Ellen Rothenberg and the Power of Mentorship
By Lori Dajose
Scientists with research to publish and data to analyze from home were relatively lucky during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, but being cut off from real-life human contact still hurt. Precious intellectual challenge was badly missed, says Ellen Rothenberg, the Edward B. Lewis Professor of Biology.
"You're stuck in an echo chamber of your own thoughts, with all their limitations, because you can't connect with other people's minds, other people's critiques, nor can you see other people’s inspirations."
Rothenberg cites these connections as a major source of scientific inspiration—and her students and colleagues feel similarly inspired by her. In over 40 years at Caltech, Rothenberg has been recognized formally and informally as an important mentor to many. In 2016, she received the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and has received—multiple times each—the Biology Undergraduate Students Advisory Council Award for excellence in teaching, the Ferguson Prize for Undergraduate Teaching, and the Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology (ASCIT) Award for Undergraduate Teaching.
Here, she shares with Caltech magazine her distinctive approach to teaching, mentoring, and human connections; and gives a piece of advice for all aspiring scientists.
Bette Korber, a 2022 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient, cited your mentorship as a positive force in her life. Do you find that there is a difference between teaching and mentoring? Or are those the same thing to you?”
“Everything about science is about resilience. ”
Well, I think that there is a difference. I'm so flattered and honored that she considered it mentoring because what I thought we were doing was teaching, and learning, and learning by teaching together, which was wonderful.
The mentoring is what I think I’m doing for people in my lab or graduate students whose thesis committees I'm on. I've gotten more and more participatory in that as time has gone on because I am much more aware of how people need career advice, and have doubts, and worry about interactions with others in the lab. And [when I’m on a committee for students in] other labs, I'm much more sensitive to that than I used to be. I really used to be a little bit oblivious about the need for advice, I have to say, but I was just trying to show what I loved about the science itself with them and hoping that they would share that love.
Take us inside of one of your classrooms—what kind of learning environment do you try to create?
What I've aimed for in all of my teaching is simply to share my vision of the science and to encourage young, brilliant people to be part of that.
I don’t follow one of the methods we’re supposed to use nowadays. The classes are based on my own lectures about the material, so that is probably out of fashion. But my classes are usually small, and they’re very organic, very dynamic. A sign that the class is working well is when the students are interrupting everything I present. My TAs and I try to create an atmosphere in which everybody in the class feels that they have free license to ask anything that they want. I want every person to raise a hand. When it’s working well, the students really shape what is done in the hour and a half or two hours of the class.
The exchange of ideas is enormously enriching. There are younger and older people in the room, but we're really all colleagues. The students may not realize this yet, but it's not a hierarchy, it's just an age difference. And I hope that I'll stay in touch with my students for decades. it's really fantastic to meet brilliant people at a young age and see they're already showing so much potential and so much creativity in their thinking. It's just a joy to know them.
I've been around long enough to see a bunch of them succeed very highly. Of course, Bette Korber has had an enormous impact. I also remember Ardem Patapoutian when he was an early graduate student, and now he's a Nobel laureate; Charlie Rice was running around the Strauss lab where he had just gotten his PhD when I first came as an assistant professor, and now he's a Nobel laureate. I don't mean you need to win a Nobel Prize to be an absolutely inspirational scientist. So many of our students have become superb scientists, and others find themselves more fulfilled doing other things very well. I admire that very much too.
So, you feel like you're learning from your students as much as they're learning from you?
Constantly. Yeah.
What inspired your two-way dialogue approach to teaching?
Well, my family was that way. I was brought up in an academic family. Every single one of our dinners was everybody debating with everybody else, a free-for-all. My parents weren’t scientists; my father was an economist, and my mother is an economic historian. Their interests were very different from mine, but they were always very intellectually engaged people.
“There are younger and older people in the room, but we’re really all colleagues. The students may not realize this yet, but it’s not a hierarchy, it’s just an age difference. ”
We had very, very lively discussions as part of our very close family life, much more than in school. I just thought that was the way an atmosphere of learning was supposed to be. That was the way you became excited about things and grappled with them more powerfully. The notion is that you talk, you challenge, you probe—because you care. I've been trying to communicate that to my students.
What advice would you like to impart to your students and mentees?
I think that young students start to learn really fast that there is a lot of defeat in science. You are having papers rejected; you are having grants rejected; you are having proposals rejected—you can get very angry about these little defeats. But the way you react to them determines whether they are just annoying or turn into big defeats.
Everything about science is about resilience. The system actually works brilliantly if you can restrict your mourning to a short period of time, and then use it to fuel your creativity to come back with an absolutely better option. It often frees you to see something new that really is stronger and more incisive than what you proposed before. It's like one of those orbits of a satellite where you slingshot around a planet. You can slingshot around your despair and then fly off it. You’ve got to do that—that's how you make it. Everybody in this field gets “defeated” repeatedly like that—it doesn’t destroy you. You have to just find a way to limit the mourning and fly off again more powerfully than before.