Black Excellence Oral History with Pascale Guiton, June 19, 2021 (Ms2024-072)

Korin Jones: My name is Korin Rex Jones, and I am interviewing Dr. Pascale Guiton via Zoom for the Black Excellence in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] Oral History Project. Today is June 19, 2021. Could you start off by stating your full name and date of birth for the record?

Pascale Guiton: My name is Pascale Schaaba Guiton, and I was born May 12, 1983.

Korin: Thank you very much. Now, to start off, I’d like to get an idea of where this story is heading and who you currently are. Could you give us a brief description of your current position and the research that you do in that position?

Pascale: I am currently an assistant professor in biological sciences at California State University in East Bay. So, there are twenty-three campuses. We are at East Bay in Hayward, California. I study Toxoplasma gondii, which is a ubiquitous parasite of humans and animals. It’s related to Plasmodium 00:01:00falciparum, causative agent of malaria. So, Cryptosporidium and so on. What we study, specifically, are the regulatory mechanisms of cellular differentiation of the parasite going from the proliferative stage to the encysted form, the latent form. We also try to identify novel virulence determinants that allow the parasite to infect orally. That’s really what we do in the lab, and it’s casting a net in the dark and trying to identify new 00:02:00protein that may actually serve as new therapeutic targets because the disease is incurable, and there’s no vaccine so far. It really is a big problem, even though people…they’re not too worried about it because if you get infected, you get flu-like symptom, and if you’re healthy, it’s okay, right? It’s in your heart, in your brain, in your muscle tissues for the rest of your life. But if you become immunocompromised, like people with HIV/AIDS or cancer patients, transplants, then the parasite will reactivate and cause havoc. It can also cross the placenta to infect the fetus, then you get all sorts of delayed developmental problems, leading cause of blindness, and things like that. In the United States, 00:03:00it’s the second leading cause of death from food-borne illnesses after salmonellosis. So, again, it’s a fascinating parasite for the biology and all, but it’s also pretty bad.

Korin: That looks really cool.

Pascale: Unless you have it, of course.

Korin: To get a better picture of how you got here, let’s jump way back in time. Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

Pascale: Okay. I was born in Dechy, France. It’s a little village in northern France. And I 00:04:00grew up in the Ivory Coast. I was one of those, I will say, mistakes baby, when my mom was a freshman in college. She was dating my dad, and she got pregnant and gave birth. My grandpa was like, get back home, since you didn’t focus in school. They went back to the Ivory Coast, and so I grew up in Abidjan. At first, actually, I was with my grandmother for the first three years or so, and then we moved to Abidjan, where I grew up with my dad until I was eighteen and then moved to the United States. That’s my origin story.

Korin: Really fascinating. Very cool. Okay. Follow-up question to that is, what did your parents do? Your mom was in school at the time, but what did they do as you were growing up?

Pascale: Okay. My mother, she got her degree in electrical engineering in the Ivory Coast, and then she moved to the United States to Virginia Tech to get her MBA. 00:05:00She worked for companies like IBM and McKesson. Now, I think, she’s into--what’s the word I’m looking for--she’s into healthy living, eating healthy, so she has her own little business. I don’t really know much about that side. My dad was an architect. He went to the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and he worked there for a while, and then he moved to the Ivory Coast, and he was an architect who was one of the best, in my opinion. I don’t know. Yeah. 00:06:00Korin: That’s really cool. I guess where I want to go next is, you grew up in the Ivory Coast until you were eighteen and then moved to America. Now, those are two very different places! What was that transition like for you?

Pascale: Oh, my God. It was insane, okay? America, America. Okay, so I told you my mother moved to America, so I’d never lived with her before. I came in 1998, 00:07:00at first, because my mom was living here, and I didn’t really interact with her that much--for vacation, before I started high school. And then she’s like, oh, why don’t you stay to go to high school? I did one month at Dunwoody High School in Atlanta. I was like, hell to the no. No. Unh-uh. After a month, I just went back home. I finished my high school years, and then I move again to give America another try, moved to live with my mom, and then go to college. The transition was pretty rough on so many levels. So, first, having to live full-time with your mother that 00:08:00you really didn’t know. I mean, I’m an adult--full eighteen years old--and have my own attitude. She has her own way of doing things. And my parents were very--I would say they don’t talk; let me put it this way. So, having to navigate the two really was difficult. But then there’s the cultural shock, as well, right? Because you leave all your friends in the Ivory Coast. You don’t know the language. I mean, we study English in the Ivory Coast, so I was really, really good at writing, I have to say, but talking was really difficult. So there was language barrier and understanding the American system. And then, there is your own identity. Let me back up a little bit. My grandpa--my dad’s dad--is white. And my grandma--my dad’s mom--is Black. So, that will be 50/50. But in the Ivory Coast, literally, we 00:09:00are considered métisse. This is what they call us in French. They call us les métisses, les métisses, les métisses. Just to tell you how our identity was really separate from being fully Black, my grandma, when we visit, she’ll say, hey, my white children are here, my white grandchildren are here. We have this mixed identity. Where we know we’re mixed; we know our white side; we know our Black side. We were living in this, in this racial identity, where we didn’t really deal with racism. As a matter of fact, what I realized, we didn’t really understood it, I feel like it was this inferiority complex that we have. Usually white people seem more prestigious. They had this sort of--like they’re better or something like that, you know? I mean, it wasn’t a big deal. The reality, 00:10:00though, is being mixed race--white and Black--we did have a little bit of an edge. Usually, métisse people tend to have a bit more money. They seem to be a bit more upper-class. So, there was that aspect of it. Coming to the United States, all of a sudden, you don’t know where you fit. It’s almost like you had to choose, and, to be honest with you…so I came in November 2001, and then I had to take some intensive English classes to get to the level 00:11:00where I could actually take classes. And then, I started fall 2002 freshman year. I didn’t have any friends, so it was difficult, and then I learned about sororities. I joined a mixed sorority, Gamma Sigma Sigma, and, apparently, it’s the sorority of Mae Jemison. So, that was kinda cool. But it didn’t really work out very well. So, I did all the pledging, and, at some point, the sorors have to come to my house for a sleepover. And, I mean, they were nice--I don’t think they meant it that way--but I didn’t understand a lot of the baggage--the history of African Americans. I was coming from Africa where there’s no Black people in Africa. I just know there are métisse in Africa. My mom’s house 00:12:00has a lot of African art and things, and so during the night, it was fine until they started asking questions, and then it was becoming a bit uncomfortable where they’re like, oh, do you think you’re better than us because you know your origins? I didn’t like it. Then, a year later, I quit the sorority because I wasn’t a sorority girl. I was hiding whenever they would say the cry; I would just hide. I don’t know; it’s stupid. But, again, I didn’t understand the culture, so I was like, okay. But that experience has made it very difficult for me to be friends with African Americans because I felt like I don’t understand them, I was being judged, and it would be difficult for me to befriend them. Also, all the stereotypes associated with Black American, especially Black men. They beat their wives; they do drugs, and all this stuff. I mean, we were exposed to all of that on TV. Here’s one little joke in the Ivory Coast 00:13:00that we have. We’re watching a movie, especially scary movie, and there’s a Black person in there, it’s like, watch this; the Black person is going to die first. You see what I mean, and it turns out every time, it was kind of true every time. And so, it’s, again, the stereotypes associated with African Americans. You come in, you have that in the back of your mind. Then, you reach out, if you will, trying to be friends, and then they’re like, oh, you think you’re better than us? And all you hear is, the white people are bad; it’s the persecution, and you have this half--or whatever--part of your family’s white. So, it was difficult for me to find 00:14:00who I was in America. So, there’s an identity crisis. But then, you realize that in America, it doesn’t matter that your grandpa was white. It doesn’t matter that your cousins are white. It just doesn’t matter. In America, you have to choose, either you’re white or you’re Black. But one Black drop--at some point, you have to make a decision. To me, if you come from another country, in America, if you have a drop of Black in you, you might as well start living like a Black person. It took me a while to understand that. Literally, it took me until graduate school to be comfortable--mid-graduate school actually, when I met my friend Tamira Butler, and then Abena. So, Abena was from Jamaica 00:15:00and Tamira is African American, and I remember saying something like, oh, Tamira’s complaining all the time about injustices to Black people, and she’s so difficult. She doesn’t want to be friends with the white people; she’s skeptical of the white people. And I was like, why are you always like that? You have all these opportunities. I didn’t understand. And so, again, the whole point is coming to America at the end of your teenage year, when you’re starting to become an adult with a mixed racial background, didn’t really make things smoother. It took a long time for me to say, you know what? I am a Black woman. 00:16:00I am Black. This is America. I’m gonna learn, literally, what it means to be Black in America because I’m not going back. I’m not going back to the Ivory Coast, so what does it mean? And, honestly, I studied what it meant to be Black in America. Alone, by reading books like Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington. Now, Medical Apartheid is a big deal, but when I heard about it, I was at the end of my graduate school years, and I was like, okay, let’s think about scientists, Black scientists. And that book--I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t finish it. I got like halfway. It was so--it was too much, you know? Then, I started learning about microaggressions and things that I assumed people were doing just because they didn’t know my culture. I realized that it actually wasn’t that; it was something else. Point is, 00:17:00the transition was difficult; it still is a work in progress, at least, for me because I don’t want to be like, oh, all white people are bad. Clearly, I’m married to one, and I have white family members. And I don’t want to say, all Black people are good either. But at the same time, there’s a reality that exists for me as a Black woman in America and in academia, in particular. That’s a reality that I have to deal with, whether I want to pretend I am colorblind or not. So anyway, so the transition was hard, and the food sucks! I don’t know what American 00:18:00cuisine is but, oh, my god, the only thing you guys--now that I’m American--what we got good is baby back ribs. I don’t like collard green, but sweet potato pie? Hell yeah! We got that good. And notice how they’re Black people dishes. Anyway, that’s my transition, was coming to age in America.

