Ximena Cid

David Zierler:

OK, this is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is November 6, 2020. I'm delighted to be here with Professor Ximena Cid. Ximena, so nice to meet you. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Ximena Cid:

Oh, it's a pleasure. Happy to be here.

Zierler:

OK, so to start, would you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation?

Cid:

Yeah. So, I'm an associate professor and the chair of the Physics Department at California State University Dominguez Hills.

Zierler:

When did you become chair of the department?

Cid:

April 1.

Zierler:

Of this year?

Cid:

This year. Yeah, yeah.

Zierler:

Was the department already in pandemic remote mode by the time you were named chair?

Cid:

For about a week and a half, yes. So our previous chair, he was going through some family tragedies. And then we had COVID hit, and we got the word about our institution switching to alternative instruction, so online, working from home, teaching from home, learning from home. And we had already done elections for chair position to start in August of 2020, which is this academic year. But then, probably around May, they asked if I could retroactively be made chair as of April 1. So, it's been a bumpy ride. It's an unusual year, for sure.

Zierler:

Let's take it all the way back to the beginning. I want to learn about your family background, where you and your family come from.

Cid:

I was born and raised in Sacramento, California. My mother, Josephine Talamantez, she's Chicana and Yaqui. So my grandfather, her father, is Yaqui Tribe, so Native American. She was born and raised in San Diego. Her family is, like I said, Yaqui. So, our tribal reservation is Arizona, but it's kind of split by the border. So there's tribal affiliation in Arizona as well as Sonora, Mexico. And my mother's maternal side is from Baja, California. So, they've been in San Diego area, border area, Baja, California for a very long time. And most of my mother's family, my uncles and cousins, primarily from San Diego area.

My father's side of the family is primarily in Sacramento. My father was born in Zacatecas, Mexico and was brought as a young child to the States. His father, my grandfather, was in the military. And so he brought his family back Stateside. A lot of my family on my father's side has been military. But my brothers and sisters and I, we were raised very much in the Chicano Civil Rights movements as well as the Native American, American Indian Civil Rights Movement as well. So we were brought up in community organizing and activism.

Both my parents are educated. So, my father had his master's degree in printmaking. He was an artist. He passed in 2009. But he was part of the Royal Chicano Air Force, which started as the Rebel Chicago Art Front. It's an art collective in Sacramento, California. And they worked a lot with Cesar Chavez during the UFW farm worker movements. So we were raised marching with Cesar Chavez, we were raised boycotting grapes for most of my childhood, strawberries, as well. But the RCAF, the Royal Chicago Air Force, which is what it later became, were very in tune with working with community. And so they would go all along the west coast, this art collective, which my uncle was also a founding member of. He was also Yaqui and Chicano but through a different family line. So we were related more by marriage than we were by blood. But my cousins were also Yaqui and Chicano as well.

But the art collective would go and help different communities on the west coast, all the way up through the state of Washington down to southern California, where they would help communities create and implement community centers. And so within the community, they would talk about, "How do you engage with community?" and they would do workshops on community building. In Sacramento, there was a lot of our local community feeding young children, breakfast before school, food drives. We grew up doing art workshops.

And that's probably my first introduction to teaching is working with my father's side of the family, primarily artists. My sisters are also artists. My younger brother's a writer, so he also has the arts within him. I was a musician. That's how I paid for my first two years of undergrad was being a musician. And so art is kind of in our blood, right? My mother worked for her professional career as well within the California Arts Council, working with grants in workshops as well.

So, my first experience with teaching was working with my father, my uncles, my cousins, all doing art workshops for young kids. And they were community-style, so you would lead a workshop but not as a lecturer holding information but having everybody engaged together. And that's really influenced the way that I teach as well is I get really bored with lecturing. And so the active engagement kind of terminology is more aligned with the style that I teach in. And it's funny that it's called active engagement because that's kind of the way that I was raised is to always work with your participants in sharing knowledge in the two-way street as opposed to one person holding it and getting it out.

Zierler:

What languages were spoken in your extended family? From your parents and your grandparents when you were growing up.

Cid:

Both Spanish and English. Both my parents are fluent in Spanish. My grandfather on my father's side spoke English and Spanish. My paternal grandmother primarily spoke Spanish. She would understand English but primarily spoke Spanish. So my grandparents' house was centrally located between all of us, the extended family. My first cousins, my aunts and uncles, we all grew up within blocks of each other. And so my grandparents' house was kind of centrally located between that, and we would always end up at my grandparents' house. So, I didn't actually know what a family reunion was until I got to college because we did that all the time. Like, a random Tuesday, we'd have dinner at my grandmother's house or celebrations. But it was both Spanish and English. On my mother's side, it was the same. Both Spanish and English. My mother's fluent, my father's fluent. I would say my parents raised us in a way that they wanted us to be very fluent in English for the educational parts. And so in our family home, we primarily spoke English. But we got Spanish from my grandparents, my uncles, and my aunts.

Zierler:

Did you tend see the cultural diversity in your family as separate? Or was it one integrated whole for you?

Cid:

They definitely weren't separate. And because we were so engaged with our community, we grew up in a very open, welcoming space. So all aspects of diversity–like the LGBT community, we have family that's part of that. My mother has always created a very open, welcoming space in our home. Most of our friends growing up, most of our family, would come and confide in my mother. And so, we weren't raised with discrimination. We experienced it outside of our family, and some of our immediate family kind of had issues here and there. But my immediate home was very welcoming.

And the neighborhood that we grew up in was very much a Black and Latino neighborhood primarily. So, it wasn't really until I got to college that I experienced being other-ed. Most of our K-12 education, we were put in advanced courses. And so we got to experience having majority-white classes. But we were in neighborhood schools, public schools. And so you always had diverse populations. And so, I knew about racism and sexism, but I didn't really understand it from a firsthand perspective until I got to college.

Zierler:

What was your elementary and middle school like? Were they large schools?

Cid:

They were large schools. My brothers and sisters and I as well as my cousins on my dad's side were all very close, so there were maybe seven or eight of us going to high school at one time. And we went to a very low-funded school, so to speak. We went to a kind of underfunded, primarily Black and Brown high school that had a program for visual and performing arts. So we had students that were coming into our high school from outside of our community for the visual and performing arts center. So they were very large schools. Same with elementary, middle school. Very large, very diverse schools except for the advanced placement courses. Always with my brothers, and sisters, and first cousins. Some of our teachers in some of the advanced courses, we did experience racism.

But as kids, we didn't really understand that. So what we understood was that my mom and my dad were always present in our schools. So most of our teachers knew who our parents were. So as a kid we were like, "Ah, mom and dad, go away. You're too present in our school," right? But in retrospect, there were a lot of moments that we just didn't realize how ugly they were. Because we were kids, right? So, we didn't really understand that stuff. But my parents were very involved in our education. And not necessarily telling us what we should do but very much about standing up for ourselves and allowing our autonomy to speak. So, when we experienced something, we weren't taught to not talk about it or internalize it. And so, as an adult, looking back, I'm very appreciative of how involved they were. I'm very grateful that they taught us the value of education but not to give away our voice to education.

Because as adults, my siblings and I started to realize the structure of academia and K-12 education and how they differ depending on what you look like and who you are. And even more so in the STEM fields. And so I think the way that we were raised gave us a lot of strength and power to stand up for ourselves. And because we were raised in a community organizing space, always working with our communities, it always felt natural as well to make sure that the spaces that I was a part of, if I was seeing someone else experience harsh treatments, it was a little bit easier for me to say things and stand up for other people. Not so much for myself but, for others, it was a lot easier for me to do that. So my K-12 education, we were always at public schools, for sure. Always with my brothers and sisters. Very diverse schools but not diverse within the AP or advanced courses that were available.

Zierler:

When did you start to get interested in science?

Cid:

I think I've always been interested in space. As a kid, I would crawl out our window onto the roof and look at the stars. For full moons and lunar eclipses, my father would wake us up in the middle of the night and use his military binoculars to allow us to look and see what the moon looked like and what stars look like, planets would look like. And so I've always kind of loved space. I just didn't really understand science, the structure of science because most of my family are artists. My cousins on my mom's side are a little bit older than us. She was the youngest of her siblings. So, all of my cousins were probably about ten years older than us on her side. But my cousin Regina Talamantez became a civil engineer. And she has her own civil engineering firm in southern California.

But she would come and pick us up and take us camping, take us to pizza parties, but she would also take us out to construction sites and talk about what it's like to be a female engineer. And so, I think she had a really strong influence on me for wanting to actually pursue science in college. I didn't really know what I was doing when I got to college. I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad. And like I said, I was a musician. I played mariachi violin and would sing in a mariachi group since high school. So I used that professional kind of experience and the money that we were paid as professional musicians to pay for my first two years of college. So I went to college thinking that I was going to do a music degree, but I really wanted to take science classes. And I also thought that at college, you had to take math and science courses like you did in high school. I didn't know that you could do whatever you wanted.

My parents were educated, but they allowed us to really just figure stuff out. And I did have to figure a lot of things out when I got to college. But I took a bio-engineering course about human physiology in space, how the human biological systems change when you go to space. And so I took that course, and I was like, "Wow, this is amazing." And I wanted to know more. And so I was like, "OK, I like space. Let me try and learn a little bit about space." So I took some astronomy courses. But in order to take the astronomy courses, I needed to take the physics courses. And in order to take the physics courses, I needed to take the calculus courses. And so I kind of was stumbling my way through the astrophysics degree. I initially thought I wanted to be an engineer. I think most people think about lawyer, doctor, engineer. And I laugh about it with some colleagues, we call it the Holy Trinity, that people come in thinking they want to be a lawyer, doctor, engineer. And primarily because you're not exposed to a lot more than that, right?

