Making Science Change the World with Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:41:08] And that’s always a healthy way to go about doing this, because I know we were talking about this before. I know there are times when I I know somebody really, really well and then I see them out of context, you know, where they’re like you said, not so, but you’re not supposed to be at my job. What are you here for? It’s hard to.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:41:26] Yeah, it was it was not and also, come on, I had never seen him in a beard, he was different.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:41:35] So I guess he’s going to be upset to know I get you. Did you not watch the movie Castaway?
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:41:42] You are right. You’re right. But that was many, many years ago. He looks different now.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:41:47] I have I’ve been really trying to keep productive and do some interesting things during the the the lock down. But I will tell you that one of the things that I’ve been able to do is share a lot of movies with like we have kids that are teenage age now. And my son, his favorite movie now is Forrest Gump. So another Tom Hanks with the Beard movie. I guess he didn’t have the ZZ Top beard.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:42:15] You just go back and say, you know what, I’m just not good at this kind of thing. Oh, my memory is zero.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:42:23] Honestly, if Tom Hanks showed up at one of my talks and I was getting ready to go on stage, I was almost putting a mic on me and everything else, I probably would have I would have definitely had had to work at it to get my brain in the right gear to accept the fact that that was Tom Hanks standing standing there.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:42:40] He was very gracious about it. So let me tell you that he is a very, very nice guy. He was very gracious about it. It was like, oh, my God, I’m so fine that it wasn’t like that at all.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:42:49] Yes, I have heard that about him to that he is he’s very, very gracious. And quite honestly, I mean, it’s it’s OK. You shouldn’t expect everyone to know who you are. I mean, he he he probably got a kick out of it, quite honestly.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:43:03] I would say that was probably memorable for him. Oh, there is one person who doesn’t know who I am. Yeah. So that’s your story.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:43:13] So tell us a little bit about other opportunities or an opportunity that’s come up since you’ve earned your doctoral degree that maybe you would not have anticipated at a time when you were in a room, for example, and thought. Wow, you know, I’m actually in this room and there’s a reason why. Can you think of something like that that you just would not have thought while you were working in the lab way back when trying to earn your degree right now?
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:43:46] Absolutely. Because I I did things that I used to say. I used to wonder why are the people who do this? So I used to say I used to think that who are these people who sit around and spend their entire life talking about what should be called what? Don’t they have a life, what kind of boring people they are, the standards people. So which they say they sit around and say it’s not OK with it’s an and and then there is going to be this what is people. Oh my God. And then my first day that I sat in that meeting that I am the USA expert on a lot of documents on the isocyanate. And I was like looking around and thinking, oh my God, these people are people like me, not people. Same thing. Yeah. Another experience I used to think to myself when I was doing my PhD. Who are these sellouts who go on Capitol Hill and the scientists who actually go work on policy? I don’t understand them at all. I mean, we are here pure physics and this and that. And they’re doing and I have been the the advocate on policy for graphene in the United States. And when I on my first kind of visit to Capitol Hill and I was like standing in there and there and talking to some of the senators and I was like, I had that moment of, oh, my God, if a few years ago I would have thought about, say, who are these people? Who is the sellout, who is doing this? But my perspective has changed. We need all those things. And I would say that some of those things I used to think I would never do, I am doing it right now. And it is good to admit that at some point I thought I would never, ever be doing this. Oh, my God, never.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:45:32] But it is it is important because, I mean, a lot of where science goes in this country does depend on people in the government making decisions, making funding decisions. And so to get that out there is important. Another thing I think is very important, and I don’t know who’s doing this job right now for that job, but we really do need it is to get people honestly and truly excited about science. I don’t know what’s happened, honestly, since some of the big NASA missions in the 60s and 70s, 60s, really, I mean, in the early on the 70s, that really kind of captured the country to imagination to any extent for us to think that we have someone who’s going to go out and do this thing in science and help our country get someplace because of this thing that we’re doing in science, I think that that’s sorely missing. And I hope that we can find something like that to inspire our nation. Again, there’s a lot of really cool and interesting things that have that have happened lately that that do involve science. But I just feel like somehow science has gotten a bad rap for a number of years. And I hope we’re coming out of that now with the change in administration recently and so forth. But I hope that we’re going to get back to the point where we recognize science for what it is, which is the thing that drove the greatest economic engine in history for so many years. And we ignored it for a while. And let’s keep doing that at our own peril. We need to keep going in and moving things forward.