Angela Belcher

INTERVIEWER: Today is August 10, 2011. I'm Barbara Moran, and today we are at the MIT Studio speaking with Angela Belcher as part of the Infinite History Project. Professor Belcher received her BA in creative studies from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1991 and a PhD in chemistry from UC Santa Barbara in 1997. She joined the faculty of MIT in 2002.

Professor Belcher is now the W.M. Keck professor of energy at MIT. She is a materials chemist with expertise in the fields of biomaterials, biomolecular materials, organic/inorganic interfaces, and solid state chemistry. In her interdisciplinary work, Professor Belcher seeks to understand and harness nature's own processes in order to design important materials and devices for energy, the environment, and medicine. She has won numerous awards for her work, including a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2004. Welcome, Professor Belcher.

BELCHER: Thank you.

INTERVIEWER: So I wanted to ask you to start off by telling me about the first time that you encountered abalone.

BELCHER: Wow, so I grew up in Texas, so I didn't actually encounter abalone in Texas. But I was interested in minerals and pearls and beautiful natural structures. When I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara-- it's right on the ocean, it's actually really beautiful-- and I learned about how abalone shells are interesting materials. They're strong and tough structures. And so I didn't really counter abalone until the very beginning of graduate school when I went to visit an abalone farm in Santa Barbara. It was inside a laboratory. And I learned about the unique properties of the inorganic structure and organic composite of an abalone shell. And they had the little organisms that are actually swimming around in the little abalone condominiums in the marine lab there. And it was really a perfect project for me, it was really love at first sight.

INTERVIEWER: Great, that's what I was going to ask you. I wanted to ask you a little bit about your upbringing and growing up in Texas. So just tell me a little bit about your upbringing.

BELCHER: I grew up in Texas. I grew up a seventh generation Texan, I grew up between Houston and San Antonio, kind of back and forth between the two. I have an older brother. I loved science from very early on. As a child I wanted to be an inventor. And I didn't really exactly know what that meant, but it was a strong force inside me. And I would go into our garage in Texas where it's 100 degrees in the summer. And I would say, I'm not leaving the garage until I invent something new. And I would be out there working with whenever I had in the garage that belonged by my parents. And I never really came up with-- I had ideas drawn, sketches drawn, but never was able to produce anything. But it was always inside me that I wanted to be an inventor.

And I was also really interested in genetics early on. I have no idea where I got that from, but I would buy genetics books and try to understand it. So that was also something that was interesting to me. And I also grew up not far from Rice Library and I used to go there and check out books and try to learn more about science.

INTERVIEWER: And were your parents engineers or scientists?

BELCHER: Neither of my parents were in science and engineering. I'm not sure exactly where it came from. As I got a little bit older, I was in the Texas Medical Center in Houston and a couple blocks from the hospitals, and one of my next door neighbors was a radiologist resident. And he would take me with him to the hospitals and I would get to go on rounds. And I actually even got to go into some surgeries and wear the white coat. And so pretty early on I thought, well maybe I want to be a physician. And I thought that was a very good profession, helping people and getting to do science at the same time. And so I was interested in that, and I would actually learn a new disease every day. I'd call it the Disease of the Day, and I'd try to learn it on my own and read medical textbooks. When I started college, I thought I might go into medicine.

But pretty early on, I fell in love with large molecules and proteins, actually. And it was so captivating to me. For the first time, I started thinking about a protein in solution in its surroundings, I couldn't turn back. That's what I knew I was interested in.

INTERVIEWER: Were there any kind of-- I don't know the right word-- but values or lessons from your parents or lessons from where you grew up that you feel like shaped you, and shaped the way you work and the way you do you work?

BELCHER: I think that the idea of hard work was very important to me and to my family. And I started working when I was 13-- I started working at Baskin Robbins-- and then I was at floral design, and I strung tennis racquets, and taught tennis at tennis camp, and started working hard and saving my money. And I knew that that hard work was going to get me far. And so that's something I've always been interested in. And I also started a little camp for kids when I was, I guess, 11. 11 or 12, I got written up in the newspaper. And so I was always interested in entrepreneurial aspect and hard work. And that's something that I try to teach my kids now, is that you can be really smart and be really creative, which is great, but I think the work ethic and hard work takes you a long way.

