Lewis Brooks:
We've now reached one of my favorite parts of the weekend, when we recognize the most recent Alumni Achievement Award recipients. This year's recipients exemplify how Brandeis alumni are using their education and talents to help repair the world and to literally save the planet. I know they make us all feel especially proud to be Brandeisians. President Liebowitz will now present the awards to these year's recipients who will join us on screen.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you, Lewis. This is a great part of today's program, and it's one of my favorite times of the year. This year there are three Alumni Achievement Award recipients, Patricia Hill Collins, class of '69 and PhD class of '84, Susan Reich Weiss, class of '71, and Drew Weissman, class of '81, also MA '81, and a parent of a student from the class of 2015. All three recipients of this year's alumni award are at the forefront of critical issues facing the United States and the world, the coronavirus pandemic and racial injustice. The Brandeis Alumni Achievement Award represents the highest form of university recognition, bestowed exclusively upon alumni. It's given in recognition of distinguished contribution to one's profession or chosen field of endeavor, and I'm honored to recognize our three awardees today.
Ron Liebowitz:
First, Patricia Hill Collins. Patricia Hill Collins has dedicated her career to understanding the intersections of race, gender, and class. Distinguished university professor emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park, and distinguished professor of sociology and Africana studies emerita at the University of Cincinnati. Collins is the author of 10 books. In 2008 she became the first African American woman to reside over the American Sociological Association. A Philadelphia native, Patricia came to Brandeis University in 1965, where she was deeply influenced by Pauli Murray, the civil rights leader and then university's first professor of African American and women studies.
Ron Liebowitz:
Patricia received her master's degree from Harvard University and directed the African American center at Tufts University before returning to Brandeis to earn a doctorate in sociology. Her books include Black Feminist Thought, first published in 1990, and honored with numerous awards, and Black Sexual Politics. Her other works include the widely used textbook Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism, and Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. She has also authored more than 50 articles and essays and dozens of film and book reviews.
Ron Liebowitz:
In 2013 she received Brandeis's Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize for scholarly excellence and contribution to racial, ethnic, and religious relations. So, with admiration and gratitude, I present Patricia Hill Collins with the Alumni Achievement Award, whose citation reads. Patricia Hill Collins, an eminent scholar and leader in social theory at the intersection of feminism, gender, race and social inequality. The author of 10 books, among them the award-winning Black Feminist Thought and Black Sexual Politics, and the first African American woman to reside over the American Sociological Association. Congratulations.
Ron Liebowitz:
It is now my honor to recognize Susan Reich Weiss. The concept of the coronavirus might have become known to most people only last year, but Susan Reich Weiss, class of '71, professor and vice chair of microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying coronaviruses for four decades. Weiss is co-director of the Penn Center for Research on Coronavirus and Other Emerging Pathogens, established this past March to coordinate and boost the university's efforts to confront the COVID-19 pandemic. Susan was raised in Yonkers, New York. As a biology major at Brandeis University and later as a graduate student in microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard, Weiss worked in bacteriology labs before switching to studying viruses.
Ron Liebowitz:
After Harvard, Weiss joined the retrovirus lab at the University of California, San Francisco. She moved to Penn in 1980, where she developed a lab that focuses on researching the basic science around coronaviruses and has continued this line of research for four decades. She also gained a reputation for mentoring young scientists, serving from 2010 to 2019 as associate dean for post doctoral research training. In the early 2000s, attention to coronavirus began to grow with the outbreak of the SARS coronavirus and continued with the 2012 MERS coronavirus outbreak. Each of those coronaviruses caused fewer than 1,000 deaths worldwide. Susan is credited with helping to speed up the understanding, treatment, and ultimately the vaccines of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. So with admiration and gratitude, I recognize Susan with the 2021 Alumni Achievement Award, whose citation reads. Susan Reich Weiss, a pioneer in the study of coronaviruses, whose scientific research over the past four decades has helped with the understanding of the 2002 SARS and the 2012 MERS outbreak, as well as the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Founding co-director of the Penn Center for Research on coronavirus and other emerging pathogens. Congratulations.
Susan Reich Weiss:
Thank you.
Ron Liebowitz:
Last, it is my honor to recognize Drew Weissman. Drew Weissman, class of '81, MA '81, and a parent of class of 2015, is a professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of vaccine research at the school's division of infectious diseases. More than 20 years ago, Drew began studying how messenger RNA inside cells could be used to create vaccines. His collaborative work is now credited with laying the groundwork for the COVID-19 vaccines created by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. Drew, who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, was a biochemistry major at Brandeis and received his PhD from Boston University. When he arrived at Penn in 1997, he began collaborating with biochemist Katalin Karikó on using mRNA as the basis for a vaccine.
Ron Liebowitz:
Over the years, many researchers gave up on mRNA, but Drew and Katalin persisted. By engineering a modified version of the messenger RNA and then developing a system to deliver it to its target, the two researchers laid the groundwork for the vaccine brought to fruition by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Together they were awarded this year's Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award in basic medical from Brandeis and then Rosenstiel Foundation.