Korin: So, I wanna ask a follow-up about the drop of blood because that’s something that I learned about when I was little. Where it’s if you have a drop of blood, you’re Black, and that’s all there is to it, because this other thing is an exclusive class that you can’t get into. So, what I’m curious about is how have you been able to--or if you’ve been able to--maintain 00:19:00a lot of your cultural heritage that was not American? So with the Ivory Coast, while constantly being told by people that you see that don’t know you, but just see you and go, that’s a Black woman. How have you been able to maintain that?

Pascale: Well, I have to say I just embrace being Black. I mean, I figure the mixed thing in me is like twenty-five percent anyway. And most of the people in the Ivory Coast--my family--are Black or mixed. Like I said, there’s no Black people in Africa. So, it’s like it’s not something we think about. As a matter of fact, in America, it would be shocking, but in class, for instance, the way we would describe people would be like, you know the really black one? But it’s just 00:20:00because this is what we see. It doesn’t come out with a bad thought. So, maintaining culture. I mean, the only thing, culturally, that I still do is listen to Ivorian music and, from time to time, cooking the food. I don’t think that becoming Black in America has changed what I knew to be cultural. One other thing was braiding, for instance--getting your hair braided. At some point, I decided to question it; is it okay to have your braids to go to school? But then you start seeing people braiding their hair. And they’ll do it. I remember in college, I used not to wear jeans because it was weird, so I’d do dresses, and then I realized that, hey, you know what? Just be cool; just wear jeans. Or things like 00:21:00calling professors by their first names in graduate school? Unh-uh. So, it’s little things like that. But I would say, in terms of the way I think, I think more like an American now than an Ivorian, and I’m a bit more liberal. I feel like I’m a bit more accepting of others that are different from me socially like the gays and things like that. This is not something that is accepted or widely talked about in the Ivory Coast. I would say in that sense, as an adult, I am more American than Ivorian because I came into adulthood--full adulthood--in America. Back home, it’s not like in America, where when you’re like sixteen, you start getting jobs. At least, not the way I grew up. I mean, my parents were still helping me get my passport. 00:22:00I was still living at home. I didn’t really have a job. I wasn’t paying rent and things. I became an adult in America, and so I found who I was in America. As a matter of fact, I think I became comfortable with who I was when I moved to California. So, it took a long time. And I moved to California in 2012. So me, postdoc, I think this is where I was like, okay, I’m fully this. It’s almost like last year cemented it. I’m new to the revolution 00:23:00because now, I feel like I truly understand the struggle. The other thing, too, that I want to point out is for a long time, I felt like I shouldn’t be a beneficiary of things like minority grants, and I talked to one of my professors about that. I’m like, these things were not meant for me. And then he said, look, if you step out of here, you will be seen as a Black person, right? It doesn’t matter where you come from. So, if you’re going to get the crap that comes with being Black, then, at least, you can also take advantage of the benefits that come with it, right? So, I was like, okay, so then I stopped feeling guilty. But yeah, I don’t know if that answered the question. I tend to go into tangents.

Korin: No, that was really good! And I’d also like to know, then, your Ivorian family, how’ve they responded to sort of this mental shift that you’ve had.