INTERVIEWER: It seems like you were quite a precocious child-- starting camp and going off to the hospital. Were you the smartest girl in school?

BELCHER: I think I was pretty normal, actually. And I think that I've always been very focused. It's interesting looking back, because I talk to my husband-- we went to elementary school together-- and he seems to think I was one of the smartest kids in the class. I definitely didn't feel that way. I felt pretty normal, and I felt always very driven by my interests. And I never really cared what people thought. I just thought science was interesting and I thought business was interesting, and that's what I was going after. I think I was pretty normal.

INTERVIEWER: I had read somewhere that you were dyslexic?

BELCHER: I'm dyslexic. And it's kind of strange, because I didn't know when I was very young that I was dyslexic. I felt like kind of a slow reader. I do remember getting extra tutoring in reading from my aunt, who was a teacher. And I don't think at the time they realized I was dyslexic. And I have a really fantastic memory, and so I just memorized all the words. I never learned phonics and how to sound things out.

It's one of those kinds of things that today, I feel like it's one of my biggest advantages and disadvantages at the same time. It's an advantage because I do have this really good memory, and I do have a way that I think is interesting of processing information and thinking about things that I may not have had if I wasn't dyslexic. It kind of forced my brain to work in a particular way. At the same time, I'm very slow at writing emails because the dyslexia does slow me down in terms of writing. But I think overall, I feel like it's been an advantage. I really like the way that I think and lay things out in the creativity. I think it's kind of playing to your strengths, which is something I've always been a big fan of.

INTERVIEWER: That's really interesting to me, because I was wondering if that was the case. If not relying on the written word so much, if there was something about-- because your work is very creative, and the ability to put these different fields together, and I was wondering if there's-- I mean, I wonder if you'll describe a little more about your--

BELCHER: Thought process?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

BELCHER: I think I'm just a dreamer. I'm a dreamer. I like to think about what's possible and think about different fields. My degrees are in different areas and I've always thought about how to put them together. And I don't know how other people think because I haven't really done any studies in it, but I think in graphics and I think in patterns and colors. And when I'm thinking through a new idea, it's almost like looking at it projected onto a screen. I can see how all the pieces come together. That's just the way that my brain works. And I'll take an idea and move it around in the projector in my brain in three dimensional space and see how the pictures snap together and fit together. And then kind of push it forward and see what the possibilities for the outcomes are.

And when I'm actually describing a new idea or brainstorming with my students-- which I do a lot because I have very smart students-- and we sit together and brainstorm on new ideas, I do that. I take the pieces and I project it out and say, this is how I'm thinking of it. I'm thinking of the structure or thinking of a way of having biology make a new material, and kind of just go through in my mind clicking it together and looking at it on a screen. And when people talk to me a lot of times, I'll be looking off to the side. And they're like, what are you doing? And I'm like, well I'm kind of looking at it, seeing how it looks when it's projected. So I don't know if that's normal or not, that's just the way that my brain has worked, and it's worked fine so far.

INTERVIEWER: What if there's any societal events from your upbringing that shaped what you want to do at all.

BELCHER: I wouldn't say that that's exactly the case, but I always felt like I wanted to make a difference in the world. And that's always been very important to me, that I want to do something that does benefit society. And I think that's why I was interested originally in medicine, because of the human aspect and helping take care of people, especially in hard times. And I was really driven by that originally. And it was a little bit hard for me when I came to the conclusion that that wasn't what I wanted to do when I was 18 years old. And there was a guilt associated with it, that I was much more interested in molecules.

And so for a while, I thought, well I'm going to do both. But as I was going down the path, I realized that molecules are wonderful too and there's so many things that you can do that do have a benefit on society. At that time, when I was 18 and 19 years old I never really thought that I would be using molecules for energy and using biology to create new materials for energy. But I think that I've always had this overwhelming desire to make a difference in the world.

INTERVIEWER: That's interesting, and that brings me to my next question. How did you end up at UC Santa Barbara, and how did this shift from medicine to science happen? Was there a particular teacher or class, or was there a moment when you fell in love with molecules and felt that that was the way to go?

