Dr. Robin Bond and the Quest for Microbes and their Realms

Hello All!! Today, I would like to introduce you to a FANTASTIC WOMAN IN SCIENCE, Dr. Robin Bond. She is a teacher and she studies how microbes act in different environments!!! Let's meet her below...

Source: Dr. Robin Bond

JACQUE: What is your name?
DR. BOND: Dr. Robin Bond. I use she/her pronouns.

JACQUE: What is the official title of what you do?
DR. BOND: Analytical Chemistry faculty

JACQUE: What is the layperson description of what you do?
DR. BOND: I teach chemistry to college students and also do research in environmental chemistry. For the most part, I study how the environment affects (and is affected by) microbes. My favorite application of this is astrobiology—the study of what sorts of life can live in different environments.

JACQUE: Where do you currently live?
DR. BOND: Western Washington state

JACQUE: Where are you working now?
DR. BOND: The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. It’s a non-traditional public liberal arts school that is big on interdisciplinary education.

JACQUE: What are you currently working on?
DR. BOND: I have ADHD and as a result I have about a gazillion projects going at any one time. Three of these are research projects: one terrestrial I also have several partly-finished writing projects: a paper that hopefully will be off to a scientific journal in the next month or so (knock on wood), a book on teaching your 

JACQUE: Can you give us a broad picture of how your time is spent at work?
DR. BOND: I spend anywhere from 12-16 hours a week in the classroom, and something like 15-20 hours a week preparing for the classroom. The rest of the time (5-15 hours a week?) is spent on writing, research, etc.

JACQUE: ​What kind of gear do you use to do your job?
DR. BOND: As an analytical environmental chemist: So much gear! I have stuff I use in lab (flow-injection analysis/chemiluminescence detector, ICP-MS, GC-MS, UV-VIS among other things) and field equipment as well (portable field spectrophotometer, portable pH probe, portable conductivity meter, etc.)

JACQUE: Is there a single reason that you are passionate about your job? Or is it several things?
DR. BOND: Understanding science completely changes the way a person sees the world. I once heard a student say: “After taking physics, I can’t even think about skateboarding the same way.” If I do my job correctly, I will open people’s eyes so that everything in the world around them is seen in a whole new light.

JACQUE: Are communications a big part of your job?
DR. BOND: I communicate with my students all day and I also try to do outreach when I have the time.

JACQUE: What is your motivation?
DR. BOND: I want to know all the things!! But since I can’t, maybe I can at least know a few things.

JACQUE: ​Tell us about your educational path so far.
DR. BOND: I definitely took a roundabout path into academia. After getting an undergraduate degree in chemistry, I took 15 years off to raise and homeschool my children. I started grad school a few days after my youngest son’s 8th birthday. I got my Ph.D. in geochemistry at age 43 and landed a tenure-track job a couple of years later.

JACQUE: Please tell us about the thing you are most proud of accomplishing so far.
DR. BOND: I have to pick one?
Getting a Ph.D. despite punishing circumstances.
Raising four amazing children.
Inspiring students to love chemistry so much that they change their major.*
Getting students so fired up about research that they suddenly decide they have to do a Ph.D.*
*These are events associated with specific students, but I’m not sure they want to be named.

JACQUE: Who is someone you admire in your field? Why?
DR. BOND: My collaborator, Dr. Kennda Lynch. We’ve worked together since early in grad school and I honestly believe she is the best scientist I’ve ever met. Also, she’s gotten to where she is through some immense personal struggles, so her level of accomplishment is pretty amazing.

JACQUE: Did you have a mentor? If you did, how did you and that mentor come to work together?
DR. BOND: I’ve had several mentors over the years, but I owe the most to my graduate advisor, Dr. Tina Voelker.  Not only was she patient with my journey (see the next question!), she taught me to be good about self-care AND do some pretty fantastic science.
I found her through sheer serendipity. I picked my graduate program because it was very interdisciplinary, but I entered the program with a different advisor in mind.  I took her class my first semester. We are both quiet people, so it took a while for us to ‘click,’ but we eventually figured out that we worked well together. 

JACQUE: A question from 11-year-old Sarah- Do you get paid for being a scientist? In other words, how do you get paid for what you do? 
DR. BOND: I get paid to teach, and part of that teaching is showing other people how to do research—so yes, I get paid to do science!

