A portrait of a scientist, as an administrator

Being a scientist starts with finding interesting questions to answer, planning and executing research, teaching and mentoring students. But it doesn’t end there, as Jyotsna Dhawan goes to prove.

By Bharti Dharapuram

| Posted on March 6, 2025

An institution is a microcosm shaped by a community of people interacting with each other to identify a common vision and chalking out ways to realize it. However, it is also embedded within the larger fabric of society whose flaws seep through its walls, requiring reformation from the inside, and out. Despite their importance, and the significant time and effort which go into it, these aspects of academic work are often hidden in the shadows.

Jyotsna Dhawan has straddled the two worlds of a scientist and an administrator in a career spanning close to three decades. At the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, she led a research group studying how muscle stem cells are maintained in a quiet state in our body to be called into action during repair and regeneration, which has important implications for disease and therapy. In a life paralleling research, she has held various leadership roles. She was among the scientists who envisioned the Institute of Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (InStem) in Bangalore, and helmed it for several years. She has served as a member of several grant and scientific committees, advisory boards, and headed scientific societies.

Jyotsna speaks to us about managing administrative responsibilities, and the deeper underpinnings of women’s representation in science.

If you want something done, ask a busy person

“When you are looking for a faculty position, you are really looking at it as a scientist,” Jyotsna says. Arriving with an eagerness to dive into science and in the absence of any formal administrative training, it takes time to appreciate aspects of institutional sustenance and regeneration. “In effect, well-thought out and inclusive institutional structures should support and enable scientific work, but it is sadly often not the case,” she adds.

Administrative duties of researchers include planning and decision-making related to student admissions, new faculty search efforts, staff appointments and promotions, scheduling coursework, maintaining institutional facilities, making purchases, and allocation of resources. All of this, while tailoring the institute’s perspective to the larger expectations of funding agencies, yet maintaining a culture of openness and competitiveness in the field. These responsibilities are a huge burden, especially for young faculty beginning their research career, admits Jyotsna. “Some aspects are particularly onerous because they require sitting in judgement of your colleagues,” she says. It can be very distasteful when they fall in the realm of sexual or workplace misconduct, she says. “But one can’t shy away from it, you have to participate in these issues sincerely because it strengthens the institutional mechanisms for dealing with a complex and sometimes demoralizing work environment.”

Young faculty often have a visceral negative reaction to these demands on time, but it is important to take that energy and convert it into something that addresses the issue, she adds. And time plays an important role in teaching the ropes of the job. “Efficiency comes simply by the practice of doing things with as much engagement as you can muster. It doesn’t mean that you will always do the best job, but you do a number of different tasks and do them in a timely manner,” she says. “It is also a trade-off. There is always a balance between whether you think the issue at hand is something you can contribute to with ideas, capability, time and effort, and its long-term impact,” she adds. “If you find yourself putting an A effort on everything you do, you burn out pretty quickly,” she warns.

“There’s a saying that if you want something done, ask a busy person,” quotes Jyotsna. And it couldn’t be more true for a scientist. “If you ask a working scientist what they did this morning, they’ll tell you they signed off on documents, dealt with a committee, edited a research abstract, got funding for a student to attend a conference, met with a colleague, responded to email, listened to complaints, multiple different things. All this, while trying to keep your research front and centre…Each of these, even if some of them sound trivial at first, requires a conscious thought process and engagement,” she emphasises.

All of these happen in the background of academic research and its many demands. And thinking about research needs space and enough room for creativity. “A cluttered mind cannot focus on research questions. Ideas come incrementally, in bursts, and it requires an openness of the mind”, she says.

It would be ideal to wipe away the lens

“As a scientist, the difficulties of getting a lab off the ground are so large that you are not specifically thinking about encountering issues related to gender,” Jyotsna says. “When I joined CCMB, there already were several women faculty who were academically accomplished and strong individuals,” she recollects. “But still a small minority compared to what one might want. That number, unfortunately, hasn’t changed dramatically over the years,” she points out. “In any academic committee or meeting, you are very often the only woman and you get used to it,” she says gravely.

“We live in a social milieu and some of these issues are much larger, and not just limited to women in science,” Jyotsna explains. “It is about how we ensure equitable access, opportunity, and working experience for people with differences, gender being the largest one of them,” she says. “As solutions, I feel there is a greater deal of complexity than we have focused on. There is also a substantial resistance to having open conversations about a supporting environment for inclusiveness, as that is always interpreted as somehow lowering the bar, reducing competitiveness and merit.”

But she has seen some positive changes in the course of her career. “There is now better formalism for understanding the role of gender.” These formal structures, such Vishaka guidelines to deal with workplace sexual harassment, have allowed women to openly raise issues that otherwise would have been difficult. But apart from focusing on a breach of women’s rights, she also feels that we need structures that do not see people through the lens of gender and promote broader inclusion of historically marginalized groups. “The ideal would be that we are able to wipe away that lens.”

“Most of the programs associated with gender issues tend to be focused on female audiences,” Jyotsna says. “But women already know this,” she says with exasperation. She advocates for a more open discussion involving everyone, and feels that gender sensitivity programs are one way to do this at academic institutions. “We need to have these programs done by professionals where there is a space for conversations about women’s self-determination,” she says. She would love to see her male colleagues actively participating in the conversation about women in science. “Every March 8th, we have these programs where a prominent woman scientist is invited to speak to a group of women scientists–a real case of preaching to the choir. Women who have opted for a career in science have already experienced the challenges that are being portrayed.”

Instead, Jyotsna says she would like to see male colleagues as speakers, and more importantly as the audience, taking an active lead in engaging with the challenges. If all institutes can enforce regulatory procedures to perform animal experiments, it is certainly possible to mandate everyone to attend a simple yearly awareness program and engage in a conversation about gender, she stresses.

Jyotsna says that there is a lack of interest in fostering such programs from being strapped for time, and a feeling that addressing these issues distracts us from doing science. “But we do it to our peril, and it leads to a build-up of issues, resentment, and impacts our larger vision of who we are.”

Scientific institutions are a part of a complex sociological system and the solutions are not going to be simple or straightforward, Jyotsna says. “Everyone feels we know the path, because we can all see quite clearly the unremedied problems that face us. But I think it requires an acknowledgement and engagement with a larger set of things from individuals, not just institutional mandates.”

“That larger context is an appreciation of institutional culture: what are the things that you as a scientist find enabling in your environment, and what are the things needing change we need to collectively work on. These are not things that can come from administrative fiat – they require honesty, openness and nonpartisan discussions and the ability to see ones’ colleagues as fellow travellers, not as competitors for institutional resources.”

About the author

Bharti is an ecologist with a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore where she studied how ocean currents and environment shape coastal biodiversity. Following this, she studied arthropod diversity in the forests of the Western Ghats for her postdoctoral research at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad. She has been drawn to language and writing since childhood, which led her to the annual Science Journalism course offered by the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore. During the challenging phases of her PhD research, she found solace and fulfilment in writing about scientific discoveries and the people behind them.