Women's Week Wraps Up With Award Ceremony

Tamily Weissman, a concentration advisor for neurobiology and lecturer on molecular and cellular biology, was honored with the fourth annual Spark Award last night at the culminating event of Women’s Week 2010.

Weissman was selected for the award, bestowed annually by Women in Science at Harvard-Radcliffe, on the basis of her contributions to the field of neurobiology and for her role mentoring and inspiring students at Harvard.

“She is wonderful as an advisor and has a personal interest in all her students,” said Francesca R.L. Reindel ’11, secretary of WISHR. “I think having a ceremony to honor an inspiring role model can bring women in science together as a community and motivate us to move forward.”

At the banquet, Weissman spoke about the difficulty of finding a balance between work and personal life, particularly in a largely male-dominated field.

“There were times I felt I had to prove myself more than the men around me, and they took me more seriously once they realized I was smart and capable too,” she said.

Weissman added that women have made great strides in scientific disciplines in recent years, but noted that there are still significantly fewer female tenured professors. At the same time, she cautioned that simply adhering to the traditional metrics of success is not the path for everyone.

“We women should not feel as though we are the ones failing if we do not achieve a certain level of prescribed success,” she said. “We need to embrace, not criticize, both men and women when they think about doing something nontraditional.”

Reindel said that Weissman’s honesty was refreshing.

“You don’t always hear about following something that really makes you happy instead of following an external point of success,” she said.

“I think it’s important for undergraduates to recognize that.”

Several of the week’s events focused on negotiating among career, family, and other parts of women’s lives.

Members of various women’s groups agreed that “Clocks: A Conversation on Balancing a Career with a Life,” along with the Spark Award Banquet, was particularly inspiring.

Elizabeth A.T. McLeod ’10, president of the Seneca—which co-sponsored the week’s events with the Harvard College Women’s Center—said that the events had sparked informal conversations among students about the issues discussed during the week.

“It’s a blast seeing the community of Harvard women coming together year after year,” she said. “Women’s Week is a time for building friendships and sharing ideas in a way that I think carries over to the rest of the year.”

—Staff writer Alice E.M. Underwood can be reached at aeunderw@fas.harvard.edu.