Academia is a long journey of specialization and behind any professor’s CV are long hours of research and study. While the path can be direct for some, for others there’s a pivot, a moment or experience that changes the course of that journey.
Penn Today spoke with four professors whose academic paths diverged, to learn about the trajectory of their interdisciplinary work. Vijay Balasubramanian traverses the boundaries of physics and neuroscience. Tukufu Zuberi is a demographer-turned-curator. Brittany Watson integrates education, research, and veterinary medicine. Amy Hillier began her career studying historical mortgage redlining and moved into supporting trans youth.
Vijay Balasubramanian
The Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics in the School of Arts & Sciences
Wandering through Kolkata’s markets in India stimulates the mind. Hawkers’ cries pass through the inner ear as electrical signals; the pungent, earthy smell of turmeric enters the brain through olfactory sensory neurons. In 1976, a 7-year-old Vijay Balasubramanian had his own market revelation through a bookseller’s portico, where the cover of a slim volume showed a man peering through a microscope lens and a smattering of white paint scattered like stars across the firmament of man and machine.
“What is a scientist?” the book asked, running through a series of exciting adventure shots: archeologic discovery, venom extraction, missile control. In that moment, Balasubramanian knew he would be a scientist. It looked, he says, “amazingly cool.”
When he arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Balasubramanian wanted to study the fundamental laws of nature. “So that’s physics,” he says. While earning his doctoral degree at Princeton University, a mentor suggested Balasubramanian read papers in the burgeoning field of neuroscience. It immediately resonated. “Oh my god, this stuff is so cool,” Balasubramanian thought. “But the final year of a Ph.D. is not the time to switch.”
He earned his degree and took a position as a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. During the day, he worked on string theory and the information loss paradox for black holes. But in the evening, he would moonlight in a neuroscience lab.
As a young theoretical physicist at Penn, Balasubramanian met Peter Sterling. A former Freedom Rider and professor of neuroscience at the Perelman School of Medicine, Sterling was “a true intellectual,” Balasubramanian says. He knew everything, was interested in everything, and would talk with anybody.
The pair wrote a series of papers together regarding information processing and transmission. “He’s so quick and so much fun and so lively,” Sterling says of Balasubramanian. “He’s fearless; there’s nothing he won’t try.”
While in Cairo with wife Heather J. Sharkey, professor of modern Middle Eastern and North African history at Penn, Balasubramanian prepared a neuroscience grant and submitted it to the National Science Foundation, “sort of on a whim,” he says. “I put it in from an internet café on an island in the middle of the Nile.” He got the grant and started a research group.
After that, Balasubramanian says, “I was off and running.”
“I was certainly told,” Balasubramanian says of his work in neuroscience, “do not do this before tenure.” But, if he waited, “then I’d be too set my ways,” he says. “I just wouldn’t know enough; it would be too hard to learn; I wouldn’t have the time.”
Younger scientists often ask him about exploring multiple fields, Balasubramanian says. The advice he offers is to “have a central line where you have credibility, where you’ve established that you’re really, really good at what you do, and you can be trusted.” That gives you more latitude, he says.
After that, it’s just sheer discipline. “You’re going to have to wake up earlier than everybody else. You’re going to have to work longer days,” he says. “Otherwise, you know, everybody else is working hard too, and you’ll never be able to achieve the level of expertise and knowledge to be able to do things at that world-class level.”
Balasubramanian wants to see more interdisciplinary collaboration. “Each field trains its students with a certain body of techniques that has been found historically useful in that field,’ he says. “Very often, those techniques also have uses elsewhere, but they don’t know to apply it.”
Traversing borders can be helpful in producing new insights, Balasubramanian says. You can ask questions that people in the field won’t. You might experiment with new ideas or put two disjointed ideas together, he says. “If you’re coming from outside, you have the leeway to do all kinds of silly things. Sometimes, they’re not silly.”
Why not ask new questions and propose new answers? In the end, the data will tell you what’s true. “It gives me comfort to know how things tick.”
Tukufu Zuberi
The Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations and professor of sociology and Africana studies in the School of Arts & Sciences
Tukufu Zuberi is an idealist, with one eye on the greater good. He grew up in Oakland, California, during the 1960s, when the funk music scene was flourishing, along with the Hells Angels and police brutality, often directed at the Black and Chicano populations. “Social tension was very thick,” Zuberi says.