Zierler:

On that point, going back to high school, Berkeley is going to have a lot of students who are coming from much better-funded schools, public and private than you did. So looking back, how well-prepared were you in terms of the quality of your math and science education in high school when you got to Berkeley and looked at your fellow classmates and what they were able to achieve?

Cid:

I was not prepared at all. I was not prepared for the level of competition that incoming students already had. And all of our classes at Berkeley were graded on the bell curve. So even if you did really well, if everybody else did better than you, you could still get a C for getting a 92 in the class. So, I wasn't at all prepared. And I did a summer bridge program, so I started essentially the summer after high school. And I always did well in my math and science courses in K-12. I hadn't gotten up to calculus. And talking with a bunch of my educational colleagues, I didn't understand enough about tracking that happens in K-12. So, unless you're starting at a certain age or certain grade level with algebra, you're not going to get up to calculus, right? So I got through pre-calculus, I did a bunch of science courses, so I took biology, I took physics, I took chemistry, I took all the science courses.

But our high school was very underfunded, and we didn't even have textbooks or lockers because it was also a very violent high school. And so, we didn't have a lot of storage. They removed all the lockers because they were afraid of weapons. I used to watch these shows where they'd have people meeting at lockers in high school, and I'm like, "That's all just movie magic," because I didn't realize that high schools really did have those. And so when I got to Berkeley, everything was a struggle, even in summer bridge, where it was kind of a sheltered program for under-represented students, under-prepared students where we were taking math, science, English. We had a lot of athletes that were with us. But I got into a big fight with one of those faculty, the math department. And so it took me about two years to really learn how to be at Berkeley and study at Berkeley. I was working two jobs the whole time in undergrad as well.

Zierler:

I want to set the stage a little in terms of how you got to Berkeley and what your reaction was there. Going back to this idea in your childhood that diversity was celebrated and that being other-ed was something that was an alien concept to you, right? Now, Berkeley, of course, has a national reputation for being an extremely tolerant and progressive place, but it's also in many ways a white-dominant place. So I wonder how your experiences when you got to Berkeley might complicate that narrative and understanding of Berkeley's progressiveness and tolerance.

Cid:

So Berkeley's an interesting place. I think being able to be a part of the summer bridge program was very important to the success that I had. There weren't a lot of us that were in STEM, but there were a lot of Black and Brown folks and people of color in the summer bridge program. And so, we came in with a cohort of people with similar backgrounds to myself. And that created a lot of lifelong friendships really. I still have some really close friends to this day that went through that program. And so that created a very good cohort of us. And freshman year, when the academic year started, there were very few of us that were in STEM programs. And those of us that were in STEM programs, very few of us actually finished our majors in STEM. And so it became a culture shock. The language that people would speak, the word choices that we had, as liberal as Berkeley likes to be, it is very much a white space. And in the STEM field, it very much is a white male space. Our faculty were all pretty much while male or foreign.

So there weren't a lot of moments in my first two years where I felt comfortable. And actually, there were a couple of classes where I was the only woman, the only woman of color in my classes. And my Physics 2 class, your second semester calculus-based intro class, I ended up having to take it three times. The first time, I flat out failed because I just didn't know how to study well. I didn't know how to compete. It wasn't even just about learning the material, it was competing with the material. The second time I took it, I felt so isolated and so discriminated against. And I don't think it was intentional. I think that the TAs that I had and the faculty were actually trying to be supportive but they would always come to me, "How can I help you? I want to make sure you're OK." And by doing that, it very much made me feel separate from all of my other colleagues.

And so, I just became so uncomfortable that I ended up withdrawing. And so when I took it the third time, I passed it. But by that third time, I felt kind of a little traumatized from it. But I'm also a very stubborn person. So, whenever people tell me no, I get very, very — and it's not to my benefit sometimes — stubborn, and I want to prove you wrong. So in my early days as well, my first couple of years, I had faculty where I would go to their office hours, and I did everything I could to try and learn because I realized very quickly, "I do not know this stuff. I don't have the same knowledge of how to even study. I've never seen it before." Most of my peers had already taken the intro classes in high school, and they were retaking them at college for easy As. And I'm seeing all of this stuff for the first time. I'm seeing integrals for the first time. I'm seeing vector calculus for the first time. I'm trying to really learn physics as opposed to a conceptual frame of physics.

Zierler:

You're also working and supporting yourself.

Cid:

And I was working two jobs. And so trying to balance all of that and going to faculty office hours asking for help and having them tell me, "Oh, you're at a point where you're just not going to succeed. So, I think you should just drop the class." And I'm like, "Wow, how is it that you're a faculty member, and these office hours are dedicated times that you're required to support students, and they're sitting here telling people who are asking for help that they might as well just drop the class because they're never going to succeed?" And so those left really lasting impressions, but those also got me really fired up because I would get so angry by having these moments where I am asking for help, and you're still telling me no. And so those first two years, I became very focused on just being present in the classes so you would have to see me and deal with me. It also kind of broke me a little bit I think.

Because when you're constantly having people tell you that you're not good, that you don't belong here, whether right to your face or the subtleties of it, that starts to affect you. So even if you do have a lot of confidence–it started to affect me by my third year. And so I started really trying to figure out, "Well, what is it that I like to do? And can I actually do this?" And it was also around that time that I started to find mentors. I started doing research around that time. So that same class about human physiology and space, it was taught by grad students, and they were working in the space plasma lab. So they had posted an announcement, "We need undergrads to do some data analysis. It's a paid position." And I was like, "I'll take that job. That means that I can stop working at this other job off campus and work in a research lab," not knowing what the hell you do in research, you know? But I was like, "It's paid. I'll go do that." And that helped a lot as well because the advisor that I had for that group, Dr. Janet Luhmann, she was amazing. She was so supportive.

Zierler:

Was she supportive also in the sense of encouraging you that you did have the intellectual capacities to succeed in this field?

Cid:

Yeah, very much so. She sent me to my first conference, which was the American Geophysical Union. It's in San Francisco every winter. And so, it wasn't too far to go to it. But she helped me talk about what it means to present research. I didn't know what it meant. It was the first conference I'd ever been to. AGU is huge, it's like 25,000 [people]. So, when you do poster presentations, it's a whole convention hall filled with people, professors and researchers, and here's little old me and this line of poster boards. And I was so intimidated, but she had already walked me through how to present a poster, she helped me create it but she very much let me direct it. So it was my story that she would help me create. So I knew my project, but it was through the narrative of helping me create that first poster of, "How is it that we think about small, individual pieces fitting into the big picture?"

And so that helped a lot. And because I was doing that, because I had gotten that advice and that mentoring to do that, it very much gave me a big confidence boost. And being in that convention hall that year with grad students, with professors, with research scientists all intermixed with each other and having people come and talk to me as well without questioning, "Do I belong here? Do I know what I'm talking about?" that was a game changer for me. And it really did solidify that I could do this work. And she also sent me to a space physics summer school that was created for first-year grad students because space physics and plasmas, it's not a very common field for many institutions. And so there was this space physics consortium, Science Technology Center that was funded, it was Levin Institutions, and they would bring first-year grad students that were thinking about space plasmas to do this summer school and a whole picture.

And so, we were looking at particles from the sun hitting the magnetosphere, but there were all these different components about space plasmas and space physics, space weather. So when I got there that last year, my last summer of undergrad, and it was nothing but grad students, I was like, "Wow, this is kind of cool. I can hang with all these people. I know what I'm talking about." She started talking to me about grad school. And it was so casual, the way she would describe it. I didn't know anybody that'd ever really gone to grad school.

Zierler:

Meaning that she thought that you were appropriate for grad school before you thought you were appropriate for grad school.

Cid:

Yeah, very much so. So she would just talk to me about it. Not asking me, "Are you thinking about it?" It was just something that you do. And I didn't ever have that experience. I didn't know people that really went to grad school. My father got a master's in printmaking, but it's a very different structure within the arts than it is with science. Although I think the creativity of both is very interconnected. But the way she would talk to me and the casualness of it just normalized it. And it wasn't her agenda, like, "You need to be in this field. You need to be doing these things." It was a lot of conversations about, "What is it that you like? How is it that you're coming up with questions that you do?" I was teaching as one of my jobs as a tutor in one of the programs at Berkeley, which is one of the first scholar programs in the country. And I really enjoyed the way that people could process a question and approach it from lots of different ways.

So, I started to have a lot more questions about education, the process of teaching compared to space physics. And so she introduced me to Ramon Lopez, who ended up becoming my graduate advisor. And I officially met him at a SACNAS conference my last year. They gave us his book. He had coauthored a popular science kind of book about storms from the sun. I think that's what it's actually called. And in the front cover, it said that he was affiliated with SACNAS. And so when I had realized I was going to go to that conference, I was like, "Oh, let me look him up." And she had already told me about him. His name, at least. So I met him when I was an undergrad at that conference, and we sat down and really talked about science education, physics education as well as space plasmas. Because he was doing both.

