Stacey Tecot
Interview Posted By: Ashley Smith
1. Can you tell us a little about your background? i.e. Where you grew up, what education do you have, a summary of your resume, did you always want to do what you are doing now, when did you start to become interested in STEM, what internships/ volunteering
I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. I was so lucky—I went to The Tatnall School, which emphasized environmental science. Now they even have courses on wildlife conservation and conservation biology. The most memorable classes were those that involved some sort of scientific project. We tested the water quality of our streams and visited parks, we learned about insect diversity by finding them on our own, and we even learned about bird reproduction by incubating eggs (which later came home with me as chicks). I was also fortunate in that I grew up with woods and a creek behind my house, and we were always playing outside. I think that those things combined—a great STEM education with inspiring, hands-on classes and access to the wilderness—shaped me from an early age.
I knew that I wanted to be a primatologist for as long as I can remember, and that led me to Biological Anthropology in college. In my spare time I studied some wild squirrel monkeys living, oddly enough, in downtown Fort Lauderdale. I had my first official internship as a college sophomore. It was an apprenticeship at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute, where we worked with chimpanzees who knew American Sign Language. That was the experience that took me from a primate lover to a primate researcher—I now had questions and wanted the answers to them. After I received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology at the University of Miami, I earned a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
2. What exactly IS your job? What do you do on a day to day basis?
I’m a professor at the University of Arizona. I teach courses in Biological Anthropology, and I focus on primatology—the study of primates. More recently I’ve begun some projects based in Tucson, branching out to study dogs and humans. Mainly I do research with lemurs in the rain forest in Madagascar. We follow the animals all day, recording their behavior, taking their photos, and collecting their urine and poop. Poop is so useful—we can use it to analyze hormones, genetics, food, parasites, you name it! When I’m not in Madagascar I’m at the university teaching and writing up my research, or applying for funding to do research. I also direct a lab called the Laboratory for the Evolutionary Endocrinology of Primates (LEEP), where my students and I analyze primate hormones in the urine and poop we collected in Madagascar.
3. How does STEM relate to your job? How do you use the information you learned from your degree in your job?
In the lab we use principles from a range of STEM fields (e.g., chemistry, microbiology) to develop new assays to measure hormones, and I use all kinds of technology in the lab and the field. Sometimes it’s pretty basic though, like catching lemur urine with a Frisbee. And of course math is important to determine what all of my data mean. More broadly, my training has been in how to use the scientific method to ask evolutionary questions about us as humans, and those are the questions that drive me. I use this method and this evolutionary framework to guide my research.
4. Have you faced any discrimination/ challenges being a woman in a stem field? If so, how did you deal with it? Do you have any advice for up and coming women in STEM?
People seem comfortable questioning my life decisions and giving me advice about my personal life. I’ve been asked why I’ve chosen my work over a family (beginning in my 20s as a graduate student), and on my first week as an assistant professor I was told by a colleague that I should hurry up and have kids because I didn’t have much longer. No care was ever taken to have a real conversation with me about my plans to have a family. Instead, I felt judged and advised by people who knew nothing about me personally. I do my best to focus on the fact that they have bad social skills, and that this says nothing of me or the choices I’ve made based on a lifetime of self-knowledge. I have faced challenges like anyone else, but I’ve also been very fortunate. I’ve found several strong female mentors who were the best role models I could hope for. They made it easy for me, a very shy and quiet person, to approach them. They made me feel as if I belonged and didn’t need to constantly prove why I was there. As a result they helped me find my voice. My advice is to find those women who can not only model good behavior and teach you what it is to be a scientist, but who support you as you and inspire you to figure out who that can be. Of course that’s no easy task.
5. What is the best and worst part of your job? What do you look forward to in your job on a day to day basis? What do you wish you could change?
The best part of my job is that it satisfies every part of me. When I’m in Madagascar I get to hike in the rainforest every day, pushing myself physically, seeing new species, and learning a new language. I get to check out from city life every now and then and slow down when I’m in the field, and I get to be social and meet and work with a diverse group of people from several different cultures. I get to have an impact on my field through teaching and mentoring students, and I love seeing students transform throughout the time that I know them. I’m able to satisfy the need to get behind a cause and volunteer my time by doing community-engaged research that I think can impact society in a positive way. For example, I am a little dog-obsessed, and absolutely gutted by the number of dogs that are abandoned and euthanized in the US. So, one of my most recent projects involves studying the effects of certain enrichment programs on the behavior and physiology of shelter dogs, which will hopefully help us understand how to shorten time to adoption. I love the challenge of thinking on my feet to creatively solve problems in the forest and lab, while I also find great satisfaction in the precision of lab work and data entry. The very best part is finally analyzing data after a multi-year field study and seeing if your data support your predictions. Even though you’re collecting the data, you often don’t know what it is until much later.
The worst part of my job is that I don’t like sitting in front of the computer for so long. I’d much rather be in the field or the lab! But writing up your results can also be immensely satisfying. It’s just not great for my back.