Pascale: Yeah, 00:24:00it’s funny. They’re okay, I think. My family is very Christian and very Catholic, in particular. So, I grew up super Catholic. Altar girl, going to church. When I was in the States in graduate school, I was going to church every day because I had to have the Eucharist before--I mean insanity, and then I decided it doesn’t make any sense, so I became an atheist. I think about it is I don’t believe in the Christian God anymore. If there’s a God somewhere, I don’t think it’s the Catholic God. In that sense, I’m a Christian atheist because I don’t feel like 00:25:00going and looking for another god; I tried. Clearly, it didn’t work out. If he or she or they or whatever is up there, they’re gonna come and find me. That’s the way I think about it. I don’t think there’s a higher power. I don’t. Honestly, I’m like, if there is, then we should all be able to know; it shouldn’t be this big deal. That is not very well accepted. It’s like, oh, it’s a phase. Oh, she is gonna to come back. There’s that aspect of it, and then there’s me being pretty liberal. I used to play rugby. They’re like, oh, it’s a boy sport. There’s this, there’s definitely this woman role and male roles, right? Here’s an example. When I got engaged with my now-husband, my 00:26:00aunt came to visit, and then we went hiking. And we all got our feet dirty. So, why is it that, when we get to go into the car, and I’m cleaning my feet because they’re dirty, she’s like, oh, you need to clean your husband’s feet, too? I’m like, excuse you? Why would I do that? She’s like, oh, come on, Pascale; clean his feet! He’s dirty. I’m like, yeah, but he can clean them, too! There’s this tension, right? No, he’s going to clean them, but she wouldn’t get in the car, until I cleaned that man’s feet. And he’s a white man, too! I cleaned the damn feet, and he enjoyed it. He put his nasty feet up there, and I was hating it so hard. 00:27:00So, these are the little things where the woman role--for instance, having children, right? So far, I don’t have any, and every single phone call is [someone asking,] when are they coming? And I’m like, what if I tell you they’re not coming? Again, there’s that, and there is being open to things like you can live with someone before marriage, or you don’t even have to get married; gay people have rights, and you cannot judge people for who they are or for what they believe in. And I’m a bit more sensitive now to the way we talk about animals. I’m not saying 00:28:00this is true for all Ivorians, definitely not, I’m just saying my family. So, I have a dog, Ziggy, and I love my pets. I love my dog. And my cousin will make comments like, oh, if this dog come to us to Abidjan, we’re just gonna cut it and make some dishes with it. I think when I was in the Ivory Coast growing up, I would have found it funny, but now, it’s not funny to me at all. There’s this, oh, Pascale, we can’t even joke with you anymore, type thing. I think, in this sense, that American way of thinking clashes with the day-to-day how people think of things.

Korin: If you had to guess, would you say that they’re attributing this solely to you being American, or does this also have to do with your position and role in academia?

Pascale: No, they really love that I am a scientist. I mean, they think I’m going to cure everything--cancer, HIV, everything. I don’t think 00:29:00they fully understand that I do this little random little bit. When it comes to my profession, they definitely value what I do. But I really think it’s this living abroad. It’s because you’re no longer with us here that you don’t really understand the things the way we understand it. It’s that living abroad. Because that way of thinking has really started--I want to say graduate school, right? I feel like the first four years in the States were pretty difficult for me on so many levels. It’s in graduate school, when I moved away, where I was all by myself. Then I, sort of, started to be, if you will, started to actually be me. Also, I suffer from bipolar 00:30:00disorder, and here’s another thing that clashes with my African family. They don’t get it. Black people don’t get mental illnesses. Black people don’t go see a therapist every week or something like that. And even when I had to, at first, I thought it was depression or whatever, so I was misdiagnosed for God knows how long. That’s another thing that we can talk about, how that affected the way I was in academia and things like that. They don’t understand that. So…it’s like, oh, just snap out of it. Like I can just snap out of that. This is something that I became okay with 00:31:00in America. In the Ivory Coast, they could yell at you; they could hit your head, all kinds of stupid things that they say to you, and they don’t understand the scars that are built. It’s not child abuse. I mean, nobody beat me up or anything, but…yeah.

Korin: No, I understand. That’s kind of a big thing in the Black community here as well.

Pascale: And that’s what I’m learning! The more I engage with the African American community now, the more I see Africa because there’s a lot of the..close-knit families. This is something that is missing in, I will say, most families 00:32:00in America. The cookouts. I mean, I don’t have a lot of friends to invite me to cookouts. But it’s cool, and it’s something that we have. The Ivory Coast, Christmas is a family affair. Everybody will show up to your wedding. I don’t particularly like that one, but your wedding, you’ll have a bunch of people coming, and you don’t even know who they are. And dancing. Oh, my God. Cultural shock? Oh, Pascale, we have this small party! You get to the party, and you have a bunch of white people sitting there drinking and talking! There’s no dancing, and I’m like, wait, where is the party? I would get bored because I don’t know how to do small talk; I don’t understand half of the cultural references they have, and it’s like, okay, I want to go home now. I’m lucky I’m an extrovert, so I can be the life of the party, I don’t know if you can tell, but 00:33:00those…we have a party; it’s going to be great. Okay; there’s no dancing. But then, you go to a Black person party, and it’s like, oh, yeah, and start dancing. Anyway, culturally, that’s something else.

Korin: So, more on your undergraduate experience. We’ll start there. What was that like, in terms of science? Was it difficult? Was it hard? Did you know exactly what you wanted to do?