So that's where I was introduced to him. It was maybe my fourth year. I took five years in undergrad. SACNAS was also the first time I ever saw someone who was like me really talking about their culture while they were sharing their science. And it was Keivan Stassun, who is now I think the director of the Vanderbilt-Fisk Bridge Program. But he was talking about astrophysics, and I was sitting in that session while he was also showing pictures of his family, and his mom, and his culture, and it was so overwhelming for me because in my classes and my research lab at Berkeley, I didn't have anybody talking about their culture and how it influenced who they are as a scientist. I knew that about myself, but that language was missing. And the support for how you speak–you end up code switching a lot without knowing that terminology in undergrad out of survival mechanisms, right? You have to learn to speak the way your peers do and the way your professors do without knowing that that's what you're doing.

And so, with him just being himself and talking about his cultural presence in his life as a scientist, it was very overwhelming for me. And he actually took me outside on one of the balconies of wherever that conference was that year, and we sat and talked for an hour about what my interests were, his path through STEM, and it really influenced me in thinking about, "Why isn't it we talk about our cultures within STEM fields, who we are as people?" It was so foreign from the past four years at Berkeley where it's nothing about facts without any human kind of input in how you come up with questions, how you would analyze data, what the lens is. It was always presented as just these dried facts with no human interaction. And so that kind of changed a lot of the way that I processed what it means to be a scientist and how you can be a whole person in science fields. And so those were two very influential, I think, moments, going to the AGU conference and presenting for the first time and then going to SACNAS that same year a little bit later.

Zierler:

And Professor Lopez, was that UT Arlington at that point?

Cid:

I think he was actually at UTEP, so University of Texas El Paso. He got recruited from UTEP to Florida Institute of Technology, and that's where I joined his group. So I studied abroad my last semester, and I kept in contact with him after. So the fall semester is when I did the SACNAS conference, and then that spring semester, I was done with all my classes, and I studied abroad. So I graduated abroad. But I kept in contact with him, and he offered to bring me to Florida — so he must've been in Florida at that time — to do kind of a REU program after I graduate. So, it wasn't official REU because it was after I graduated. But I studied abroad in Italy, and I came back and went straight to Florida. And when I did that summer research, number one, I really liked doing space plasmas with him, it was about the magnetosphere, but he also introduced me to studies about simulations and presenting concepts in different ways and seeing different learning games about space plasmas in current systems that happen during solar storms.

And I was just fascinated by it. And so I did that summer internship, and near the end of it–because I didn't know what I was doing, but my advisors had told me, "Take the GREs, so even if you aren't going to go to grad school, at least you have them there. They're good for five years, and they'll still be fresh in your mind." I didn't do well on them at all, but I did do them. And because I had already done them and I had already been talking to him for about a year about my interests through Janet Luhmann, through the SACNAS conference, and then while I was studying abroad as well…

Zierler:

Ximena, I want to ask you, toward the end of your undergraduate experience, because the dominant theme academically was one of not really having very good mentoring except in rare circumstances, because you did not feel like you were well prepared vis-a-vis your fellow students, because you really didn't know anything about what research meant or presenting at conferences, besides certain people giving you the confidence that you could succeed in graduate school, what had you learned about yourself that convinced yourself that this is something that you would be capable of doing?

Cid:

So, I learned that I'm very resilient. I learned that I could manage my time better than some of my peers because I was working two jobs almost the entire time that I was an undergrad. I learned that my grades, and my GPA, and my GRE scores that last year and a half were not measures of my comprehension in the field or even my potential in the field. And so, I think the last year and a half of being an undergrad, it was like I was rebuilding my own confidence. I came in very confident. I've never been someone who wasn't confident until probably after my second year, where I became very insecure, Impostor Syndrome, all those phrases. And it wasn't until maybe my last year and a half, it started coming back. And I think it was by doing that summer school with nothing but grad students and not being intimidated while we were going through the learning process of all the different subfields of space plasmas that I really just learned that I know a lot.

And so really validating that I think is what I did that last year. Presenting at conferences. Just that reaffirmation that I do know a lot, and that I can do this. I wasn't ready to go to grad school. So as confident as I kind of got near the end, I absolutely wasn't ready. So when I did the summer internship with Ray Lopez in Florida, when we finished, he was like, "I'll pay for grad school. You can start in two weeks. You're accepted. We'll have an RA position for you, so you don't even have to teach, not a TA. It's fully funded, and you'll be in my group." And I was just like, "Whoa. That's a great offer. But I can't do that." I was on this whirlwind high of spending six months in Europe. I hadn't seen my family really. I came home, and then the thought of moving to Florida, which is so different than California, I just couldn't do it. So I ended up taking a year off. And I said no.

And then I got so insecure that I said no because I didn't know at the time either that that's a common practice, to have grad school paid for in STEM fields, and I was just like, "Damn, I turned down paid school. I don't have to work and I can just go to school full-time." But I said no, because I knew I wasn't ready. I knew that if I had gone straight through, I probably wouldn't have finished. And I did random jobs. But I think I needed that, too. I did get a lot of confidence back, but I didn't have the confidence to move that far away from my family, which is a whole different level of confidence. So, it's a difference between your physics comprehension confidence and cultural confidence.

Zierler:

Did you have a sense for graduate school if you would pursue more theory or more experimentation? Were those things that you had worked out as an undergraduate?

Cid:

I knew that I really liked space physics over astrophysics. I still like space, and my first love is going to be about space. But I really liked the fact that within our solar system, within a few days of an event that happens on the sun, we on earth can experience that. That proximity, right? Something that could influence our everyday lives. Magnetic storms influence so many things on earth. The Northern Lights, our phenomenon of the power grids, oil pipelines, airplane travel, all of these things are affected by space, whether something happens on the sun, or ten days later, you see all those effects happening on earth. And I thought that was very fascinating whereas in astrophysics, outside of the solar system, something happens, it's so far away that it's never really going to affect us.

I like the immediate influence on our everyday lives about space physics. But I also really enjoyed the way that we think. And so I took classes in cognitive science. I took classes in education. The Florida Institute of Technology had a science education PhD program. So I ended up taking half my classes within that department my first year because I became very fascinated about how people are their own variables, the way that we ask questions, the lens that we look through for data. Data collected by people is a whole different ballgame than a simulation. And so I learned a lot about that my first year. And Ray Lopez gave me the freedom to explore a little bit my first year when did go back. So after my year off, I called him up again, and I was like, "OK, I'm ready. If that offer still stands, can I come?" And I did. And then we moved. So after my first year, he moved us, got recruited back to Texas, and so we moved back to UT Arlington.

Zierler:

And there was no question that you would go with him. That was the point. He was the one you wanted to study with.

Cid:

Yeah, and I also didn't like Florida at all. It's a whole different culture than California. Even the Latinx population is a whole different vibe than California. And I've always known that, but to actually be in it, primarily islands, like Puerto Rican, Dominican, Haitian, there's a different culture completely, even if the language is the same, right? Spanish. And so the food's different in Florida, the people are different. It just wasn't my vibe. And so when he brought our group together and was like, "OK, I got recruited out. Y'all can come with me or not," it was no question for me. And on top of that, he was always very good about supporting us as grad students. We weren't throwaways. I talked to different colleagues that had horrible graduate experiences. I had horrible graduate experiences but not because of him. He negotiated for UT Arlington to also cover our move. And so four of us went with him, and they paid for our move from Florida as well, guaranteed admission for all of us. We didn't have to actually apply. So there was just a lot of support for that move. And for me, it was no question. Like, "OK. I'm going to go to Texas now. I've never lived in Texas, but it's halfway back to California. So, let's go."

Zierler:

What were some of the central research questions that Professor Lopez was working on, and how did that relate to the development of your thesis topic?

Cid:

Yes. So, he actually introduced me to a follow-up study that he had done with a colleague in Texas, where they were looking at a magnetic sub-storm that happens in the night side of the US magnetic fields. So, it's a graduate-level textbook about this phenomenon of currents. So field of line currents, meaning electric currents were along the direction of magnetic fields around the earth. And there were questions about, "What are the induced magnetic perturbations?" You had an electric current now, you're inducing magnetic fields. But what direction are they close to the earth? The northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere, inside of this current wedge, outside of it? And it's a freshman physics kind of question, right? Your thumb is in the direction of the current, your fingers curl around in the direction of the induced magnetic fields. But all of the grad students couldn't get it from the image that was presented in the textbook, this graduate-level textbook, space plasma textbook.

And so, what he did is he had me do a follow-up study where we created a 3D simulation. The same material, same information about the current wedge that forms during this magnetic phenomenon. And when we asked the grad students again about it, it was an easy question. And so that really sparked this interest of, "Wow, the way that we present information really, truly influences our understanding of it." And maybe because I come from an artist background as well, the visual representations, and the mental representations, and thinking about the different ways that we use our mind to understand abstract ideas, it just became so fascinating to me. And so it was still questions that were rooted in space plasmas and space physics, but they really were about the teaching and learning of physics, right? And the way that we present information.

And I always thought about different populations and how they interact with different materials because I always would look at myself in a way that I would approach problem-solving, and it would always be different from my peers at Berkeley. Like, I would - we'd all get the same answer, but then I would be told that I'm doing it wrong. And I'm like, "How can I be doing it wrong if we're all getting the same answer? It's just a different way of doing it," as opposed to it being wrong. And so asking those questions and being introduced to a field where we could ask questions like that about, "What is your process of learning physics?" in a field that I liked and that I was very engaged with, it just, again, exposed me to something new that really excited me.

Zierler:

And would this be a good example of learning from Professor Lopez that one's personal background and culture was actually relevant in terms of succeeding in science?