BELCHER: I think it was from the very beginning. I went to California just as a 17-, 18-year-old wanting to leave home, looking east and looking west. And California looked very nice. And Santa Barbara was a really great fit for me. As you mentioned before, my degree is in creative studies, which was a design-your-own major. And it was great for me, because I was interested early on in the origin of life. What were the interface between the first molecules and how they became self-replicating molecules, and did that happen at the interface of inorganic materials? So I was interested in that from very early on.

So that kind of took in, I was interested in geology, I was interested in chemistry, I was interested in biology, and I didn't want to choose, basically. So I went into this program that was design your own major, that you could put things together however you wanted. And that, I think, had one of the largest impacts on my career because I could see early on that it's okay to put these different disciplines together in ways to solve problems, and it was actually encouraged. And so I did. I worked in physics labs, I worked in biology labs, in ecology and biology and chemistry. And it really started giving me the idea of putting these different tools together to solve problems. So it was one of the best decisions I've ever made, was to go to UC Santa Barbara and major in creative studies.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. You could see, though, how that could go terribly wrong and you could just flit around in a million different things. So I was wondering if you had someone or several people guiding you or mentoring you.

BELCHER: Yes, I did. You had a mentor who was an academic mentor, but then I was also in, from the very beginning as an undergraduate, in research labs, similar to what we do at MIT. We try to get the students into research labs as soon as they want to and as soon as they have time for it. And so I worked one-on-one with several different faculty there. To me, it was a blast.

INTERVIEWER: And they were supportive of this interdisciplinary idea?

BELCHER: Yeah, very supportive. And UC Santa Barbara is a very interdisciplinary place. And that's where I academically grew up. I was there for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc. And this idea that there aren't boundaries between fields is very much a part of their fabric. And I remember as an undergraduate, I had keys to the physics department, the biology department, the materials, the engineering. And it was really great because I could go different places and use different equipment and it was a very supportive environment. It's hard to mention people, because there are so many. It was a great experience, there was so much one-on-one time with faculty there that it was a great experience for me.

It gave me a tremendous amount of confidence very early on. I remember when I was an undergraduate in a molecular biology biochemistry lab, Jim Cooper's lab in UC Santa Barbara, we were doing polymerase chain reaction and it was a way of trying to amplify particular DNA sequences. And I was like the second or third person in the whole building to do this, and I was a young undergraduate. And I was reading the manuals and trying to figure it out. And we only had one instrument in the whole building, and now we have a couple of them in my lab.

I remember barely being able to sleep at night, couldn't wait to try the experiments. And that's always been the way it was for me. And just how encouraging Jim and lots of other faculty were there in terms of-- I think, to me, that's been the key to my success and my career, is just absolutely loving what I do and being so excited about it. And there's so many days even now that I go to sleep thinking, I can't wait to see what the results are like tomorrow. What a wonderful existence that you love your job so much that you just can't wait for the next day to see what's happening. And I felt that from the very early time of being an undergraduate, just the excitement of discovering something new or trying to find how pieces fall into place.

Maybe part of that is innate in me, but I think part of it was the early mentors that I had that were just as excited about what I was doing or the research was going on in their lab. That's been absolutely key to me. I can't imagine having a job where, oh, it's just a job. For me, it's not just a job or career. it's a life, it's excitement. Every day, there's something new. And not every day is a great day, there's days where things just go wrong. But I learn 10 things a day, I learn something new. It's really a great place to be.

INTERVIEWER: Great. So tell me, eventually you ended up steering toward chemistry and did your PhD on abalone. And so tell me how that came about.

BELCHER: Well, it came about by-- it's kind of an interesting story. I worked in a physics lab some as an undergraduate in UC Santa Barbara with a professor, Paul Hansma, who was also a physics professor. I took him for a physics undergraduate course, he's really fantastic. And he worked on atomic force microscopy, and built some of the first atomic force microscopes that could be used to look at many different things, including biological samples. And when I took it, his class is one of those classes that you take and then you know that that's what you want to do. So I took his class, his physics class, and said okay, now I'm sure I want to be a physicist. And by this time, it was my junior year. And I went to talk to him and I said, I'm sure I want to be a physicist now. And he said, well, you know you only have a year and a half left. Why don't I introduce you to some of my chemistry colleagues? Afterwards, I'm like, wait a minute.