At the nearby Merritt College, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party. Its influence, principles, and free breakfasts quickly traveled through the city and into Zuberi’s neighborhood. The Panthers instilled in him the idea “that I should be a socially responsible human being,” Zuberi says. “I should not only care about myself, but I should care about my community. I should care about the world.”
Zuberi attended San Jose State University, where he took his first class in sociology. The professor “started talking about society and why people do things,” Zuberi says.
At this point, it was the late 1970s. The Civil Rights Movement was ending. African independence was in full bloom and so was the Vietnam War. In the midst of turmoil, being able to reflect on the world and identify patterns “gave me a certain sense of intellectual calmness,” Zuberi says.
As a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. he took his first classes in demography. He was good with numbers and wanted to work in the field of applied statistical analysis, “especially to understand the problems in Africa and among African diaspora populations,” Zuberi says.
Demography fascinated him. “It gave you a view of what was happening and what was about to happen in a simultaneous form,” he says. “It’s aimed at what is going to happen tomorrow. What are we going to have tomorrow?”
Coming to Penn as a research associate in 1989, Zuberi says, he was attracted by the innovative environment and the reputation for demographic analysis of large data sets. He worked on projects relating to understanding family structure, mortality, and birth patterns, using demographic analysis to look at race and diasporic conditions.
He enjoyed the work, he enjoyed his colleagues, but he wanted to address a broader audience, Zuberi says. “My main interest was, How do you engage the public?”
Zuberi found that wider audience through material culture, using sociological methods to facilitate discussion. He curated “Tides of Freedom: African Presence on the Delaware,” which opened in May 2013 at the Independence Seaport Museum, and he became one of the hosts of “History Detectives,” a PBS show exploring the stories behind historical objects. The show specialized in “hidden” narratives, those that are left out of history books.
He later spent four years curating the Penn Museum’s redesigned Africa Galleries which were reinstalled in 2019, introducing contemporary artists from the African diaspora and placing them in dialogue with artifacts from Benin and Ghana.
“The idea here was, ‘Can we do an exhibit about decolonizing the museum using a collection that was built with the colonial mentality?’ And our answer was, ‘Of course we can, and we must embrace this challenge because this is the future of the relevance of the museum,’” Zuberi says. “Loosen it up, get away from that tradition, and think about a world in the future that embraces everyone.”
Today, Zuberi is still curating, still looking at the African diaspora, still thinking about the big questions. “I try to bring this kind of critical tension to every exhibit that I do,” Zuberi says.
His next exhibition, “Fighting for Freedom,” will premiere at the Penn Museum in August 2025 before travelling abroad. The exhibition includes more than 70 ephemeral posters from the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and World Wars I and II, as well as posters from the Black Power and Civil Rights Movement.
“The boat needs to be shook,” Zuberi says. “Listen to what the people are saying. They’re tired of hearing the same old story. So how do we change that narrative?”
Humans are malleable, Zuberi says. Social change is possible. “But we can only change our future by coming to terms with our past,” he says.
Brittany Watson
Associate professor in shelter medicine and community engagement in the Clinician Educator track at Penn Vet and director of the Shelter Medicine and Community Engagement team
Even as an undergraduate, Brittany Watson says, she wanted to explore education, research, and veterinary medicine. “I was always somebody interested in interdisciplinary types of programming,” she says.
Now an associate professor at Penn Vet directing the Shelter Medicine and Community Engagement team, which provides clinical care, education, and conducts research, Watson has found a way to incorporate all three pathways.
As an undergraduate at Duquesne University, Watson enrolled in a dual degree program, earning a bachelor’s in biology and a master’s in education. She started lab research as a first-year student, eventually working in a lab, doing research on transposons in DNA, studying on embryology, and exploring feral cats. “I’m a bit of a dabbler,” she says.
That’s one of the things that attracted Watson to veterinary school. It’s a lot more flexible than other fields, she says. You can explore and switch clinical interests. To become a researcher, “I was going to choose one thing, very narrow, to do this incredible deep dive,” Watson says. “But I felt I was a better person to connect things together.”
Through her experiences at Duquesne and Penn Vet, Watson had externships that helped craft this interdisciplinary pathway. Whether at zoos, aquariums, laboratory animal programs, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “getting that experience helped determine where I wanted to focus and how to integrate those interests,” Watson says.
After earning a degree in veterinary medicine at Penn, Watson worked as the veterinary director of continuing education initiatives at the Charleston Animal Society in South Carolina, the first animal protection organization in the state and one of the first in the country.
She also completed a doctoral degree in education from the University of South Carolina, where she researched science curriculum and the impact of high school outreach by shelters. This was a critical pivot to integrate high-level education and research training in a veterinary medicine career, Watson says.