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:47:07] Absolutely. And you know what? Science is cool. It’s just it’s a matter of branding special young people to actually get into science. You have to brand it right. Do you want people to go into nanotechnology that you have to inspire those kids? And that’s why your audience is so important that we are the ones who can represent that interesting picture of whatever it is that we were doing. And those of you who are in hard sciences, it’s even bigger because you are the person who actually can inspire someone to go and get a degree and go to high school and and be interested. I was inspired by that. I don’t know all the stories off of all the science fiction I read. I knew from very early age I wanted to be a science because it was the glory of that. Right. We have to create that glory for kids again. And once you have that as a kid, it stays with you.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:48:01] You have to work again about the stories. You know, I, I really like the way that Neil deGrasse Tyson popularizes science. He’s so good at saying things in a way that people can connect with them. When I was in in physics, in college, one of the things that we did is we had this thing called the Grandma Theorem, and it was that you didn’t really understand something until you could explain it to your grandmother that got the idea being there, that your grandmother probably wasn’t a theoretical physicist, not the. She was a simpleton, but just that she didn’t know what you were talking about, if you could explain it to her so that she did understand what you were talking about and she got something out of it. She could ask a meaningful question back then. You truly got it. And that notion of, again, we’ve talked about being able to speak to a wide audience I think is really, really important. One of the stories that Neil deGrasse Tyson tells is how we are actually made of stardust. That is what we are. And and the way he tells it is very captivating. But when you can say things like that to people so that they understand the way that these vast, huge things, I mean, we look out at night, we see stars, and what we don’t see is the factories that build us. And so I just think that that being able to communicate that in a way that’s really inspiring is is something that we should aspire to as scientists, particularly as people who work on sort of the periphery of science, if if that’s the thing.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:49:29] Absolutely. And if science is not just hard, sciences is any form of science, any of us was doing something in our own niche. We are becoming experts. We can inspire somebody else to go in that area.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:49:42] And you should spend some time figuring out how do I make somebody else? When they asked me what I do, I say, wow, that’s really cool.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:49:51] I am not good at that. You see, like being I’m really good on a stage. But if someone asked me, like, what do you do? I say, oh, yeah, I have myself.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:50:03] Even if it’s not what you do ninety nine point nine percent of the time, you can still say, oh, here’s this thing I’m doing or this is the thing I work with and maybe I work with policy. But but this thing will do this cool thing over here. Let me tell you that. Let me show you let me whatever. And then they’re like, whoa, science is cool. If we’re constantly if that’s what people are constantly thinking is how I just talked to a scientist and they said this cool thing. That’s part of what’s going to change public perception.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:50:29] You know, another thing that, as you were talking about is that I’ve realized this about myself and, you know, in academia, in a lot of these sciences, especially not in humanities, it’s in physics. And it’s it’s hard sciences, material sciences. And also, I would say applied sciences. They tell you how bad it is for us to say, I do know how they actually teach us to make it out of that equation. We always say we even if it was us who was doing it, would mean that one person we always are taught to say, because our collective is what’s important. It is taught to be extremely humble about what we do. And that is a very good thing. But at the same time, when you get out, you have to take a little bit of that off because I’ve I’ve kind of gone back. I have a very vested interest in my psychology of humanity. Sciences are really interesting to me. So I kind of have, like, gone back and looked at what is the reason of me not being able to talk to somebody about what I do. I travel so much. You know, how many times you get asked when you’re going like you’re at the airport, you’re sitting at a restaurant or bar waiting, somebody says, what do you do? And I often find myself not wanting to say it because I feel like it’s going to make somebody else feel inferior. If I say I have a Ph.D. in physics, they say their immediate reaction is this, Oh, I wasn’t really good at physics. And I’m like, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad about that. I so I’ve decided sometimes I’ve actually I, I have said that I work in insurance just to not even say that because I feel bad about making somebody else think that. But, you know, I shouldn’t be maybe I should flip it and say I want material and then put it on the materials interest, not on what?
