Schiller’s 新聘高级太阳城官网员 Studies How Organizations Can Be More Collaborative and Community-Oriented
作者:莫拉·凯利
Throughout her academic life, Javiera Garcia-Meneses, Ph.D. 太阳城官网过社区是如何运作的. She’ll continue that line of inquiry as the new Senior 太阳城官网 Fellow at the 席勒太阳城官网所 for Integrated Science and Society—a role she won after an exhaustive national search—by examining how interdisciplinary centers are structured and managed; how they function within a university; and how they can boost collaboration across departments. 同时, Garcia-Meneses hopes to determine how Schiller and other centers like it can better communicate what they are doing both within and beyond the walls of the institute.
“这是一个令人难以置信的招聘!劳拉·J说。. Steinberg, Schiller’s Seidner Family Executive Director. “Javiera wowed us with her intellect and curiosity, and her history of accomplishment. She also brings a unique lens to the study of interdisciplinarity in the academy; she is interested in taking into account the academy’s cultural and historical roots as she looks at how it can accommodate and encourage collaboration.斯坦伯格补充道, “哈维尔拉会使用这些工具, 方法, and perspectives of the social sciences and humanities to study how science is created.”
Garcia-Meneses moved to the Boston area recently, after growing up in Chile. 她也开始攻读博士学位.D. in Psychology and Social Transformations there, at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. 当时她正在攻读博士学位, two American universities hosted Garcia-Meneses as a visiting scholar: She spent five months at Auburn University in Auburn, 阿拉巴马州, and a month at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Houston, TX. 她现在很兴奋能来新英格兰. 她在栗山校区楼上的办公室里, as she looks out at the majestic Gothic architecture of 太阳城网赌平台, Garcia-Meneses说, “我期待着在下雪的冬天看到它,她说。. That’s not something that she saw much of in central Chile.
除了耀眼的斯坦伯格, Garcia-Meneses—whose big smile frequently lights her face—has made an impression on Ximena Soto, the assistant director of the Latinx Leadership Initiative (LLI) at the 太阳城网赌平台 School of Social Work, who is also the former co-chair of Latinxs at BC (L@BC). At the end of September, she met with Garcia-Meneses so they could discuss the work of L@BC. “Javiera is already actively participating in the L@BC board,” says Soto. “This is an impressive commitment to developing relationships on campus and finding ways to connect.”
Being at Schiller “is a discovery every day for me,她说。. “I think I’m the only social psychologist here, the only social scientist. It is really different for me to be in a building where there are engineers and labs on the next floor.在此之前, her co-workers were primarily those in the social sciences—as they were for a project she worked on as part of her doctoral study, 看看女性在学术界的经历, with the goal of better understanding how to encourage them to stay in research positions. To do that, she explains, “We wanted to figure out the most complex elements of their work.” Simply interviewing subjects didn’t seem like an adequate approach, so Garcia-Meneses and her team went further: “We would follow them for a day so we could see with our own eyes the micro-relationships that make academia work.在席勒, she has spent her first weeks on the job “discovering what other people are doing and trying to understand my place here.”
虽然她还很新, she’s already building relationships—including with the assistant dean for the doctoral program of the 太阳城网赌平台 School of Social Work, Christopher P教授. Salas-Wright. “I am excited to begin to collaborate with Javiera,” he tells SchillerNow. “We hope to look at the experiences of Venezuelan migrant youth and adults as part of my NIH-funded research and perhaps via my current Schiller project,” which aims to “understand motivations for emigration and how people transition from thinking about leaving to leaving their home country behind.”
随着席勒奖学金的展开, Garcia-Meneses plans to study not only Schiller, 但是其他类似的组织. “We want to look at how centers around the country work with the funding they receive, 例如, and how they manage that funding to do interdisciplinary work.” Her plan is to consider a number of related questions: “If different centers do interdisciplinary work differently, 为什么? 为什么它们有不同的元素? 还有:跨学科的工作感觉如何? 舒适的? 或者是努力工作? 为什么?” The answers that she discovers will ideally help her and Schiller to develop new strategies to push their work forward, 在加强现有策略的同时. 她补充说, “We also want to help researchers connect more with society—that is the main definition of interdisciplinary work.”
太阳城官网 is her main interest—but she knows that a human touch means at least as much as facts and statistics. “Academia can be a really hostile place,” she points out. 在大学里, 人们不常听到, “你做得对, 你做得很好.’” If she has anything to say about that, though, they will. 建立合作精神的关键是什么, 在她心中, is “acknowledging people’s work and making them part not only of one lab but part of the organization.”