Ron Liebowitz:
Weissman is now focusing on an even more ambitious project, developing a vaccine for all coronaviruses. Besides SARS-CoV-2, two other lethal varieties of coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, have spread among humans in recent years. Drew's breakthroughs are another example of how basic science innovation can advance the sciences in particular address pressing health challenges. So, with admiration and gratitude, I present Drew Weissman with the 2021 alumni achievement award, whose citation reads. Drew Weissman, a groundbreaking biochemist whose basic science research over the past two decades has had profound and worldwide implications, a collaborator in the modification of nucleic acids for RNA therapeutics and vaccines, created with laying the groundwork for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccines. Congratulations.
Ron Liebowitz:
Now we move to a wonderful part of the program, where we have a conversation with our three recipients, and I have a host of questions to ask them. I think what I would prefer to make this easier on all of us, is if we answer these questions in the following order. I'll ask this question, and I hope that each one of you can provide an answer in the order, as the way I see people on the screen, Patricia, then Drew, then Susan. So, I have a few of these questions and then we'll take questions of course from our alumni and Lewis will come on to direct that traffic.
Ron Liebowitz:
Okay, first. As president of the university, I can't begin a conversation with such esteemed alumni without asking about your time at Brandeis. So, why don't we begin, and Patricia, as I said before, you can go first. Could each of you tell me what drew you to Brandeis first of all and how you chose your major? So, what brought you to Brandeis and then how did you choose to study what you ultimately studied here?
Patricia Hill Collins:
I think it's important for you to know that I'm the first person in my family to graduate from college. So, I had not the same situation as many people have. What drew me to Brandeis was that Brandeis reached out to me. This was the beginning of affirmative action or positive action, where because I scored really well on the PSAT, there was a little box I could check for schools that wanted to get in touch with students like myself, and I checked that box, I claimed it, and Brandeis sent me material, and I looked at the material and I trusted the brochure, and anyone who's ever taught in a university knows, the brochure doesn't necessarily match what you're going to experience.
Patricia Hill Collins:
When I arrived on campus, as far as I was concerned, it was like I never had a chance to do a campus visit, so the first time I visited Brandeis was my first day of campus, and it was a shock, but what a rich environment. I was fortunate enough to go to school during a period of time when there was a lot going on. I was interested in race and I was drawn to sociology because it was the only area that was trying to think through in a very substantive and important way how we deal with race. So, that's how I ended up in sociology, and there's more to the story, but I'll stop there.
Ron Liebowitz:
That's terrific. Thank you, Patricia. Drew, how about you?
Drew Weissman:
I was always interested in science and I was attracted to Brandeis's science program. I continued my interest throughout Brandeis. My choices were to graduate in three years or to stay a fourth and get a master's degree. I chose to do research because it interested me. So, the attraction was it was a great campus, it was a tight campus. People got along great. People supported each other and they had a great science program.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you. Thank you, Drew. How about you, Susan?
Susan Reich Weiss:
Okay, so my choice was a little bit more random. I just had an older friend who went to Brandeis and it just appealed to me. My other choice was to go to one of the big state universities in New York, which cost half as much money. So, with some arguments with my parents I convinced them to let me go to Brandeis, with the provision that I would work every summer and pay as much of it as I could myself. I think it was well worth it. I also, like Drew, wanted to do science, and I saw Brandeis as a place where I could really have great, rigorous science, but also I was interested in other things. I took several years of Russian and Spanish, I really liked languages. So, for me, that was really a plus at Brandeis. Being able to do science and being able to have a broader education and having friends that were interested in all different kinds of disciplines at the time. So, I have absolutely no regrets. I was really glad I went to Brandeis. Oh, and I should mention too I had the opportunity, as Ron mentioned, to work in several labs, to really be part of a research lab, which got me really hooked on going further in science.
Ron Liebowitz:
We're glad all you came to Brandeis too. One more follow-up question about Brandeis though. How would you say your time at Brandeis, because you mentioned it was a very rich time to be on this campus, and Drew and Susan mentioned that science had already had an outstanding reputation, but how would you say your time at Brandeis influenced your future career path, what you chose to do for your career? How did your time, these four years, or yeah, four years, how did it influence you?
Patricia Hill Collins:
For me, the liberal arts aspect of it was really important. What I learned at Brandeis was how to think for myself and how to research for myself, and how to ask questions that other people hadn't necessarily asked. I found the freedom on campus to do that, that was very different than my high school. Sociology, music, I was interested in music, I was interested in math. There was a lot that I could explore on campus, and that has influenced the kind of work that I've been able to do since, very much so in terms of my theoretical and conceptual work.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you. Drew.
Drew Weissman:
It's kind of a difficult question because there's so much I can say. I think what really sticks out in my mind is the collegiality, the collaborative nature, and the friendships that I developed at Brandeis. It was an incredibly warm and supportive community. I was a premed, I got an MD PhD afterwards. It's an incredibly stressful time, being in the premed program, but I had the support of not only the students, my friends, but the teachers as well. They wanted us to succeed, and I think that's what shaped my future. Where right now I have a lot of students in my lab and I work with them to help them succeed, and that's what Brandeis taught me.