Pascale: Okay. In the Ivory Coast, and everywhere else in the world, we have very good high schools. So, when we graduate, after high school, you either go straight to medical school or you go straight to law school. You go straight to whatever school--economics or whatever. Here, we realized that, oh, no, you have to do four more years of, essentially, high school, before you get to where you want to be. I wanted to become an MD, and then when I came to the 00:34:00States, I wanted to major in biochemistry, and I didn’t understand how things worked, so I ended up majoring in biology with a minor in chemistry. And science on paper? It was amazing. It was easy because a lot of it was review. I used to not be good at math in the Ivory Coast. If anything, I was C student, if even, C minus student. I was great everywhere else--biology, chemistry. But not physics and math. I was bad. So, come to America, in calculus, and I just do it like this. Quick. So, the sciences were definitely easy. But, the one aspect of it 00:35:00that was difficult was the hands-on portion. Because I went to public school in the Ivory Coast--they are the best there okay; private school is for rich kids. I actually went to one of the top public schools in the Ivory Coast, Lycée Classique d’Abidjan. Our mascot is the caiman. It’s like the wood or this stick or whatever will be in the river forever; it would never become a caiman. Anyway, I digress. Doing hands-on biology stuff or chemistry stuff, it wasn’t like that. We will have physics labs and things, but reagents were not working. Here’s an example. Chemistry class. It was some sort of oxidation experiment that we’re doing. 00:36:00Professor puts in the reagent. It turns black, and he’s like, it’s green. And we’re like, of course. Actually, I remember me and my big mouth. I raise my hand, and I’m like, monsieur--this is like mister. This is what we call them--monsieur, this is not green! This is black! He said, Guiton; I say it’s green; write green! So, I didn’t really know how to do lab work and how to think beyond the, this is what’s in the textbook. We really did a lot of things by hand, so deriving equations and things like that. We did a lot of that, so that was good. So, the theory of it, I really, really, got it, but the hands-on was a bit difficult. So, being in the lab was fun but also scary 00:37:00because I used to think that, if I don’t have straight As in America, I’ll get deported. That’s another fear that was in the back of my mind; who knows why. And then my science professors, specifically, Dr. Pascoe who is Black from Jamaica, Dr. Kennedy who is Black from the U.S, and then, Dr. Eichenbaum who is a Jewish woman from Israel. They really made a big difference in my undergraduate career. Dr. Pascoe--they used to think it was my dad because his name was Pascoe, which was so weird. And he was teaching like I was taught in the Ivory Coast--tough love. And he was an amazing organic 00:38:00chemistry teacher. I didn’t realize it then because, again, I told you, I was trying to figure out what it meant to be Black. And I think what they saw, and I may be putting words in their mouths, but I think what they saw is a Black woman in science with potential. And they did whatever they could to make sure I was really going somewhere. Does that makes sense? Now, I really, really appreciate it. I could go to their office and be like, hey, Dr. Pascoe. I could really be myself with them. It was really great. And then the other one, who made me love microbiology more than anything else, It’s Dr. Kudravi. He killed himself, which really broke my heart. He used to say, you need to know the material 00:39:00from the top of your head, and there’s no reason not to! And I took my first microbiology lesson, and I think the first quiz--I don’t know; it was a language thing. The first quiz, I got a D, and I never get Ds, okay? I got a D, and that professor called me in his office, and he basically said he doesn’t understand where this D’s coming from, and I better not get that again because he sees how I participate in class, and he expects me to be better than that. I never got a D or anything in biology ever again. Like, ever again. That stayed with me. You know, everybody else was scared of him but--I was scared of him. Don’t get me wrong. He was this skinny white man; he’d always wear black jeans and his shirt tucked in. With his little glasses. I loved him to death. And because of him, I took microbiology, microbiology and public health, microbiology 00:40:00and microbial pathogenesis. So, you see all my upper-division biology courses were microbiology, microbiology, microbiology, microbiology, microbiology, microbiology, and here I am a microbiologist. The science professors--these four really made a difference. Dr. Eichenbaum gave me a chance in her lab. I really didn’t know how the American system worked. For me, it’s college: Professor don’t care about you. You go to college; you take your classes. I didn’t even know what fricking syllabus was. I mean, just to tell you how clueless I was, I didn’t understand that there are opportunities that you can take to go do research. I had no idea. I was just going--class, get your As, and move on. And one day, because I’m an international student who couldn’t work outside campus, and at that point, I was paying rent because I had to be; I was living on my own with my friend in our apartment. 