"Take Five" with MBL Director of Education Linda Hyman

"Take Five" is an occasional feature in which we pose five questions to a Marine Biological Laboratory community member about their career, dreams, and passions. Here we profile Linda Hyman, the MBL’s Burroughs Wellcome Director of Education. 

Hyman oversees the direction of the MBL’s academic programs at all levels, including the world-renowned Advanced Research Training Courses. Prior to coming to MBL, Hyman was associate provost at Boston University School of Medicine, leading the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences, and she has held several other leadership roles in academic administration. She received her Ph.D. in Biology from Brandeis University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University School of Medicine. 

At the national level, Hyman completed a term as a division director at the National Science Foundation, and she served as chair of the Association of American Medical Colleges Graduate Research Education and Training group. Hyman was recently named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

You have an impressive research background. Can you talk about that research and what influenced your shift toward science education? 

I did my Ph.D. in the area of early development, working with Xenopus, an important player here at the MBL. Looking back at that experience, it makes me feel like I've come back home after a long journey. I switched to yeast genetics as a postdoc because I really wanted to use genetic tools, and that wasn't possible in Xenopus at the time—so I took a course at Cold Spring Harbor (but don’t tell anyone else about that). My next step was as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Tulane University School of Medicine. There, I went through the whole academic process—teaching, service, research, grants—and was awarded tenure. 

My next stop was at the National Science Foundation as a Program Officer. I wanted to see “how the sausage was made,” because I was in the trenches writing these grants, and I wanted to better understand how the system worked at the other end. That was really transformative, because that's when I started to make the shift into a more administrative role. I felt I could make a bigger impact in my community by working with other people on science policy and research than by being in my own little niche. 

How did you come to your current position, and what excites you about leading the MBL’s education programs? 

I was here as a graduate student and was the teaching assistant for the Embryology course [in 1981]. The MBL is the kind of place that really sticks with you, so when this opportunity came up, it was a full circle kind of thing. To some extent—just because of where I was in my life—it was important to me to be in a place that I really cared about and felt was meaningful. 

One thing I find exciting is that the Advanced Research Training Courses truly are world-renowned and have an amazing impact on science worldwide. Everywhere you go, people know about them and are happy to relate their own experiences. It is an honor, really, to be at the helm of that, because it is such an amazing infrastructure and organization with history and legacy. 

The opportunity to develop other educational programs is also a challenge. It’s exciting to say, “Okay, we're really well known for this, but what else can we do?” Developing the high school programs and the undergraduate programs and the other tentacles of the Education Division has been a challenge, but also fun and important because it extends the pipeline.

You play a key role in the MBL’s education of the next generation. Is there a particular teacher, professor, or mentor who had a significant impact on your own life? 

I don’t feel like I had very many mentors—but it is notable that I had a couple of tormentors (no names!) When you have a tormentor, it's another way of learning about the importance of good mentorship and wanting to make sure we do better! 

When I was in first or second grade, my teacher wrote on my report card, “Linda has a lovely personality. But....a scholar, she'll never be.” That resonated with my mom because from her perspective, research careers were not for women—she wanted me to be an optometrist. Try as hard as she did, she really was not super encouraging about my journey, but at the end of the day, she embraced it and was proud of me. 

Not to shortchange Mom—she was an amazing person. She was a Holocaust survivor and experienced Auschwitz and several of the other camps in World War II, eventually immigrating to this country with absolutely nothing.  So I was a latchkey kid, first-generation college student, first to go to grad school, etc. I raise that because we use the term “survivor” to describe people like my mom, and that resonates in some ways with a career in science because they are both about hard work, grit, and resilience. I think that sense of survivorship and resilience was really embedded in me as a young child and was something I could apply professionally, because as you know, experiments usually don't work. You have to go back and try them again and again and again (but please change something when you do!)

What accomplishments in your career or life have meant the most to you? 

I was recently notified that I was elected a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is very meaningful to me because it represents a body of work. Scientists are accustomed to being reviewed by their peers, and although I could point to a specific project and the funding for it as an accomplishment, this award feels like a recognition for the culmination of a career journey. 

What are your goals for 2025, either personal or professional? 

This is really a critical time at the MBL, and resiliency is no stranger here. I am completely convinced that we are up to our challenges and will emerge stronger than ever, but this coming year is going to be absolutely critical for that. If I have any goal, it is to help steer the ship and make sure that people feel valued for what they do, because they are. My goal is to work with my team and my colleagues to provide the foundation to thrive. But perhaps my biggest goal is to ensure that students do not get disillusioned by what they hear and read about in the world around us. The MBL is a place where people come to remember why they got so excited about science in the first place, or—if they are younger—to plant the research seeds and get excited about science. It's our most important mission, so we must keep it going.