Patricia Hill Collins:
I guess I agree with just about everything that the two previous people said, and particularly what Drew said about the sort of, even though I wasn't premed, I had all my classes with the premed group, and this was a pretty tight group of people that were together and study together and that sort of thing. But for me, I think the most influential thing was I worked in the lab of David Gillespie, who left Brandeis a very long time ago, and actually moved to Philadelphia. But anyway, working in his lab I got to work along with the graduate students and really do my own research project, which really got me excited about going to grad school in microbiology, and from there I went on to switch, as you said, to virology. So Brandeis had a big influence on me that way.
Ron Liebowitz:
I suspect the follow-up question that I would have here, very different responses from Patricia versus Drew and Susan, but what about the political climate on campus at the time? Patricia and Susan both there in the '60s and carried over to the early '70s, and Drew there in the '70s, going into the early '80s. The science area might be different from the social science area in terms of experience, but I'm wondering how the environment on campus, the activism that Brandeis was known for at that period of time, how that affected all of you or any of you? Patricia, do you want to go first?
Patricia Hill Collins:
It had a profound effect on me. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, which was halfway through my degree. So, I experienced arriving on one campus and leaving a very different campus in terms of how racial issues were operating and also the war was an ongoing issue on campus in terms of those times. I want to stress though that it's really important to realize that you can be passionate about something, politically involved, and be an excellent student. It's not a question of choosing one or the other, it's actually using your education to be excellent to do bigger things, and that to me was what I took away from those years. I appreciated the activism, I appreciated all the things that were going on around me, but I was the bookish student in the library all the time. That's where I spent my time, and it was well worth it.
Drew Weissman:
I was involved in the activism, and back during that time it was mixed. There were a lot of issues that people were concerned about, everything from environment, to racial equality, to voting, to Jews for Jesus. It was a big range of things, and because a lot of my friends who are political science majors and we supported each other, I was interested in those things, but my main focus, I was in the lab doing research, and that's where I was happiest. This past year I've been on the news and in film and TV, and I found that I'm not happy doing that, I'm happy working in the lab. So, that's my happy place.
Patricia Hill Collins:
Yes, yes. Clap for that.
Ron Liebowitz:
Susan.
Susan Reich Weiss:
Yeah, I think I have to quite agree with you. I was in overlap with Patricia at Brandeis and I also saw a lot of things going on around me. I saw the antiwar movement, and I think it was in '69 there was a student strike, well not really a strike, but all the classes shut down, except for organic chemistry, which I was taking at the time, because those guys would never shut down. So again, there was a sort of mixture of all this turmoil going on around us and all these really terrible things, I think. There were students hiding a draft dodger in one of the buildings. There was recruitment for military recruitments being protested. It was really a pretty ... I know it was a terrible time in a way, but I also kept studying my chemistry, like everyone else, because we had to. So, yeah. I mean, I think all three of us, it sounds like all three of us continued to do our studies while the world was burning around us too.
Ron Liebowitz:
It's interesting-
Patricia Hill Collins:
I'd like to add something though. It's not that I was squirreled away in the library and uninvolved. What I'd like to stress is that involvement, the classroom and outside the classroom work together. I happened to be in the class law as an instrument of social change, that was taught by Pauli Murray, while the building where we were holding our class was taken over. It was very difficult to squirrel oneself away in many situations from what was going on outside. I don't feel it was terrible. I felt it was really quite important that those types of activities occurred. The issue was navigating it and making sense of it.
Susan Reich Weiss:
Yeah, I didn't mean it was terrible that those things happened, but it was just a lot of turmoil, and I guess for we, science people, it was a little bit easier to squirrel ourselves away in the science quadrangle because it was... but no, I totally support a lot of what was going on.
Ron Liebowitz:
It's interesting, as a no Brandeisian coming in to Brandeis and as an administrator, the one thing I hear most in traveling and engaging alumni is this issue, about the incredible engagement of the student body. It's one thing that comes to mind when they rethink their experience at Brandeis. As Drew said, there were a number of issues that they bring up. I never heard Jew for Jesus, but I heard a lot of the other ones, the environmentalism, and I heard about apartheid, and I heard about race relations, and I heard about all these issues, but this is what Brandeisians seem to recall most about their, in addition to loving their educational experience, by the way. They don't talk about student life, they don't talk about the parties, they don't talk about those issues, they talk about these two things, academic excellence and the activism. I think many of us, administrators, have gotten a little soft that the first sign of student activism we get all nervous and we get all exercised about where is this heading, but in reality it's been part of Brandeis's history, and I think some of us could really learn, step back and learn by talking to the alums here what it was like, because all of us survived and all of you survived, to the benefit.
Ron Liebowitz:
Okay, let's move on. Now, all of you have had relatively long and storied research careers, and I'm wondering what kept you going? In other words, there are times, and I know in some cases, especially with science, when we fail at something it could be easy to throw the towel in, but even in the social sciences when you think about pushing a new idea, a new paradigm in thinking, Patricia, and Drew and Susan in science it's probably similar, what kept you going? What motivated you to keep up what you were doing to become successful over such a long period of time?
