Kathryn Fitzsimmons
BIO
Geoscientist and full professor at Uni Tübingen, single mama of school-age son.
Twitter: @loess_kathryn
Kathryn Fitzsimmons
“I persisted, and that was the right decision for me.”
The natural world has always been my playground and a constant source of wonder. Thanks to my school science teachers I found a name for this passion of mine: geology!
This led me to a dual major in Earth Sciences and German Studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and a stint in a gold mine which helped me realise that understanding desert landscapes involves more than just extracting natural resources.
Confronting this challenge to my career expectations, I undertook an Honours and then a PhD project (the latter at the Australian National University) on the history of aridity in Australia, working with desert dunefields as sediment archives of changing conditions. Good luck had me being awarded a Postdoc running the lab there, after which I fell into another Postdoc in Leipzig, Germany in 2010, at a Max Planck Institute with a focus on human evolution. I started investigating when people dispersed into Australia, Asia and Europe thousands of years ago.
I never intended to stay in Germany, but life had other plans for me! I met and married another academic (an archaeologist) and for several years during my Leipzig Postdoc we battled with the two-body problem (he was in Germany, but on the other side of the country). During those years we did our best to find jobs in the same city, but when it was evident, at age 33, that this was not going to happen overnight, we decided to throw caution to the wind, have a baby and hope for the best job-wise. Neither of us wanted to give up our chosen careers, though I got mighty close to throwing in the towel a number of times. Thankfully, parental leave in Germany is fairly generous and we were able to live together for the first year of our son's life, in 2014. The second year, however, was much more difficult; I was essentially playing single mama on a temporary contract as Postdoc, with family time restricted to weekends.
Just as I was awarded an exciting new Group Leader position with a big grant at another Max Planck Institute - this time in Mainz - my husband announced that he was taking a tenure-track position in the US. Thereafter my single parent status became permanent as I moved through the separation and divorce. Starting out in the new job in 2016, in a new city, was enormously challenging - not least because at first I could not find childcare for my son, and I had no idea how I was going to handle leading field trips to Central Asia for 6 weeks at a time! I am enormously grateful to the equal opportunities officer at my new institute, who negotiated a kindergarten place for my son, and to my parents for flying out from Australia at enormous cost so that I could lead my field campaigns each year. I was less pleased about the regular remarks from people around me that I should be working part-time (not an option in my job) and that I was being a bad mother for choosing this career.
I had to quickly grow a thick skin and remind myself that when I am with my son, I am 100% there with him, and that my career is also an essential part of who I am - not to mention the fact that I am good at it! I am convinced that science will lose out in a big way if women, and particularly mothers, continue to feel compelled to leave research because the working conditions are stacked against them.
A few months ago I hit the jackpot: I started a new, permanent position as Professor in Geosciences at the University of Tübingen. I am looking forward to this new challenge, and particularly to having more contact with undergraduate students – the next generation of scientists. My son is now 7 and has not only joined me in the field, but is a vocal supporter of his strong mama who defied the odds and made it to that coveted permanent job as a leader in science. Being a single mama and professor is a slog, and covid and its lockdowns and home schooling have added an extra dimension to the challenge, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I persisted, and that was the right decision for me.