Melissa Kline Struhl
I became a scientist because I like hard problems. I love solving them too, but I’m endlessly attracted to the ones that resist easy resolution and generate ambiguity and conflicting demands. I’m also really interested in how we think about our own scientific practices, and I love looking for concrete ways to improve them.
I started graduate school in 2009, and while 2011 is often cited as a key year for the ‘replication crisis’, I only remember being dimly aware of some weird studies about telepathy. My interest in how we document and verify our science came as the result of being a TA for Rebecca Saxe’s undergraduate methods course, while struggling mightily with my own experimental work with young children. In the first, I learned how to be skeptical of the artifact of a published paper, and in the second, I learned to be skeptical of myself.
My mentors trained me to fold replications into my study designs - show something we know, then show a new effect that follows. I had multiple experiences falling down on the first step, and not knowing whether my inability to ‘get the effect’ was due to an unknown difference in my methods, my own incompetence, or low power. Even more eye-openingly, I failed to replicate myself, and it was because I’d let myself make some very optimistic analytic decisions about the initial dataset. In the submitted manuscript, I disclosed that this was a post-hoc finding, and I’m eternally grateful to the editor who gently asked me to run the experiment a second time, yielding the null-est null result I’ve seen either before or since!
After grad school, I spent four years as a postdoc, with three unsuccessful runs at the faculty job market. I had incredible moral and practical support from mentors including Laura as well as Jesse Snedeker (Harvard Psych) and Josh Tenenbaum, Ted Gibson and Ev Fedorenko, but it was tough and demoralizing. I don’t really have any wisdom for these job searches, except that I was really glad I learned - and then stuck to - my own priorities for a happy career and life. For me, this eventually meant realizing I wanted to stay in the Boston area with my husband Ben and our support network, and I got used to the winces of sympathy when people found out I was ‘geographically restricted.’
When I went to the Center for Open Science, I agonized about leaving the faculty job market, even as I wasn’t really sure if what I was doing qualified as ‘leaving academia’ or not. The fact that I was able to take this job working remotely (in 2019) is probably why I’m still in science, and spending time away from academic psych departments has taught me a ton. I spent two and a half years immersed in metascience research - the study of how science functions, and specifically how we make and evaluate empirical claims in our papers. I also got to work on a large collaborative team, and being able to rely on teammates - and having them rely on my ideas and solutions in turn - was extremely motivating. It expanded my awareness of what scientific work is and who does it, and of the limitations of how we currently communicate and reward that work.
Becoming the Executive Director for Lookit is exciting because it’s a chance to work directly on the scientific issue I care most about - improving the quality and representativeness of research with young children. I’m really excited to find the hard problems, learn from the families and researchers who use the platform, and figure out how to do the very best science we can!
Outside of science, I love running, backpacking and getting on top of mountains (most recently Mt. Katahdin, which really reminded me of being a toddler trying to climb up a bunch of way-too-large stairs!) I also play boardgames, especially collaborative ones (there is a theme here), and when it’s not a pandemic, I dance tango and sing in a choir. I live in Somerville with my husband Ben.