00:41:00I saw a job, like student assistants in the lab. And it was a summer day; I had shorts on, flip-flops, and a tank top I think. And I just popped into her office because I had no concept of job application--so stupid. Popped into her office and said, hi, Dr. Eichenbaum; I saw the ad, and I want to do it because I can do it. And she’s like, what? I was like, yes, I can do what you want me to do in the lab. I’m a biology major, and I can help you. I can start now, if you want, and she took a chance on me--I think about how idiotic I was. But I think she saw something, and she gave me a chance, and I washed dishes for a while in the lab--like flasks. I started growing streptococcus cultures and things like that. When 00:42:00it came time to apply--because I was going to go to medical school, remember? She said, oh no, I will make you a scientist. If you go to medical school, you will waste your brain. That’s a direct quote, and it stayed with me forever. So, when I see MDs, I’m like, yep, wasted their brains. How did I end up at Washington University in St. Louis? Dr. Eichenbaum did her postdoc with Dr. Caparon who was at Wash U and had missed deadlines and everything. He came to give a talk, and she introduced him to me. We 00:43:00chatted and, again, I didn’t even realize informational interviews are actually real interviews. So, with my crazy self, I was just talking about things, and he’s like, oh, you should apply to Wash U. At the time, to get into Wash U Medical School, you needed [inaudible] thirty-six on your Medical College Admissions Test. Yeah. This girl had a panic attack during--I literally had a panic attack during the MCAT, where I thought that the physics session, the physical section was almost over ten minutes into the test. So, I started like bubbling things that by the time I realized, it was just bad. So anyway, so my score did not--I knew I wasn’t going to make it. And he’s like, oh, you should apply to Wash U for the school, and I said, well, I missed the deadlines. He’s like, it’s okay; just apply. I applied, and it was actually of all the schools--I applied to five--Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, and all that. It was the only one that accepted me, and I’m so grateful for that. Now, let’s back up a little bit with the medical school application. So, I got a twenty-two on my MCAT. That score doesn’t get you anywhere, but I think letters of recommendation, personal statements, and whatnot 00:44:00got me an interview at Harvard Medical School. I remember it was February 14, 2006, that I had my interview there. And you stand in front of it--it’s Harvard--it’s Harvard. But then, there was this blizzard; it was crazy. And I remember standing there being like, oh, my God, I can’t believe I’m in front of this building. Go through the interview. They asked me, why do you want to be a doctor? Guess what happened? I cried. I cried because I couldn’t believe--I couldn’t believe--it was the stupidest, stupidest thing. But everything happens for a reason, and so yeah, I just cried. I said, I really want 00:45:00to help people, and I started thinking about my brother at that time. He was a premature baby, and he turned blue and people went, oh, my God, what are we going to do? Like, it all came flooding back, and I just started crying. So, I never opened the letter that came. To this day, I don’t know if I got in or not because I was convinced I didn’t get in. And then, on top of that, I was an international student. So, they probably--I wasn’t going to get a scholarship or anything, so there was no way I was going. But then fast-forward, five and a half years later, I was offered a position at Harvard to do a postdoc, and I turned it down. 00:46:00I’m just saying. Because I was like, nah, I don’t really like the research. You know, I don’t care if it’s Harvard, I’m just--peace out. It’s really interesting how, at some point, I thought it was an all in all, and then given the opportunity, I was like, yeah, no, thank you. I mean, granted, I came to Stanford University, but I turned it down because I didn’t see myself doing that type of research. The name Harvard didn’t matter at that time. That’s, again, what I’m saying about coming into my true self, where I wasn’t doing things because people say to do things. Anyway, this is, this is really undergraduate in a nutshell. My professors were my friends, really. I started making 00:47:00friends when I started--Dr. Pascoe made me a teaching assistant to teach organic chemistry, like a supplemental class. This is when I had some of my classmates in biology taking chemistry, and I was a year ahead of my entering class because I was taking a bunch of classes. So, I graduated after three years. So, in 2005. So, from 2002 to 2005. So, I graduated 2005, but I graduated with the class before, so I didn’t really have a lot of friends in college. I did have some one of them. One of them--I have to give him a shout out. Matthew was my first 00:48:00friend--white friend--in America. And the way the friendship started was funny because, I told you, I was very uncomfortable in our labs. You start lab, and the first day of lab, they say, take out the graduated cylinder, take out the--and I had no idea what it was. And I was standing by my bench looking so clueless, and he was standing there, and he’s like, it’s this one. It’s this one; it’s this one. He’s pretty introverted, and so I became this bubbly thing. So, it was just the two of us; think I had a crush on him a little bit. My other good friend was Gina. She’s my other white American friend. I’m still friends with her to this day. They were amazing. People 00:49:00would ask me to help them during the week, and I helped them, and on Monday, they come and started talking about the parties that they had, and nobody invited me. So, it was isolating, but…I’m a crier. You think about those things, and you’re like, wow, okay. Yeah.

