a careful scientist, and I try to teach my students, my postdocs, to be careful scientists and think about what they're doing and to think about all the angles in it." Ann realizes that at times she might overdo her carefulness to the point of perfectionism. "Sometimes I get an idea, and I'll do the experiment. And then I think that tells me one thing, and then I'll do another experiment. But sometimes, for instance, even though I know the answer, I can see it, I wouldn't publish it. Then I become a perfectionist. That can become a detriment, when you try to get the best possible. Then you look at other things in the literature, and things aren't quite so beautiful, but the answer is still there." |
| Rather than writing strings of short papers, Ann tends to produce more complete and synthetic research papers that connect particular results with the bigger picture. "I try to relate things back, and this sometimes makes my papers complicated, and people don't understand it. It takes them three or four years. When I give a talk, they say you just put too much in because you're trying to put it all back together." Because "we aren't in the most competitive field in the world," Ann says she can get away with publication habits that do not maximize the number of research papers. |
| Ann considers it a general trend of female research scientists not to rush into publication but to present results that are both more complete and more thorough. "I think the females tend to work harder, in the sense that they want things to be more complete when they publish than men sometimes do. I think that tends to be more male: go in there and do something and then worry about the controls and all the possibilities of things that might have gone wrong afterwards rather than worrying about them in the beginning." |
| When considering internal qualities that are advantageous for her work in science, she mentions persistence and inquisitiveness: "wanting |
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