Bisson's love for science key to career
Chair of Department of Biological Sciences works to attract girls to pursue career in field

By DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor

You want to change the world. You want to cure cancer. You want to make life better for people.

	Mary Bisson, the first woman promoted to full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, works with young girls to encourage them to pursue careers in science.
	Photo: Jessica Kourkounis

These are the reasons, says Mary Bisson, to pursue a career in the sciences. "The other reason," she adds, "is because you just love it. If you don't love it, you won't do well and you won't be happy."

Bisson, professor and chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, has worked hard, along with other female scientists in Western New York, to attract young girls to the sciences. Bisson and her colleagues have done outreach work with girls in middle schools and hosted conferences at which girls can meet female scientists and women engaged in non-traditional fields.

"The basis for being able to go on in the sciences occurs in grade schools—and certainly the middle schools. You have to have a good grounding in mathematics, and you have to have good discipline and high expectations of yourself." She said that when talking to young people, female scientists don't gloss over the fact that the sciences are difficult. "Science is not easy for women or for men," she says.

Bisson is vice president and past president of the local chapter of the Association for Women in Science and sits on the national board as well. The local chapter participates in middle-school science fairs and sponsors a prize for young girls.

"The main thing that we try to do is present the scientist as a human being—the idea is that all scientists aren't men with gray hair and lab coats and that scientists do all kinds of different things," she says.

The first woman to be promoted to full professor in the UB Department of Biological Sciences and the department's first female chair, Bisson received her doctorate from Duke University during the 1970s and has seen numerous changes over the years in how women in the sciences are perceived and treated, and in the numbers of women entering the field. Bisson now has four female colleagues in the department. But as a graduate student, she says there were only a few other women pursuing degrees in the sciences and "we were still, to some extent, oddities."

"When I first came here as a professor in science, the Association for Women in Science was very important to me just to meet other women, and there are certain problems that women would have in common that I might not necessarily be talking to my male colleagues about. So it was great to have this network of support of women for that reason," says Bisson.

The problems particular to women, she notes, ranged from issues that would seem trivial to concerns that were less trivial—things that her male colleagues may not have found interesting. For example, the appropriate attire for meetings.

"Men had uniforms," she recalls. "They would wear a suit if they were of a certain status. I noticed that if a woman dressed really nicely, she was trivialized because it was thought she was spending too much time on her appearance and, therefore, she couldn't be taken seriously. But if she dressed very dowdily, she was ignored. So there was the question of how you could be seen as a human being and not your clothes." Besides, she points out, "you can't be a laboratory person and wear heels and skirts."

"You had to wear clothes that didn't call attention to yourself, but didn't allow yourself to be ignored, either. Now that may seem trivial, but the whole concept of being taken seriously as a person varied with other things, not only with the clothes you wore to a meeting, but also with standing up for your own ideas," says Bisson.

Furthermore, she points out that women who spoke up at meetings and presented new ideas often were completely ignored. But if a male colleague later brought the same idea to the table, it was welcomed and he was given credit for it. So, the challenge for women became how to emphasize that it was their idea first without allowing themselves to again be trivialized or ignored, she says.

However, Bisson notes, she's never had a problem with the credibility of her research being questioned because she is a woman. "I was always a very outspoken graduate student and post-doc and early professor. It never occurred to me not to be outspoken, and I think, to some extent, the research didn't suffer as a result of my being a woman," she says.

And, she wouldn't have paid attention to any prejudicial treatment where her research was concerned. "It's a waste of energy," she adds.

One significant difference Bisson has noticed between her female and male colleagues over the years is that women more often choose research projects that are outside the mainstream. "Maybe they choose them because it's less competition and they're avoiding competition, or maybe they aren't looking for a competitive field; they're just looking for what interests them. That's a generalization and you can often find exceptions," she says, adding that she, too, chooses projects because she is interested in them and not because a particular project is going to be "the next hot topic."

"I still get grant proposals back saying that I should do more mainstream projects. I do science because I love it and I'm not going to do science because someone else is telling me what to do. I'm not going to jump on a bandwagon," she says. Bisson's research—she studies plant physiology—has centered on a particular algae and how its transport systems regulate salt. The U.S. Department of Agriculture currently is funding her research.

"One of the main focuses I have is salt tolerance—which is an important agricultural concern because of irrigation, which tends to add salt to the soil," she says. One goal of the research is to transfer this regulatory mechanism into higher plants so they can withstand heavily irrigated soils.

The Department of Biological Sciences has a reputation on campus for congeniality, to which she credits the work of a former chair, Darrell Doyle, who, in the 1970s, parleyed many retirements "into a lot of great hires."

"I would actually credit him and those hires that he made for setting the stage for us being a very collegial, collaborative group," she says.