Patricia Hill Collins:
I realized that I was going to be first in line in a lot of situations and that people would be following me. If I were doing my job correctly, I would be thinking about social inequality, and that is a question that is never going to be solved. It's not a problem that can be solved. It's something where we can continue to move forward and think in more deep and comprehensive ways about where we want to go. I started my work in race at Brandeis, but I continued on through class, and through gender, and through sexuality, and through nationalism, and through ethnicity, and ability, because these are all things that are axes of social inequality. So, what kept me going was the importance of the question that I was investigating and recognizing that I got my education for a reason. It wasn't just for me, it was bigger than me.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you. Drew, what kept you going?
Drew Weissman:
Our story goes back 24 years, where Katy and I started working on RNA at a time when nobody cared about RNA and nobody thought it would be a good therapeutic. People would look at me and say, "Why are you doing this? You're wasting your time." And Katy and I, we kept working at it, because we knew it had enormous potential. The potential to us was so great, we weren't willing to give up. Now, what's funny, nowadays I'm asked, well, what do you tell your students, your PhD students, your assistant professors when they come to you with a project that's not working? Would you let them go 23 years without success? And I of course have to immediately say no, of course not. I think you have to look at the project and decide, is this worth putting many years of your life and your career into? And that's how Katy and I felt.
Patricia Hill Collins:
That's it.
Ron Liebowitz:
Susan.
Susan Reich Weiss:
Well, my story is in a way similar to Drew's, because back in around the late '70s I was looking to work on something different from my postdoc lab, because I didn't want to be in a really competitive situation with these two incredible scientists I worked for, so I just looked around and I found that coronaviruses looked really, really interesting, just inherently interesting. They were human viruses that caused the common cold. They were very interesting animal models to work with. There were veterinary coronaviruses that were important that people were developing vaccines. On top of that, these viruses had a really unique way of replicating that was just really interesting and was amenable to study at that times. So, that's what I decided to do for my new lab, and I know that it seemed like a really dumb thing to work on to a lot of people.
Susan Reich Weiss:
There was a very small group of people working on these viruses for the next, well, since the late '70s, and really that was true until about 2002, when the first SARS outbreak happened, and all of a sudden coronaviruses became somewhat important and people knew what they were. But still, they were kind of considered not that important, and then we had MERS in 2012, and then of course 2019 really put them onto the front page of the New York Times, which was incredibly shocking to me.
Susan Reich Weiss:
So, for me, it was probably just the intellectual interest that kept it going, and I kept working on different aspects of this really wide open field. So, just learning more and more about coronaviruses is what kept me going, plus training lots and lots of young scientists who now are doing all kinds of interesting things related to COVID-19. So, after all these years it's finally somewhat gratifying to have worked on this virus for all this time.
Ron Liebowitz:
Yeah. Just a followup for each. Drew, the issue that you get questioned about, your graduate students, you're beyond graduate student days when you decided to stay with this RNA. So, I'm sure that had an impact, but you still had to convince funders, you still had to get funding to do your research, so I imagine that was an uphill struggle and something that was challenging.
Drew Weissman:
It was really a struggle every year. We were fighting for grants, we were fighting to get our papers published. We were fighting for recognition. I was still doing HIV research. So, I would go to HIV meetings and I would sit down with the important people in the field, people like Gary Nabel and others, and tell them about the RNA, and they would all look and they would nod and say, "Yeah, that sounds really interesting." And they would walk away with no interest at all.
Drew Weissman:
So, it was a continuous struggle. We kept generating data. We finally convinced companies that this was a potential great advance, and that's when things turned around.
Ron Liebowitz:
Susan, how did you keep your funding coming in for your persistent pursuit of your research topic that was in question?
Susan Reich Weiss:
Well, I mean, it's always difficult to get funding in any kind of basic science research. So, I just kept sending in grants. I knew I wouldn't get it the first or second time, but I just was very persistent. I've been funded since like 1980 on coronaviruses.
Ron Liebowitz:
We'll come back to the funding question later, but Patricia, I want to ask you a question too. One of the most inspiring thing I've heard since being president at Brandeis was Anita Hill talking about Pauli Murray. She gave a wonderful talk about Pauli at a dinner, and I'm just wondering what it was like. I read in the citation that Pauli Murray was influential to you. What was that like, studying with her?
Patricia Hill Collins:
I don't think of it as studying with her. I think of it as learning from her. The conversations that I was able to have with her, both in class, outside of class, and after I graduated were really important. What came from my time with her actually touches what the two of you have just touched on, which is how you keep going through times when you are supported or not supported. Her life is a testament to working for social justice over decades, and I did not know that at the time. I was much younger and wasn't as thorough as I am now, but afterwards, when I came back to visit her life and research what she had done, it was fascinating to me how she remained focused through the depression, through World War II, through the '50s and the upheaval of that, through the Ghanaian Constitution, through the feminist movement. There are many, many things that she was involved with that we didn't know, and in fact, the problem was the buried history that we didn't know about her.
Patricia Hill Collins:
So, now there are a legion, there are quite a few people now who know about Polly Murray, but if I had to say what was she like, she was just like all the other people who were trying very hard to continue their projects through lean times, through fat times. Right now we're in a fat time when it comes to social inequality and race, but how committed will people be 10 years from now? Who will be doing this work 10 years from now when it's not fashionable, when it's not required, when it's not pressured? She had the long game perspective on this. She was going to do it all the time. She was committed. That's what I learned from her.
