Jeanne Small moved often in her childhood. “I am a ‘military brat,’ first US Army, then US Air Force,” she says. “I was born in Germany, then lived all around the eastern United States.” While she was in elementary school, Small’s father earned his PhD in electrical engineering, giving her an inside look at what it was like to do research for a dissertation. Small also had a grandfather who was a chemist employed in water quality management. “The family connection was so important to me for feeling connected to science,” Small shares, “especially in an era when there weren’t too many females in science.” Small and her father did math problems together: “I always had a study partner to go to when I struggled with a concept,” she says. In addition to encouraging her to take all the math and science courses she could, he found creative ways to engage her interest and skill in STEM. “My father was substantially deaf, so he did things like bring home an oscilloscope to use to tune our piano, and required me to calculate frequencies in the process,” Small says.
As a young child, Small wanted to grow up to be a baseball umpire or ice hockey referee. “I was interested in careers where women might fit in if they were talented enough,” she says. Despite this interest in careers that were unconventional for women, she found it hard to imagine a career as a scientist, due to lack of role models. As she grew up, she decided she wanted to become a medical doctor. “[I] quickly changed my mind after my first college physics class,” she says. “I truly wanted to do biophysics.” The lack of female role models continued into her college career — and beyond. “I never had a college professor, chair, dean, or president who was female while I was a student or professor,” Small says. “There were women in college positions whom I saw from a distance, but I never had one in front of me on a day-to-day basis. I never had professional women role models until I worked as a program officer at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2004."
Small’s father’s last military assignment was in San Antonio, Texas, and that station led her to her first research position. “When I graduated high school, I was able to participate in a summer research program at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center as a ‘Junior Science Trainee,’” she says. “I was assigned to a project in a biochemistry laboratory that included circular dichroism studies of conformational changes of cell surface glycoproteins. I struggled to understand circular dichroism spectroscopy, to the point where all through college I asked questions and participated in research that engaged the connection between light and biological macromolecules. Hence the interest in biophysics!”
When she started her undergraduate studies in 1976, there were not many biophysics programs in the United States. She decided to study chemistry at Trinity University in San Antonio. “I figured I could work in the ‘bio’ and ‘physics’ of biophysics around a chemistry education,” she says. “The burden would be on me to make the connections, but I felt I could do it.”
After graduating in 1980 with her bachelor's degree in chemistry, she attended Harvard University and earned her master’s degree in 1982 and her doctorate in 1985. “While a graduate student, a fellow student set up an experimental apparatus based on pulsed-laser photoacoustics, with the goal of using it as a calorimeter to understand the thermodynamics of reactions initiated with light. I added a direct kinetic measurement component to it while working with biological molecules that refused to behave the way I thought they would,” says Small. “The whole process involved really understanding a Jablonski diagram, and thinking through all the deactivation pathways a molecule in the excited state could take. I still really like studying Jablonski diagrams, because I think they are simple and powerful.”
Since then, Small has held a variety of positions in different sectors. “I have been an assistant professor, senior research in a biochemistry and biophysics department; a tenure-track/tenured assistant professor/associate professor/professor in a department of chemistry and biochemistry; a ‘rotator’ program officer with NSF, a managing director of an NSF science and technology center, and now the chief information officer (CIO) of Quantum Northwest, Inc., a company my husband, Enoch Small, founded 23 years ago,” she says.
Each work environment has had its positives and negatives, and each suited a different period of Small’s life. “I love to teach and am interested in how people learn, so being a professor was important to me. The flexibility I had was great for parenting two young children,” Small says of her time in academia. She reached a point where she had an expanded teaching load and could no longer give research the attention she wanted to. “[I] welcomed the chance to be ‘borrowed’ by the federal government as a rotator program officer at NSF,” she shares. “This was wonderful for my children, then in high school, to live in the ‘power center of the universe’ in the Washington, DC, area. I got to work in the amazingly idea-rich environment of a federal granting agency, and learned many new skills such as formal project management.” Following her stint as a rotator program officer, she decided to transition to research management at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle. “This was good for my family and for me, as I learned how to manage the structure of a $4 million per year research center,” she says. “When the UW center was ending, I went back to NSF to learn how to manage multiple $4 million per year projects, from their perspective. Again, I learned a lot, including the importance of communicating one’s science effectively so that our legislators can understand it.”
In her current role as CIO of Quantum Northwest, Small undertakes a variety of duties. “I think of ‘information’ writ broadly — from IT infrastructure in the company, to marketing materials, to financials, to Google Analytics on our website, to social media connections,” she says. “At the moment, I am focusing on how to reformat out products’ Performance Certificates into true Calibration Certificates acceptable to the pharmaceutical industry; revising our product installations; itemizing changes needed to our website; and drafting a Statement of Work needed to partner with a university to test our products in one of their labs. I love getting a chance to play with our instruments and test them. I also like learning how to best use software from an industrial perspective. I’m certainly not bored — the challenges are infinite!”
“I find the Biophysical Society meetings life-changing, since I met my husband at one! San Francisco, 1986; we were married a year later. I made lifelong friends at my first Biophysical Society meeting, friends I keep up with over the decades. My annual reunion with fellow biophysicists leaves me feeling rejuvenated every time,” she shares. “Our company has never missed exhibiting at a Biophysical Society Annual Meeting. It’s where we meet our old friends, find new customers, and learn what is at the forefront of optical spectroscopy in biophysics.”
As someone who has held many different positions in different sectors, Small has valuable insight into career development for early career scientists. “Think broadly about your personal skills and the various opportunities available to you,” she advises. “By its very nature, biophysics forces you to make connections between concepts that are not necessarily obviously linked. You learn to see the world differently and offer creative solutions to problems. These are highly transferable skills!”