An Interview with Carla Shatz – Harvard’s First Female Neurobiology Chair

CS: Well – let me say first off a couple of things: What I expected to happen in my life, never happened, and what happened was not what I had expected. I fully expected while I was growing up, that I would have kids and a family. I was married but I put off the decision to have kids for too long and when it finally came time to have them, I found that I could not conceive. The subsequent infertility treatments were very time consuming, so what time was saved by not having kids got spent in the difficult struggle to conceive. There is never a good time to have children, so my advice is not to postpone this decision. Find an environment where having children is an acceptable part of life and where there are supportive senior faculty. Senior women in the field are increasingly more understanding about the needs of a professional woman to balance kids and career. Now there are several senior women on the faculty here at Harvard. What I did not expected was to have such a successful career. I have found science to be thrilling, exciting and all consuming. It was so much fun that I didn’t notice time passing. This love of science I got from mentors and parents.