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Meet Gabriela! Gabriela is a glaciologist, a mother and a powerful role model for women in academia.
Her academic path is truly inspiring; her passion for mathematics, problem-solving, and the outdoors led her to the career of a glaciologist.
This is a story of pursuing your passion, trusting your instincts and timing, and a shining example of how it is possible to successfully navigate academic life and motherhood.
Hi Gabriela, I am happy to get to know you! Tell us a little bit about your research and your academic journey. :)
Hi! My name is Gabriela Clara Racz and I am a glaciologist. I study glaciers and how the water that is flowing through glaciers and underneath them (at their base), is affecting their dynamics. Processes at the glacier base are challenging to study since we can't monitor them directly - these water filled cavities and channels are buried under 100s of meters of ice. The common approach in the past was to drill boreholes all the way to the glacier bed with a hot water drill (like the one in the photo below), and put a pressure sensor there. For my PhD, I used a combination of mathematical modelling and subglacial water pressure time series from a dense set of borehole data to try to estimate where these subglacial water channels are located and how their configuration (and efficiency) is changing over the melt season. However, there was a recent advancement in the field and my current group has developed a drone based ground penetrating radar (GPR) with which we can detect where water at the bed is located. So now I am training to become a drone pilot!
Hot water drill on a surging glacier, Yukon
I grew up in Zagreb, Croatia, and I showed interest in mathematics from a very young age. I just loved solving puzzles. This led me to participating in many math competitions during elementary school and high school. In high school I also spent a lot of time in a physics lab where I prepared for International Young Physicist tournaments (IYPT). IYPT is a scientific competition between teams of high school students. It mimics, as close as possible, the real-world scientific research and the process of presenting and defending the results obtained. Participants have almost a year to work on 17 open-ended inquiry problems which usually include easy-to-reproduce phenomena presenting unexpected behaviour. I loved that unlike most math competitions, this was a team competition with a lot of collaboration, and that problems couldn't be solved within a short time with a known method. They were deliberately formulated in a more open way so they could be viewed and solved from different angles. Also, the final competition was a debate/discussion and not an exam. I realized that this is what science was all about and how much I enjoy this process - being able to build a better understanding of a certain physical process or phenomenon, find or develop a model to describe that process, perform the experiments to collect the data and compare it with model predictions.
I ended up getting my bachelors and masters degree in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at University of Zagreb. I initially thought that I wanted to apply mathematics in biomedicine. My masters thesis was in that field, and I also did a 3 month long internship in bioinformatics at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. During that internship, I spent a lot of time hiking in the Alps, and that made me realize how glaciers are retreating at unprecedented rate, and that there are still so many things that we don't know about them. Most importantly, that with my mathematics background I could help improve that understanding. That's how I switched to geophysics, and started my PhD in Glaciology, on the other side of the world, in Vancouver (Canada). I loved it because it was a mix of mathematical modelling and fieldwork in remote and breathtaking environments. I finished my PhD last spring, and moved to Lausanne in June, where I now work as a postdoctoral researcher at UNIL.
Now tell us a little bit about yourself :) 3 interesting facts would do!
Muxia, when we reached the ocean after 900 km of walking
I walked Camino de Santiago with my best friend. It took us 33 days to cover over 900 km across Spain from Saint Jean Pied de Port to Fisterra via Santiago and Muxia.
Djembe (of) course concert in Split
I've been playing djembe (a type of african drum) since I was 11. I still haven't found my djembe community here in Lausanne, but I am working on that.
Frosthaven unboxing - What's inside the big box?
The big box
I love baking and board games - my favourite combination is hot chocolate lava cake and Frosthaven. My husband Deni also loves board games so playing Frosthaven together is our favourite type of date night.
How are you doing these days? What does your typical working day look like?