Cid:

I'm not sure. He was Puerto Rican, so he was Latino, right? And he'd have parties where he would be cooking. And he understood Mexican culture enough that he did talk to my family. I went through some medical issues that first year when we were in Florida, and he was just very supportive. I had a breast cancer scare my first year in Florida, and I had to have surgery and biopsies. And he was like, "Oh, you don't know us yet," because I think it might've been the first three months of me being there, and he was like, "My wife's going to go with you to all your appointments. I know you don't have any family here." And it wasn't really about our culture, but I think because he understood my culture, even though he's not Mexican or Native, there was just a freedom to be who you are. So, I don't know if it was necessarily him talking about Latinx culture in the study of the field, but it was a way of creating space where we didn't really worry about who we were.

And our group was very diverse. He had brought students from Texas to Florida, from El Paso to Florida with him. And so there were already other Mexican grad students. We had white grad students. And so there really wasn't an otherness within his group, where you're distinguishing people by your gender, or by your ethnicity, or by your sexual orientation, or whatever other identity that you have. And I think that was more–I wouldn't say that's culturally rich teaching of curriculum, but it was just creating space where you didn't have that as your central focus, thinking about who you are by your identity first as opposed to your scientific identity first. And so, I think that's the freedom that he created in our group, that I wasn't really focused on my identity, I was focused on becoming a scientist. And I think that was probably the first time that I really experienced that. And it was subtle. It was a subtle shift between those two things. But it's a big shift in terms of what is the weight that you're carrying with you, or what is your thought process carrying with you? When we did get to Texas, we did have some weird tension between the grad students in our group and the grad students that were part of the department already. Because part of it was he had negotiated a different salary for us. We didn't have to apply, we were just accepted.

And so, there were moments where it was like, "Oh, it's because you're a Mexican woman." And I'm like, "Well, is that really why that's happening right now? I don't think so." So I think that, above all things, with Ray Lopez, is one of his gifts, that he makes you feel comfortable enough to not worry about your identity. Because he's not easy as an advisor in the sense of critiquing you, and training you, and preparing you to have your own questions and your own thought process of being a scientist. It's not just all, "Yay, go for it. Do whatever you want." He definitely was hard on us to learn how to be scientists. But it was never about our identity.

Zierler:

What were some of the central conclusions of your PhD thesis?

Cid:

So I had looked at different aspects of visual spatial cognition. And so starting with that first review paper and revising the study, that just kind of sparked all my interest in the way that we use our minds. And so we looked at assessing people's spatial comprehension. And there's different kinds of spatial cognition that you can use. There's rotation, there is way-finding, there's map-reading, peripheral vision. So, there's all different kinds of spatial visual cognition, right? But we were looking primarily at spatial reasoning as it related to rotation. And so we did a bunch of assessments. And during my time in Texas, I also was collaborating with different cognitive science groups. And so, Ray is also really good at networking, and he taught us that as well, and working with all different kinds of groups, so it's not just about the focus that he's in.

But he does physics education, he does have colleagues in cognitive science and spatial cognition as well. And there was a really big center about spatial cognition. And so he introduced me to some of those professors and researchers. And so in the beginning, it was like, "How do we measure spatial cognition?" I'm a physicist. That's not something we learned. And so I ended up learning a lot about that. And so we did a lot of comparisons. There's gender differences for sure with spatial reasoning skills. But only certain kinds of spatial reasoning skills. So, women are really good at your peripheral vision compared to your focused vision. And I think that when you look at those characteristics, you start to see trends between different types of assessments, right? So if we are doing standardized assessments, there are correlations with that. And so I started looking at population differences that weren't necessarily about your ethnicity or your socioeconomic status, but it was about spatial reasoning, right? And cognition. And then the correlations between comprehension and in particular electricity, magnetism, right? Whenever you talk about fields, it's all abstract, right? And we create a lot of mental images, and we teach by doing a lot of modeling.

And so, I looked a lot at those courses and the correlations between spatial reasoning and those courses. And we started to use V Python, Visual Python, and I transitioned that into my post-doc as well where I was writing. And I still do that work now. I just haven't published it in a while. But I write a lot of programs with my undergrads now about spatial reasoning. So 3D simulations that you can rotate, that you can zoom in and out of, that you can let time move forward in. So the students that I work with now, we do a lot of that work. It's very easy for them to work on a semester writing a program that I will then incorporate into my teaching. But it's primarily about electromagnetic fields. I did that in my post-doc as well. And the programs on exams, when you start to look at them in terms of exams in E&M, both lower division and upper division electrodynamics, they have a huge impact on comprehension. And so, it's a way for us to create a different representation, right? We have mathematical representations, diagrammatical representations for these abstract ideas.

And so, these are ways to also create 3D simulation representations. And by doing that, what you're really doing is you're reducing your cognitive load. So I learned a lot about how our brains work, how much pieces of information you can hold at one time. I almost did a post-doc in a cognitive science group, I actually interviewed with a group in Chicago, and we did a study near the end of my graduate work where we were doing brain scanning with a bio-engineering group at UT Arlington. And so we were collaborating with them to do brain scanning so that we could see pulses, the neural network pulses. See, we have activation as it relates to spatial reasoning. So we did a study where we were looking at the mental rotation task, kind of looks like Tetris blocks. We made those and then did scans of our physics students with this little skull cap kind of thing while we were looking at their brain function as they were solving physics problems as well as rotation problems.

And that was super cool. So I was like, "Oh, man, I want to learn more about the brain. Let me go do a neuroscience, cognitive science post-doc because that sounds so cool, too." And I do have interest in that stuff as well still, and I talk a lot with my neuroscience friends and colleagues that I've made over the years about that kind of knowledge.

Zierler:

What post-doc did you ultimately accept?

Cid:

I accepted a post-doc with the Physics Education Group, PEG, at University of Washington. But I actually had a tenure-track faculty position at a community college in Texas right after I graduated with my PhD. So that's why I kind of stopped with the post-doc applications and interviews, because I was offered this tenure-track faculty position. And so I was teaching at a community college, and I was training their faculty on physics education. And so, the reason I got connected with them is there was an alumni from our department who had done nothing but high-energy particle physics for her PhD, and she ended up being faculty at this community college. And so, my last year as a grad student, she had reached back out to us because I think she might've graduated three years before I did with her PhD.

But she reached out to me in particular because she realized in the community college that she needed to know more about physics education. And so I ended up mentoring her while she was a faculty member, and then she told me about the open position, I applied for it, and I was offered the position. And so I started working at North Lake College as a tenure-track faculty member in community college. It's a little different in community college than it is a four-year institution. But I did that for a semester, and during that first semester, that fall semester, I had applied a while ago for the PEG post-doc with the University of Washington under Lillian McDermott.

Zierler:

But you had put it out of your mind at that point, you were just concentrating on teaching?

Cid:

No, it had been probably a year before that I had applied for it. And then I had gone to maybe the AAPT conference, and Lillian came up to me and she was like, "Oh, I'm glad you're here kind of. I wanted to offer you this post-doc." And I was like, "Whoa. I completely forgot about that." And so then I had to do a little soul searching. Like, "Do I leave a tenure-track full-time faculty job and go back to a post-doc, or do I stay here?" Because I had every intention to stay there. And I talked to my dean at the time at the community college, and she was so supportive. And she was like, "Oh no, you can't stay here. You have to go do that. It's going to create so many more opportunities for you. Just don't leave us in the middle of the semester," right?

So, I had asked Lillian and Paula and Peter if I could push back the start date for the post-doc, and they were fine with that. So I ended up saying, "OK. Let me finish this fall semester, and then I'll accept the post-doc and go to the state of Washington, go to Seattle." And so I did that. And it was a hard move at that time because like I said, I set up a whole office, I was expecting to stay permanently in Texas, at least for a while. And I had maybe about five days to pack everything up and move. My brother came and helped me, and we drove up to Seattle, dropped all of our stuff up and then flew back to Sacramento for Christmas. And then because it's a quarter system in Washington, we started right after the new year. So I maybe had two weeks between the two. But I had thought also that if I wanted to ever get into four-year institutions, then a post-doc would be critical for that. And it was with a world-renowned group. So I was like, "How can I say no to that?" So I did that. I did that for three and a half years, working with the Physics Education Group in University of Washington.

Zierler:

Did you remain involved at all with the research from your graduate school days? Were you still working in space physics and things like that?

Cid:

Not really. So when I got to the University of Washington, they were all about curriculum development more so than any of the other projects that I did. It was a challenge working with the group up there because they didn't really have a project for me outlined. So I came in and overlapped very briefly with one of their post-docs, and he was great. And he started teaching me a lot about the pre-service, in-service programs that they have. And so I started doing that. And then they brought in another post-doc who did quantum computing in her PhD, and they brought her in to specifically work on quantum curriculum, tutorials for quantum and that kind of thing. So she came in with a project. And for me it was a challenge creating a project that we both agreed on, that myself and the group agreed on.

I still was very much interested in thinking about visual spatial cognition, and so I was working on developing 3D simulations with GlowScript now. And we were including them in tutorials and working with them with the introductory sequence courses as well as working with teaching courses, so PBI, Physics By Inquiry. So I learned a lot about that, and I really liked doing that, I really liked working with teachers. But it was a struggle trying to figure out a project during the whole time I was there. And I think there was a little bit of tension between myself and the group as well at the time on trying to figure out what to do with me. I don't think they knew what to do with me.

Zierler:

You mean on an intellectual basis, on a cultural basis? What was the issue?

