GRANT’S DESI ACHIEVER

FROM INVISIBLE TO INSPIRATIONAL: A QUANTUM LEAP

Shohini Ghose, award-winning physicist.

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

Shohini Ghose is a quantum physicist, who, with a fellow scientist, made the first-ever observations of individual cesium atoms that showed the effect of chaos on quantum entanglement.

Her research has been selected for McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology. She is a TED Senior Fellow and Chief Technology Officer at Quantum Algorithms Institute.

She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2017.

Ghose dedicated her recently published book, Her Space Her Time (review on page 24), to “all the women scientists whose names are lost to history and for all the women scientists who will make history”.

But the professor of physics and computer science at Wilfrid Laurier University pushes back against being described as a “female” scientist and withdrew an article from a prestigious publication when the editor thanked all other authors for submitting articles and thanked her for adding “diversity”.

She received an apology and a promise to do better.

How does she balance the two – her work as a scientist and her passion for shining a light on the work of female scientists?

“There is no easy solution,” Ghose admits. “Every under-represented person faces this balancing between tokensim and stepping up and breaking barriers. I don’t have a blanket rule, I weigh the context, on a case-by-case basis. If I walk away, will that hurt or help the big picture? But it’s complicated. Whenever I am nominated for an award, I never know if it’s for my work or because I belong to a minority. I have never seen a man – certainly not in my field – question if he’s there because he’s a man. When the fact that there are so many men points to the benefit of gender. The very group that benefits from gender doesn’t see the evidence!

“I don’t have an issue with being described as the first person of colour to be elected President of the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) because I had worked there for a long time, I moved up the ranks, and no one ever saw me as a woman of colour. Partly because there was no recognition of such things! But it was great all the same to be recognized for my contributions.”

In this role, Ghose has created and chaired a standing committee to embed equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in all activities of CAP across Canada.

Is it so wrong to be seen as a representative of an elite minority when we talk about the importance of youth seeing themselves reflected in roles they aspire to?

Ghose says it’s not necessarily about right or wrong, unless you’re already undermined in a role, when the talk is about, “Oh, look, she’s there because she ticks the diversity box”. It has to be about excellence, not identity, excellence must include identity.

She founded Laurier’s University Research Centre for Women in Science (WinS) in 2012 to build a strong community for women in science through research, communication and action and help develop policy and actions to address structural and social barriers in science.

Since then, there has been progress in how female scientists are viewed and in opportunities for them. Not as much and as fast as she would have liked, their numbers in science are still fairly low, but the conversation is changing.

She describes the “real push” in Canada with the federal government’s new policies and regulations for applications for research funding.

“Now gender-based analysis plus (GBA+) is part of the evaluation of who gets funding, and money talks! You have to show how you are embedding diversity. That, to me, was an important step. These can be tricky to evaluate, specially when you don’t have human subjects, as in my field, and changes will take time to trickle down, but we’re moving in the right direction.”

“You have to be an optimist to be an activist!”– Shohini Ghose with Indian movie star Shahrukh Khan at her TED talk.

The lack of momentum is not for lack of trying. So what is it going to take to shift the needle in a significant manner?

Ghose believes it’s not about doing more, but about doing smart, and that’s what makes WinS unique.

“We bring researchers together to work on EDI as a problem to be solved. Why are more girls not taking science? What are the barriers? We need to gather data, not guess at solutions. We need to move away from what I call ‘fix the girls’ approach. Mentoring and outreach models are good, but they work around fixing women and not the structural and systemic barriers.

“Let’s look at wage gaps, at how women’s work is evaluated when hiring or promotion decisions are made. None of these will change with girls’ camps. It’s not up to women facing the issue, it’s up to those in leadership roles. That’s why I say mentoring is a Band-Aid, it’s a way to adapt to a problem, not solve it.

“Things have not changed in human history, so not likely to change any time soon,” she says with a rueful chuckle. “Changing culture takes time and its an uphill battle, mainly because we’re not addressing the real problem or reframing the questions around the barriers. But I’m an optimist – it’s the only way you can be an activist!”