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:52:26] I have a Ph.D. in physics and they’re like, oh, I never was good in physics. No. You know, there’s so much cool stuff in physics. Let me show you this. Cool. Let me take out a pencil or a piece of paper and show you how I can make a little graphene and how this is stronger than the steel that our airplanes made out of. And all of a sudden they’re like, yeah,.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:52:48] I put it that I usually like when I was and I’ve seen this with a lot of special female scientist. It is a lot stronger. We are afraid of seeing what we do. We are we always downplay it like people say, oh, what you’ve done. It’s just say I always downplay it. And I think that may be a way to get around it is to put the story not on us, but put the story maybe on this cool stuff that we’re working it. And that way we can kind of deal with.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:53:15] I don’t know how much, because I’ve I’ve gone away from from the, you know, the hard sciences, so to speak. So I don’t know how much this has changed. But in APA, where most of the folks that we work with, our folks there in psychology and education and, you know, business, things like that, the APA guidelines for writing academic papers. Now, do have you have the author refer to themselves as I or we, if that’s appropriate, which has been, I think, a long time coming. And I don’t know how much that represents a psychological shift that that we want scientists to be able to to be comfortable injecting themselves into the story. I don’t know. But I think it’s it’s good for at least a clarity standpoint, because I don’t know how many times when I was first learning and reading papers early on, like, OK, well, author of What when someone say the author of things such and such as you don’t you say, I think this.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:54:16] We feel guilty for saying I. Yeah, it’s it’s a guilt that I have to still kind of look at it. And and I realize that it’s usually in the kind of physics engineering fields. It doesn’t propagate outside that much. But it’s a thing that we have to work on. I think special people who are maybe doing a dissertation or they are working in that field, that’s something that maybe you get.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:54:43] When your students do what you have to do to to not be a student anymore. But but but as you grow in as a professional, I think it’s important for you to take ownership of what you do and and to be able to communicate it. I just think that’s so important in so many ways. I want more people to think science is cool. And if we can get scientists who are better at talking about it, then that’ll happen.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:55:05] I agree. Yeah.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:55:07] Yeah. Well, Dr. Cincher, thank you so much for joining us here today. This has been a rare treat for me to get the talk about some of the stuff that I have kind of geeked out on for years and years myself. And I think it’s been an interesting conversation, I think, for everybody. These notions of communication and how you present yourself and and how you feel comfortable with yourself and what you’re doing, I think it’s it’s important for everybody to understand.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:55:33] It was a pleasure speaking with you. It was really fun experience, and I think that it was a very broad topic that we talk about. We touched on a lot of different things, and I hope that your audience finds it and educational to us, but also enjoy at the same time.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:55:50] That’s the fun thing for me about talking to all these interesting people from so many different aspects of of of science, of academia, of industry is all of these unique perspective. So I really enjoyed it. And I want to thank you again for being with us today.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:56:06] Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:56:08] Now, if folks would like to reach out to you because they want to know more about graphene or they they’re interested in kind of how you have been able to get to where you are after completing your doctoral degree, what’s the best way for someone to reach you to continue this conversation?
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:56:25] I’m easily accessible on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, such a good day and I’m very responsive. My door is always open. So if anybody wants to reach out to me, please feel free to do that. And Zina Jarrahi Cinker, easy enough and unique enough.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:56:43] We’ll put a linkin the show notes. For anybody who has a hard time finding that, you can just go to our blog at DissertationDone.com/blog and find Dr. Cinker’s episode there. And we’ll have we’ll have links to LinkedIn and everything as well. So thank you once again, Dr. Cinker, and remind everybody else that’s listening that today’s episode has been brought to you by Dissertation Done. So if you are facing the dissertation process in the near future or in the clear present, reach out to as at DissertationDone.com/done. And we’ll see if you might be a good fit for our Fast Track Your Dissertation coaching program. And if you are an expert and you’d like to get your message out there, the best way to Expand Your Authority is by becoming a published author. And we’ll take you from the blank page to a published book in less time than you thought possible. Check us out at DissertationDone.com/book. For more on that again, Dr. Cinker, thank you so much for being here today.
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker [00:57:39] Absolutely was an absolute pleasure. And I look forward to keeping in touch with any of your folks that are interested in learning more about graphene and for everyone else out there.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:57:49] Have a great day and go out with your unconventional life.
Outro [00:57:59] This has been an unconventional life. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, subscribe now to keep getting inspirational stories of unconventional lives as soon as they’re released. Until then, go out and live your best unconventional life.
