People
On the Road to Science
U of G librarian weaves together roles as counsellor, teacher, consultant and author
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Olivia, 9, plans to become an interior designer or singer. Her cousin Allison, 7, wants to be a librarian and artist. But if the girls ever consider becoming scientists, they'll know where to turn for career advice: their step-grandmother. Recently appointed U of G librarian Peggy Pritchard has taken on many roles — student counsellor, teacher, consultant and author — as she weaves together a career advising students on their own pathways toward science. Thinking of her granddaughters but speaking for any student, she says: “It's important that they follow their heart. What is it about science that interests them?”
In November, Pritchard started a contract appointment at Guelph as academic liaison librarian for chemistry, physics and engineering. Besides heading daily to campus — a trip the 48-year-old occasionally makes astride her Kawasaki motorcycle (“What is so wonderful is to drive down the street and see the men's heads turning because they're jealous,” she laughs) — she took on an extracurricular post with a new off-campus website that helps high school students move more easily into university science programs. Call it a “coach's corner” for tomorrow's scientists.
Officially, Pritchard is the online coach for SONIC (Synapse Outreach Network in Cellsignals), a science recruitment program funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in partnership with the Toronto-based Canadian Biotechnology Education Resource Centre.
This virtual mentoring program promotes health research careers among middle and high school students by providing help with science fair entries, classroom visits, teacher information and summer research experiences. Visitors to the program website (www.cellsignals.ca/sonic) can view short video clips of scientists and PhD students talking about their work.
As of last September, users can also click around the SONIC coach section — complete with Pritchard's photo and bio — to pose career questions and see her posted replies. Recent queries have included how to figure out university costs, how to find part-time work while studying, and how to combine science and military training at university. She's also written short articles for the site about emerging careers in nutrigenomics, bioinformatics and neuroscience.
Pritchard says students view her as an independent source of advice apart from their parents and other, possibly biased, acquaintances. That's a role she cultivated as a career counsellor at Queen's University during the mid- to late 1990s. One key tip she learned while talking with students was to listen to the verbs, not the nouns.
“It's not: ‘I want to be a veterinarian.' Instead it's: ‘I'm so interested in improving the health and working life of these thoroughbred horses.' If you hear the questions they're asking themselves, the questions tell you what's fascinating them.”
Her SONIC role came in a roundabout way.
Several years ago, Richard Ellen, a professor of dentistry at the University of Toronto, began “Cellsignals” as a CIHR strategic training program for grad students in health research. Last year, he obtained additional funding to extend the program to teens interested in health research careers. Pondering how to reach that younger audience through the program's existing website, he thought of Pritchard.
She had edited a book published in 2006 called Success Strategies for Women in Science: A Portable Mentor. She had also relocated her communications consulting business to Guelph. (Pritchard had accompanied her husband, Andrew Kropinski — a microbiologist at Queen's — for his secondment to the Public Health Agency of Canada here. He's also an adjunct professor in U of G's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.)
Speaking of Pritchard, Ellen says: “She seems to love what she's doing. I think that alone is a terrific message for teenagers. She has this sparkle — she feels really strongly about what she's doing. She's working in a very important area.”
That “area” involves promoting science to both girls and boys, as well as providing advice specifically for female students nearing the end of their graduate studies and beginning their science careers.
The latter audience is the intended readership for her book, which grew out of a problem she had noticed at Queen's. There, she and a colleague had introduced a skills training course in 2000 for microbiology grad students — male and female. Pritchard encouraged her female students to look for mentors among faculty members, but the idea was apparently too daunting for them.
“They were concerned that these women would want nothing to do with students. I thought: ‘If I can't get my students to go to the mentors, I'll bring the mentors to the students.'”
That ultimately led to publication of Success Strategies for Women in Science. Published by Elsevier, the 350-page volume discusses such topics as career management and professional development, mentoring, networking, communicating science, time stress and work-life balance. Individual chapters were written by female scientists at universities and research institutes in Canada, the United States and Europe.
Besides editing the book, Pritchard interviewed more than 350 scientists about their experiences, including physicist Ursula Franklin; Rita Colwell, former director of the U.S. National Science Foundation; and CIHR research vice-president Mark Bisby. She used many of their stories in the book and also wrote chapters on career management, time management and mental toughness.
Her project was partly funded by CIHR, which has voiced concerns about low application rates for research funding among women and relatively few nominations of women for Canada Research Chairs at universities.
The book has a U of G connection. In 2004, as she was completing the manuscript, Pritchard came to Guelph for an earlier research leave of Kropinski's. As a visiting scholar, she met engineering professor Valerie Davidson, who offered Pritchard office space in the Thornbrough Building to finish the project.
The book resonated for Davidson, who has held an NSERC/HP Chair for Women in Science and Engineering since 2003. She says the proportion of female students in university science programs is growing, but that number falls off when those women reach the workforce.
That's echoed by Bisby and Miriam Stewart, scientific director of CIHR's Institute of Gender and Health. In the book's foreword, they write: “In our 2003 competition for PhD studentships, 58 per cent of the applicants were women; for post-doctoral fellowships, 47 per cent were women; and for career awards for new faculty, only 36 per cent were women.” They go on to note that when CIHR last offered awards for senior investigators in 1992, women made up only 20 per cent of award holders.
“Her book gives a lot of different practical tips,” says Davidson, who organized a campus lecture by Pritchard in early 2005. “Those kinds of details are helpful when you're going from being a student to being a working professional.”
The two have reconnected since Pritchard returned to Guelph and are beginning a pilot project to archive materials from Davidson's regional chair for a digital collection in the McLaughlin Library. Davidson says that collection may grow to include all five regional chairs across Canada.
Pritchard is one of 13 academic liaison librarians assigned to academic units across campus. As the library's main contact for faculty, staff and students in chemistry, physics and engineering, she helps develop research and teaching collections and provides information on literacy skills training.
She's worked in libraries at McGill University and the University of Lethbridge, as well as at the Barrie Public Library. She studied library and information studies at McGill for her master's degree, following an undergraduate degree in health and physical education at Queen's.
Besides offering online career advice through SONIC, she runs Pritchard Communications and Consulting in Guelph. As a speaker, she has given presentations to young scientists at U of G and at universities in Europe and the United States. Early this year, she will discuss women in science at the University of California at Berkeley. She's also president of Town and Gown Toastmasters in Guelph.
Looking for the thread running through those interests, Pritchard says it's all about making connections, for her and for others. “I have a passion for that.”