NEB Podcast #72 -
Transcript
Interviewers: Lydia Morrison, Marketing Communications Manager & Podcast Host, New England Biolabs, Inc.
Interviewee: Samuel Ogunsola, Ph.D. candidate, Co-Founder of SWIS Africa
Lydia Morrison:
Welcome to the Lessons from Lab and Life podcast, brought to you by New England Biolabs. I'm your host, Lydia Morrison, and I hope this episode brings you some new perspective. Today I'm joined by 2024 Passion in Science Award Winner Samuel Ogunsola. Samuel launched the Shaping African Women in STEM program or, SWIS Africa, an initiative that aims to inspire young African women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics by sharing stories of successful African women in STEM. Hi Samuel, thanks so much for being here to join me today for the NEB podcast.
Samuel Ogunsola:
Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here, thank you, grateful.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, I'm so excited to share your story with our audience. And I want to start by explaining what it was that you observed about the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in Africa that drove you to found the SWIS Africa program.
Samuel Ogunsola:
Oh yeah, I would say what happened is because I myself am a scientist, I did my undergrad in biochemistry from Nigeria, and after I graduated I noticed that there were many female friends of mine and also females around me that are giving up on their dream of pursuing a career in STEM. So looking at that, I see that there is a big challenge because we need everyone on board to be able to make STEM progress. We need the females, we need the males because we see the world in a different way. So if we have only male scientists, that's not going to help us because we also need different perspectives in looking at our data and also the impacts we're making through STEM.
So that's what led me to start SWIS Africa. And the goal is mainly to use stories of women that have gone ahead to help inspire, empower, and equip the new set of women that are coming up to be able to pursue career in STEM. So we do this through different programs to be able to help achieve this goal. So we have interviews we publish, we publish blogs and different things just to ensure that we get to inspire more women to pursue a career in STEM.
Lydia Morrison:
Wow, that's so important. I'm curious, in your conversations with the women that you knew that didn't pursue careers in STEM fields, what were the reasons that they gave you for not moving forward with those careers?
Samuel Ogunsola:
I would say one of them is stereotypes and biases, getting to imagine you discuss with your parents that, "I would love to get a PhD," as a woman, the first question that we ask is, "Okay, when will you be done?" "Maybe I'll be done at age 29, age 30." "Don't you think you should get married first?" And by the time you get married, you give birth and do all those things, before you say you want to go back, life has already happened. So many people just stop there, right? Although there are women that are able to still push through, and that's part of the stories we are sharing. Being a woman to be able to give birth, be married, and still be able to do your PhD program and succeed is something that is amazing. So we get to share the stories of those people to empower the new sets that are coming, that there are actually women that are doing this and they're able to excel at it, right? So that's one.
I would say the other one is also lack of role models, right? People to look up to. If, for instance, I want to pursue a career in aeronautic engineering and I've not seen any woman do that before, I might feel discouraged, I don't think it's a field for women. Maybe women are not even engineers, maybe all the women are doing nothing, or maybe they're just scientists in the lab. So the more we see women in engineering, the more we see them share their stories that we are actually doing this, we are here so you're not the only one out there, so I think that will encourage more women to join.
And then I'll say another one is lack of resources, lack of recognition, lack of opportunities for women because the trainings might be different, the way you maybe train a guy might be different from the way you train a lady. So being able to understand that can also help us to get more women to pick up career and also pick up interest in STEM.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, I think that those observations are true for lots of different fields and careers, and I think especially poignantly so for women and women of color in STEM fields in particular. So it's so wonderful to have attention drawn to it and to see someone building a community around those people to help those women support each other and help each other rise in their careers and be successful. So how does SWIS Africa work to support the mission that you've just described for us?
Samuel Ogunsola:
Yeah, we use different ways to do that. So we have our objectives, so we mainly have three objectives. So the first one is to celebrate. So we do that through interviews, we organize interviews. Through those interviews, we get to celebrate the person we interview, so people get to hear their stories. And I think celebrating someone encourages them, "Wow, people are actually learning about what I'm doing, I think I feel important and I can push through this more. So that means there is a meaning to what I'm doing."
And then the other part of it is we also engage. So that part of engagement involves regular sending out emails, social media posts, getting to discuss with them. And that also that's where mentorship comes in place because I cannot just be one-off programs or maybe one-off connections, so you need to be able to constantly or consistently talk to them, get to hear what they're going through. So we try to do that. So every month we try as much as possible to send out an email to all the people in our community, and we have about 600 of them now.