Cid:

I think both. I don't think there was anything gender-related because Lillian is such a powerhouse, and Paula's such a powerhouse. But I don't think they understood how to process my commitment to my communities. So I was very heavily involved with working with Native communities in Seattle, and I would go and tutor, and I would go and do workshops with K-12 students and different members of the UW SACNAS organization club. And I don't think they appreciated that. I also started working with Latino organizations. Any time any of the programs like McNair Scholars or the CAMS Scholars, programs that were dedicated to migrant workers, or any of the undergrad programs that would support students, I was always involved with them. I had a lot of colleagues that were directors of programs at UW, and they would reach out to me whenever they had a physics or math student on the ways that we could support them. And so, I worked a lot with undergrad students as well, and I don't think the group appreciated that. I think that they saw that volunteer work and thought that it was not enough of me dedicating to physics work. Except for when there were grants that were due, right? Then they'd come and ask me about all the different stuff that I did and orgs that I worked with. And so there were times that I felt very tokenized.

But I would also question, like, "You're looking at this data, and you're measuring all these games, but when I walk into these classrooms, they're not with people like that. And how is it that we're adjusting that?" And I don't think they knew how to process those questions either. And that's actually what carried into some of the more recent work that I've been doing about diversity and equity is just recognizing that while working with PEG, which is internationally known, that they never address population differences in the work. They would talk about comprehension games with the curriculum that they worked at, but they never talked about how the populations that they were working with influenced those games. And so when I would ask those questions, it was always just kind of pushed off and brushed off. And so I think those are some of the tensions that I experienced. And I don't think it was malicious, I just think that they never paid attention to that because they didn't have to. UW is an elite institution, and they're working with students that are very similar to Berkeley's background where they're coming in prepared, and they're coming in from schools that prepared them well on how to compete, grad students in the programs that are working with PEG also coming from those same backgrounds. And so, I don't think they'd ever had anybody actually bring up that awareness.

And so, when I was doing that, I don't think they really knew how to handle those questions. But it became a necessity for me because we keep talking about all this curriculum that's supposed to support everybody, and it's supposed to have best practices for everybody. We're setting the bars for those things in STEM education. Because all the other STEM discipline-based education fields are looking at physics, right? And I'm working with one of the foundational groups. And so I started to question that a lot more of, "How is it that we measure these games? And who is it for?" And I started working actually with Steve Kanim around that time with the paper that we just published, Demographics of Physics Education Research, where we were asking those questions because Steve was also part of PEG as a grad student and helped develop a lot of that curriculum that went into the tutorials for physics.

And so, he was working at the University of New Mexico, and he gave a talk, I forget at which conference, but I ended up really resonating with that. I'm like, "You're one of the first people that I'm hearing asking these questions." Because I've been asking these questions for a really long time. And so we sat and talked for a while. And that had been something that myself and a couple of other grad students and post-docs that were part of physics education throughout the years, like a good friend of mine, Geraldine Cochran, we met as grad students, she's Black, and we always had these questions about, "How is it that our field is defining all of this curriculum, or best practices, or expert-like thinking when it's never talked about who it is we mean?" And so that ended shifting a lot of my focus of, "There's nobody that's done this work."

And those of us that are coming from these ethnic minority backgrounds and gendered backgrounds, we always ask these questions because it's never about us. But from a physics perspective, where's the data that actually supports that? And so that's been a lot of my focus the past few years is really creating papers about the data in a physics way so that we can have conversations within our field or reference these things in our field to really have these conversations and assess ourselves. So, while I was a post-doc, I started shifting a lot of my focus out of necessity more than out of interest, and it'd become an interest of mine. And I'm a pretty good expert in it now, I think.

Zierler:

In what ways did the mentorship and guidance that Professor Lopez gave you prepare you to succeed at a place like Washington without having a figure like him in your life at that time?

Cid:

I think part of working with him is that he's not a micromanager. And I appreciate that a lot because I don't like when people micromanage me. Peter Schaffer's a little bit of a micromanager, and so there was tension with me and him because he would always want to see every step of the way, and I'm like, "Let me breathe a little. Let me get some ideas down, or let me think through this process before you start altering it or before you start commenting on it." But I think in working with Lopez, part of the hands-off style really does support the development of independent thinking, right? Of your sense of self as a scientist and the validity of your questions. I was still learning, and I still am learning, about these different pieces of physics education. It's such a broad field.

But I think because of the way that he taught us, all of us coming out of his group have a very strong sense of self in the questions that we ask. I don't think any of us in his group, or very few of us, have left his group without having that sense of confidence of the validity of our questions without needing someone else to validate that. The, "I have a question. I want to figure out how to answer that question, and I want to be able to talk about it and get other ideas about it so that it builds on my understanding about it as opposed to influencing and changing." And we're going to get changed and influenced the more we talk about things, but it really is a sense of validity in that I don't have any insecurity about asking these questions. And so I think that that was a very good structure that he had. He also worked in a way that it was very structured by levels. So we always had mentoring included in our graduate group. A new student would come in, and instead of him leading the courses on the introductions to space physics, we would lead those discussions on journal collaborations.

And we did that with undergrads, too, that the more senior undergrads would teach the newer undergrads on how to run the simulations. And so there was always this staggered kind of approach where we were mentoring people as we went, and that mentoring of people also re-solidified our own independence. Because if we had the ability to explain things to others, that solidifies your own knowledge about your content. And so, when I got to Lillian's group, I didn't really need the same kind of structure as other people. The other post-doc was coming into PER as a novice. She did a whole different kind of PhD instead of physics education. So I already had the foundation in physics education, but I also had the strength to ask my own questions. And so I think that training from him carried over. But he also knew Lillian, he was very good friends with her.

And so, he'd come into town every once in a while, and we'd all have great conversations outside of the group. So, I think the networking from him also was a pretty good lesson that we weren't so isolated within our home base of our subfields, but the fact that you could talk to other people always created opportunity as well. He didn't explicitly teach us that, but every time we'd go to conferences, like, "Damn, Ray knows everybody here. How do you know everybody?" And he also has kind of a photographic memory. And so when we would go with him to conferences, he was very good about introducing people to us. But he'd walk around and be like, "Oh So-And-So, how's your mom?" Or, "How's your daughter?" Or, "How's your dog?" All these random things. I'm like, "How do you know everybody here? That's crazy." And I think watching that at conferences showed us as grad students the power of networking and just talking to people.

And so, I started doing that also with the grad students in our group, that whenever we'd go to physics education conferences like AAPT, or the PERC, or FFPER, there are moments that even if you don't drink, you're going to go to the bar so that you can network. There's value in that. You don't have to drink. Or if you're a vegetarian, and you're at a steakhouse, it's not about what's happening in the moment, it's about building your network and connecting with people so that when you want to make a transition, you know enough people for that next step. And so I started doing that a lot without realizing that I was doing it with our grad students.

Zierler:

In what ways did your professional ambitions change as a result of your post-doc? In other words, you went in with this advice from the dean in Texas that you would be able to accomplish so much more by getting the post-doc, right? So that's a very career-oriented perspective. I wonder in what ways the experience of the post-doc might have changed your professional motivations just in the course of being there and experiencing what you did.

Cid:

They definitely changed the environment I wanted to be in. So I went from a faculty position, a tenure-track faculty position into a post-doc. And it was a faculty position at a community college into an elite institution as a post-doc. And then having a lot of challenges with getting any of my work off the ground, right? So, I didn't publish the whole time I was a post-doc. And that became a sore subject for me, a little bit of a tension point for me. And overcoming, "If I can't do this over here, I'm going to figure it out over here." And so there was a lot of growth that I got while I was at the post-doc. I gained so much experience about working with K-12 teachers, in-service and pre-service. But I also gained a lot of knowledge about academic structure that I don't think I had before. And being a part of a larger group, the three faculty members and I don't even know how many grad students and undergrads there were, at least two or three post-docs the entire time I was there as well.

So, it was a very large group. And watching the different kind of academic structures, it was a lot of reminders of Berkeley in terms of the elitism, in terms of the way that people communicated with each other within the Physics Department as a whole, how they viewed students and how people would talk about students, not necessarily PEG, in the group itself, but just in the Physics Department as a whole, how grad students would see themselves. At the end of it, I realized I did not want to be in that kind of institution anymore. And we also worked a lot with Seattle Pacific University. So there are quite a few physics education folks that started with UW and transitioned over to SPU. And so it also taught me a lot about the structure of creating collaborations between institutions and working with different granting organizations on how to distribute funds or research offices.

So, there was a lot that I learned from that. But at the end of it, it was very, very apparent that I was like, "I do not want to be in this kind of environment anymore. There's no support for students of color, there's no support explicitly for women," there was a lot of fighting to make voices heard. The grad students at UW, not within PEG but as a whole, both in the Physics Department and the Astronomy Department, were doing a lot of organizing for themselves and created their own seminar series. And so, I think working there really solidified that I didn't want to be in a place like that anymore. And I wanted to start working strongly with students of color again because I was really over the fact that all these conversations we were having were never addressing different populations. And that was very apparent with the PEG curriculum is that nobody was really addressing any aspect of diverse students.

Zierler:

To what extent did you come full circle back to what you were doing at a community college in Texas in terms of the kinds of students you wanted to be working with?

Cid:

It was such a whirlwind at North Lake College because I had been teaching my own lectures probably the last two or three years I was a grad student, not just TA-ing labs. I never really TA-ed labs before, but I did my own lectures. And so the whole grading process, preparing your courses, all of that, when I got to the community college, it was four classes as well as faculty duties. And so, I think I was just so overwhelmed with learning how to be a faculty member and that heavy of a course load that I don't know really what I was processing for that semester. It was a lot. And I was tired all of the time. I remember going to a bar with friends on a Friday afternoon, and I fell asleep in the corner of the booth because I was so tired all the time.