Korin: So, I just wanna say that the organic chemistry thing is very impressive. I mean, everything that you’ve done seems to be very impressive, but that’s just one of those--In American colleges, organic chemistry is like the biology student-slayer, you know? You think you want to be a biologist, but then you get there.

Pascale: I love organic chemistry; man, it was amazing. I hated general chemistry. But organic chemistry? You know how I used to study it? 00:50:00You know, we eat beans and tomatoes--the cherry tomatoes? So, we’ll have like a salad, green beans, cherry tomato--so, to learn my nomenclatures, I would have one bean, one other bean, one other bean. So, each edge is a carbon, right? So, this will be one, two, three. So, you get propane--three is propane, right? And, you put another one; you get butane. But if you put two beans right next to each other, then you get an alkene, right? Then you put a little cherry tomato on top, then you get yourself a carboxylic something. Oh, it was amazing! This is how I learned. It was so fun, so then I did the teaching assistanting for 00:51:00organic chemistry I when I was a junior, and for organic chemistry II the semester after that. It was fun. I mean, I was doing a lot of teaching, but this is really where I started this--I really started loving teaching, and he got me in a teaching position, essentially, with small research. So, in retrospect, I was doing all these things because a professor’s like, do this. I didn’t even know you could get paid. I was just doing it, you know, naive.

Korin: Yeah, I saw a lot of that teaching experience on your CV. You have a lot of teaching on there. So, was this part of your decision to become a professor as opposed to a research scientist or something?

Pascale: No, see, after 00:52:00the medical school thing--and actually--let me put it like, medical school? I don’t think I would have been a great doctor. No. In America, in particular, it’s the whole customer thing, and now that I hear the experience of Black doctors in the U.S., I think I would slap a patient very quickly. Unh-uh. So, yeah, I don’t think I would have been a good doctor. But anyway, once the medical school--it became clear I wasn’t going--literally, my thing was, you finish your degree. You get your Ph.D., and I didn’t even know you could go straight to your Ph.D., until my professor said, apply for a Ph.D. school because it was all, you have to get a master’s. So now, I tell my undergraduates, if you are in biology, and you want to get some money, skip the master’s thing, unless you just need to work now or you want to increase 00:53:00your GPA. Just go straight for the Ph.D.; you can always do so many things with a Ph.D.; you don’t have to do what I do. I tell them that because I remember I didn’t know about it. For me, it was all get your degree, get your Ph.D., do your postdoc, go to R1 institution. My entire life has been in academia, and a part of me thinks it’s because I was scared of what is outside academia, because I never really had a real job until this job. I worked twice in my life at the library, and I didn’t really interview for that. It was my mom’s sister’s friend because her daughter was at Georgia State University, too, and she knew the person who was running the library, and she worked for her. So, when she left, she said, hey, my niece is there. I didn’t do an interview. Or, at least, I may have talked to Allison, and I didn’t know that was an interview. 00:54:00And I did the lab thing, and you know how that went. So, these were my two real experiences, where I would call working, but you can see it doesn’t count. So, this job that I have is really my first job, where I actually see it as a job or whatever it is. So, how did I come to this particular position? My graduate school was actually, in terms of science, it was smooth. A lot of people hated graduate school. 00:55:00I think ignorance is bliss, you know? It was what it was! I was just doing things. I didn’t really understand the whole Nature paper versus whatever paper. I was just doing things, and my mentor was letting me do things! So, when I came to Stanford, then I started becoming aware of Nature and all this stuff, and my project was really hard. This is when I was really dealing with being bipolar. It really came out a lot. I don’t know if it was stress or whatever. But then my mentor--every year we would have like a career, how-are-you-doing, type meeting. We’re sending out my CV, and he noticed that I did a lot of teaching. And, you know, 00:56:00it’s like, oh, it seems like you like this or have you considered going to a primarily undergraduate institution or going to a school like San José State University and things like that. And I was like, I don’t know what that is. So, he’s like, well, think about that. I was like, okay, I’m going to try. There was an opening for a position at San José State University to teach some microbial pathogenesis course. I took it; I taught that for a year, and while I was doing that, I was also in the lab. And then, my principal investigator was the head of the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards program at the time. I was too senior to be considered a fellow, so he created a thing that says affiliate. So, I was an IRACDA affiliate. I was benefiting from all the teaching and things--all the knowledge, the pedagogy, and stuff, but I wasn’t really a fellow. I think I may have gotten some money or something. 00:57:00I don’t know. But I don’t care; I was an affiliate. As I was doing the teaching in the department, there was Ellen Yeh; she was a new faculty at the time; she works on plasmodium, and she said, hey, Pascale, I notice you do a lot of teaching. If you want to talk to my friend Nazzy Pakpour about how it is to teach at a school and do research, talk to her. She’s at CSU East Bay. Okay. So, spring 2016, I go, and I talk to Nazzy and she’s like, hey Pascale, by the way, we have a position that is opening looking for microbiologists. My 00:58:00postdoc was hard, so I didn’t really have a paper then. I had a little project. Five and a half years of a postdoc; the project was done in the last six months, and that’s the only paper I got out of my postdoc. So, that paper wasn’t coming out until like 2017, like February 2017 or something, so I had no paper. I wasn’t prepared to apply for anything, and she’s like, oh, you should apply. So, everything snowballed like that. I wrote the application. I was stressed out because I was teaching and research wasn’t working. I had no idea what I was doing. John Boothroyd was like, yeah, go apply. I 00:59:00applied. I, literally, was not expecting it. Next thing you know, they called for an interview. And I was like, oh, crap! So, I interviewed spring 2017. The following day, they called me to tell me I have the job. It was just insanity. Then, all of a sudden it’s like boom, boom, boom, I have to try to finish things and started as an assistant professor the following August. August 2017. No idea what I was getting myself into, in terms of dealing with students and being Black in academia in that position; it really hit me like boom! I’m sort of--it’s just now that I think I’m finding my footing a little bit, but, again, we can talk about this. This is going until twelve, right? Yes, it is. Because I’m like, okay, maybe I’m not answering all of his questions. But yeah. 01:00:00So, that’s how it happened. I didn’t know. For me, teaching was more like a hobby. I love kids a lot. So, I will teach STEM or I was teaching--I told you I was an altar girl, when I was growing up. So, when I was growing up in the Ivory Coast, I was teaching the children the whole thing about being an altar girl--it’s not like here where it’s just go in like--Nuh uh. Over there, there are quizzes. We will give them quizzes like, what do you call these? The chalice. What do you call this? You know, do all of that. I really had fun playing teacher with the women who were working in our house--the cleaning ladies and stuff because they were in-house. A lot of them didn’t go to school; they didn’t know how to write. Wednesday afternoon, we didn’t 01:01:00have class, and I will say, okay, come, it’s school time. So, we had a board, and I would teach them A, B, C and how to read. It was so fun. My favorite part is when they were able to write their names. It was amazing. Yeah. That’s how it happened. Now, I’m teaching stupid cell wall. That’s how I got to this teaching thing.

