SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton was among roughly 30 early-career researchers selected to participate in the Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences Annual Workshop, held this past April at SFI’s Gurley Forum.
Now in its seventh year, the annual workshop is organized by SFI External Professor and Science Board member Karen Willcox, director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin, which, along with SFI, co-sponsored the meeting with Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories.
During the past two years as a Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at SFI, Kaleda Denton’s work on conformity has shifted from developing theoretical models, which was the focus of her Ph.D., to testing these models on real data. A chance encounter at a conference introduced her to a dataset that she could use to test one of her models.
“It was a very good fit compared to the standard model,” she says. “It gave me a deep sense of meaning to find out that I’m contributing to understanding about something out there in the world.”
With the support of her Stanford Ph.D. advisor, SFI External Faculty Fellow and Science Board Fellow Marcus Feldman, Denton was excited to join a cohort of others working with data in a broad range of fields.
The Rising Stars meeting featured 15-minute research talks from each of the early-career participants and provided meaningful networking opportunities. It also offered insights from later-career panelists, who shared advice on building sustainable research careers, from managing grants and rejection to choosing projects and collaborators carefully, says Denton. SFI Vice President for Science Jennifer Dunne, Education Director Suzanne Kern, and Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova shared experiences from their careers.
One main takeaway, Denton says, was the importance of pursuing work that is meaningful to you beyond the next career milestone. “Several people emphasized, ‘If you pick projects intending to get tenure, but you don’t enjoy those projects, then when you get tenure, you’re still going to be doing work you don’t enjoy,’” she says. “This advice really resonated with me. Sometimes, in academia, there’s an implicit way of speaking that is more about job prospects than about following your heart. I appreciated that this group was talking about it directly.”