So he introduced me to Galen Stucky, who is a chemistry professor at UC Santa Barbara who is fantastic, dynamic, really pushing the boundaries of new materials. And he's a big thinker. And his excitement for science is contagious, as Paul's was. And so I started talking to him, and he was really wanting to go more into the bio end of things, bio and organics, so I was a good fit. And so then he introduced me to professor Dan Morris in the marine science end of things, but material scientists and a biochemist as well. And these three people-- Paul, Dan, and Galen-- were all working together on starting to work on abalone shell. And so I got pulled into that project from starting to isolate the proteins involved in abalone shell. So I got to work with three people. Basically, I had three advisers from my PhD who were all from different disciplines. And they all had a really great working collaboration, got along well together, and they were all just enthusiastic and excited about the project. So I kind of got swept into that.

So I started working from trying to find proteins that can control inorganic structures, so working between all three of them, so it was kind of a dream come true.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that really makes a lot of sense, actually. How that set the basis for, really, the rest of your work. And having that interdisciplinary thinking there. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But the postdoc in electrical engineering, that I don't understand.

BELCHER: So I worked on the abalone shell. And one of things I wanted to say about that was that-- and this is something that was a lifelong lesson to me-- is that when we work on the abalone shell, we had groups of physicists, chemists, biochemists, molecular biologists all working together. We'd have meetings every Wednesday at noon where all the team would get together from all these different disciplines. And one of the things that I liked about it is all three of these faculty were top of the field in what they did, but we kind of had a rule that when you walked in that door, you left your ego at the door.

And so you'd have a biologist-- maybe it's a graduated student up at the board-- explaining something about biology, as they think related to the abalone shell. And then you'd have a physicist up there explaining something about the physics of it. And so we spent a couple of years doing that until we all could speak the same language, and it was a really, really fantastic experience. So I was very, very happy about my PhD.

And then for my postdoc, I really chose it based on a person. It was working with professor Evelyn Hu at Santa Barbara at the time, she's now at Harvard. And she's a fantastic mentor. She's a physicist by training, but was in electrical engineering and material science. And she's a big thinker, and I wanted to work with her. And so she took me into her group, and no one had had any biology background in her group before. And it was a big learning curve for me to learn to fit into her group. And some of my original ideas that I was thinking about on how to interface biology with semiconductors didn't really work out. But it was a great learning experience, which originally led to what I do now, which is selecting and evolving organisms to work with electronic materials.

It's one of those things where you have to jump in with both feet and you have to leave your ego at the door, because you're going, I know nothing about this. What can I learn? And I try to approach things that way a lot now because I can think, well, do I know enough to enter this area? I think what you have to do is decide, this is something I want to learn. This is something I want to do. Jump in with both feet and then work with really smart people in that area that can then help figure out how to interface it and if there's an interface and how to push it forward.

INTERVIEWER: It's interesting how that set the whole groundwork. It seems to me like a lot of people do a PhD thesis that then has nothing to do with their subsequent work. So it's nice that this all really built the foundation of what you're doing.

BELCHER: You know, I'd love to say I planned it, but I didn't plan it. I just followed what I was interested in. And that's always been my approach, is to just go with what I'm interested in and get into it and see if I can make a difference in that area. And that's exactly what we do now. It's like, oh, this is interesting. Can we have an influence in solar? And that's how we just approach things.

INTERVIEWER: So afterward, you went back to Texas. How did you end up going from Texas to MIT, how did that come about?

BELCHER: So I went back home to Texas and I was at University of Texas Austin-- the chemistry department is a fantastic department there. And things were going really well. I wasn't really on the job market because when I finished my PhD, I didn't apply for a lot of jobs. I got a job at University of Texas and it was a great opportunity, and so I went there. And once I got there, I started being recruited by other schools because I wasn't on the job market so they hadn't seen me before. And one of the places was MIT. And I had no intention of coming to MIT, I didn't know what MIT was like, but it just didn't sound like me.