Korin: That’s actually really cool! It’s nice to hear people that enjoy that because you hear about professors and scientists, where teaching is very low--

Pascale: I have to say, with our positions, the day I lose that love for teaching and, particularly, teaching science, is the day I quit my job, and I totally go do something completely different because the pay sucks. In terms of research, it’s not like you’re going to get 01:02:00the Nobel Prize or anything. I mean, you could, but that’s not the goal. The goal is really teaching students, and there’s some joy with--I don’t know how to explain it. It’s the only reason I do this job. The students. And now I have a mission to make sure that my Black students, and my--mainly my Black students, but then my Latinx students, and BIPOC students really, really find a space for them in STEM. That’s my mission, so I cannot quit on them now. It’s definitely something that I am working to. It fuels 01:03:00that career. I cannot stand the politics in academia, especially around issues of diversity, equity, and inclusivity. I just can’t. It’s sickening.

Korin: We are coming up on the hour mark for the recorded part of the interview. So, is there any last message that you would want to give before I end the recording?

Pascale: Yeah. I would say opportunities present themselves. You may or may not see them as opportunities, but if someone wants to help you, no matter who they are, Black, white, yellow, whatever, just be genuine. Take it and try it. You never know where it’s going to land you. And I would say people--Black people, white people, 01:04:00whatever--who are in a position of power, take a chance on someone that doesn’t do the things the way it’s supposed to be done. Does that make sense? Because I wouldn’t be where I was, if people were expecting me to do everything professionally or correctly or whatever. Take a chance on people who are different.

Korin: Is there a message that you would like to give other students who might be afraid of, or suffering from, mental illness that might be concerned that they won’t quite make it into graduate school?

Pascale: Okay. So, here’s the thing. You heard before, I suffer from bipolar disorder, and for a long time, I kept it hidden from professors, from people. I would have ups and down, ups and down. 01:05:00It’s difficult to go through life with a hidden disease, and remember that. It is a hidden disease. Any PTSD, any of those things, be okay seeking help, professional help, medical help, but also make your principal investigator, your professor aware of that. Not because you are seeking their pity, but so that they understand that you may not be at your best every single day. If they don’t support you, then that is not a lab for you. That is not a mentor for you. Be you. Be real with what you are. The disease does not define you. When you have cancer, the cancer is not you. You are battling it. The same way you’re battling the dysregulation of the biochemistry of your brain, and there’s nothing wrong with it. 01:06:00Just talk about it. Make sure you are not alone because, the reality is, you are not alone. We’re there. We see you. I read in Bill Sullivan’s book, instead of fighting the drug users or the drugs, fight the addiction, so the same way, instead of stigmatizing students or professors or people with mental illness, show empathy, and let’s build a social safety net that will actually fight those diseases just like we’re fighting cancer. That’s my message, and you can be a voice for that. That’s that.

Korin: Thank you very much for that message.

Pascale: You are welcome. 01:07:00[End of Interview]