Ron Liebowitz:
That's fascinating. I have to say also that a question I receive often, and we have these 10 year reaccreditations where an outside group of seven or eight academics come in and look you up and down for a 10 year review and give you recommendations, and we had Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, who chaired that reaccreditation. One of the first things he said when he came on campus in 2018 was, I think this was the year after Yale College built two new colleges and named one after Pauli Murray.
Patricia Hill Collins:
After her.
Ron Liebowitz:
It was the amazing elevation in the eyes of some of these individuals, including Peter, when they found out that Pauli had her start and was at Brandeis, and all of a sudden. So, the questions I get from alumni is, what are we going to do to honor Pauli Murray? What are we going to name to honor Pauli Murray? We've been thinking about this ever since, and that's why I'm curious, and I'll probably want to talk to you offline, but yes, she was an incredible individual. The more I learn and hear about her-
Patricia Hill Collins:
That's how I feel.
Ron Liebowitz:
All right, here's a softball for all of you. What has been the most gratifying aspect of your work over the years? What has been the most gratifying? It might not be as evident as what we point out in citations that we've read for you, but what has been most gratifying?
Patricia Hill Collins:
The most gratifying for me right now is that I've gotten old enough to have people come and find me and say, "I read you when I was an undergraduate, and then I'm teaching you now in my class." Or, "You've affected my dissertation." The most gratifying has been how the ideas themselves have traveled. Even though when I was writing early on I had no sense that anybody was ever going to read anything or think about anything I did. I got up and did it anyhow, and that's the Pauli Murray effect. So, the most gratifying is running into all these people as I travel to many, many countries, Brazil I've been going to quite a bit, and realizing that the kinds of things we're dealing with here are global issues and that I did not know I was part of a much bigger story until now.
Patricia Hill Collins:
So, the gratifying thing is that I'm here today with you to receive this award and to thank you in person. So, it's not a posthumous award, because this is difficult work.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you.
Drew Weissman:
To me, there's really two answers to this. The first answer is what my family, my friends, my collaborators want me to say, which is when the phase III results come out and we had 95% efficacy for both of the COVID-19 vaccines. Then there's my answer, which is probably it was 2005 when Katy and I made the discovery that modifying RNA got rid of its inflammation, and when we made that, that told us that all of our work was correct, and there was an enormous future for the use of modified RNA, but we had to sit down and keep studying it and keep developing it.
Ron Liebowitz:
So wait, Drew, on that second point, just a clarification, what happened between 2005 and the successful vaccine? In other words, those 14 intervening years, was it widely known that this was going to be successful or is it a long process that only became knowledgeable when you got the results of the phase III?
Drew Weissman:
It took another seven or eight years before the world realized what we were doing and became interested, but we kept working all along. We kept doing animal models and other therapeutics. About eight years after that people caught on, companies started working with it, and became much more interested.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you. Susan.
Susan Reich Weiss:
So, like Drew, I sort of have two different types of gratifications. One is scientific, just something that's difficult to describe because it's pretty technical, but when we, so around 2010, we identified a particular protein in the mouse coronavirus that was a very good antagonist of the host immune response, and then we found the same, very similar protein in MERS coronavirus years later. So, that was just a scientific finding of one of the ways that these viruses are really clever in shutting down the host innate immune responses. There are many other work like that, but that was the particular moment that was particularly gratifying for me in my lab.
Susan Reich Weiss:
Then in the last year and a half I've been really gratified to be able to give, I think I've given 50 seminars on basic biology of coronavirus and history of coronaviruses, and just educating people on how much we really knew about these viruses in the past. Kind of like Drew, it was a very long study of these viruses that contributed to understanding them, and just there are so many new coronavirologists now, there are probably thousands of them, and I felt like my role has been to really educate them in the biology of the viruses and the history of this field of research. So, that's been pretty gratifying over the last year or so, year and a half.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you. So, here's my last question before turning it back to Lewis, who will then field questions coming from our audience. This one, you all touched on this indirectly, but I'm curious to know what do you see for the future in terms of funding the research in the areas that you do, so social science research Patricia, and for scientific research for Drew and Susan? What do you see in the future? I mean, some of us in the academy of course are more optimistic with this particular current administration, and perhaps the past maybe not, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this.
Patricia Hill Collins:
I almost don't want to comment on this because I think I might sound too negative, because I honestly feel that until the US as a country commits to having a conversation, it's going to be really difficult to find the kinds of social science topics and issues that we require. I mean, the battle over the census right now is crucial, and that's a crucial piece of social science that occurs every 10 years. A lot rides on that, and everything is contested around even the questions that we ask. So, the assault on the integrity is social scientists, who are doing crucially important work for the scientific work to even be funded, to be taken seriously, to think about the implications for policy. Without that important social science piece and that policy piece, I don't know where we go.
