ASCENT 2009 Keynote Speaker
Autobiographical sketch of Dr. Kimberly Sullivan
I am an associate professor of Biology at Utah State University. I received my Ph.D. in Psychobiology from the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University working on mixed species foraging in woodpeckers in 1984. I then enjoyed eight years studying the behavioral and physiological ecology of Yellow-eyed Juncos in a remote area in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona first as a post doc and then as an assistant professor at Indiana State and at Utah State.
I met my husband, Bruce, on a Christmas bird count in Logan, Utah. After our daughter was born and Bruce went to law school, I worked on bird projects closer to home and assisted my students with their field projects. By the time Bruce finished his law degree, we had a son, Ian, and I was ready to spend more time on research. I then spent a wonderful sabbatical year at the U of Washington carrying out field work on Song Sparrows around the Puget Sound and in the San Juan Islands with my husband and children. I returned to Utah State and tried to balance life with two young children, a husband trying to establish a career in environmental law, teaching, advising and field work. The questions I was most interested in required spending long days in the field for many months of the year. I was frustrated by the difficulties I encountered trying to do this type of work with a young family and no support from my institution. This was all complicated by my son’s health issues. At this point I was ready to leave academics.
In 2001, I took the opportunity to work at the National Science Foundation as a program officer in the Animal Behavior program. My family moved to Arlington, Virginia. This turned out to be a great opportunity for my husband also as he found employment as a staff attorney with an environmental group. I found that I enjoyed facilitating science almost as much as I enjoyed doing science myself. I also became interested in science policy.
The first rounds of ADVANCE awards were made while I was working at NSF. During this period my university hired a new president who was much more supportive of women in the academy than previous administrators. To me, this looked like an opportunity to dramatically change my institution to be more welcoming to women scientists and engineers. The ADVANCE program officer at that time still remembers when I came to her office to talk about the program. She doubted Utah State was ready for an ADVANCE award. I said if we could change Utah State, we would show that any institution can change. And we did it!
I returned to Utah State, gathered a team and developed an ADVANCE Institutional Transformation proposal which was funded on the first submission. We are now in the final year of our award and completing the remaining project. Utah State is a very different institution now than it was when we began. We struggled at times through administrator turnover and budget cuts but we met our goals in improving the recruitment, retention and promotion of women science and engineering faculty. We were incredibly fortunate to have a great team who each came from a different background and brought a different set of skills to the project. We also enjoyed working with each other.
While working on the ADVANCE project, I began conducting research on women in my field, ornithology. This started as a small project for an undergraduate and grew into a MS student project and multiple papers. I’ve enjoyed studying the societies I belong to, interviewing graduate students and trying to figure out what happens to women after graduate school.
At the present time, I am continuing to work on ADVANCE and women in science projects while still helping my students with their research on animal behavior. My children are now teenagers and my husband is successful in his field of environmental law. I am, though, starting to dream about going back to my first love, long term behavioral studies, as my children leave home.
-Kimberly Sullivan