Being a mother and a scientist

I'm very excited about the upcoming book on being a mother and a scientist - a collection of essays by scientists (including me) who are also mothers on the different ways they manage to do both. It's slated to come out in the spring of 2008, and they are currently looking for images for the cover. Here are the ones I submitted:

Often when I bring the girls into lab with me, they draw little pictures and tape them up everywhere. This is really fun as I sometimes don't notice them until the next day. This flower is one example of a drawing I found after their visit.



It's impossible to remove those aspect of me that are a Mom, the skills that I've learned mothering, from my other non-Mom interactions and it's impossible to remove the scientist in me from the non-scientist interactions. This is why I feel that this photo embodies what it is to be a scientist and a mother - a lot of being a scientist is a curiosity about the world, and here I am sharing that curiosity with one of my children.