JACQUE: What are the parts about being a scientist that you didn’t expect?
DR. BOND: Maintenance and writing!
By maintenance I mean things like washing glassware (which I hate) and fixing equipment (which I love). 
Writing is something that I struggle with! I can write fiction with no problem at all but technical writing has been an uphill climb.
 
JACQUE: What do you find MOST frustrating about your work?
DR. BOND: Writing and grading.

JACQUE: Can you give us a basic rundown of how a project is conducted? (From the idea to the end)
DR. BOND: An idea strikes me at a random time (usually while gardening). I write it down, and later do a literature search to see what’s been done and what hasn’t. I get a student who wants to help me, and we work together to write procedures for how we’re going to do phase 1. We implement the procedures and revise as needed.  At some point we get data, and we use this data to figure out how to proceed with phase 2—so we write procedures, implement them, revise as needed. Eventually we get enough statistically significant data that we can report it to the scientific community. 

JACQUE: ​What is your favorite part of your job?
DR. BOND: I have so many favorite parts! I love teaching in general, but especially those parts where I take what we’ve learned and talk about its relevance to the natural world. I love helping students take their first tentative steps into a research career. I love seeing students get fired up about really cool science.

JACQUE: What is your least favorite part of your job?
DR. BOND: Grading. Ugh.

JACQUE: What is your highest point so far?
DR. BOND: I have to pick one? It’s hard. Getting the Ph.D. after all the struggle was huge. Also, landing a tenure-track job, which I’d been told I wouldn’t, because: a) I was too old and b) I got an interdisciplinary Ph.D. which would be hard to market.

Source: Dr. Robin Bond

JACQUE: ​If money were no issue, what project would you do?
DR. BOND: Set up an experimental model of the ocean on Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
Also, take time off teaching to finish writing my book on building scientific literacy.

JACQUE: ​What is your social life like?
DR. BOND: I’m an introvert who makes friends slowly. I’ve been in my current position just over a year and am just now finding people I want to hang out with outside of work. My social life will be much better in a year or two!

JACQUE: What is your home life like?
DR. BOND: Mostly quiet. My youngest son and I sometimes watch Star Trek reruns, sometimes work on projects together. My eldest son, who has a disability, is also currently living with me but he pretty much keeps to himself. The other two boys are grown and gone, and I don’t have a partner, so a rather large chunk of my time involves reading.

JACQUE: Do you have any pets?
DR. BOND: One cat and seven chickens. 

JACQUE: What kind of hobbies do you have?
DR. BOND: Gardening, reading, home improvement. I’m particularly fond of power tools in all their many incarnations.

JACQUE: How did you handle situations when people underestimated you?
DR. BOND: When someone tells me I can’t do something, my gut reaction is, “Oh yeah? Watch me.”

JACQUE: Can you give us an example of handling a bad situation well?
DR. BOND: I remember getting very mad at my advisor in grad school once. I was very tempted to tell her off in a snotty email, but instead I went to my therapist and cried about it, and we came up with a better way to bring up the issues involved.

JACQUE: Can you give advice on what NOT to do when handling the stress of college and the job?
DR. BOND: Don’t work long hours (at least, not for extended periods of time)—if you’re too tired, you can’t think straight

JACQUE: Were there times you wanted to give up? How did you push through?
What coping mechanisms do you have that help you handle the stress of your job?

DR. BOND: I’m answering these questions together.
Therapy has been very helpful in my life. I originally started due to PTSD after leaving my marriage, but I found it was a good way to deal with frustrations of the job.
The best things for me are gardening and “puttering around the house”—by which I mean fixing and improving things, both big and small projects. I’m the sort of person who needs to work with her hands to be happy.

JACQUE: Where did you grow up?
DR. BOND: Southern California.

JACQUE: Who were your biggest supporters?
DR. BOND: I’ve had so many supporters in my life, I feel uncomfortably privileged. I have two great parents and six amazing siblings. I also had really fantastic friends in grad school who were my absolute lifeline.

JACQUE: What is your cultural background?
DR. BOND: My dad is white and my mom is Chinese.  Being biracial was not something that was really supported when I was growing up (heck, in school the forms usually made you ‘choose one’ for the race) and it took me 40+ years to figure out how to integrate different parts of my cultural background.

JACQUE: Which socioeconomic group did you grow up in? 
DR. BOND: My family had a modest income by most standards, but my parents had a lot of kids, so we probably could have qualified for the free lunch program. Technically we were middle class, but I also remember going to bed hungry several times.

