The typical scientist is 32 by the time he or she earns a doctorate. In most cases in the life sciences, graduates then have to spend several more years as low-paid postdoctoral fellows, or "postdocs," before getting their first academic jobs.
In a 2000 survey of University of California at Berkeley postdocs, most of whom were scientists, 60 percent of married women with children said they were considering leaving academia.
Rud's adviser, James DeCaprio, said few of the graduate students and postdocs he has trained, male or female, have gone on to academic research positions. Those who have made it tend to work about 70 hours a week. The rest end up choosing business or law school, the pharmaceutical industry, or teaching in less prestigious positions.
"If you work 80 hours a week, you will be twice as successful" than if you work 40 hours, he said, explaining that more hours translates directly into more experiments, and more discoveries. "They move the science along faster than the competition."
DeCaprio called Rud smart and creative, and said she has "as good a chance as anybody to be extraordinarily successful." What happens will depend mostly on how many hours she is able, or willing, to put in at her bench.
Raised in Pasadena, California, by a single mother, Rud always knew she wanted children. Her love for science came later. Today, Rud gushes about the elegance of biological systems -- how clever viruses are, for example. "It's like an art critic discussing a work of art," said her husband, Ryan Rud, an English teacher at English High School in Boston.
Female role model
Debrah Rud's mentors have mostly been male, but she credits a woman with inspiring her to consider a science career. In college at the University of California at Los Angeles, she signed up for a chemistry class taught by "E.A. Carter," and was taken aback when a stylish woman showed up to teach. She was doubly impressed when she found out Emily Carter was a mother. "I could identify with her, as opposed to the scientist in the lab coat with goggles and exploding beakers," Rud said.
Still, like many of her peers, Rud found herself in graduate school uncertain about what she wanted to do with her life, except that she and her husband wanted to start their family early.
Her pregnancy brought her confusion to the boiling point. She worried about the hours it would take to succeed -- hours away from her family.
At the same time, she wasn't sure if she loved the repetitive work at the lab bench, altering the salt levels in experiments, for example. And she couldn't imagine taking a job in a pharmaceutical company lab, where she'd have better hours but feel like "a drone."
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