In Chapter 16 of 19 in her 2011 Capture Your Flag interview with host Erik Michielsen, Stacie Grossman Bloom answers "How Has Your Scientific Training Informed Your Development as a Manager?" She notes how management skills challenge scientists given they are not formally trained. Bloom highlights how organizations such as the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) provide scientists management training via programs such as the Science Alliance.
Stacie Grossman Bloom is the Executive Director at the NYU Neuroscience Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center. Previously, she was VP and Scientific Director at the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS). She earned her PhD in Neurobiology and Cell Biology at Georgetown University and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Rockefeller University in New York City. She earned her BA in Chemistry and Psychology from the University of Delaware.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: How has your scientific training informed your development as a manager?
Stacie Grossman Bloom: Developing managerial skills, as a scientist, is not so easy. It’s not one of the skills that you learn in the lab. You can be naturally inclined to be a good manager, but I would say throughout graduate school and postdoctoral training, management is not the skills that you get. One of the things that we do at the New York Academy of Sciences is a science alliance program that provides career mentoring and skill development outside of the university. So, it’s a place where currently about 10,000 young scientists come to learn those kinds of skills. One of those is how to manage your lab, or how to navigate the visa process, or how to find a career outside of academia, how to be an entrepreneur, how to take your idea to an IPO. Those are the kinds of things that we are trying to teach young scientists at the Academy.