EngineerGirl Ambassador Micaela Venyo interviewed Fiona Doyle as part of the Ambassadors program in 2022.
Fiona Doyle is a professor of material science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and she is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
0:08 – Why did you choose to go into engineering?
It’s actually not that basic a question because I didn’t choose to go into engineering, I’m kind of a happy accident. When I was your age and finishing up high school, I was good at math and science and occasionally people said ‘do engineering’ but very few people in my school had done engineering. I went to an all-girls school and very few women went into engineering. I really didn’t know very many professional engineers so from what I had been able to determine about engineering, it didn’t sound that great so I went off to Cambridge to do physics.
I discovered that physics at the college level wasn’t the fun stuff that I enjoyed in high school. I actually discovered that materials science encompassed a lot of what I had enjoyed in physics in high school so I ended up majoring in that. While I was doing that I discovered that I really liked extracted metallurgy and I went off to Imperial College to do a Masters in extractive metallurgy and at the end of it I discovered that that was an engineering degree. I really followed my interests and ended up in a program that turned out to be engineering …. I can now look back and realize that I think like an engineer and do life like an engineer but I never consciously chose it. I just did what seemed fun.
2:10 – What were your school days like in college?
Cambridge, as an undergraduate school, had a different system [than American colleges]; they had three terms every year which were only eight weeks. We had classes six days a week with lectures in the morning, big lectures with hundreds of people, until my final year when I specialized in materials. Then labs would be in the afternoon. Cambridge had a tutorial system whereby you, in very small groups, meet with either a faculty member or a postdoc and discuss problems that appeared in previous exams. There was a lot of partying, a lot of fun, a lot of drinking coffee with people and pondering the meaning of life and everything else.
That was a lot of fun but graduate school was very different and very structured. Going to the department, spending all day there. Particularly when I was doing a PhD, I approached it much more like a 9 to 6 job in the lab. ... I figured early on that it was a good idea to be in the lab the same time that the professors were around because A. I could ask questions and get assistance, and B. They got the idea that I worked hard. When I was in grad school there were a lot of students in my group who were from Latin America and they tended to be night owls. They’d come into the department at four in the afternoon and work late into the evening. But they weren’t around much when the professors were around so they suffered from a reputation of not working hard. …
5:20 – Can you think of any challenges in your career and how you overcame them?
For me, one of the biggest challenges was that the preparation in math that I had in high school was not adequate. The British educational system is so different from the American system that there isn’t really a direct analogy. I had had three years of calculus by the time I went to college but it actually wasn’t adequate because they assumed I had done more calculus than I had done. I never really mastered vector calculus; that really was a challenge for me. The way that I overcame it was that I went into a branch of material science that really didn’t need the math that I wasn’t able to do; so that’s a rather sad story. To me it really underscores the importance of building up your foundation.
The other challenge which I can really see in retrospect is that for so much of the time I was the only woman. When I went to grad school, I was the only woman in my program; when I became a faculty member, I was the only woman in my department for nineteen years. It just meant that it was often lonely. I overcame that challenge by seeking out women in other programs. I also was a lot friendlier with the female staff in my department than most of the professors were. That actually became an advantage. One of the things I don’t like about academia is that in many institutions, there’s what I frequently refer to as “academic feudalism”, faculty are higher up on a [hierarchy] than staff who aren’t in academic titles. It drives me crazy because everybody’s important for the success of students and at a university, everybody’s there for the students. A lot of staff members told me that they really appreciated my respect for them and appreciation for what they did. As a result, as an administrator at universities, I’ve enjoyed working relationships with staff colleagues that many administrators didn’t have. I think that stemmed from the fact that, early on, I [treated the staff with respect because they were my friends].
9:00 – Could you describe your career and what activities you did on a day to day basis?
During term time, my work very much revolved around teaching and preparing for classes and doing office hours and so on. The rest of my focus was on research. When I was a younger faculty member, I spent a lot of time in the lab and as techniques evolved, I got busier doing other things. I delegated more to my students but I still enjoyed hearing from them on a regular basis what they were doing. Different faculty members have very different styles to supervising graduate student research. Some are very hands-off, others are very managerial. … I think when you’re overseeing doctoral students, your most important job is to teach them how to do research. If you’re managing them so they become technicians, they don’t really learn how to do research. They’re not exactly thinking for themselves which I think is a problem. … There’s also a lot of behind-the-scenes activities that academics do, and it’s put into this big bucket called service which involves all sorts of different committees. I was very engaged in our academic senate, I led that for a couple years. Serving on exam committees for PhD students. Meeting with other people and students. …
11:50 – What is one thing in your career that you’re particularly proud of?
… I’ve worked in the area of mining and resource production, which most people will sort of say, ‘this is really bad for the environment’. Very early on, when I was in school, I came to the thinking that as a society, we need raw materials, and the fact that they [weren’t] being produced in an environmentally responsible way didn’t mean that we had to stay away from the production of raw materials. I felt that the big engineering challenge was figuring out how to produce our raw materials in an environmentally responsible way. When I started my career, that was deemed an almost heretical attitude by a lot of people in the industry. It made me a lot of enemies. I often felt, … that I would have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering much earlier had it not been for the fact that there were a lot of people in the mining industry that didn’t want me [to be] because I preached a gospel of environmentally responsible production of materials. Attitudes have changed and I am actually now recognized as a bit of a pioneer of the concept … which is not to say that we’re fully there but
"I am proud the fact that I didn’t compromise on my ideals"
and in many respects I feel like I helped move the needle toward to the need to actually be responsible for what we’re doing in the way of producing raw materials.