So, I don't know how much I can say in terms of a comparison because there was all the challenges of learning how to be a faculty member with a high course load, even though it was a much more diverse population, and then jumping into a post-doc after six months. So, it was just so much in a very short period of time that first year, the six months at the community college as faculty and then the first six months of the post-doc. It was such a big difference between the two of those. In some ways, it was easier to transition back into the post-doc because I didn't have that high level of teaching and prep. But in other ways, it was much more difficult to figure out the structure and the system of the group. But by the end of three and a half years, when I looked back, because I'd done the faculty position first and then the post-doc, I had zero fear about teaching classes. Zero fear. So that part was like, "I can do whatever kind of institution I want because I can teach classes. That's not a problem for me. And I can teach a variety of classes."

So, I didn't struggle with that. But thinking about the ways in which we engage as faculty, I think that was something I was very much kind of processing and thinking about, "Where do I want to go? What kind of institution do I want to be in?" I was very strategic in the places I was applying to. And I realized at three and a half years, I was like, "I'm done with being a post-doc. I'm done with not having my own say, not having my own drive and freedom to do what I want." And so I think I probably spent a little too long in the post-doc because I was so ready to be done with it. But I don't know, it's hard to say if I did this, would it have been different? But I did want to get back to California. It was nice being in Seattle, at least the same time zone as most of my family. And so when I started applying, it was primarily on the west coast. There were a few here and there sprinkled out that weren't on the west coast, but primarily on the west coast.

And also primarily at CSUs because of the demographics of the institutions. There are a couple of community colleges that I applied to as well. And when I was thinking about the difference between those two, course loads were about the same. CSUs are teaching institutions, community colleges are teaching institutions. So, the number of courses didn't scare me because I had already done it at the community college before the post-doc. UCs were maybe one course, a quarter or you first year, one course overall while you get your research going. I also didn't like the hustle of constantly having to apply for grants. There was always a lot of stress in the post-doc of applying for grants, and I just didn't like that kind of anxiety of, "Do I have a job or not?" I didn't like that.

And so, I didn't want to be in that kind of environment. So, the UCs, PhD granting private institutions, it just wasn't what I was interested in doing. So I think that having that faculty position at the community college helped me kind of frame those two. But it wasn't really the population difference because I just was so overwhelmed that I think while I was teaching at community college to really pay attention to the differences in demographics. I just didn't have enough time to process that. There was no research that I was doing at all, there was no assessment of how different populations were influencing the ways that I was teaching. I didn't have enough time to really assess that. Yeah.

Zierler:

How did the opportunity at CSU Dominguez Hills come about for you?

Cid:

I had applied to all kinds of CSUs. And I think I'm starting to realize that when I create what it is I want to do or what it is that I want, I don't know what I want most of the time, but I have a general idea. When I'm close to a next step, I can kind of feel that. And so, when I was applying, I applied to I forget how many CSUs, but I interviewed for sure at Fullerton, I interviewed at Dominguez. The post-doc that I was working with at UW was also, at the same time, interviewing at the same institution, so that was kind of awkward. We'd go on interviews, and then we'd come back, and it was like, "Do I share what I experienced or not because of next week? We're competing but we're kind of friends." It was very awkward during that time.

But I also was starting to get really irritated that I would look at all these institutions, and they would always mention diversity and equity and how you incorporate that into your style of teaching, into your service that you do. And then we'd go on these interviews, and it was clear that that was not a priority. So, on paper, it's a priority, but then how do you actually address that? And so it was kind of shocking, but not really. And because you're interviewing, you're trying to put your best foot forward, and there were for sure institutions that I was like, "There's no way in hell I'm going to work here. I can tell that from the first instant. It's just not the place for me." But because I'd also done a faculty position and then gone into the post-doc, I wasn't so fixated on, "I need a job, and I'm going to do anything that I need to to get a job." I was like, "Well, if I don't get a job, I'll figure it out. I don't have that fear of not getting a job. I'm always going to be able to get a job. I've hustled my whole life."

And I haven't stopped working since I was 15. So that wasn't a fear of mine. If it's not right for me, I'm not going to do it. And I think the post-doc helped with that as well, just knowing that I didn't have that same kind of necessity. I wanted a job, of course, but it wasn't a necessity to just–"What do I do?" I knew I wasn't going to adjunct either. And with the community college, that became apparent because I would see the adjuncts we had, and what they would get paid, and what their experiences were. And I was like, "That's just not even worth it to me. I could probably work at a fast-food restaurant and make more than that." So, I knew that I didn't want to do that either. Yeah.

Zierler:

Did you pay much mind, from the diversity perspective, to the path-breaking nature of your career? "First X to do this," or, "First X to do that." Was that anything that you considered? Was that personally meaningful to you at all?

Cid:

Yes, and no. I think that it's very important for us to acknowledge firsts. But there's also a downside to that because we get fixated on that piece of your identity. And it also ignores, at least for me as an indigenous and Chicana woman whose people were here before colonialism and conquest, I grew up learning about our ancestors and the value that they created and contributions to STEM that they had, and it was never in our formal education. I wasn't the first to go to college in my family. My parents were educated. And all of my brothers and sisters, we all have UC degrees for our bachelors. But there's this tension about that, right? By being a first, that becomes a very salient piece of your identity, and you become praised for those things that have nothing to do with you being a scientist.

And so, you often get labeled these things, and that's your primary identity that people want to acknowledge when you walk into a room, when sometimes we walk into a room, and I want to be acknowledged as a scientist as opposed to the first. But also, it ignores and continues to erase traditional knowledge. So I grew up knowing that the Maya Civilization created the concept of zero independent of European scientists and mathematicians. I grew up knowing that the Mayan Calendar was more advanced than any other calendar in the world. I grew up knowing that the Azteca, the Inca, the Maya civilizations and the pyramids they created were superiorly advanced than what people acknowledge in formal education and STEM.

And so, there's always that kind of tension as well that when we continue to talk about our first status, it also reinforces the western view of academia. And it also ignores the fact that there are generations of lost knowledge, right? So, when I talked this year about being the first indigenous chair, it's not because I am the first indigenous chair in the States.

Zierler:

Of a physics department, you mean.

Cid:

Of a physics department. But I'm probably the first to have my cultural ties to my indigeneity, right? So what we were raised in terms of the Chicano/Chicana aspect of our identity is that we as Chicano people — and this is different depending on where you're from when you identify as Chicanx — was a mentality that we have indigenous roots that are blended, that have been erased and stripped from us. So, there's a lot of elders in my community that identify as Chicano because they know they're indigenous, but they have been stripped and removed from that knowledge. And I had conversations this year as well with Mario Diaz, who is the current NSHP chair president. And he's Mapuche, which is South American indigenous. But he was removed from that as well.

So, he's coming back to his Mapuche roots, and he's been chair as well as an adult. There were conversations that I had with a faculty member in Texas, also working at CERN, also doing rotations in NSF, board member of NSHP, but he also identifies as indigenous and Chicano because he's Mexican but doesn't have connections to his indigenous roots. And he was also the chair of his department for a while I think in UTEP. So I know that there's other indigenous people that have been chairs. It's just, they don't have that cultural connection to their tribes. And the reason I started saying it a lot more is when I talk to my Black colleagues, where they are actually highlighting how many Black physics PhD people there are or how many Black PhDs in astronomy there are, that becomes a different conversation.

And they were starting to talk to me more about the “strategical-ness” of making sure that's known. And with indigenous populations, I have been trying to find more indigenous physics people for years. I started really devoting time and energy to it when I was a post-doc because I was working so strongly with Native populations in Seattle. The first Native Chicana PhD in physics that I met was Sofia Cisneros at a SACNAS conference on the opposite sides of the room, and it was at an NSHP breakfast or social event where we were going around and introducing ourselves. And when she identified herself as Native Chicana, it was similar to the overwhelming experience of when I talked to Keivan Stassun, and I was like, "Oh my God, there's another one of you out here." And it was overwhelming. And while I was a post-doc, there was a grad student, John Lee [?] in the Physics Department, and he had just started probably my last year as a post-doc.

And so, I had a handwritten list of all the astro- and physics indigenous folks that I knew. Undergrad, grad, post-docs, faculty. And it was small, very small. And so, since maybe my post-doc years and that handwritten note, I've been putting a lot of effort in trying to find more Native folks in physics and astronomy as well as adjacent fields. And I realize, too, the way that we talk about data, even if it's programs that are dedicated to ethnic minority students, they still don't include indigenous populations. There's always an asterisk, right, of data too small or numbers too small to do statistics on. And so even when we're trying to find out the statistics, we don't have it because people don't collect it.

And so, when I was talking a lot to my Black colleagues about why they're so adamant about identifying, "I'm the 38th Black person to get a PhD," and being very vocal about it, it was about highlighting the lack of Black PhDs in physics and astronomy, the fact that the trends are decreasing as opposed to increasing. And so, by talking about that number, the actual number — there's maybe 100 Black PhDs I think now — and being so vocal about it, I started to see the strategy of it, right?

Zierler:

Minimally, it gives you something to work with.

Cid:

Right. So, when you talk about numbers like that, you have a stronger position in national conversations about why this should be an important topic for our physics societies, and granting agencies, and editors, by actually listing the number. So for me, it became more about the strategy of it. Like, "Let me talk about it from this perspective." Because every time we bring up these conversations without the actual number, being a first or how many of us there actually are, it becomes like, "Yes, you're included in the data," but how are we included in the data? How is it actually being addressed? And it's not.

