Kindergarten Scientist

Stacy Blain was born to be a scientist.

Stacy: I loved science from a very early age. I can remember my kindergarten science teacher, things like that. Crazy. So I always knew this was what I liked…and someone’s tried to destroy something that I’ve wanted since kindergarten.

Let me explain.  This is my college roommate who found a cure for a specific breast cancer. I have said those words often. They stop people in their tracks. It humbles me when I do. The voice in my head uses it against me sometimes. Who do you think you are? What have you accomplished? I mean… I’m just running a school. Good Lord. My roommate cured breast cancer…

But the university where she worked was not always a supportive mentor. In fact they accused her of terrible things and removed her from an NIH grant that would have allowed the drug she was working on to go into clinical trials much sooner.

Stacy: They basically took everything away in January of 2022, and I didn’t leave until December 23. I stayed there… part of me thought they would wake up and realize they were wrong and they’d give me everything back and I’d just go back to work. I know that’s completely ridiculous, but that’s what I think people that are abused think. Right? I think, oh, this is going to end, and they are going to be better to me, or my employer is going to be better. That’s the psychology you fall into. I wasn’t quitting because I felt like this is what I was supposed to do. This is my whole life. 

It is hard for me to tell this story. The arrogance, gaslighting, and intimidation seems unreal and yet all so familiar to me.   Stacy is suing her former employer for gender discrimination and harassment. This is a recurring pattern. I have seen it play out in the lives of too many women with whom I’ve crossed paths. Yet somehow as something so unfathomable happens, it begins to feel only like a story and not part of one’s reality. Maybe it is a coping mechanism.

Stacy: This wasn’t just a job for me. This was, like, my entire definition of self.  I am a mother, a wife, a friend, a scientist. That’s how I describe myself.

I think she lists them in that order purposely. Motherhood wins the day, but not in any stereotypical way.

Stacy: I’ve often said to my kids, all I want is for you to find something that makes you inspired. I left you kids every day to do something that was a part of who I was. And I hope that I didn’t damage you by not being there every minute. But I said, also, for me, I was such a better mother because I wasn’t there every minute. I wasn’t great at showing up to school with a snack every day.

God, sorry. Seriously, we need a snack? We can’t make it 20 minutes home?

Her list of who she is also includes one other title: CEO. She took that cure and formed Concarlo Therapeutics, a preclinical-stage precision oncology company whose mission it is to dramatically improve outcomes for patients with drug-resistant cancers by creating transformative therapies that control the p27 target. (Yep, I had to look all of that up.) The name of her company is the confluence of her children’s names. I loved that so much, I borrowed the idea. When I stepped away from headship to impact EDucation more broadly, I wanted to remember that my priority is always Grace, Ella and Nicolas, thus GEN-Ed was so named. 

Stacy has always inspired me, but once we took this walk, I found myself enchanted in new ways. We talked about our responsibilities to the women who came before us and the women to follow. We blended the idea of “Princeton in the nation’s service” to dedicating our lives to make something better for this generation and the ones to come. We talked about closing chapters in our lives that had included hundreds if not thousands of students between us. We talked about pivoting from academic worlds to leading new concerns, the necessary period of grief that accompanies the transition and the unexpected joy of longer fingernails. We have both taken the time to reflect on how we want things to be different going forward, so I asked her to define a good leader?

Stacy: Well, I think there are multiple aspects of it. First and foremost, you have to be able to sell your product to other people. And whether that’s you’re physically selling products or you’re doing what I’m doing, which is selling this vision to raise money, that’s what it all comes down to. Can I convince people that this is a good question, that this is a good path to reach the answer to that question, and that will then transform human health?

The second is actually building the team and then making sure the team is seen and validated. Everyone is respected. I have the saying… I do not want to be the smartest person in the room. I want to be in a room with all these brilliant people, and I’ll just help facilitate all those conversations so that we can be the sum which is so much greater than our parts. 

Apparently that’s an unusual mindset. I’ve been told this, like, a lot of people want to be the most powerful person.

Maybe this is the undoing of the imposter voice that lives in our heads – choose to be in rooms with brilliant people. Listen as if you might be wrong to broaden your thinking. Learn something new.

Stacy: I think one of my scientific strengths is being able to listen to different arguments and sort of parse down like, okay, this is actually the question we’re asking, and can we design the experiment for that question? And if we’re right, great. And if we’re wrong, great. Because now we know we need a different question. 