6. How do you balance your work and personal life? Any secrets or advice you’d like to share?
I think that being able to integrate so many personal needs into my work (see Question 5) helps me feel somewhat balanced. And of course my dog, Rex! Every time I come home, or enter the room for that matter, he greets me with 5 minutes of squeaky toy joy. Who can resist that? A wagging tail is an immediate de-stressor, and an easy way to redirect my focus from work to personal life. That’s not to say that these things are separate. On my daily walks with Rex in the desert I can take a step back from the computer and process whatever I’m working on. Having said that, I’m always striving to be better about how I spend my down-time. I’m a work in progress.
7. What do you define success as?
Success is when I’ve feel like I’ve completely used my day and have been fully present with others and myself (vs. ticking off tasks until it’s time to go home). A super successful day is seeing an old idea in a new light.
8. What is one personality trait that you think is universally important for a successful career?
Drive.
9. Who was a mentor to you throughout your career? (can be more than one!) What did they teach you? How did they impact your life?
I had the best female mentors! In high school Loretta Powell, my chemistry teacher, had a powerful impact on me. She was doing science that I previously viewed as ‘masculine’. I probably wasn’t conscious of it then, but I think that the gift I received from Dr. Powell was a major paradigm shift. I saw someone like me doing something that I thought was for other people. All of a sudden barriers I thought were present were lifted.
In college, Linda Taylor used to write notes on my exams: come see me to talk about your future. She knew just what to do to get a shy person on the right path to taking their future as a primatologist seriously. I needed that extra push to seek out mentorship. She worked hard to help me find opportunities, and I also try to do that—encourage people to push themselves to do more.
Toni Ziegler welcomed me into her endocrinology lab and her home. I modeled my lab after hers and I would never have been able to build LEEP without her help. But the most important message I learned from her was how to live life—mindfully, fully, lovingly.
Pat Wright taught me that seemingly outrageous ideas can come to fruition if you start by seeing everything as a possibility. And Deborah Overdorff taught me to choose happiness in life always.
I have also learned that my friends, peers, and students can be mentors. I learn so much from interacting with these people, and draw a lot of strength from them. And then there is the distant mentor, the one who you look up to and who empowers you despite the fact that you’ve never met. For me, those people were women in pop culture: Linda Carter, Pat Benatar, Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, Blondie, Joan Jett. I saw strong women all around me growing up, and that seemed like the norm.
10. What do you think is the best advice you've ever received? What advice would you give your younger self if you had the chance? What’s one piece of advice you can pass on to us?
My advice is to be comfortable with doubts. Reassessment is important to ensure that you’re on the path you want to be on. You should do something because you’ve chosen to do it, and you can make that choice every day. I’ve never been one to make long-term goals because they perpetually situate me in the prologue, looking to be satisfied in the future. But if I’m doing what I choose to do today, I can see something good in every day.
I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. I was so lucky—I went to The Tatnall School, which emphasized environmental science. Now they even have courses on wildlife conservation and conservation biology. The most memorable classes were those that involved some sort of scientific project. We tested the water quality of our streams and visited parks, we learned about insect diversity by finding them on our own, and we even learned about bird reproduction by incubating eggs (which later came home with me as chicks). I was also fortunate in that I grew up with woods and a creek behind my house, and we were always playing outside. I think that those things combined—a great STEM education with inspiring, hands-on classes and access to the wilderness—shaped me from an early age.
I knew that I wanted to be a primatologist for as long as I can remember, and that led me to Biological Anthropology in college. In my spare time I studied some wild squirrel monkeys living, oddly enough, in downtown Fort Lauderdale. I had my first official internship as a college sophomore. It was an apprenticeship at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute, where we worked with chimpanzees who knew American Sign Language. That was the experience that took me from a primate lover to a primate researcher—I now had questions and wanted the answers to them. After I received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology at the University of Miami, I earned a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
2. What exactly IS your job? What do you do on a day to day basis?
I’m a professor at the University of Arizona. I teach courses in Biological Anthropology, and I focus on primatology—the study of primates. More recently I’ve begun some projects based in Tucson, branching out to study dogs and humans. Mainly I do research with lemurs in the rain forest in Madagascar. We follow the animals all day, recording their behavior, taking their photos, and collecting their urine and poop. Poop is so useful—we can use it to analyze hormones, genetics, food, parasites, you name it! When I’m not in Madagascar I’m at the university teaching and writing up my research, or applying for funding to do research. I also direct a lab called the Laboratory for the Evolutionary Endocrinology of Primates (LEEP), where my students and I analyze primate hormones in the urine and poop we collected in Madagascar.
3. How does STEM relate to your job? How do you use the information you learned from your degree in your job?
In the lab we use principles from a range of STEM fields (e.g., chemistry, microbiology) to develop new assays to measure hormones, and I use all kinds of technology in the lab and the field. Sometimes it’s pretty basic though, like catching lemur urine with a Frisbee. And of course math is important to determine what all of my data mean. More broadly, my training has been in how to use the scientific method to ask evolutionary questions about us as humans, and those are the questions that drive me. I use this method and this evolutionary framework to guide my research.
4. Have you faced any discrimination/ challenges being a woman in a stem field? If so, how did you deal with it? Do you have any advice for up and coming women in STEM?
