An Interview With Bridgette Davey

Bridgette is a physicist currently working towards her PhD in Biophysics at the University of Notre Dame. 

Photo by Bridgette Davey

“Growing up in a small conservative town, I was always trying new things and traveling whenever I could. Some of my adventures include playing flute with an orchestra on a musical tour in Ireland and sea kayaking in the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve had my fair share of misadventures along the way as well which include sinking up to my knees in quicksand and being thrown off a half-wild horse into an electric fence. When I’m not proving Murphy’s Law, some of the activities I enjoy doing in my spare time are playing the flute, growing plants, acrylic painting, reading, and collecting differently shaped Rubiks cubes. My favorite book series is a science fiction series called “The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin. Research wise I’ve experience in a variety of disciplines including astronomy, atmospheric radiation, scanning tunneling microscopy, and nuclear imaging techniques for agriculture.”

What inspires you?

One of the things that really inspires me is how much people can do with very little. There are classical examples such as when Galileo (allegedly) first demonstrated objects fall at the same speed by dropping a very heavy object and a light one from the top of the Tower of Pisa, or when Henry Cavendish “measured the world” by using four lead spheres and a modified torsion pendulum (his experimental results are part of what later led others to the determination of the gravitational constant G). There are countless modern examples as well. I recall an article in a physics magazine, Physics Today I think, that spoke about the difficulties physicists in Cuba face due to restricted international access and access to funds (the article cited university faculty earning just 40 Cuban pesos a month or $40). Despite all of these adversities and having so little, great research was still conducted through ingenuity and workarounds. For example, Professor María Sánchez Colina did research involving light absorption by nanocrystals and used a completely homemade photovoltage spectroscopy apparatus to do so.

What did you want to be when you were younger?

When I was really little (0–4) I wanted to be a brachiosaurus (thanks mom and dad for that dinosaur for kids book you bought…) and I would eat small rocks to “help me grind up food”. That morphed into a love for animals and until ninth grade I wanted to be a veterinarian. For ninth, through twelfth grade, I wanted to be a flutist, and then in college, I started off as an English major, decided that was too hard, and switched to physics.

Which subjects did you enjoy at school?

In secondary school, my favorite classes were Speech, Marching Band, Jazz Band, English, Biology, and Anatomy.

What would you like to tell your younger self?

One, it is ok to not be ok. You do not have to have everything figured out. No one really does, not even all the teachers you admire so much. If someone tells you they have everything figured out they are either lying or disillusioned. Two, speak up. If something doesn’t seem right it probably isn’t. Sit at the front of the classroom and answer questions. Tell someone if you appreciate them. Three, life is short and full of change. A lot is going to change in the next few years and that’s ok. It’s ok if you can’t always stay on top of it either, sometimes you just have to hang on and try to enjoy the ride.

Why did you choose STEM?

It sounds odd to say, but I originally chose STEM because of someone reaching out to me and letting me know it was an option. I was absolutely terrible at my hard science courses in secondary school and that made it an option I didn’t even consider going into college. That changed the first day of college when I met my future mentor. He sat down at the table I was at, didn’t even introduce himself, turned towards my family, and said “She’s going to be a physics rockstar. Welcome to the Physics Department” (I was still an English major at this point). Throughout the next four years, he convinced me to take an ever-increasing number of physics courses and become more and more involved with research and the department. I eventually dropped my previous major entirely and switched to physics. What ended up keeping me in the major was a combination of excellent mentors and personal enjoyment. In the beginning physics courses, I absolutely loved learning about a topic and then being able to do physical experiments to prove it. The idea of seeing a real-life problem and being able to represent it on a piece of paper through a series of mathematical equations and then SOLVE that problem is amazing.

How important is it for you to stand out?

I enjoy public speaking quite a bit, so in that sense, it is important to me, but that’s more enjoying being able to share something I’m passionate about than standing out. I also do appreciate it when an accomplishment I have is recognized, but that is not the driving force behind why I do things like research. Based on that I would say standing out is moderately important to me.

What difficulties did you face in the industry, as a woman?

Most of the “difficulties as a woman” I have faced have been outside of academia. I have had absolutely amazing mentors/professors who never made me feel like my being a woman was anything other than just another fact about me such as “I have green eyes”. I remember one of my advisors saying something along the lines of “I could care less about what gender, orientation, whatever someone is. What I want to know is how well they can do a derivative and what area of physics they are interested in.” Outside of my home institution, the main problem I have seen is a general “women are for bearing children” attitude in some areas. For example, previously I gave an astronomy presentation to a younger more conservative crowd. The presentation went well. Afterward, a conversation developed where one of the kids wanted to know the general path I took to doing research in astronomy/how they could get started. Their main worry was they believed they couldn’t do it as a woman because in that specific community most women were expected to marry, have kids, and become a stay at home moms who supported their husbands and raised kids for their job. I have found a number of communities that have that same “a woman’s only job is to stay in the kitchen and bear children” attitude and find it very limiting and offensive both towards the women themselves and towards myself when I am waived away as “just an exception” to the rule or told that what I am doing is temporary and that I will eventually “settle down to have children”. Other specific instances I have faced in the industry have been more isolated one-off type things. I recall crass jokes about making sure none of the women in a class were pregnant before going into a bunker for nuclear physics, being at a job and not being allowed to carry anything heavy, being told I would make a better grade school teacher then a college professor because I had a “nurturing attitude”, jokes about having it easier as a woman because I could always “flirt my way out of anything” or “show a little leg” to get my way, things like that (there were some more vulgar comments as well that take the previous remarks a few steps further).

What advice would you give to the next generation of female scientists?

In regards to difficulties you might face as a woman, it is ok to strike a balance between speaking up and letting things roll off of your back. If you are always fighting to get rid of every single micro-aggression and misconception that someone has, you will exhaust yourself. It is alright to have days where you just don’t care or choose not to say anything. That does not make you a terrible person or mean you agree with what someone says. For general advice, stay curious! There are so many cool opportunities out there to explore and we live in a really weird world. Only 5% of the ocean has been explored. We still don’t have a proven grand unified theory for physics. Dark energy makes up over half of the known universe and we have no idea what it is. Final word, you don’t have to find your “life’s passion”. A subject matter that interests you is just as good. Very few people have a ‘lightbulb moment’ where they come across something and know that is what they want to do for the rest of their life.

Two of my favorite quotes are from the Three Body Series by Cixin Liu. They are “Staying alive is not enough to guarantee survival. Development is the best way to ensure survival” and “Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”

I majored in general physics for my undergrad career. I did a variety of internships and research during it in areas ranging from astronomy to scanning tunneling microscopy. In the last year of my research I worked on a project using an isotope of nitrogen as a tag to trace the nitrogen cycle in plants. I ended up really enjoying the biology aspect of the project and that influenced my decision to further my career with an advanced degree in BioPhysics. For biophysics one of the areas I am interested in doing research with is alternative cancer treatments due to seeing how difficult and damaging chemo therapy was for a family member. After graduate school I am interested in the field of astrobiology and/or becoming a professor.

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