So, when we started to talk about the numbers of it, that became a much more salient way within our professional societies, within institutions, within funding agencies to have a more realistic conversation of, "How is it that people are collecting data? How is it that we're acknowledging indigenous populations, the fact that this entire continent is on Native land?" Any aspect of large experiments are always on Native lands, and that came to head with the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii this past year.

Zierler:

Still very much a hot topic.

Cid:

Very much so. And so, we've been doing a lot of work about that. How is it that we're acknowledging indigenous populations? The Physics Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, APS, we had one of the speakers come and do a colloquium this semester with our department, and it also reminded me that I think it's the Shoshone Tribe has been bombed on US soil. Sovereign nations that have years now of health issues because of nuclear testing on Native land. Illegally done because Native reservations and federally recognized tribes are sovereign nations. And so, it's a matter of, when we say these things, it creates a different conversation, and it creates a different strength in your conversation to have that knowledge.

Zierler:

So where in this would there be a National Society for Indigenous Physicists?

Cid:

I'm glad you asked that. As challenging and crazy as 2020 has been with COVID, this has been a very good year for Native physicists and Native astronomers because for whatever reason, two years ago, 2017, I organized a session for SACNAS of indigenous physicists, and it was so widely attended, and it was such a good session. And from that, I started really being able to connect with people. Last year in Hawaii, when we went to the SACNAS conference, myself and Brittany Kamai and then quite a few indigenous Hawaiian scientists really changed the whole structure of SACNAS to be inclusive of Hawaiian voices. And sessions that were hearing about the impacts on indigenous Hawaiian populations with the Thirty Meter Telescope. And we brought in elders who have been camped up at the access road.

And so, it was a very different structure that we created. But with all of that organizing the past two years from that one session that I had at SACNAS, we've been able to connect much more strongly. We had our first couple of Zoom meetups, and everybody who joined us, I think there might've been 13 of us, were expressing our gratitude for being able to finally connect with people because every single one of us in our trajectory in academia have experienced the thought of, "Maybe I'm the only one." And that's a horrible feeling, to think that you're the only person like you in a very large field like physics in the country.

Zierler:

And, of course, you can speak to that personally.

Cid:

Personally, right. Every single one of us can speak to that personally. We're never going to have colleagues that are close enough to us. I'm very lucky that a colleague of mine, Franklin Dollar, who I went to undergrad with, we both started faculty positions, him at UC Irvine, me at Dominguez the same year, we've been able to come back and work together as well. He helped me create and organize my first Día de la Física, and I hosted it at his campus. And so every single one of us also is very involved with mentoring and working with our communities. So this year, we are almost ready to launch the Society for Indigenous Physicists. We have organized ourselves, we have a website that's almost ready to launch. We have started to really organize ourselves. We have Slack channels now, we have email threads. But it's really the first time in most of our lives that we've actually had connection to each other.

And the first couple sessions that we did do where we had meetups, it really was just introductions. "Who are we? Where are we? What tribes are we from? What cultures do we come from?" Because all of our cultures are different, too, right? When you talk about Native peoples, there are 562 federally recognized tribes and then so many more that are unrecognized. So, there's so much complications when you talk about indigenous people. And so, we're very excited that we're finally at a point where we can have a society for indigenous physicists, and we've created our structure that's very open. So, it's not literally just physics, right? It's astrophysics, it's space sciences, it's planetary sciences, it's folks in industry who left the field because they were so isolated. It is PhD holders, bachelor holders. Corey Gray is awesome, and he's working with LIGO.

Zierler:

I interviewed Corey Gray last week actually.

Cid:

He's amazing, right?

Zierler:

He's amazing.

Cid:

And he's so fun to be around. But he's translating LIGO discoveries, gravitational wave discoveries, black hole merges into his language with his mom. And that's amazing. And he's not a PhD holder but very prominent in our field and as an indigenous scientist. So, it's not so rigid I think as NSHP, NSBP where it is just about the physics. We're trying to be more inclusive because there's so few of us. We have maybe about 25 or 30 of us that we've identified now, and every single one of us has a small circle, and they're starting to overlap. And I think that's the momentum that we've had this year, and that's the beauty that we've had this year, as challenging is 2020 is, that we are finally connecting with each other in a very strong way.

Zierler:

Within the faculty environment, how would you describe your overall agenda in terms of teaching, and mentoring, and the science? How do all of these things work together for you?

Cid:

For me, I am very much focused on making sure that I'm working with my community. So, for me, I'm always dedicated to creating open, welcome spaces in my classrooms. I try very hard to provide exposure for our students and to all the different subfields of physics, or astrophysics, or even engineering. We don't have an engineering department on our campus. So, for me, it's all about foundations. And I think I do that with teaching, I think I do that with any level of course that I teach. I tend to talk about scientists that aren't necessarily talked about. So, when we talk about the foundations or the history of science, you're always talking about Newton, you're always talking about Einstein, you're always talking about these different people.

But I bring in the history of the Americas and how people in the Americas contributed to STEM. My non-science courses, I often have our students write a paper where they're thinking about some piece of their own identity. Whether that's their gendered identity, their ethnic identity, their first-gen identity, something, and how that connects with STEM so that we can start to see ourselves in STEM. It's very hard to try and imagine yourself in a position that you've never known, right? It's very difficult to say, "I want to be a professor," because most of the time, we've never known professors. And this is the reason why people come in saying, "Doctor, lawyer, engineer," because that's the thing they're exposed to, right? That's the thing that's going to help create a career for you.

Zierler:

And does your very presence and background give students ideas about career paths that they might not otherwise have had? Is that your sense?

Cid:

I think so. It's always a weird, humbling, awkward thought to have. But visibility, at the very least, is super important, right? Our faculty at most institutions don't reflect the student population that you work with. Our department at Dominguez Hills is the most diverse physics department in the country percentage-wise. We're a small department, but our department very much represents our student population. It very much reflects that. And I think because of that, our students see themselves in a different way. I think the fact that I take students to SACNAS every year–and it doesn't matter what ethnicity you have, you could be white, Black, Asian, whatever, I think the fact that you get exposed to different cultural worldviews that include STEM also changes the way that you view yourself and your responsibility to other communities.

The speakers that I bring in for our colloquium series, I try to focus on subfields that we don't have within our department so people can get exposure that way, but I also try and focus on diverse speakers. And I've seen other institutions and other organizations that are like, "This is the Diversity Speaker Series," and I hate that because now you're clearly creating an otherness for us. So instead of focusing on our identities, I try and focus on your development as a scientist. But I know your identities, and I understand your cultural practices, and I'm acknowledging that. But it's not the thing that is creating a barrier for you when you're working within our department, when you're working within my classes. And so I want you to feel that who you are contributes to your way of thinking because it does, right? The way that we're raised, the environment that we come from, the languages that we speak, the ways in which we speak all influence the ways that we engage with our field.

And so, I try very hard to create an environment where you feel very comfortable just being who you are, so that that doesn't become the thing that you're focused on, but the science and learning to be the scientist is the thing that you're focused on. And I do bring in frames of reference that are a little bit different. I do specifically talk about Native populations, Chicanx populations, Latinx populations, Black populations. And I'm not talking about it as, "Oh, this is the Black speaker for the day." It's the scientist of the day so that you can see that, and you can feel yourself be a part of that. I encourage our students to also do research. I didn't go to a school as an undergrad where that was promoted for undergrads to do that. It was a lot of research for grad students, right? But how is it that you engage as an undergrad?

And I think a lot of the institutions had a different way of approaching undergrad research as you're just the busy bee plugging through stuff, not really contributing. But I want our students to feel that sense of accomplishment, that when you do engage in a different way, you start to build that identity of the scientist within you. And I'm not shy also about talking about racism, and sexism, and classism in our departments. Because our students are talking about it anyways. So, I want to make sure that I'm acknowledging, "How is it you feel right now? I don't want you to feel like you have to leave all of that outside of the classroom. You can be who you are, and all of your feelings, and all of the things that make you who you are within our space."

Zierler:

Has becoming chair given you opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise have to help set the tone or set the agenda in that faculty environment?

Cid:

I don't know, because it's all during COVID, right? So, it's a whole different way of being a chair. It's challenging for sure. But I am not shy about using my voice. So the Strike for Black Lives and Shut Down STEM and Academia, I acknowledge that. Scholar strike, when our Black community is being affected by violence and police violence. I've acknowledged that. I've sent messages to our whole campus as well as our whole department, and I've had a lot of my colleagues that have commented that even the simple email of acknowledging Black Lives Matter–simple phrases that give people freedom to just be. I think that's what I do as a chair. It's very difficult to process what I do differently as a chair and especially right now because it's so unusual to work from home and to teach from home and not be connected in the way that we normally are.

But for sure, I have the ability to connect with our students in a different way, and I have the ability to connect with our faculty in a different way. And there have for sure been moments where the fact that I'm a chair now has given me a different power in the conversations that we have within our campus. And so, I'm aware of some things and probably oblivious to a lot more in terms of, "What is the difference between me being chair and not?" I feel like I'm in a rat race at the moment because there's so much that's different about this year. But maybe when I'm chair during normal times, I'll be able to answer that a little bit better.

Zierler:

Maybe you don't want to be chair by the time we get back to normal times.