People seem comfortable questioning my life decisions and giving me advice about my personal life. I’ve been asked why I’ve chosen my work over a family (beginning in my 20s as a graduate student), and on my first week as an assistant professor I was told by a colleague that I should hurry up and have kids because I didn’t have much longer. No care was ever taken to have a real conversation with me about my plans to have a family. Instead, I felt judged and advised by people who knew nothing about me personally. I do my best to focus on the fact that they have bad social skills, and that this says nothing of me or the choices I’ve made based on a lifetime of self-knowledge. I have faced challenges like anyone else, but I’ve also been very fortunate. I’ve found several strong female mentors who were the best role models I could hope for. They made it easy for me, a very shy and quiet person, to approach them. They made me feel as if I belonged and didn’t need to constantly prove why I was there. As a result they helped me find my voice. My advice is to find those women who can not only model good behavior and teach you what it is to be a scientist, but who support you as you and inspire you to figure out who that can be. Of course that’s no easy task.
5. What is the best and worst part of your job? What do you look forward to in your job on a day to day basis? What do you wish you could change?
The best part of my job is that it satisfies every part of me. When I’m in Madagascar I get to hike in the rainforest every day, pushing myself physically, seeing new species, and learning a new language. I get to check out from city life every now and then and slow down when I’m in the field, and I get to be social and meet and work with a diverse group of people from several different cultures. I get to have an impact on my field through teaching and mentoring students, and I love seeing students transform throughout the time that I know them. I’m able to satisfy the need to get behind a cause and volunteer my time by doing community-engaged research that I think can impact society in a positive way. For example, I am a little dog-obsessed, and absolutely gutted by the number of dogs that are abandoned and euthanized in the US. So, one of my most recent projects involves studying the effects of certain enrichment programs on the behavior and physiology of shelter dogs, which will hopefully help us understand how to shorten time to adoption. I love the challenge of thinking on my feet to creatively solve problems in the forest and lab, while I also find great satisfaction in the precision of lab work and data entry. The very best part is finally analyzing data after a multi-year field study and seeing if your data support your predictions. Even though you’re collecting the data, you often don’t know what it is until much later.
The worst part of my job is that I don’t like sitting in front of the computer for so long. I’d much rather be in the field or the lab! But writing up your results can also be immensely satisfying. It’s just not great for my back.
6. How do you balance your work and personal life? Any secrets or advice you’d like to share?
I think that being able to integrate so many personal needs into my work (see Question 5) helps me feel somewhat balanced. And of course my dog, Rex! Every time I come home, or enter the room for that matter, he greets me with 5 minutes of squeaky toy joy. Who can resist that? A wagging tail is an immediate de-stressor, and an easy way to redirect my focus from work to personal life. That’s not to say that these things are separate. On my daily walks with Rex in the desert I can take a step back from the computer and process whatever I’m working on. Having said that, I’m always striving to be better about how I spend my down-time. I’m a work in progress.
7. What do you define success as?
Success is when I’ve feel like I’ve completely used my day and have been fully present with others and myself (vs. ticking off tasks until it’s time to go home). A super successful day is seeing an old idea in a new light.
8. What is one personality trait that you think is universally important for a successful career?
Drive.
9. Who was a mentor to you throughout your career? (can be more than one!) What did they teach you? How did they impact your life?
I had the best female mentors! In high school Loretta Powell, my chemistry teacher, had a powerful impact on me. She was doing science that I previously viewed as ‘masculine’. I probably wasn’t conscious of it then, but I think that the gift I received from Dr. Powell was a major paradigm shift. I saw someone like me doing something that I thought was for other people. All of a sudden barriers I thought were present were lifted.
In college, Linda Taylor used to write notes on my exams: come see me to talk about your future. She knew just what to do to get a shy person on the right path to taking their future as a primatologist seriously. I needed that extra push to seek out mentorship. She worked hard to help me find opportunities, and I also try to do that—encourage people to push themselves to do more.
Toni Ziegler welcomed me into her endocrinology lab and her home. I modeled my lab after hers and I would never have been able to build LEEP without her help. But the most important message I learned from her was how to live life—mindfully, fully, lovingly.
Pat Wright taught me that seemingly outrageous ideas can come to fruition if you start by seeing everything as a possibility. And Deborah Overdorff taught me to choose happiness in life always.
I have also learned that my friends, peers, and students can be mentors. I learn so much from interacting with these people, and draw a lot of strength from them. And then there is the distant mentor, the one who you look up to and who empowers you despite the fact that you’ve never met. For me, those people were women in pop culture: Linda Carter, Pat Benatar, Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, Blondie, Joan Jett. I saw strong women all around me growing up, and that seemed like the norm.
10. What do you think is the best advice you've ever received? What advice would you give your younger self if you had the chance? What’s one piece of advice you can pass on to us?
My advice is to be comfortable with doubts. Reassessment is important to ensure that you’re on the path you want to be on. You should do something because you’ve chosen to do it, and you can make that choice every day. I’ve never been one to make long-term goals because they perpetually situate me in the prologue, looking to be satisfied in the future. But if I’m doing what I choose to do today, I can see something good in every day.