April | 2019 | Reinventing Nerds

Dr. Lisa Kaczmarczyk is an award-winning computer science researcher, educator and book author. She provides independent evaluation services for academia and the hi-tech industry. These evaluations are used as evidence of project viability to secure funding from grant agencies and investors.

Her clients have included Google, Stanford University, the University of Illinois, Purdue University, California State University and the Broward County Florida Public Schools. Dr. Kaczmarczyk is also an Adjunct Faculty in the Computer Science Department at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont California. Dr. Kaczmarczyk holds advanced degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Oregon, Northeastern University and Tufts University. Dr. Kaczmarczyk was lead author on the 2014 ACM Education Policy Committee report “Rebooting the Pathway to Success: Preparing Students for Computing Workforce Needs in the United States” and is author of the book “Computers and Society, Computing for Good.” She is passionate about working with clients who share her desire to use computer science to make the world a better place.

Highlights:

Q: Lisa, you recently received an award for the Top Computer Science Education Research Paper of the Last 50 Years. What was this paper on and why is it so important?

“The paper is sharing the results of a research study about misconceptions that novice computer science students have. Computer science is also a very abstract topic and the mistakes that students make are often baffling. The paper reports on the misconceptions that students have and why they have them. It’s important because this paper was the first to apply rigorous research methods to investigating misconceptions.”

Q: How does this research fit into your current work?

“It does in that the ‘misconceptions study’ presented faculty with evidence-based information to help them make strategic choices about how to improve their instruction so it would be more effective. The work that I do now in project evaluation is also about providing people in organizations research-based information to help them make strategic decisions about their projects.”

Q: What is project evaluation?

“Project evaluation can exist in any field. I work primarily with computer scientists and engineers. They may be in universities or K-12 school systems, or they may be outside of academia. It’s when you have a project and you want to know that the project is having the impact that you hope it is having. In the case of the work I’m doing, there’s a formal research component that is being conducted by the people in charge of the project, but there are a lot of other factors that impact whether the project will be successful or not. So, the evaluation comes in and takes a look at what are their needs, what do they need to know. I develop a customized plan for whoever I’m working with to figure out the best way to gather information to help them with their project.

Q: Why would you need to do a project evaluation for an academic project?

“Nowadays it’s very difficult to get funding from the National Science Foundation if you don’t have a project evaluation.”

Q: What kinds of people issues come up during project evaluations?

“Very often I’m asked to take a look at complex projects where there are a lot of people involved. Recently, I concluded a project with the Broward County Schools in Florida. The project they had funding for was to integrate computer science into the elementary day classroom. There was a research program to look into the effect on student achievement of the elementary school students. It spanned across the entire district and there were about ten schools involved and there were a lot of different moving parts. There were a lot of different people who needed to be on board for it to succeed.”

To hear more about the complex people issues that arise in Lisa’s project evaluations with schools, high-tech incubators, and non-profit organizations, as well as about Lisa’s surprising background, listen to the episode.

Words of Wisdom:

“Trust-building is what it’s all about.”

“The ideal scenario is that nothing is a surprise.”

“If I see something bothersome, I won’t wait. I say, ‘Let’s talk.’”

Contact Lisa Kaczmarczyk:

Twitter: @lisakaczmarczyk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisakaczmarczyk/
Website: http://www.lisakaczmarczyk.com/

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Joanie has a conversation with Nihar Bhakta, who is a project team leader at Gossamer Bio. Nihar is a kidney transplant physician by training and has worked in biotech and pharma for about 14 years. Nihar has a very thoughtful approach to collaboration and teamwork and discusses the challenges that arise in biotech and pharma and what he’s done to lead teams effectively. Not surprisingly, a lot of his learning was from trial and error, and Nihar is very open about how he leaned into his humility to succeed.

Highlights:

Q: What do you do at Gossamer?

“I am the project team lead for one of our assets. A lot of my responsibilities revolve around ensuring that all of the various items that need to get done on our project team get accomplished. It’s enabling and helping the team get through decisions and key pain points, etcetera, and also making sure the team is collaborative.”

“One of the things that’s vital to any team is ensuring that they have good lines of communication where there are challenges or issues are resolved. As team leaders, a lot of the time we spend focused on is ensuring what needs to get done, what the important work is that the team should be focused on, and how can we work best together. A lot of that has little to do with my training, both as a physician and in terms of what we do from a broader perspective in drug development. It really is about how our teams function and collaborate together.”

Q: How is it that you didn’t have the training in pharma and biotech for what you’re doing?

“We’re trained as scientists and data really drives so much of what we do. How you conduct experiments is so important. We all are trained to make sure we’re designing the right experiments and the best experiments. But what we don’t realize is that we have a lot of different people who have different thoughts about how to design the best experiments because no one knows everything.”

“Every scientist has a blind spot in that individual people can drive great successes, but if you ask almost any great scientist, there’s always a team of people who they’ve worked with, there are always people who have collaborated with them, or there are other people who’ve they’ve based their work on.”

Q: How did you learn how to collaborate and communicate?

“Most of it was trial and error. Most of it is being an individual contributor, knowing the biology, the side effects, and so on. That’s how you develop your expertise. With what we do in biotech and in drug development, you have to apply the science of what you’ve learned. The application of that work is often driven individually, but sometimes it’s the interpretation of what comes out of those results. And the interpretation can be a very collaborative effort.”

“Some of those skills I learned a long time ago. During training, when we’re residents, there is a lot of education that goes on and there are a lot of people you have to mentor. That’s the role of a senior resident or attending physician. I’m not proud of this by any stretch of the imagination, but I had a proclivity to make interns cry in residency. It wasn’t because I was yelling at people. It was because I would be talking to them about science or trying to educate them on what they might have done which wasn’t appropriate for the patient, and that lead to some very difficult interactions.”

To hear Nihar’s example about a real patient and to hear more about his approach to teamwork, leadership, and collaboration, listen to the episode.

Words of Wisdom:

“How you get the work done is just as important as the work you’re getting done.”

“It’s important to think about how we can design the best experiment, not how I can design the best experiment.”

“We all collaborate in some capacity.”

“Data is complicated. It can be overwhelming for one person to interpret it.”

“When you’re talking about data, you have to realize who you’re talking to and what mindset they’re in.”

Monthly Archives: April 2019

Lisa Kaczmarczyk: People Issues in Project Evaluations

Highlights:

Words of Wisdom:

Contact Lisa Kaczmarczyk:

Nihar Bhakta: People Skills for Scientific Collaboration

Highlights:

Words of Wisdom:

Contact Nihar Bhakta: