More Like this

1. Maintaining Innovative Potential Over Time

   Goldstein, Bruce Evan (March 2021, Social innovations journal)

   How can you maintain your community’s social innovative potential over the long term to devise new approaches to intractable social-ecological problems, adapt to changing conditions, and scale innovations to catalyze systems change? Leadership practices that foster capacity to generate fundamental social innovation were identified by highly experienced designers and facilitators of learning networks during a dialogue series on how to maintain lively, generative innovation communities held from 2018 to 2020. In their own words, I offer their advice on how to choose an appropriate suite of innovations through co-work that both probes the system for opportunities for change and pursues harder-to-achieve leverage points for change by building on short-term innovation. I also offer their insights into how to engage your community member’s innovative potential over time and how to generate useful rapid feedback to stay aligned with your goals using measures that enhance your community’s capacity to self-assess. This can both hold the organization accountable and build capacity for self-governance. In my commentary, I suggest how this practical wisdom concretely applies ideas about systems change to the challenges of organizational leadership. 

   more » « less
2. My Big, Fat 50-Year Journey

   https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00499  

   Palmer, Martha (March 2024, Computational Linguistics)

   My most heartfelt thanks to ACL for this tremendous honor. I’m completely thrilled. I cannot tell you how surprised I was when I got Iryna’s email. It is amazing that my first ACL conference since 2019 in Florence includes this award. What a wonderful way to be back with all of my friends and family here at ACL. I’m going to tell you about my big fat 50-year journey. What have I been doing for the last 50 years? Well, finding meaning, quite literally in words. Or in other words, exploring how computational lexical semantics can support natural language understanding. This is going to be quick. Hold onto your hats, here we go. 

   more » « less
3. Fostering inclusion and diversity through research, teaching, mentoring, and outreach

   https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E19-07-0379  

   Torres, Jorge Z. (November 2019, Molecular Biology of the Cell)

   I am deeply humbled and honored to receive the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) Prize for Excellence in Inclusivity. Thank you to the ASCB for recognizing the contributions of faculty to inclusion and diversity in STEM and the importance of this for the advancement of science. Thank you to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) for your generous support of inclusivity. The prize money will be used to fund outreach activities aimed at increasing inclusion in science and to create research opportunities for students from underrepresented groups in the sciences. In this essay, I share bits of my life’s story that I hope will resonate with a broad audience, especially students from underrepresented groups in STEM, and that drive my passion for inclusion and diversity. I provide points of consideration for students to enhance their preparation for science careers and for faculty to improve the current landscape of inclusion and diversity in STEM. 

   more » « less
4. Love and Discord: Creating Passion Through Leadership

   Goldstein, Bruce Evan (March 2021, Social innovations journal)

   How can a social innovation enhance diversity in ways that maximize its social benefits and minimize its social costs? This challenge was explored in a dialogue series convened from 2018 to 2020, where highly experienced network designers and facilitators (or “netweavers”) explored how to maintain lively, generative innovation communities. This paper provides advice from the netweavers in their own words, combined with my commentary on their ideas for benefiting from diverse membership and building and maintaining connection within social innovations organizations that may have limited face-to-face interaction. I first explore how to bring love to your leadership by engaging selflessly, telling the truth, and cultivating a mind and body connection. I recount how the netweavers engaged in ritual, storytelling, and other creative techniques for enhancing intuition and imagination, and how they maintained brief personal connections that were individually tailored to their community member’s needs. Second, I explore how to embrace diversity and disruption. A creative community contains many kinds of diversity, and these differences are useful for innovation work since they cause people to question and broaden their ideas and assumptions. I recount the netweavers’ ideas about how to weave this capacity for creative disruption within a culture of safety and reassurance without letting things get too comfortable and complacent. They concluded that social innovation communities should not cultivate consensus, but rather should create an environment where people see each other as legitimate participants and feel safe to share their differences. 

   more » « less
5. My Trajectory in Molecular Reaction Dynamics and Spectroscopy

   https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-physchem-090519-124238  

   Gerber, Robert Benny (April 2021, Annual Review of Physical Chemistry)

   null (Ed.)

   This is the story of a career in theoretical chemistry during a time of dramatic changes in the field due to phenomenal growth in the availability of computational power. It is likewise the story of the highly gifted graduate students and postdoctoral fellows that I was fortunate to mentor throughout my career. It includes reminiscences of the great mentors that I had and of the exciting collaborations with both experimentalists and theorists on which I built much of my research. This is an account of the developments of exciting scientific disciplines in which I was involved: vibrational spectroscopy, molecular reaction mechanisms and dynamics, e.g., in atmospheric chemistry, and the prediction of new, exotic molecules, in particular noble gas molecules. From my very first project to my current work, my career in science has brought me the excitement and fascination of research. What a wonderful pursuit! 

   more » « less