And so I flew out to give my seminar and told my husband, don't worry, we're not moving to the East Coast. I'm just going to go see what it's like and then tell them I'm not interested. And I flew out here and I absolutely loved it. I gave a seminar, I loved the faculty, the students, the projects. I looked around and it's one of those places where you think what everyone else is doing is incredibly interesting and you want to work with them. And that's what it was like. I always say it's like Disneyland for scientists and engineers because I looked around, I go, wow I want to do that, I want to do that, I want to do that. And so I flew back and told my husband that I really liked it. And he says, well that's good, but let's not really think about the East Coast.

So I came out for second interview out here and I loved it even more. And I think I actually came out for a third interview to fly out to say I wasn't coming. And during that time, it was at a Starbucks, I was talked into coming. And I had to fly back and tell my husband we were moving to MIT. Because it's one of those kind of places that there's so much exciting happening here, I didn't want the opportunity to be left. I wanted to be involved in it. And it really had to do with the development of the biological engineering department here. The way that they looked at biological engineering, the way they looked at the world really resonated with the way that I looked at the world. And that, combined with the material science department here, it just seemed like it was the absolute perfect fit for me.

We've been here nine years now, and we keep saying, well one day when we go home-- and we say, we'll never go home. This is too great for us.

INTERVIEWER: Now, when you said that originally you thought that MIT didn't sound like you, and you seem to have this issue with the East Coast.

BELCHER: Well, I just grew up in Texas. I'm a seventh generation Texan. And I didn't want to live anywhere that snowed, for one. But that way it didn't sound like me. I thought MIT was going to be kind of a snobby place. And I don't know why I thought that, I just did. And I thought, that's not really my personality. But it's not like that at all. And that's one thing that I love about MIT. What matters is how good you are and what your ideas are and how hard you work. It's not where your family's from, it's not where you went to undergraduate school, it's all about your ideas and if you can make them happen. And I like that. It's what you can do, what you can bring to the table, and how well you work with other people. That's the key to success here. And I like that a lot. So it's very much me. I just didn't know.

INTERVIEWER: And is your husband also a scientist?

BELCHER: Yeah, he's a physician. He's at UMass.

INTERVIEWER: And so how did you convince him? What did you have to--

BELCHER: You know, it's kind of funny because I think that we were saying where to go and we made a list. And I think I listed Boston one and he listed it last. I think that's how it happened. I think he was convinced that I completely fell in love with MIT and that it was the only place that I wanted to go. And Boston's a good place for medicine too. He also grew up in Texas and did all his education in Texas. And so I think that it was a place movement more than anything else, from his point of view. Because he ended up going into the residency in the Harvard Medical School system. And it's a great place for him to work. I think it was just the idea of moving away from our home and our roots. And we're very much Texans.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, I can imagine that would have been difficult. And have you adapted to the snow yet?

BELCHER: We have. I don't shovel snow, my husband does that. But we do. And it's fun because my oldest has gotten into the snow for the first time this year. And he's done cross country skiing right out of our backyard. So that's pretty nice. The seasons are great. And Boston is a great city and Cambridge is great as well. I think it's mostly that we're both so happy in our jobs. And I'm so happy here at MIT that everything else kind of falls into place.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to ask you specifically about interdisciplinary research. Do you find that MIT is quite friendly to that?

BELCHER: Oh, very much so. In making the decision where to go during my move, that was the most important thing for me. I was trying to recapture what I had as a graduate student in a postdoc in terms of no boundaries between disciplines and between departments. And one of the reasons that I liked it so much here is that it felt that way to me. And you can never really tell until you get here. My group almost never publishes a paper without collaboration from another group. We just love to work with other groups. And putting ideas together that are bigger than just us really amplifies the research. And so we work with people from a lot of collaboration here on campus.

And part of the new building that we're in, the new Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research is that way because we have half scientists, half engineers in the same building. And it's kind of a dream come true in terms of you can't walk down the hall without running into someone in a really different area than you. And it really brings about new ideas and this interdisciplinary relationship. And that's my favorite part about science, is I like working in areas that I can bring something to the table that maybe I'm not an expert in. But if I'm working with a person that's an expert in that and we work together, maybe we can find a way of thinking about something that people haven't thought about it before and have new approaches to solving problems. And that means everything to me, and MIT is just a perfect environment for that.