I am doing well, thank you for asking! My typical working day... well, I have breakfast with my family, and then take my daughter, Tessa, to daycare. We are lucky that her daycare is only a short walk from my office, so I leave her at daycare around 8:55, and I am at work around 9. In the summer, there is a lot of fieldwork, and when I am not in the field, there is always a lot of packing/cleaning and logistics to sort out, so my days look quite different in the summer than they do these days. Currently, I am supervising one bachelor and one masters student with whom I meet weekly, and I am involved in projects of two other students. I try to dedicate one day a week for each of these different projects, and I also have to dedicate time for learning more about our drone based system and becoming proficient in drone flying. This month, my supervisor and I are writing a research proposal, so I've been either reading papers or meeting with him to brainstorm and talk about science. This is the biggest difference compared to my PhD. Although I had great friends in my research group, for my PhD, I always worked alone, only focused on a certain chapter of my PhD at the time, so it is so refreshing and rewarding to work more with other people, on diverse projects, and be treated as an expert in my field by my supervisor.
I almost always leave work at 5 to pick up my daughter from daycare. We then go for a walk along the lake, say hi to ducks and swans, and make a mandatory stop at the children's playground. My husband works from home, but he always meets us for a walk or in the park so we can spend time together before going home to eat dinner that he prepared. We actually realized that we want more time in the afternoon to hang out with our daughter so for two days a week we will be picking her up at 2:00 pm starting April.
Malaga, November 2023
When did you become a mother and how did this reflect on your academic career?
Tessa was born in August 2021 during pandemics and my final year of PhD. In hindsight, I think that I was lucky that she was born during the pandemics, since I was able to work from home after I returned back to work from maternity leave (and my husband started the parental leave). At first it was really challenging trying to finish my PhD and still spend as much time as I wanted with Tessa. However, I see now that by being a mom, I have become better at setting boundaries and especially at leaving work behind after I close my laptop and go home. I am trying to be more present in all aspects of my life, I am more focused at work, since I know that I will not have time to keep working on it at home, and I want to be fully present for my daughter when I am with her. Of course, this doesn't mean that balancing is easy, there are many days when it is hard to focus and I can't be productive, since I only slept a few hours the night before, but I also learned to be kinder to myself and balance my expectations.
Regarding career prospects after my PhD, I became less willing to compromise, I wanted a longer term postdoc for stability and a place closer to home so that our families can be more involved in Tessa's life. Of course, both project and supervisor had to be a great fit too. I miraculously found a postdoc that fit all of these criteria when Tessa was only 2 months old and I managed to get it. Some people told me not to mention that I am on maternity leave, but I realized that if me being a mom is a problem to my potential future supervisor, I wouldn't want to work in that group anyway. So, they knew I just had a baby and they were willing to wait for me for over a year to return from my maternity leave and finish my PhD.
How did you tell your supervisor you are pregnant? How did he/she react?
When I started my PhD, we already had a mom PhD student in the glaciology group. She was one of my supervisor's wife's students (my supervisor and his wife are both glaciologists and professors in the same department). During my second year, my good friend and colleague got pregnant during her first year of PhD. We have the same supervisor, so when I told him that I was pregnant a few years later, that wasn't new and unfamiliar to him. I think that it also helped that his wife was pregnant at the same time (our maternity leaves actually overlapped). With the support of my supervisor, his wife, and my friend, it was easier to navigate university's procedures (more about it in one of the next questions).
Pender hill, a short hike on Sunshine coast, BC
What was your pregnancy like? How did you manage to work during this time?
I was lucky that my pregnancy was quite uneventful and smooth. However, my postpartum recovery was a bit of a different story since my daughter was a big baby (4.3 kg) with an even bigger head (99 percentile head diameter)... During pregnancy, I was able to stay active, I went on daily walks in the forest or to the rose garden that has a beautiful view of mountains and ocean. We would walk there and watch the sunset almost every day. I used to bike to most of my midwives' appointments. Towards the end of pregnancy, biking back (I used to live on a hill) became challenging so I would just walk next to it on the steep parts. At the beginning it was hard to accept that my body needed much more rest than it used to. I wasn't feeling nauseous in the first months, just extremely tired. So I had to accept that I sometimes needed a nap during the day. I was working from home so it was easier to stay comfortable and take some time to stretch or rest. I didn't follow a 9-5 work schedule, I had to be more flexible and listen to my body. Since the pregnancy was close to the end of my PhD, I had a clear list of things that I wanted to get done before maternity leave. I was quite happy with the progress I made.