Curiosity, then, is a weapon against imposter syndrome. We can find those places where we feel lesser than or wrong and know we only need to reframe the thought. Ask a different question. Get curious in the moment. Learn from the room rather than worry in false comparisons or long for someone to validate your thinking or your actions.

Stacy: You know, funny you’re saying this, I was about to say, I don’t need to be seen and validated all the time. Although I now think, what if I had been more mentored and more seen and validated for 20 years? Where would I have been? So maybe my ability to do this now as the CEO is a reaction to what I didn’t have for 20 years. I was a lone wolf. I was doing my thing, and I remember thinking, if I just dig in, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t need to have validation, and I don’t need to have mentorship, I can just do my stuff. But now that I’m running a gig, I want it to be different.

I lived for 20 years in the if – when. That’s the way I describe it, If I get this grant, when I win this teaching award, then I’m going to be “in the boys club.” But then you realize you’re never going to be in that. You should be able to say these are the things that I’m doing and working hard for and I should be valued and seen for the place that I am in. 

I was in the room, but I wasn’t seen, right? I have this saying, do I have my invisible shirt on? Like my invisibility cloak? Like, can no one actually see me?

What does such invisibility do? It makes us see ourselves differently. It breeds imposter syndrome.

Stacy: I recognize that I have it. My university ignored me and then was trying to destroy me and said I did all these terrible things, and it’s hard not to take that personally. But one has to look for the motivation that others have to ignore you, or to hurt you, and frequently, and in my case, that was more about how I didn’t fit into someone else’s definition, how I was making people nervous because I wasn’t subservient to their opinions, especially when I started my company and really believed that we could cure breast cancer. That really annoyed people, because they were saying, who the hell does she think she is? So I definitely have imposter syndrome. But I think you have to recognize it’s there and you have to fight it and say, tomorrow’s another day. And then also fight the people trying to bring you down. 

Even Stacy has imposter syndrome. If she does, what hope is there for the rest of us? She is different. Not only is she standing up for herself in a lawsuit, but she also recognizes imposter syndrome for what it is and embraces it as a way to make the most out of each day. Like Barb Buchwach, Stacy understands the value of time. We only get so much time, so we need to make the very best of it.

Stacy: I think what it comes down to for me is life is a zero sum game. Every minute that you’re not doing something, having fun, making a difference is a wasted minute. There’s only so much time.

She has a very scientific way of thinking about things – even how she spends her time. There is a constant analysis happening in her mind. Does this conversation have value? Is this mission aligned with mine? 

Stacy: I ask, is this going to be valuable? And that’s exactly the metric I do in my head. I’m going to go to this thing because I think it’s going to be valuable to me. But networking is sometimes difficult for me. Because it is not initially obvious how this conversation might align with my mission. But in my new CEO role I’ve had to put myself out there more. And a lot of times now I’m completely pleasantly surprised because I’m learning about different industries and different things that I didn’t know about.

Liz: And so you are not the smartest person in the room.

Stacy: I’m not the smartest person in the room and I’m totally comfortable with that. The last five years have been a mind blowing transformation for me. I’m definitely putting myself out there. And I think a lot of it is that the metric of my time value is different. 

Her former bosses may have tried to bring this fierce yet petite woman to her knees these past few years, but she stands tall in her gratitude. Not because the path was easy, but because she never had to walk it alone. By her side, unwavering and steady, walks Jason, her husband, another dear college friend of mine.

Stacy: He’s had my back. We’ve had a lot of angst over the last few years, but we’ve been able to have a lot of joy because we have each other’s back, and we’re so supportive. And I think that it is really a beautiful thing to realize I married the right guy. 

In all the time Stacy felt invisible at work, Jason saw her. When others wouldn’t, Jason validated her. I have a hypothesis that it comes down to this simple truth: one person who truly sees you can give you the strength, the support, and the courage to keep rising, no matter what life deals you. 

When I was walking with Stacy, I had the sense that two small towhead girls…maybe kindergarten-aged… dressed in the finest 70’s style… were continuously darting awaying from us with arms swinging wide and feet barely touching the ground only to return with faces beaming wide from some brief but grand adventure before facing the next. We are all still our younger selves finding joy in our scariest adventures and comfort in our deepest connections.

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