And I don't collaborate that much outside of MIT anymore. And it's not because I don't want to, it's just so easy to collaborate here. And if you're just in the same building or a couple buildings away, it's very easy to set up these interactions that can make a big impact in different fields.

INTERVIEWER: I heard you once say somewhere about the way you-- I don't know if you still do this now that you're in a new building-- but the way you actually organize your students physically and set them up in these groups. Can you talk a little about that?

BELCHER: So my group moved six months ago to the new building, and I let my students self-organize there. And so we didn't do that as much. But they seemed to organize not necessarily in areas of-- we didn't have our solar people and our battery people and our cancer people. They just picked the people they wanted to sit next to. So it's a little bit different now. But the thing that I love is that my students and postdocs-- most of them are in one big office with individual desks. And I'll be sitting there talking to one student about maybe our CO2 sequestration and storage project, and a student behind me is saying, oh, okay well what about-- and they're working on a completely different problem. And they'll throw their ideas into it.

So it's a really good interactive way of organizing ourselves. Because we have a small group and we're sitting there. And all the other students around, they either have their headphones, they're not listening, or they are listening and participating. And most of the students in my lab don't work on just one project. So a student of mine who just graduated, she worked on cancer and solar. And you say wow, those seem like very, very different-- actually, cancer, solar, and batteries-- they seem like very, very different areas. But they're not because they're all based on biological control of a specific inorganic material. And once we had good biological control of that specific inorganic material, oh, it works for batteries, works for solar, works for cancer.

And if we didn't have such an open-minded group, I think that would be hard for someone to say okay, I'm going to focus on this particular gene or this particular cell type. No, we're not like that. We're like, let's develop this material and see how many different fields we can impact with this one material. And that comes partly by-- I think I talked about interdisciplinary as being one my favorite things about MIT. But it's the students. It's the absolutely fantastic students that we get here-- undergraduates, graduate, postdocs-- picking the students who can think about ideas in a broad way. And that's very, very important to me. And I think that's the kind of people I try to bring into the group.

And the clustering that we have of students, I can look and say, there's a material scientist there, there's a structural biologist there, there's a mechanical engineer there. It's all mixed together in our group, and I think it brings a lot to an interesting way of solving problems, addressing problems.

INTERVIEWER: Now, do you still teach?

BELCHER: I do teach, yes. In the fall, I teach organic chemistry and biochemistry for materials with Professor Rubner, who is a fantastic teacher.

INTERVIEWER: Is that undergraduate?

BELCHER: It's undergraduate, yes. Sophomore, junior level course. And I also teach biological engineering labs in the fall as well.

INTERVIEWER: And tell me about, do you like teaching?

BELCHER: I love teaching. I do love teaching. The hard thing about teaching at MIT is that there's so many fantastic teachers at MIT. And you'd think that would make it easier, but it's a little bit harder. And the students are very, very engaged and interested. I absolutely love teaching. I think it's hardest part of my job because you're sitting there in front of 40 or 50 students, and you're working on presenting an idea. And you get feedback in real time because you can look at their faces, you can see if they're engaged, you can see if they're interested, if you're doing a good job or not. It's very obvious in real time as you're doing it. I very much enjoy it. And I only teach undergraduate courses because I love undergraduate students. I mean, I love graduate students too, but teaching undergraduates is fun.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. It just seems like you have so much on your plate. You're running the lab, and you have teaching, and I'm sure you do a ton of grant writing. I was just wondering if you could describe a typical day for me.

BELCHER: I don't think any days are typical. No two days are the same. There's all the things that you mentioned. There's grant writing and all kinds of meetings about new ideas, and there's grant reports, there's my favorite part of the day, which is just going in and talking to the students in my lab, which I would do all day long if I had enough time to do it. Looking over their shoulders, see what the data is doing today, and where directions are going. There's preparing for lecture and teaching, and then there's other kinds of things like outreach and being on scientific boards and things like that. And then I also founded two companies, and so there's boards for companies as well.

INTERVIEWER: Do you sleep? I just don't understand.