Patricia Hill Collins:
Now, I personally have stepped back from doing that kind of research because it's too frustrating for me. I know it's extremely difficult. Historically it would've been difficult for me to get funded to do work on race, and gender, and those types of things. So, why beat your head against the wall? I am much more optimistic about the future of philanthropy, because I think they have been moving in directions because they have space to investigate questions that cross cut basic science and social science and the humanities. To look to questions that are bigger that we need to think about, and to think of ways of putting together interdisciplinary teams to address those questions. So, I don't necessarily see the government being the lead in that regard. I see the government being an important player in terms of government funding, and perhaps corporate funding, although there we might have to have another conversation another day. But if I had to think about where the exciting research, the exciting questions are being funded, I don't necessarily look to the big institutions. I look to the little people, I look to the crowdsourcing, I look to the people who want to fund things that they want to see happen.
Patricia Hill Collins:
So, money comes from many, many different places and we can never ever underestimate the effects of lots of people giving a little bit of money or a little bit of time for something they want to see happen. I want to see it all work together more seamlessly than being in a polarized climate that we are now around this.
Ron Liebowitz:
Polarization certainly would lead me to ask your advice perhaps offline, not here, about creating the environment on a university campus that allows in this polarized environment to have these important conversations, because it is a real challenge. I mean, you would think that this would be the place, a university, a college campus, where this would be a natural, where this type of conversation could be hosted and could be generated, but there are real challenges to that. So, I'll seek your advice offline on that too.
Patricia Hill Collins:
There are reasons why I am not a college president, and they do not have to do with qualifications, they have to do with aspirations. Good luck with this.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you, thank you. Drew, future?
Drew Weissman:
I also have to be careful not to be negative, but basic science funding is difficult.
Patricia Hill Collins:
Yeah.
Drew Weissman:
It's been difficult since I started. I think it's always going to be difficult. NIH funding goes up and down depending on the administration, but NIH over the past year has shifted a lot of their funding from basic science to therapeutics, and I think that's hurting basic science research. What they need to realize is that therapeutics comes from basic science research. I'm happy that private industry, organizations have increased funding, that philanthropy is increasing its funding. I think all of that is necessary. I think what the government, what people have to realize is that if we don't support basic science research, the United States is going to stop doing basic science research and we're going to stop making new therapeutics, we're going to stop understanding how things work, and I think that that's a shame and we really need to support basic science.
Ron Liebowitz:
Okay, and Susan.
Susan Reich Weiss:
So, I of course agree with Drew, and my experience has been really almost all my funding has been from the NIH, a little bit from the Multiple Sclerosis Society when I studied coronaviruses in the brain, but it's always been a struggle. I think this last few years has been a little bit of boost, and as Drew said, it goes up and down. For example, coronavirus funding goes up with SARS, it didn't go up a whole lot this year. There were some supplements, but I think I've been giving a lot of talks also urging the support of basic science, and I think that even from philanthropy it's very difficult, because what basic science like I do is really basic science. I mean, it's applied in a very, very long-term way, and I think it's really hard to explain that to people, because even private funders want to understand how your science is going to produce a drug or a vaccine, and everything that I study, for example, is in some point will do that, like understanding really basic mechanisms of how viruses interact with host cells, but that's really hard to get funded. Really the main way to get that kind of research funded is through NIH and it takes an enormous amount of time to keep writing and rewriting grant proposals.
Susan Reich Weiss:
So, I guess I don't want to end on a down note. I hope it gets better. People say that the public appreciates basic science more perhaps now, having gone through the pandemic. So, we'll see how it goes.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you. Not negative at all. I think getting the point across to our viewers and all of us that basic science is the foundation for everything after, and so it is important. So, very positive in that sense. Okay, let me turn this over to Lewis and thank you all for this portion of the Q&A. Lewis will now take questions from folks in the audience.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you Ron and congratulations Patricia, Drew and Susan. We have questions coming in. They're divided up a little bit, but just coming off of the last feel. Someone asked, "I'm struck by the optimism that all three of these seem to have. What would you say to people, especially young people, who are scared about the future?" I have the same Patricia, Drew, Susan lineup, so can we stick to that?
Patricia Hill Collins:
Why am I going first all the time?
Lewis Brooks:
Luck of the Zoom.
Patricia Hill Collins:
No. Okay, all right. Okay. I'm an optimistic person because I have no choice to be anything but. Actually what keeps me going are young people. I mean, I draw optimism from the fact that when you're young you're in a position to take risks, you're in a position to think big, to not think in the scripted boxes, and that's how you come up with innovation and wonderfully new things.
Patricia Hill Collins:
Now, it may not look like that when young people say to themselves, "I have no future. It's all uncertain, what shall I do?" But I'm a person that had no certain future. I mean, I tell people, I have a career in a field that I'd never heard of before I went to college. I had never heard of sociology. So, how is it that you can be open to ... You have to be open to things and you have to build them if they are not there. That's the other thing. So, to me the big problems that face young people are I think young people are up to the task. So, what I try and do is just encourage people, because there's this woman Fannie Lou Hamer, who was a famous African American activist who said everybody has a light in them that shines. That little light in you, let it shine. She really had this philosophy that each of us have a talent and a set of skills, and we can contribute.