Cid:

I've already contemplated quitting because it's so hard. It's so challenging. There's so many new things that you have to process. Evaluations. How do you do faculty evaluations if you can't actually observe them? This is the first time I was on a tenure review panel. And last year, all the stuff that they submitted, we couldn't use their teaching evaluations. So how is it that we're assessing your engagement at a teaching school with all the chaos happening with COVID? So, there's a lot of different things that are hard for me to process as chair because it's so different, and it's so unusual, and it's so challenging. Creating labs for everybody online without equipment and using simulations. That's what our whole summer was about. And then how do you assess people in exams online with no ability to see, "Are you looking up answers? Do you even have your cameras on?" There's just so many new things this year that it's hard for me to say what I'm doing differently because everything's different, right? Every single thing is different about this year. So, I'm not sure.

Zierler:

I want to ask you about your perspective within an academic environment of the issues Black Lives Matter, and then Shut Down STEM, and in the physics community, Particles for Justice and other similar movements. I've heard different perspectives from other underrepresented members of groups, that on the one hand, this is an opportunity as a national reckoning to talk about all kinds of discrimination, and I've also heard that this is really a time to let African Americans particularly have that space, and that this is not a moment that is sort of inclusive of all kinds of discrimination. So I wonder if you could sort of reflect on your feelings about those kinds of debates.

Cid:

Well, first, it's not new. None of this is new. Violence from police, academic systems, none of this is new.

Zierler:

I guess I should clarify that what is new is that it's on the radar of white-dominant society.

Cid:

So why is it on the radar of white-dominant society? That's a better question to ask. And the reason it's on their radar right now is because of social media. We have the ability to film people and make it known instantly. Because there has been violence on Black and Brown communities since the existence and the foundation of the United States of America. And there's a lot of parallels between most ethnicities in this country that aren't white, to what Black people and African American people are experiencing. It's very important to let the Black community speak how they want to speak because if we're not part of that community, we don't have a right to take over that voice. And I think that's true for any movement. But I think that we should all be supportive. That's what allies are.

So, it's not my place, as someone who's not Black to speak on behalf of Black people or African American people because I am not from that community. That doesn't mean that I don't know what it's like to be discriminated against. It's just, I'm not Black, so why am I going to speak on behalf of a population that I'm not a part of? So, I think that's something that people don't understand how to do. How do you work with communities when you're not from that community? I've given a whole bunch of workshops on how to do that. So it's very important to allow Black people and African American people, however they choose to identify, to speak on behalf of themselves, and to speak in any way that they chose to speak, and to demonstrate and be in any way that they want to be. Just as I think it's important for Native populations to do the same, right? With No DAPL, and Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, and the Thirty Meter Telescope, it's sometimes offensive when you hear other people speaking on your behalf. But there are similarities, right?

So that's where allies come in. I understand the pain of what my Black colleagues are going through because I've experienced my own versions of those. And I grew up in a very diverse way as well, and I grew up in a way where I was always community organizing with my family and protesting violence against our communities. So I understand what that feels like as well. I don't know firsthand what it feels like to be a Black person watching these things happen, but I do understand the pain of it. And to be honest, as well, it gives us a way to also acknowledge that within our communities there's racism, right? There are Afro-Latinx folks who are both from the Latino community and the Black community. And yet the Latino community often discriminates against Blackness or darkness. And it's the same with Native populations. There are Black Natives out there as well, and there's a lot of parallels to the genocides that happened, the slaveries that happened, the violence that happened with Black and Native populations.

And so, Blackness is part of our communities just as much as whiteness is part of our communities. And that's something that I think is also topics that are happening within our communities as well. How is it that we can support other communities but also hold our own communities accountable for the racism that happens or the discrimination that happens within our own community? Because that's just as important. And I think that's where white allies need to learn how to do their work better. Because we are held accountable to check ourselves, but white communities don't have that same responsibility. And I think that white allies don't know how sometimes to be allies. And instead of taking a step back or talking with people and asking first, they think that, "I've always been privileged. I'm going to use my privilege to speak out on behalf of someone else."

And it's like, "Whoa. You don't have the right to speak on behalf of someone else. You need to be holding your own community accountable first and then joining us when we ask for it, when we ask for that support. And I think that's a lot of what white privilege is, not knowing how to be supportive, choosing not to be involved because you can, you have that choice, and not acknowledging that you actually have privilege against every other ethnicity. And this election shows that as well, right? There's a lot of whiteness that is the dominant thing maintaining whiteness as opposed to working with communities. And so how you engage with people is to listen first, right? Ask and listen. "What is it that you need us to do right now?" And I do that with my Black colleagues. "What is it you need us to do right now? How do I hold space?" I think as a chair, I've done that. "Let me hold space for my Black colleagues to be OK with taking the day off. Acknowledging that I'm going to take the day off in support of that as well so that it's not just you isolating yourself but acknowledging that this should be normalized.

We should have moments that we can grieve, and that it's OK to do that. That we should have moments where it's OK to feel angry and hurt. And it's OK for us to stand with you as well. But I don't know. I don't think it's anybody's place to speak on behalf of somebody else. And I think our first job is to listen. And people don't know how to do that enough.

Zierler:

Now that we're literally talking about the present day, the election happening right now, for my last question, I want to ask, looking forward, given that a theme of our talk has been so clearly and powerfully that diversity is good for science, and science is good for diversity, these things work hand in hand, what are the things that you're most optimistic about in pushing ahead in that degree? The things where, by emphasizing and celebrating diversity, by finding allies in the community, how is that beneficial for science? And to flip that around, how can science, and you in your unique position as a physicist, a scholar, utilize science for the purpose of promoting diversity?

Cid:

So, number one, any time you have diverse groups, diverse people, diverse trains of thought working on a problem, you're going to be more efficient. There is lots of data that already shows that. So, it's not a matter of, "Is diversity good for science?" We already know that. It's a matter of acknowledging it, and recognizing it, and promoting it. Because the data's there. The data already exists that shows that. What's not there is the institutional structure to support it. And that's because people choose not to. It's easier to leave things the way they are. I think that the more diverse people that we have in our fields, the visibility alone creates change. That is the first step, right? To hire more diverse faculty. Accept more diverse students. And this question of whether or not we're lowering our standards, it's moot. It's a nonstarter. Because we already know that the structure is designed to exclude diverse populations.

Zierler:

Well, this goes right back to you not doing well on your GREs.

Cid:

Standardized assessments are the first step to getting into any college. SATs, right? You have to take the SATs, and people look at that for admission in bachelor's degrees. We do the same with graduate students, right? We have to take the GREs. And then we take subject GREs. And this year because of COVID, people are removing it, which is a great first step. But we already know these things are biased, right? There's already been lots of work done on that as well. But again, how do departments and institutions choose to acknowledge it? I think that the physics community is so good at maintaining the way things have always done. It's very difficult to create change. And often those of us that come from diverse backgrounds, that falls on us. And so, it becomes a necessity for our own survival in our fields.

So that becomes the work that we do. Most of us didn't come into physics, and science, and math with the intent of doing diversity equity inclusion work. Most of us wanted to be scientists because that's what drew us into the field. And the longer that we're in our fields, the more that we feel that obligation because the higher up we get, we have more power. So the higher up we get, we also have that power that we can use for our voice. And so, we have to balance that. We have to balance that, and sometimes we do a good job of that, sometimes we don't. Many of us get very burnt out. So, I talk to my colleagues now with COVID that we're all burnt out because our students are coming to us in higher demands. So, the necessity of diversity or how that's going to influence a field, does it improve the field? We already know that answer. We choose, as fields, not to acknowledge it and not to incorporate it. We choose not to change our systems to allow our growth to prosper.

How does science influence diversity? I think that the more diverse people we have, myself included, my position, I can use my voice to talk about science in a different way. Because I don't think the same way that a lot of my white colleagues do. I think that's always been true. I know history that is never acknowledged, and I bring that up in my classes. And by doing that, I'm influencing the next generation, and it's a lot of responsibility to be aware of that. It's a lot of pressure to be aware of that. And I go through my own phases of like, "It's too much. I don't want to be responsible for everybody else. I just want to be responsible for myself." But I don't have that freedom, and I know that, and I'm aware of it, and I acknowledge it. And there are days that I do very well at acknowledging it and owning it, that I don't have that freedom, that I do have a very strong influence on the students that I work with and the colleagues that I engage with. But there are other days that I'm just like, "Ah, it's too much pressure to think about all the accomplishments I've had, or all the firsts, or how that influences everybody else that is part of my community. That's a lot of weight to carry all the time."

But I know that each one of us has a huge impact. I can see it with my colleagues. And so, if I can see it with my colleagues, I know it's happening with me, too. I'm just a lot more humble, I'm a lot more reserved sometimes than I appear. And so thinking about how I impact, just for my presence, that becomes a little overwhelming and intimidating for me sometimes. But I know it's true. And I think that because I know it's true, I try very hard to use that as a sense of pride, I guess. Because I know that the students that I work with have also been influenced by working with me. They influence me just as much as I influence them. And they're going to go on to their own careers, and they're going to be able to use that little, small piece as part of their path when they get into their positions as well. And so I think just by our mere existence, we are opening doors and creating opportunities for those that are coming up behind us. And I'm fully aware of it, and I fully acknowledge it, and I fully embrace that. Most of the time.

Zierler:

I want to thank you so much for spending this time with me and sharing your incredibly important and powerful perspective on a whole range of topics. It'll be so important to be able to include this in our collection and to convey this to the broad array of researchers from all over the physics world and beyond who will find so much value in this conversation. So thank you, really, so much, for spending this time with me. I really do appreciate it.

Cid:

Oh, I feel humbled that you even asked.

[End]