BELCHER: Well, I slept a lot more before my one-year-old, he doesn't sleep that much. It's all about having great people to work with. And I don't to all of this myself, by any means. I have great support, great colleagues. The students do help me with the grant reports and grant proposals, and it's a team effort. And I think a lot of times, it's this is Angela Belcher's lab and she's done all this. And I'm the head of a lab, but the hard work is really done by the people in my lab. And knowing how to hire the people or get the people together that work well together that have the good scientific ideas and can do the research, but also help with new ideas and pushing the lab forward and writing about them. And then there's writing papers and things as well. It's kind of hard because I don't really have a typical day.

INTERVIEWER: Is there anything since you've come here that you could describe as an MIT moment that really captures the spirit of the incident or just something you say, oh gosh, that's so MIT.

BELCHER: I should have thought about that one in advance. Maybe I'll think about that and come back to it because there's just so much that is MIT. I feel completely surrounded by-- one of the things that I love is that I was walking to get something to eat. And just the conversations that you hear going around in terms of, well, I was working on this cell line and this gene, or whatever it is. It's just surrounding you and it's the enthusiasm and the excitement. And you're kind of peeking and listening because what they're talking about is really interesting. I think that is very, very MIT. That no matter what you're doing, standing, going somewhere, there's some exciting science happening around. I'd say that's more just typical day-to-day and it gets you really, really excited. Or when you walk around and you see student competitions where students are building things or the robotics that they do, and the students are cheering or getting excited about something. I think that is very MIT to me as well.

I don't know, when President Obama came, that was pretty exciting. And that's one of the things that I think about, that when I'm doing something exciting like that, that you think, this is very MIT. That you have people that are important in policy-making, important in the country, that are so interested in what we're doing and what's coming out of MIT. And they believe in us, that we can change the world. And to me, that's very MIT. And that's an exciting place to be.

INTERVIEWER: What was it like to meet Obama? Was there anything about it that surprised you?

BELCHER: I think what it was is that he's a very smart guy. And that's not surprising, but it's the kind of questions and interaction you have in real time that you know are real, they're not staged. Unless he really studied my research, which I doubt he did, had time to do, his questions were just so on the mark. And he seemed very engaged and very interested and excited. I think they actually had to kind of push him on because he wanted to stay and ask more questions. So that was one.

And also just how he puts someone at ease when he walks in. You hear about those kind of people, who walk into a room and put people at ease. I haven't met that many of those people, but you wouldn't expect it from the president of the United States. But I remember being a little bit nervous-- not about meeting the president, but meeting the president representing MIT, because I didn't want to mess up-- and my collaborator and friend, Paula Hammond, she and I were together and he walked in and just put us completely at ease. And it was just like talking to a friend about the research that we were doing. It was just a really smart person.

INTERVIEWER: So would you mind telling me the story about the periodic table?

BELCHER: So I had these periodic tables made for the incoming freshman class that are the periodic table and the elements, it says, welcome to MIT, now you're in your element. And the other side are the amino acids with their structure and the pH at which different things occur. And I had them made because I'm always looking at the periodic table and the amino acids. And it's kind of funny, as we talked about before, when I came to MIT it was almost like this huge relief because I found my home, I found a place where I really fit in. And so when I made the cards I said, now you're in your element because of the pun in it, but also because that's the way I completely found that I really fit in once I got here. And I thought there's probably a lot of other people that once they get here, they realize this is it, that they really fit in.

And so I give them out a lot. I give them out when I give lectures, I give them out at elementary schools and science fair competitions and a lot of people. And so when the president came, I said, I'm going to give him a periodic table. And I talked to my husband the night before, I said, how do I give the president a periodic table. And by the way, here's a periodic table. When is the right moment that that comes up in your life? And so I was really nervous, I think I had it in my pocket. And so I kind of worked through different scenarios that night when I was falling asleep the night before. And so I decided to say something like, I wanted to give you a periodic table in case you're ever in a bind and need to calculate molecular weight. And he smiled, and he took it and he said, I'll look at it periodically. He has that kind of wit, he really got it.

