A juggling act for doctors and scientists
Kids and career amid COVID are a challenge. A U. of C. grant seeks to help.
Recently, in a moment most parents during the pandemic know all too well, Kamila Wiaderek and Olaf Borkiewicz touched their daughter Luna’s forehead. It felt warm.
Their toddler, 3, had a fever; what was next was familiar. They needed to get her tested for COVID19, notify her day care and figure out how to reassemble their schedules. And as omicron complicates kids’ abilities to stay in school, many parents are again trying to work from home with quarantined children and shifting policies around when and whether they’ll be able to return.
“It was an immediate wake-up call for us that we have to reorganize our life,” Wiaderek said.
The couple had a few unique challenges. As scientists who work at Argonne National Laboratory, much of their work is in a lab, and not always predictable. And with their families abroad in their native Poland, they don’t have grandparents or other relatives here to help.
Juggling parenthood and child care has been a top conversation during COVID-19. But for doctors, scientists and researchers, it carries extra challenges. Within these fields, it has always been tricky to build a family while growing a career — traveling to different cities to follow jobs, inflexible and sometimes unpredictable schedules, years of schooling — and the pandemic has starkly highlighted all of this.
The University of Chicago recently announced a new grant to
retain early-career scientists with young families. The $660,000 in funding will be for physicians who conduct research while juggling caregiving duties, for children or aging or ill family members.
Science is a competitive field, with people very invested in their research.
As Wiaderek, an electrochemist, said, “You really want these experiments to work.” She works in a lab that is part of Borkiewicz’s beamline X-ray research.
And that work affects more than just people in the lab. Burnout can lead to departures from the field. This means fewer voices and less diversity in a field that depends on ideas.
“If those are the people disproportionately affected and those are the people disproportionately leaving ... we’re going backwards in terms of solving
the health issues,” said Dr. Anna Volerman, an associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at University of Chicago Medicine. “And that has long-term implications.”
Volerman, co-director of the grant program, said the goal is to support research adversely affected by the pandemic and find sustainable solutions for physician-scientists who are also caregivers. In short, they hope to make it easier for scientists to find work-life balance, and keep people in research. As a mom of three boys, one born in February 2020 just as the pandemic was about to begin, she gets it.
“We’ve all gotten that phone call from school or day care: Your kid has a fever, you have to be here within the hour. You’re like, ‘I have patients; what do I do?’ ” she said.
Add in the risk and fear within the pandemic, and the absence of typical support systems like day care or grandparents who may be far away or too at risk, and it’s even harder.
“A significant proportion of clinicians are burnt out right now,” she said. “We’ve had to adapt and change and be in these really constant moments of uncertainty at the same time we’re trying to provide stable environments for our children and our families.”
The pandemic created multiple issues for researchers, said William Lowe, vice dean for academic affairs at Northwestern Medicine Feinberg School of Medicine who will help direct a similar $550,000 grant, part of the Fund to Retain Clinical Scientists. First, many were unable to visit labs, and
lost work for reasons ranging from inability to monitor experiments to a harder time interviewing people who did not want to come to facilities. Some of the work could be done remotely; some couldn’t. Lots of projects were disrupted or limited.
“Are people going to leave academics, especially younger people?” he said. “People who are like, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t juggle my family on top of trying to keep my research going with all these types of pandemic-related stress. I think that’s a real concern.”
Dr. Amanda Marma Perak, a cardiologist at Lurie Children’s Hospital, works in research about 80% of the time, and sees patients the other 20%. She was pregnant when the pandemic started, and already had a toddler son.
A research project she began before the pandemic was ultimately limited because many parents involved did not feel comfortable returning for final in-person visits.
And like many she had to find new child care solutions, with in-laws helping watch their toddler and her husband watching him when she saw patients at Lurie. She remembers trying to work on research with a toddler saying, “Mommy, I have to go potty.”
“With research, you really have to be able to think creatively and extend your brain to think of new ideas,” she said. “That was definitely a challenge.”
And as a physician, “You have to do the job and you have to do it really well, because it’s children’s lives,” she said. “You figure out how to show up on time ready to work and ready to focus.”
Many say that more openness has been created around what it’s like to balance science careers and families.
After COVID-19 closed everything, Wiaderek and Borkiewicz switched their hours to split up work and at-home duties. Working remotely when they could, they reviewed data and wrote publications.
During the pandemic, both began being more clear about work-life boundaries, for example saying they could not agree to a 5:30 p.m. meeting because they needed to pick up their daughter at 5 p.m. They could call in from the car, or reschedule.
“People started realizing we have lives,” Wiaderek said. “It brought much more empathy and a human face toward work. It’s much more acceptable than it used to be, and I hope that culture will stay.”