Callie Chappell: What Does it Mean to be a Scientist?

Welcome back to our blog series featuring current and former Ethics Center Graduate Fellows! Our goal is to highlight the often under-recognized ethics-related work graduate students are doing across the university, whether it be through their research, advocacy, mentoring, or community building.

Callie Rodgers Chappell, a 2019-2020 Ethics in Society Graduate Fellow, will complete a PhD in biology this academic year. Callie studies the effects of genetic and chemical variation in an ecological context, focusing on yeast and bacteria that live in the nectar of California wildflowers. Callie’s concern with how variation and diversity affects the environment – both ecological and scientific – permeates every aspect of her work. From coordinating a collaborative research team of undergraduates to a bioengineering and art program for low-income teens (BioJam) to shaping federal policy as a Science and Technology Policy Fellow, Callie prioritizes expanding people’s perceptions about “what science is and what it can be.”

The Center for Ethics in Society spoke with Callie about research processes, ideas about the creative nature of science, and, ultimately, what it means to be a scientist. An edited version of the conversation appears below.

Can you tell us a bit about how you came to be an ecologist at Stanford?

I grew up in rural northern Michigan, raising monarch butterflies and making homemade applesauce from wild apples with my grandma. I found a deep connection to nature there, even though, as an adoptee from China with white parents, I lacked a strong cultural connection with the people around me. I was one of the few people of color in my hometown. But I saw, through my own racial and gendered experience, how the diversity of plants, animals, and organisms in my environment contributed to its beauty and beingness. This got me interested in understanding how variation and diversity influences the way species interact with one another and the impact that has on ecological communities and ecosystems.

It sounds like you must have known from an early age that you wanted to study ecology.

I didn’t at the time, and only recently have I realized that I’ve always been an ecologist. As a former policy debater, I wanted to study philosophy and go to law school. After two years of debating in college, I left the team because of its rampant sexism, and with my “free time,” I thought I’d try scientific research. Because I loved monarchs as a child, I joined a chemical ecology lab that studied monarch butterflies and the complex chemicals in the plants they eat.

After earning a master’s degree in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, I returned to ecology to learn how genetic variation influenced the ways ecological communities change over time. I joined Tad Fukami’s community ecology lab because of the research and the welcoming lab environment. It was the first time that I had the opportunity to work with a diverse group, especially with other Asians and Asian Americans.

Having thoughtfully engineered your graduate school environment, has your experience been pretty seamless?

Hah, not exactly.

When I came to Stanford, I had spent most of my life with a singular focus on academic achievement. But for me, school was always an escape from challenges in my personal life. In the third year of grad school, I hit rock bottom. The pandemic slowed my world down, and I finally had space to begin unpacking traumatic experiences. Through those very demanding reflections, I realized that my power and strength came, not from fulfilling the expectations of other people, but from being true to myself. For the first time in my life, I had enough support to ask myself, “Who am I?” “What do I want from my life?” and “How can I do the PhD my way?”

What was your answer? 

I saw that the practice of scientific research worked for some but not all, and I wanted my work as a scientist to be towards justice. The most direct way to do this was by changing how I went about doing my research. Inspired by Biology Professor Lauren O’Connell, I collaborated with undergraduates from Stanford in the first generation/low income (FLI) community and even some non-Stanford students. We call ourselves Team Nectar Microbe and operate like a lab-within-a lab. 

Through these students, I learned to view science through different eyes. This inspired me to envision what ethical research – and science generally – could look like. They showed me that what has to be done is transform the system itself. 

What do you mean by transforming the system of science? 

Working with my undergraduate collaborators, I realized that institutional reform isn’t enough. To achieve transformative change, researchers must reconsider what types of knowledge and labor we see as valuable and reimagine what we consider the practice of science to be.

Around that time, my friend, Rolando Perez, a then-PhD student in the Bioengineering department, approached me about getting involved with BioJam, a program he co-founded in 2019 with Corinne Okada Takara, a bio-artist and arts educator in San Jose. BioJam, a biodesign educational program focused on justice and equity, is dedicated to reorienting power relations between institutions like Stanford and communities. We elevate teens’ culture and community in science, starting with art.

BioJam empowers students not just to pursue careers in science but also helps us see science as a practice that occurs, not only in labs, but in agricultural fields, city lots, and our own kitchens. We also reimagine the role Stanford researchers can play in research and technology development: instead of assuming that we are always the teachers and leaders, we can also be followers, listeners, and learners. By creating supportive, collaborative structures that center the knowledge and expertise of communities, by communities, and for communities, we are trying to create structural change that reimagines the scientific process as liberatory and just.

Were Stanford willing to reconstruct its traditional science structures, hierarchies, and processes and other community organizations followed BioJam’s lead, would that be enough to transform scientific systems more broadly? 

It’s a start, but I also saw how top-level policies constrained community activism. After two ethics fellowships at Stanford and leading the Stanford Science Policy Group, I took a leave of absence from my PhD in 2021 to be a Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, DC.

One of the central tenets of the National Academies is providing objective research to inform policy, but many of us wrangled with what “objectivity” really means. Reevaluating what objectivity is and recognizing that incorporating more expansive forms of knowledge and different types of experience into research discussions and practices can help inform decision-making. 

So how do we change the structure of research that informs how we steward biotechnology and the environment? We can do that through STEM and policy, but I have always seen art as my most powerful tool.

Do you envision changing science by being a practicing artist?

Yes, I do! Even though I’ll be getting my PhD in biology, my own profession is, and always has been, an artist. For me, science and art are both processes of creative inquiry. Artists create things that reflect our observations, whether that’s through painting, illustration or growing sculptures out of mycelium. Those creative processes might look different than the microbiology, DNA sequencing, coding, and paper writing I do for my PhD research, but at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to better understand the world and share what we’ve learned.

Regardless of what I'm creating, the fundamental question driving my career is: What does it mean to be a scientist/artist? My goal is to help people think differently about what science is and what science can be through that change. My identity permeates every aspect of my work, and I highlight rather than minimize that fact. Embodiment sounds like it's an individualistic thing, but it's actually a collective endeavor. What is identity without being embedded in community? I’m shaped by the care and support of the wide-ranging communities that have touched my life. Perhaps embracing the complexity of identity – both the joy and pain of it – is the most radical act of all.

 

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Donna Hunter is a freelance writer, editor, and tutor living in San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley and was an Advanced Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric.