DST-CPR LECTURE SERIES

Lecture Title: Impostor Syndrome and Academic Training in STEM

Speaker Name and affiliation: Dr. Devasmita Chakraverty
                                                          Assistant Professor                                                                                                       Ravi J. Matthai Centre for Educational Innovation                                                                                                     
                                                           Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

Date and Time: March 03, 2020 @ 3:00 pm

Venue: Biological Sciences Auditorium, IISc

Refreshments: 4:00 pm

Abstract:

Impostor phenomenon, popularly known as the impostor syndrome, is an internalized experience of intellectual phoniness. People who feel like impostors are typically bright, motivated and successful, yet have incorrect, unrealistic and self-defeating perceptions about themselves. They think that they are not smart enough and may not have a realistic sense of their competence . These self-perceptions affect how people navigate their career, take professional decisions, and seek advancement opportunities. Academic training in STEM is a time-intensive, complex process. Yet, research examining how those who feel like impostors navigate academic training is not well-documented. This talk will address how individuals in STEM describe their impostor experiences in relation to their doctoral and post-doctoral training. Women and underrepresented minorities, in particular, are more vulnerable to experiencing this phenomenon.


Biosketch: Devasmita Chakraverty is faculty of Higher Education at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Prior to this, she was faculty of science education at Washington State University. She has conducted one of the larger mixed-methods studies on the impostor phenomenon, surveying more than 900 people and interviewing more than 400 of them from various STEM and medical fields in the USA, including PhD students, postdocs, faculty, MD students, residents, and physicians. Dr. Chakraverty earned a Ph.D. in Science Education from the University of Virginia, M.P.H. from the University of Washington, and M.Sc. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Calcutta. She has conducted research in India, USA, and Germany. You can connect with her on Twitter @DevasmitaTweets. Preliminary findings from the impostor phenomenon research can be found here: https://bit.ly/2VpTB5w

DST-Centre for Policy Research

in association with

Department of Materials Engineering

Indian Institute of Science

                                                                         presents a Seminar

Title  : “The making of India’s first indigenous STM: What lab studies can tell us about S&T policies in India”

Speaker & Affiliation : Prof. Pankaj Sekhsaria                                                                      

                                           Centre for Technology Alternatives

                                            for Rural Areas (C-TARA), IIT-Bombay

Date & Time : Tuesday,  10^th December  2019, 3:30 pm

Venue :  Lecture Theatre, Department of Materials Engineering, IISc

Abstract:

Instrumental Lives – an intimate biography of an Indian laboratory’ (Routledge 2019) is an account of instrument making at the cutting edge of contemporary science and technology in a modern Indian scientific laboratory. For a period of roughly two-and-half decades, starting in the late 1980s, a research group headed by CV Dharmadhikari in the the physics department at the Savitribai Phule University, Pune, fabricated a range of scanning tunneling and scanning force microscopes including the earliest such microscopes made in the country. Not only were these instruments made entirely in-house, research done using them was published in the world’s leading peer-reviewed journals, and studentswho made and trained on them went on to become top-class scientists in premier institutions.

The book uses qualitative research methods such as open-ended interviews, historical analysis and laboratory ethnography that are standard in Science and Technology Studies (STS), to present the
micro-details of this instrument-making enterprise, the counter-intuitive methods employed, and the unexpected material, human and intellectual resources that were mobilized in the process. It locates scientific research and innovation within the social, political and cultural context of a laboratory’s physical location and asks important questions of the dominant narratives of innovation that remain fixated on quantitative metrics of publishing, patenting and generating commerce.

Speaker Bio:

Prof. Pankaj Sekhsaria’s research interests lie at the intersection of science, society, technology and development. He has a Phd in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Maastricht University  and is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA), IIT Bombay. He has written extensively on environment, wildlife and development issues particularly on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. His two most recent books include his debut novel ‘The Last Wave’ (HarperCollins India 2014) and ‘Islands in Flux – the Andaman and Nicobar Story’ (HarperLitmus 2019), which is a collection of 20 years of his journalism on the islands. Instrumental Lives tells the story of the scanning tunneling and scanning force microscope laboratories in Pune university that he studied as part of his doctoral project.  

Refreshments: 3:15 PM