I was happy that I didn't look completely silly doing it. So then later when he was giving his talk at MIT on clean energy and he pulled it out, and so we have a picture of that in my office where he's holding it. And it was in the news. And when I go around and speak to kids in elementary schools and high schools and things, I always give them the periodic table. It's the same one the president carries. I know he carried it for one day, I doubt he carries it now. But then the kids, they just go nuts because they're excited about having a periodic table anyway, but having the same one the president has, it kind of elevates it for them.

It's kind of this dual experience of it was pretty neat to be able to give him that and he appreciated it. At the same time, I think getting kids excited about it, giving them that extra boost from someone like that having the same table they have it, it seems fun.

INTERVIEWER: I know you have-- in the past, at least-- given a lot of talks to middle school and younger students. Do you still do that, and why or how do you do that?

BELCHER: I still do it. I have two small children myself now, so my time is not as flexible as it once was. But I still try to do it. Whenever I'm invited locally, I also speak quite a bit in the MIT Museum and the Boston Museum of Science. So I am involved that way, whenever they ask me do something, I do. And whenever I'm asked from the public to give a talk, locally I do. I used to travel around and do it more, but it's gotten more difficult. Right now I'm working with some other faculty, we're thinking about creative ways of having a larger impact locally in our area and we've come up with some ideas that we're pretty excited about. But we'll see what comes up over the next couple of months.

INTERVIEWER: I was reading an essay by Nancy Hopkins and she wrote that when she came to MIT 35 years ago, her sense was that if she wanted to succeed in science she couldn't get married and couldn't have children. Why do you think she would have said that about science 40 years ago, and what has changed since then?

BELCHER: I think that that was definitely not an unrealistic thing to say at all. She might have had more insight than I did, because this is an all-consuming job. Being a professor, being a professor of a lab, and then-- especially in a place like MIT where expectations are very, very high, not only from MIT but of yourself. You don't get here if you don't have very high expectations of yourself and your work and your teaching.

I just went into it thinking I've always wanted to be a mom, and I went into it thinking that I was going to do both. And I didn't know I was going to succeed in both, but I was definitely going to give it a try. And I think that the timing worked out for me that I was full professor about the same time that my first child was born. And that had less pressure on me because I wasn't having to go through the tenure process. So I think that starting thinking about going through the tenure process and having one or two small children at the same time would be extremely-- and I've seen women do it and succeed-- it seems extremely difficult. I don't think that that's a function of where you are, it's a function of how many hours you have in a day. And your lab always needs you, your students always need you, and your kids always need you. And it's how to split up that time. So I understand completely where that comes from.

I didn't think much about it. I think I was always worried about it. From the time I was a graduate student, I was worried about it. How am I going to do both? And as a young faculty member, I think I was worried about how am I going to be able to accomplish both? I think that time will tell how successful I have been at it, but I think that the way things are set up at MIT now has really helped a lot. So the child care, I can't say enough about having the child care on campus, where I have a one-year-old there now and a five-year-old. And being able to go back and forth between my office and child care when I have time to have lunch with my kids and play with my kids and teach in their class means absolutely everything to me.

I think that is completely part of what my success has been, is having a place where I completely trust the well-being of my small children and then get to come back and forth during the day and be with them and be a mom and then go back and go to my meetings and go back and forth. So I'm just one building away. And to me, that has been a part of why I've been successful at doing both at the same time.

INTERVIEWER: I'm sure you have male colleagues who are the same age and also have small children. Do you find that they have the same worries or concerns that you have, or do you think mothers have--

BELCHER: Well, I don't think I can say as much about my male colleagues, but I don't know what being a dad is like, but being a mom and a dad is different. And I just know between my husband and I, we have very different jobs, different roles. And I am a worrier, I think about everything. And my husband doesn't. He kind of thinks, everything will work out. I think maybe everything will work out because I'm taking care of it.

So I'm not sure. I did make a comment to a colleague once where when my son was about one years old, I said, I just went for 15 minutes without thinking about my son. And that was really strange. My kids are always on my brain first. I'm going around doing something, I'm writing my grant proposal, or-- not as much when I'm teaching, because when you're teaching, you're really all-consumed with teaching. But I think okay, now the kids are having a snack, now the kids are having lunch, I wonder if they had a good nap. And that never shuts off, it's always at the front of my brain. So it is interesting. But I've learned how to do both at the same time.