So another one is also to empower them. So we have workshops, we have what we call the SWIS Africa Masterclass where it's online, so we invite people to come around and teach on a particular topic. So we've talked about data science, we've talked about research, we've talked about mentorship and different topics that we think would benefit the community. And then now we have new programs that are coming up.
So one of them is the SWIS Empower Art Program. So this came out of the fact that as a final year student in an undergraduate program, the next step you want to take is either to go into academia, to get a job or to start your own maybe idea. But for each of these steps, there are different things you need to achieve them. For instance, if you want to get into entrepreneurship, you need to learn how to write a business plan, how to pitch your idea. That might be different from someone that wants to go for a masters, maybe the person needs to learn how to write an essay, how to write the proposal, how to make academic presentation. And that's also different from someone going to the industry, the person needs to learn how to do interviews, how to write a CV or resume, how to even apply for a job. So each of these streams require different skills and experience. So part of what we want to do now is also create this program to help final year undergraduate student to be able to transition easily from college to the marketplace. So that's that.
We also have the SWIS Arts project, which is a SWIS Africa research training program. And the goal of that program is to empower women in research. So if you have interest in research, we want to empower you to be able to learn more about research. And besides that too, to give you an opportunity to communicate your research because the world we are in today, if you don't have to communicate your research, you are more disadvantaged. Being able to present in a conference, being able to give presentation is actually a very important skillset in research.
And then we have another one, again, for high school students, which the goal is to empower some of them to be able to do their final year exam back in Africa. These are an exam that is quite expensive, and also they need a lot of training. So these are some of the projects that are ongoing that we are looking at doing to make more impact and also get more women interested in STEM.
Lydia Morrison:
What an incredible group of resources you've been able to establish for the women in that community. I love the storytelling feature of it because I do think it's so important to celebrate those individuals. And I'm curious, how do you identify those individuals that you're going to interview or you're going to have speak at one of your events? How do you find these women?
Samuel Ogunsola:
So I would say our main resource is LinkedIn. So we go on LinkedIn, we just type in, okay, women is STEM, or women doing research, and then we search for them. And we don't look at people that are only high flyers or maybe a director, no, we also look at people that are just starting. We've interviewed recent graduates, we've even interviewed someone in undergrad. We interviewed any woman in STEM that loves to share their story. So what we just do most times is to use LinkedIn.
And besides that now, we are happy to also announce that you can actually nominate someone. So you can go on our website, SWIS Africa, and search, you see the tab for interviews, click on it. So you can look for a friend of yours that is a woman in STEM, a Black woman. It might not even be a Black person, but someone you feel we should celebrate. You can just type in the details of the person, then we'll reach out and then we invite the person for an interview. So the interview can either be virtual or maybe they can also answer the questions, or some people have probably stage fright, they don't want to show their faces, so we can just have them write the answers out and then we can post it on our website or on our media page so people can also go there and read about it. So we try to accommodate everyone and later on we're probably going to transition into starting a podcast like this.
Lydia Morrison:
I was just going to say, you should do a podcast.
Samuel Ogunsola:
Yes, we are looking into that. It's just, again, setting up the resources to get that done right. So it takes a lot of money to set it up and getting a place to do it. So it's something we're working on. And even interestingly this summer, we're planning to do our first physical interview. So we're going to get a cameraman, get sound, get everything. So we're working on that. But it's just like, again, it all comes down to resources. If you have enough money, we get to make more impact. So with the little one things we have now, we're trying as much as possible to still achieve our mission.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, and it seems like you've made great strides in achieving your mission. I also wanted to talk to you about the communication aspect that you mentioned. I'm obviously a huge fan of science communication and sharing scientific knowledge and thought process, but I think that it's so important because I think when you talked about the three tracks of moving to academia or going directly to a job or perhaps starting your own project as an entrepreneur, those are very different and all very scary things, I think, to undertake as you're thinking about how to start your future. And so I can't imagine how valuable a resource it is to have someone there giving you guidance on how to put your CV together, how to interview, how to interact with PIs, or to help you with your interview skills.
I remember when I first went to my first interviews after graduate school, my father-in-law sat me down and gave me a fake interview process. He wasn't my father-in-law at the time, but it was so valuable to me to have someone to do fake interview with and to practice those skills and to learn what kinds of questions are important to ask when you're thinking about those positions. So I think that an incredibly valuable resource for that community and really for anybody pursuing a future in STEM to understand what those expectations are. So really, really amazing.