In 2014, she landed a position at Penn Vet in shelter medicine. Under Watson’s leadership, the Shelter Medicine team expanded and developed the mobile clinic, a travelling 40-foot trailer equipped with medical and surgical capabilities that brings basic animal health care to Philadelphia neighborhoods through shelters and community partnerships.
There are so many organizations in the city that need help, Watson says, and needs shift rapidly. “It made sense for us to have something we could bring to different locations that could be a safe space for students to learn, versus investing in one particular location.”
“Perhaps most importantly,” Watson says, “we have expanded our vision beyond the delivery of veterinary care to include broader contexts of public health, interdisciplinary collaboration, educational outreach, and One Health.”
One Health is the concept that human, animal, and environmental health are intimately connected and that all need to be considered in tandem when addressing interdisciplinary problems. This is a focus at Penn Vet, Watson says, and she’s exciting about bringing people together across fields such as dentistry, social work, medicine, and nursing.
Understanding the interactions between humans, animals, and their environment is crucial to developing solutions to complicated problems, Watson says. She’s here to do what she’s always done: connect the dots.
Amy Hillier
Associate professor at the School of Social Policy & Practice
In March of 1991, a video taken on a Sony camcorder went viral: a grainy, out-of-focus view of Los Angeles’ Interstate 210, where four police officers took turns using a stun gun and batons to beat a man who had been pulled over for driving intoxicated.
The man was Rodney King, and a year later those officers were acquitted by a suburban jury, triggering five days of riots.
That spring of 1992, a young Amy Hillier was preparing to graduate from Middlebury College as a history major. Watching the Los Angeles riots from a television set in Middlebury, Vermont, Hiller was shocked. Hillier says up to that point she had bought into the narrative of gradual improvement in race relations, now she realized she felt out of touch. She remembers thinking, “I need to have a clue.”
That realization led her to move to Washington, D.C., where she spent three years working in a welfare office. “It was everything it needed to be,” Hillier says. “It really connected me to the struggle of poor people and people of color in ways that I hadn’t been.”
Every position that intrigued Hillier listed a master’s degree in social work as a prerequisite, and that led her to Penn’s School of Social Policy and Practice (SP2). Hillier earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in social welfare, using GIS mapping to write a dissertation on historical mortgage redlining.
After graduation, she started to teach, working across SP2, the Weitzman School of Design, and the School of Arts & Sciences.
She eventually ended up in City Planning doing macro social work in design, using GIS to study public health and the built environment. There, Hillier started her longtime work on W. E. B. Du Bois’ “The Philadelphia Negro,” leading walking tours of the historic 7th Ward in Philadelphia, developing curriculum for K-12 students, and creating a board game and documentary alongside district teachers and community partners.
The project is an entry point for talking about historic and contemporary racism, Hillier says. “Inequity is perhaps best understood in a city spatially,” she says. “You can experience it; you can see it. I’m not a scholar’s scholar. I’m not going to sit down and read theory or sit in a coffee shop and read books; I want to be riding my bike around the city. I want to be talking with people. That’s how I make sense of things.”
Alongside her research, Hillier was working on building her family, adopting two children. Her firstborn, assigned male at birth, was gender nonconfirming as early as the child could express herself, Hillier says.
At that point, Hillier and her then-husband did not understand that their daughter was transgender. They started seeing Linda Hawkins, co-director of the Gender & Sexuality Development Clinic, who offered to coach Hillier and her ex-husband through acceptance. “The more I engaged in that process, the more I engaged with my kid,” Hillier says.
The resistance around queerness and transness “comes from parents and adults unwilling and unable to stop and really interrogate their own sexuality and gender,” Hillier says. “What other people do isn’t threatening unless it changes how we feel about ourselves and our understanding of the world. There was something with my child that unlocked a lot of tension in me around gender and ultimately around sexual orientation.”
Hillier took a sabbatical to support her daughter and began working at the Attic Youth Center. “I just saw a place for me,” Hillier says. “This is what I went to school for, to be social change, to advocate for people, to support other people.”
With the youth at Attic, Hillier helped write Policy 252, offering new guidance around gender identity and expression for the School District of Philadelphia. The district accepted the proposed policy verbatim.
“That was the first time I thought, ‘I can make a difference here.’” Hillier, now an associate professor, switched her primary appointment to SP2, where she continues to work on anti-Black racism and trans advocacy. “There’s so much learning and growing for me here. This feels right.”