In spite of her track record and all the recognition she has received for her work, she says being made to feel invisible still happens to her “all the time”.

“We don’t wear the badge of our track record when we enter a room. All you can do is laugh, now it’s water off my back.”

A TED talk she gave in India about women physicists not being acknowledged crystallized the idea for her book.

She began researching the subject and collecting material, but didn’t have the time to actually work on the book until the pandemic brought things to a standstill.

The writing itself took about a year. With another book, Clues to the Cosmos, already to her name, the process of finding a publisher was smooth. She credits her agent John Pearce for helping her develop the proposal into a pitch.

“It’s important that he believed in the book. We received a strong positive response from Penguin Random House Canada and MIT Press in the US.”

Ghose hopes to bring the stories in Her Space Her Time to a younger audience and is also working on another science-focused book. 

The first introductory astronomy textbook in Canada for university students she co-authored in 2012 is widely used today.

She loves being connected in this manner with students she may never meet.

“I think it’s the closest to telepathy I will experience, my thoughts in someone else’s head.”

Ghose has also been writing three-line science haiku, which she calls saiku!

Growing up in India, she was inspired by Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian astronaut in space.

She was raised in an equal opportunity home where math, science and curiosity didn’t have a gender and when she declared her interest in pure science, her parents didn’t attempt to point her towards “safer” options such as medicine or engineering.

“On the contrary, had I gone into those fields, I think they would have been disappointed. I can picture them saying, ‘That’s boring!’ They think what I do is so cool. I took my parents’ thinking for granted as a child, it’s only later that I fully apprehended just how fortunate I am.”

Ghose majored in physics and mathematics at Miami University and received her PhD in physics from the University of New Mexico in 2003. That’s the year she moved to the University of Calgary on a post-doctoral fellowship.

“After 9/11, I didn’t feel as safe or comfortable in the US. In Canada, the immigration official scanned through my papers and said, ‘Welcome to Canada’ and I thought, this is the first time someone has welcomed me to their country. I felt I was home.”

She also felt like one day it was fall, and the next day, all the leaves fell and it was winter. “I had experience of winter in Ohio, but Calgary was a whole different level!”

Ghose and her husband René met as self-described fellow science nerds – they even gave each other books on essays on physics as engagement gifts. But when, in spite of years of trying to make it work, they were both unable to find academic positions in the same field in the same city, he moved to finance so she could pursue her dream in physics.

“He’s absolutely happy and we’re so lucky it worked out well. But I am aware of how unusual this was, even in the western world. It shouldn’t be, the choices and responsibilities should be 50-50, but they aren’t. My editor left a note on the passage about this in my book, about how he totally didn’t see this coming, that’s how rare it is.”

Ghose has another unusual perspective to share when asked for her tips for young female scientists who will see a role model in her.

“There’s often a sense of not belonging in different spaces among women. It drives the imposter syndrome. I give the example of someone who has gate-crashed a wedding. Would a gate crasher hide away in the corner or would he or she eat, dance and make merry until they were caught? If we are the different person in the room, if we feel like we don’t belong, if we’re made to feel unwelcome, let’s act like the gate crasher! Let’s do everything to make the most of the opportunity, of our time in that space.”

Ghose finds teaching the most rewarding aspect of her work. Being able to connect with the future generations, shaping their minds.

“To guide them in ways, hopefully, that will help them fly. I know through my own work, and recent research on demographics shows the same trends, that the next generation of scientists is a lot more diverse. It is, in and of itself, not unusual, because every subsequent generation tends to be more diverse than the previous one. The question is can we retain them? The current conversations and the regulations being put in place give me hope that this is happening.

“That in ten years or less, these young scientists will be the leaders in their fields. I find that most exciting.” 

• Grant’s is proud to present this series about people who are making a difference in the community. Represented by PMA Canada (www.pmacanada.com).