Our favourite walk to Rose garden, this time with Tessa
Nap trapped but still attending a conference
How long was your maternity leave and how did you navigate getting back to work?
As I mentioned before, since taking maternity leave during your PhD is so rare, the university procedure's are flawed. For example, your maternity leave could only start and end at the beginning of terms of academic year (September 1st, January 1st, and May 1st) despite when your actual due date is. This also means that it was impossible to have e.g. 6 month long maternity leave. I thought that this was ridiculous, so after being redirected back and forth from many different university offices, I escalated it to the dean of the Faculty of Science and managed to get it approved. However, I didn't want to just be an exception, and didn't want future moms to have to waste so much energy on fighting the bureaucracy. I was quite active before in the graduate student council so I brought up this topic to them, and they managed to raise this issue to university level. University acknowledged it but the change can be painfully slow.
My husband and I each took 6 months of parental leave, and then Tessa started daycare when she was 1. Since we were both working from home, it was easier to transition back to work after the end of my maternity leave because I could take breaks to hang out with her when we both felt like we needed it. We lived in a townhouse, so being on separate floors enabled me to still be able to distance myself a little and focus on my research when that was what I needed. It was still hard and I felt like I had to be productive all the time to make it worth not spending time with her. However, I had a clear goal - finish my PhD and move to Switzerland with my family to start my postdoc and be closer to our families.
What was it like to start a family on a different continent?
By the time Tessa was born, we had been living in Vancouver for 5 years and had our friends and neighbors that were always willing to help - our village. We lived in a student family residence, so we were surrounded by other moms or dads in academia who knew what we were going through and wanted to help. We got so many baby clothes, books and toys from them, as well as many cooked meals and kind words and advice. It was so easy to meet and connect with other moms at the playground. We really miss it now, building that kind of relationship takes time and not speaking french makes it harder to meet other families and organize playdates in Lausanne. However, a big advantage is that we are much closer to Croatia and it is easier to visit more often and spend time with our families. Both my husband and I are really close to our grandparents and we want for our daughter to experience that love and connection growing up as well. I also have three sisters and I would like them to be a big part of Tessa's life.
What did you learn about yourself since becoming a mother?
I learned how to be more present and more grateful for little things. Every time I hear my daughter's laughter or she runs to me to give me a big hug or says "I love you", my heart is so full of joy and wants to burst out. I learned that I can be patient and enjoy *very* slow walks, that journey is so often more important than destination. I also learned how strong, resilient and adaptable I am - both physically and mentally. After my daughter was born I had to learn how to breathe again and spend almost a year working with a pelvic floor physiotherapist to heal my core and pelvic floor. It was so humbling and challenging for someone who has always been active (and not very patient) to accept that training, that just consists of lying on the ground and focusing on breathing, also "counts". At the beginning of my recovery, my goal was to be able to go for a walk in the forest with Tessa in a carrier without being symptomatic. It took a long time to achieve that. Last summer, I participated in 4 intense field campaigns where I hiked on a difficult terrain and glaciers with a 20+kg backpack and it never even crossed my mind that I might not be able to do it.
What advice would you give to younger self and to all the women who would like to become mothers while pursuing academic career?
Believe in yourself and your ability to navigate both motherhood and academia. While it may seem challenging at times, having a supportive partner and community can make all the difference. Celebrate your achievements, no matter how small, and remember how far you've come. Don't let anyone else dictate the timing of your dreams and life plans – trust your instincts and do what's best for you and your family. If a potential supervisor or colleague doesn't support your role as a mother, they may not be the right fit for you. You don't have to choose between being a great mom and pursuing your academic aspirations – you can do both and be a powerful role model for your daughter.
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