JACQUE: Were many people in your family educated with college degrees?
DR. BOND: I was lucky to have many good examples to follow. My dad has a Ph.D. in chemistry. He’s an amazing science educator, and of course he used his skills on his children as well as his students.

I have two siblings with Ph.D.s, one with a master’s degree, and one with both a master’s degree and a J.D.

My mom has a master’s degree but she didn’t get it (or her bachelor’s) until she was past 50, so obviously she was a big inspiration to me as an older student.

JACQUE: Did you have other friends or peers to talk to about science?
DR. BOND: For a long time I felt very weird and disconnected from people. The first college I attended was a super-nerdy science/tech school where everyone was a nerd. That was great for me! I realized that there are actually plenty of people who think like me. I’ve sought out, and found, nerdy friends since then.

JACQUE: Did you have a teacher in middle or high school that saw something extra in you?
DR. BOND: I’ve had several super-amazing teachers in my life. The most formative was probably my second-grade teacher, who saw that I was bored in science class (because I knew it already) and set me on independent projects that would feed my passion. I also had a high school chemistry teacher who told me I ought to be a chemist because I had a gift for it.

JACQUE: What was the most unusual location you have found yourself in?
DR. BOND: I like to show two remote, but utterly different field sites in my slide shows: first, the middle of the Pacific Ocean (1000+ miles from land) and second, the Great Salt Lake Desert, in a field site only accessible by ATV.

JACQUE: Can you give us an example of a time that you were treated in a sexist way in your job?
DR. BOND: I actually had a prospective graduate advisor tell me that I couldn’t succeed at grad school while I still had children at home. (He also told me I was too old to do grad school, so clearly waiting until the children wouldn’t have been okay with him either.) Needless to say, I crossed that person off my list.

JACQUE: Can you give us an example of a time that you were pleasantly surprised that sexism did not come into play?
DR. BOND: I actually never experienced sexism in grad school (though I had friends who did). It might have helped that both my advisor and her closest collaborator were women.

JACQUE: Who were the least supportive people in your life? How did they act?
DR. BOND: Definitely my ex-husband, who said he was happy for me to go to grad school, and then tried sabotaging my schooling. (After the first year he more or less told me that he wanted me to quit, hence the shenanigans he put me through. Our marriage didn’t last very long after that.)

JACQUE: What was your lowest point?
DR. BOND: Year 5 of graduate school. I was working on a tough project (even my advisor said it was the hardest project she’d ever given a student) and there was no end in sight. I was poor, as any grad student would be, and had three kids in college. Also, my ex-husband was stalking and harassing me, which caused frequent PTSD flare-ups.

​JACQUE: Is there a part of your identity, whether LGBT, a person of color, a religious or cultural minority, or differently-abled, that influenced a facet of your experience as you became a scientist?
DR. BOND: I have a *very* different background from many scientists, and I think that allows me to think differently from others.
I educate students differently because I homeschooled my children.
I tackle problems differently because I have an interdisciplinary degree, and I got an interdisciplinary degree in part because I homeschooled my children and saw how everything was interconnected!
I have PTSD (officially diagnosed) and probably ADHD (not officially diagnosed, but I have kids who are and they’re just like me). The PTSD definitely inhibits my ability to think straight; what this has done is forced me to build collaborations, because collaborators can help catch the inevitable dumb mistakes I make when I get triggered. The ADHD makes it hard to focus, but on the plus side it also means I have a lot of research projects going at the same time, which means I can take on more students than I otherwise might.

JACQUE: Do you have a large, overall goal for your lifetime of work?
DR. BOND: I want to understand the chemical mechanisms in play in the ocean on Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

​JACQUE: What advice would you give to a girl coming into a STEM field?
DR. BOND: Be stubborn, but be humble.
Be stubborn means that you should keep going even when you think you should quit (or someone else does).
Be humble enough to recognize where you need to grow, and then work stubbornly to grow in that direction.

JACQUE: What advice would you give to parents like me to help prepare their child to go into the STEM field?
DR. BOND: I’m actually writing a book on that right now! I have way too much to say in a short interview.

​JACQUE: Do you have a website we can check out?
DR. BOND: Two:
Official work site: http://blogs.evergreen.edu/bondr/
Private site: http://science-literacy.com/

I would like to thank Dr. Bond for being a guest on FANTASTIC WOMEN IN SCIENCE!! I know that her example for reaching out and following multiple goals in life, no matter when or how, are very important!!