Patricia Hill Collins:
Now, what makes me sad is that we lose so many people who do not believe that they have that light in them, and that's the mental health issues that's been brought up earlier in your comments, President Ron's comments earlier. So, why I remain optimistic about this is because I know it's better than it was, but I also know it can be better than it is now by a bit. We each inherit that. Each generation inherits what the gifts from the generation before. So, I think young people are very cool, and I think if we supported them and if we gave them things to read and see, and space to think they will quickly figure out that they've got some wonderful things going on. Many of them already know that, but for those who don't, please find those who do and hang out with them, and leave the rest of the people, including the old farts alone if they're the ones that are bringing you down. That's what I would say to that. I don't know if that was dignified enough, but that would be my answer.
Lewis Brooks:
That was fantastic, thank you. Drew.
Drew Weissman:
I have two kinds of optimism. I mean, from science, we made a vaccine with incredibly high efficacy and 100% protection against death in 10 months. That's never been done before, not even close to that. So, science gives me incredible optimism about the future. We're making pan-coronaviruses vaccines. We're trying to cure genetic diseases like sickle cell with a simple injection. So, I have enormous optimism. For the world, the optimism there is a little different. I mean, we went through a horrible four years of corrupt government who did terrible things, but people voted them out. They're gone now. So, I have hope and I'm optimistic about our future in general.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. Thank you. Susan.
Susan Reich Weiss:
I don't have a whole lot to ... I agree with both of the previous speakers. I just want to mention, the young people that I've worked with too, I have graduate students and postdocs who were just starting their careers and have that bright light. I mean, they have so many ideas so that they're teaching me at the same time as I'm teaching them. So, I just see that collaboration between the senior people and these young just aspiring scientists as a really productive thing and a really optimistic thing. I think they're going to do really good things.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you, thank you. Also I wanted to just congratulate Drew and Susan on their milestone reunions. So, it's alumni weekend and I want to acknowledge that. All right, to Patricia's point we're going to turn this around. Susan, you're first. Did your time at Brandeis foster any interest outside of your professional pursuits that you still value?
Susan Reich Weiss:
Well, it fostered a lot of friendships that I still value. I had not seen some of my really close roommates for many years, and then in more recent years with the internet and Facebook and all that I've rekindled those friendships. Outside, I'm trying to think. I can't really think of anything other than really good friendships.
Lewis Brooks:
That's important. Thank you.
Susan Reich Weiss:
Yeah.
Lewis Brooks:
Drew?
Drew Weissman:
I think I was always interested in science since I was a little kid. Coming to Brandeis expanded my learning. I learned about politics, I learned about psychology, I learned about sociology, I learned about music, theater and opera. So, all of those things have continued to expand over my years after graduating. So, I think it really broadened me as a person.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. Thank you. Patricia.
Patricia Hill Collins:
My mind kind of went blank when you asked that question because I spent pretty much all of my time at Brandeis studying. That meant that I really learned to appreciate the life of the mind. That's what I took with me from Brandeis, directly into community politics, which I also developed an interest in as well. So, that I was a teacher. I was a young teacher when I left Brandeis after doing the year in Harvard. Basically I was bringing them and translating for them many of the books, and the works, and the ideas that I had been able to study at Brandeis and I continued to read voraciously in order to be the best teacher that I could be. So, in many ways I don't see Brandeis ending. I sort of see it as sort of a one spot in things that are connected together, and I do have friends. Susan, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I did make some friends at Brandeis. I wasn't totally antisocial, but it really was a time that I got the gift to be able to step back and go into the world of ideas at Brandeis, in a period of time when there were so many ideas out there, especially on campus.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you, thank you. I have a question for Drew and Susan. God forbid, when the next major global pandemic occurs, what will it take to have PCR testing capacity to test everyone in the US in seven to 10 days and provide PPE to all frontline emergency and hospital staff in seven to 10 days? Drew, you got it.
Drew Weissman:
So, all of that is preparation. We've always talked about preparation for a pandemic. Our problem is that sometimes we do it, sometimes we don't. I think what this past year and a half has taught us is that we need to be prepared. We don't know what the next pandemic is going to be, but there's going to be another one. We need to be prepared, we need to have PPE in stock, we need to be able to quickly make and certify tests to distinguish infected people. We need to have vaccines ready to go. We need to have therapeutics that are developed or are close to the end of development that can be used quickly. We need to be more prepared.
Lewis Brooks:
Susan.
Susan Reich Weiss:
I don't have too much more to add to what Drew said, except that now that we have the tests for SARS2 it should be scientifically really easy to develop the next one for the next virus. It's more of a question of it's not a science question at all, it's a question of preparation. The other thing that I tell whenever I give these talks is that these coronaviruses are really similar in a lot of ways. So, once we have therapeutics that are in the pipeline that are ready to go for SARS2, those should be really quickly applicable to really any new coronavirus that should emerge.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you.
Susan Reich Weiss:
So, preparation is really the main thing, there's no science in it really.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. Patricia, this one's for you. Intersectionality seems like a new term, but it's something you've been researching for a long time. What do you want people to understand better about it?
Patricia Hill Collins:
I want people to understand that you want to start with something that is really important to you, and in my case as an undergraduate it was race because that really was the big question. But while I was a student at Brandeis I discovered that it wasn't just race at all, it was race and class. The combination of race and class structures in this country, I needed to know that to address the kinds of questions I was interested in, which had to do with educational equity. That's what I was interested in, the education of black children. That put me on a path to think about race and class and then gender, recognizing the increasingly complex nature of social inequality. So, if you pick one category and you stick with that your whole life, you can actually become a problem to other people who are interested in thinking more broadly and expansively around social justice.
