Growing
up in
Science

Sharing the unofficial, untold, and
unconventional stories of people
in science.

Growing
up in
Science



Sharing the unofficial, untold, and
unconventional stories of people
in science.

Coming Soon

Wed

Oct 29

Stephen Zhang

Official Story

Stephen received his BA degree in Biochemistry from Grinnell College, where he stumbled upon neuroscience research by working with Clark Lindgren on the lizard neuromuscular junction. After finishing college, he briefly worked as a neuroscience lab TA before pursuing a PhD in neurobiology at Harvard University. In graduate school…



Past Events

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Wed

Mar 27

Joseph LeDoux

Official Story

Joseph LeDoux received undergraduate and master’s degrees from Louisiana State University (1971 and 1974), and a PhD from what is now known as Stony Brook University (1978). He spent ten years in the Neurobiology Lab at Cornell Medical school, and in 1989 joined the new Center for Neural Science at NYU as the first outside hire…

Mon

Dec 18

Gabrielle Gutierrez

Official Story

Dr. Gabrielle Gutierrez is a computational and theoretical neuroscientist who has worked on a range of scientific questions. From investigating how the retina encodes compressed visual information to exploring how spike-frequency adaptation makes a population code more efficient, Dr. Gutierrez’s work aims to understand how the…

Tue

Nov 14

Susan Carey

Official Story

Susan Carey entered at Radcliffe College with an interest in math/science, settled on cognitive science in her junior year, graduated summa cum laude in 1964, having worked with Peter Wason, George Miller and Jerome Bruner in the earliest days of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. After a Fulbright in London, she returned…

Mon

Oct 16

Vishnu "Deepu" Murty

Official Story

Vishnu “Deepu” Murty received his PhD in Neurobiology with a certificate in Cognitive Neuroscience from Duke University, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at New York University in the Department of Psychology. His first faculty position was in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, and he is currently an…



About Us

We highlight the human stories behind the science.

Have you ever wondered what your advisor struggled with as a graduate student? What they struggle with now? Growing up in Science is a conversation series featuring personal narratives of becoming and being a scientist.

Growing up in Science was started in 2014 at New York University by professors Wei Ji Ma and Cristina Alberini, and is now worldwide.This article describes the origin and impact of the series. At a typical Growing up in Science event, one faculty member shares their life story, with a focus on struggles, failures, doubts, detours, and weaknesses. Common topics include dealing with expectations, impostor syndrome, procrastination, luck, rejection, conflicts with advisors, and work-life balance, but these topics are always embedded in the speaker's broader narrative.

Join us for a conversation about the human factors that are universal undercurrents of working in academia but that too often remain unspoken.

18

Chapters

50+

Stories

11

Years