Samuel Ogunsola:
Thank you.
Lydia Morrison:
I'm curious, it seems like you're doing a great job using social media and online presence in the LinkedIn community to really help build awareness of the program and the community. If someone's interested in helping or supporting SWIS Africa or one of the sub programs that you mentioned like SWIS Empower Her, how would they go about doing that?
Samuel Ogunsola:
So I would say it's pretty simple, so just head over to our website, www.SWIS Africa.com. So on the website, you can send a message to us and then we can get to meet, we can do that virtually and get to talk about how you can come in and help us. Again, we need a lot of support for all these projects. And support is not just finance, we need support in terms of mentorship, we need support in terms of helping the team. Again, we are doing a lot of projects, so we need more hands to get them running. And again, we are not only looking for Black people to join us, this is something that is open. As much as you have interest in supporting women in STEM, reach out to us, we can talk.
We recently partnered with an organization in Canada, TechNest community, and what we did was to celebrate women globally in tech and also in STEM. So whether you're white or Black, the goal is to celebrate as many women as possible, although our focus is more on the African women, but we can still expand our reach as long as we are achieving our mission to celebrate more women, empower them and equip them with the resources they need. So you can reach out to us through our website and also you can reach out to me through my email is samuel@SWIS Africa.org. So once you reach out, you can get a talk and discuss on how you can come in and support us. Thank you.
Lydia Morrison:
Awesome. And everybody can find links to the website in the transcript for this podcast as well. So before I let you go, Samuel, we just enjoyed a lunch together and someone asked you a question during that lunch and your answer was just so phenomenal that I have to repeat the question here for all of our listeners. So the question you were asked was, what is your favorite NEB product? Which isn't something we traditionally ask at the podcast, but your answer was just so wonderful to hear. So would you share with us what your favorite NEB product is and the story behind that?
Samuel Ogunsola:
Yeah, that's an interesting story actually because when I started my PhD program, part of my major project is to clone a mini-gene. So I've tried different techniques where I kept failing, it's either I get a clone and the insert is not there, or I get a clone with the insert, but the insert is wrongly positioned. So there were a lot of challenges and that delayed my program for over two years. So I had to meet a mentor to advise me on how to give about it, and then he recommended the NEB Gibson Cloning Kit. So I checked the website and interestingly, it was actually for free, at that time they were doing five reactions for free.
So I ordered the five reactions and then it came and I just tried the kit and boom, my clone came out and it was perfect. And I even got multiple clones, so that make the project very fast. And within a year or two, I was able to move fast in my PhD program. So to me, I think my own best product is the NEB Gibson Cloning Kit. Again, I use several NEB products. I use the enzymes, I use the restriction enzymes especially, but the Gibson Cloning Kit is something I'll always remember through my PhD experience.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, I love that story because I can acutely remember how frustrating it can be to be a PhD student and to sort of keep repeating the same experiment and keep having it not work the way you expected or anticipated and how frustrating that can be. So I can imagine what a breakthrough moment that was-
Samuel Ogunsola:
Yeah, it was.
Lydia Morrison:
For you and I'm so glad that NEB could be here for it.
Samuel Ogunsola:
Thank you very much. And also, I'm very grateful for this podcast and the opportunity to come around to the campus and also get to talk about SWIS Africa. And this is not just about me, I'm also saying a big thank you to my other team members. My co-founder, Abosede Salami. She's currently a PhD student in New York, and she's been doing a lot of great work helping us to have SWIS Africa and also my team members that are supporting us to make the organization move forward. All of them are volunteers, they're not paid because for now we're still building, but they're all putting all their effort to make this work. So I say thank you to all of them, and also all the people that have supported us in terms of mentors, all the people we've interviewed and all the participants because we are all working together to make SWIS Africa what it is, so I say a big thank you to everyone. Thank you.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, thank you so much for being here today, and thank you for working so hard to build the powerful community that you're helping to develop.
Samuel Ogunsola:
Thank you.
Lydia Morrison:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Lessons from Lab and Life podcast. Please check out our show’s transcript for helpful links from today’s conversation. And as always, we invite you to join us next episode when I am joined by New England Biolab’s bioinformaticist Valadimir Potapov, who is an important part of the team that builds online tools to aid both NEB scientists and our customers in calculations and experimental design. Valdimir joins us to talk through the open access Ligase Fidelity Tools which are used to aid in the design of DNA Assembly via the Golden Gate method.