Patricia Hill Collins:
Now, one thing I very much liked about Brandeis and why I'm convinced I landed in the perfect place, was its commitment to social justice. This was clearly there. As a new institution when I arrived, Brandeis and I grew up together, so hopefully we're not just growing old together, we're growing wiser as we get older. But it was a new institution where there was much more space for exploration. So, this whole notion of following the paths of the questions that concern you, social justice for me, and then intersectionality as the term we now use to apply to many, many paths that people have been on, staring in gender and then adding in race, and adding in class, and continuing on, or starting in class, or starting in sexuality for all of our students and colleagues who are LGBTQ. Then working our way to build up those relationships and those networks, intellectually and politically. Intersectionality is the best fit term for that very, very messy progress of finding our way toward greater equity, and the language of the administration would be equity, diversity and inclusion. That's kind of the administrative way to describe it, but intersectionality is the intellectual foundation for thinking more inclusively about fairness and social justice. I fold my comments about Brandeis in there because I think Brandeis was a very important place for me to develop that.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. Thank you. All right, for all three, but we'll start with Drew this time. What advice would you give to recent alumni who are interested in becoming scholars or researchers?
Drew Weissman:
I would give them a huge clap and congratulations. I think that from what I've seen over the years, fewer and fewer people are going into academics, going into research in general. I think it's incredibly important. We need to keep encouraging our students to do this.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. Susan.
Susan Reich Weiss:
Yeah. I would say to them to pick some topic that you really have a passion for, you really have to love what you're doing. Then just keep going at it, just be persistent. Like Drew, I really also encourage the young people around me, only if they really show a real natural interest and excitement about whatever questions they're thinking about working on.
Patricia Hill Collins:
I think I would piggyback on that and say asking a good question. It's not a question of just picking a field and dabbling, this interests me this week and next week I'll be a tennis player. Many people think they can shop for a career, but if you're thinking about a career in academia you really are making a commitment to knowledge. You're making a commitment to new knowledge and all that is involved with that, whether it's funding, or whether it's showing up for the meeting with the student you don't like, or whether it's listening to people you must have a conversation with because you're the teacher. Research is critical to that, because if you really are not standing on the foundation of your own scholarship, and your own ideas, and your own passion, you're basically performing something that's somebody else's agenda. We don't need those kinds of people in academia.
Patricia Hill Collins:
So, I think it's a hard road. I mean, I often will say to students, you need to make decisions for yourself about this. You might not need to be a scholar, or a doctor, or a scientist, but you may really need to be one if you know what that is. I want to see more people like Drew and Susan. I want to see those, passionate young people would say, "You mean basic science can point me toward solving this huge global social problem that will come back?" Why are we not talking that way? That's a lifelong commitment.
Patricia Hill Collins:
So, yeah. Other than that, there's too much in academic politics that's distracting. There's no point in going down that road because that's another story entirely.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. We have actually one question that we certainly don't have ... I'm sorry, one more question. We don't have enough time, it's for you, Patricia, but I'm going to just throw it in here. It just came through. Do you have any thoughts on how we can address implicit biases? Which I know is not an easy answer in a short amount of time.
Patricia Hill Collins:
No, I think the question though is that it's the bigger question of racism. The bigger question of sexism, or the bigger question of the isms. You first have to recognize that there is structural inequality, and you have to recognize how you are actually performing behaviors that bring that on or you are resisting that all the time. It's exhausting. It's truly exhausting to always be dealing with inequality, or micromanaging other people's behaviors so they fit into the places where you think they belong. So, implicit bias says gee, I'm being racist or I'm being sexist but I didn't know it, and you're telling me about it. Now I'm all upset. I don't see a problem with talking about these issues. I think they're very difficult and contentious to talk about, but that doesn't mean people are not good people. I like to think that people are doing the best that they can with what they have to work with, and that's where we start these conversations about implicit bias, or these issues that are very contentious and difficult. Often people cannot see or listen to one another because they're so afraid of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing, or some are not afraid enough and they're always doing the wrong thing and saying the wrong thing.
Patricia Hill Collins:
So, we have to really think about the language, if it helps have better conversations to talk about implicit bias, let's do that. But let's not sit around and try and be all nice and worried about implicit bias and how can we take it out of whatever situation we're in. We can be grown up about this. The kids can do this, I think.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. That was fantastic. I appreciate that. It's been an honor to speak with the three of you and Ron. Again, congratulations Ron, and turn it back to you.
Ron Liebowitz:
I was going to say the same thing. Boy, what a great conversation this was, at least from my perspective, I learned tons from listening to the three of you, and I hope that our alumni have also learned tons as well. I want to thank all the alumni for tuning in and hopefully many of them from your classes have reconnected, at least virtually, by seeing you, and I want to just thank you on behalf of Brandeis for all you've done, not only for society but also what you represent for Brandeis. So, thanks a lot. Congratulations, and I'll say again, next year in Waltham. Thank you very much.