CBER Lunchbox Podcast - Season 2. Conversation with Pep Serra-Diaz

Check out the CBER Lunchbox Podcast, season 2 on YouTube and Acast. You can find the CBER Lunchbox Podcast also on Acast, Google podcasts, Spotify and Audible.

In episode 3 of this season, I am chatting with Josep (Pep) Serra-Diaz who is an assistant professor at AgriParisTech in France. After getting his PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Pep started a journey that ended up taking his research on vegetation dynamics from local to global scale, from experiments to models and big data. We discuss real-world impact as an academic, his journey from research assistant to engineering company to PhD, and the challenges of translating science into forest management actions. We also discuss teaching translational ecology, researching across different academic systems, the advantages and disadvantages of the French engineering school system and being gay in academia. You can find the transcript of this conversation below.

Translating research into action and being gay in academia

00:00:02 Silvia Ceausu

Welcome to the CBER Lunchbox Podcast.

00:00:05 Silvia Ceausu

I’m your host Silvia Ceausu. Today I’m speaking with Pep Serra-Diaz, assistant professor at AgroParisTech in France, and a researcher in plant ecology and global change. Welcome Pep!

00:00:17 Pep Serra-Diaz

Thank you.

00:00:21 Silvia Ceausu

So first tell us a bit about your current research and your current research interests and what you’re working at in at AgroParisTech.

00:00:31 Pep Serra-Diaz

So right now I’m working on how climate change and global change more generally, so basically how climate and humans might affect forests particularly, but woodlands in general and the way we do that it’s trying to max experiments, so field experiments, modeling, large-scale simulation modeling and, as well as correlative or statistical models. We’re trying to understand is a little bit like how this whole labyrinth of the factors and drivers like fire, like winds, like all these disturbances, also including humans might affect our woodlands in terms of their diversity, their composition, their structure. How all these landscapes are gonna change? We focus…. So basically, in temperate and Mediterranean systems especially, but I’ll be happy to work hopefully soon in more tropical dry forests in general.

00:01:36 Silvia Ceausu

So you’re working both at large scale, but also locally. Do you do field work?

00:01:40 Pep Serra-Diaz

Yeah, so basically our work is from landscapes to global scale.

00:01:48 Silvia Ceausu

What sent you down this path of research? Is this what you have been doing since your PhD?

00:01:54 Pep Serra-Diaz

I’ve always been working with models and vegetation and woodlands, but of course I was lucky enough to go through this path through, you know, different experiences during my PhD, but before that too. And also during different postdocs at different institutions. So basically I got super interested in that through of course maybe like most or a lot of us like you have a really nice professor who’s engaging. That was at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and I had like a landscape geobotany professor who liked to just put pictures there and try to explain what do you see there, why is this species there? Why do you think this forest is here? Why are those fields or agricultural fields here? And through interpreting the landscape, I realized like when you do urban planning and everything, there’s a history behind. Why the things are that way and also he was also linking that to the big mass of climate change and how all our landscapes might change. So that’s what started, somehow that triggered this part to try to learn more about that and try to be, you know, aware of what’s happening you know, in our mountains, in our landscapes. So that’s how it all started. Then you know, I just went through a period in which, uh, I was doing well I finished my bachelors and then I said, like, well, I did some research job like as a research assistant for several labs in geography. But then I said like hey, I’m fed up of universities this is like too much talking and not much doing. And so I did go to work at the private sector, an environmental engineering company. I was a consultant together with architects, urbanists and as well as forest engineers. And I was working at this engineering company just to providing like environmental impact assessments and that was really cool. I mean, I felt like, you know I was doing things like projects that started and ended, and things where I was working to try to change some of the projects so that there was less impact, and trying to enhance biodiversity in some of, like, you know, urbanization processes.

00:04:24 Pep Serra-Diaz

That was really cool for a while, but then after some time I got a little bit bored because it looked like things had a very limited time. So you know, while that was very rewarding after some time I felt like, well, we’re doing this, we know that this project needs to end after six months, but there’s so many questions to be answered yet and I’m not sure if this is as good as it could get, right? So that’s what triggered me to go into the path of a PhD and then just started my PhD in Barcelona and then on distribution of species and how that might change with climate change? I had the opportunity to visit several labs in Copenhagen, in Portugal, also in the United States where I got my first postdo. And the cool thing I think it was like through the different postdocs, which is the best part of your research career I have to say, at least for me, that was how I kind of spanned the breadth of things and issues that I study.

00:05:27 Pep Serra-Diaz

So one postdoc on microclimates and forests and how climates vary at very short time spans and short distances, and how that affects biodiversity protection and the dynamics in woodlands. Then another one on landscape ecology at Harvard University, which was more about like how forest and woodlands might change through with different simulation models, and it got really geeky and that was really interesting. And then at Aarhus university as a postdoc trying to study biodiversity but at huge scales, global scale with big data and stuff like that. So you know, first postdoc was more on experiments and things like that. Last postdoc was totally on modeling. The middle of the postdocs was halfway, and so I tried to integrate all those things. That’s how I got through this career. I mean, I was lucky I guess.

00:06:27 Silvia Ceausu

You talked a bit about the impact working in the private sector. Do you feel you have an impact as well as a researcher?

00:06:36 Pep Serra-Diaz

I do, it’s just…. I think it takes longer to see that impact. It’s just the time scale is very different, and while at some point in my life I needed to have something more tangible, something that there is a product here that I see I know after six months or four months, sometimes 15 days, you need to have something out there. Right now. I feel like the impact it’s a little bit like it’s more longer term. Also I think it has an impact when I shifted a little bit from, I am starting to shift a little bit from going from more, more like a papers perspective or project perspective to also try to engage with people in the field. This is something that we do also in in our teaching, but also something that we do also with, you know forest managers and people who are now, especially right now for us who work on climate change, people are starting to ask questions, like: well, OK, I have this piece of land. How the hell am I gonna do this? And that’s where you started to confront, to give answers, not for the 2100 but actually for right now and the end of the day. It’s like, well, what do I do with these trees and what do I do with these trees right now? You know and, and that’s where you know, you start to realize that as a scientist you don’t have of course all the answers, but you need to work across different people with different perspectives. So trying to combine both, it’s the way I do it, but as a scientist, I see that the impact of you know of what we do it’s longer term so you have to be more patient sometimes.

00:08:26 Silvia Ceausu

What are the climate change impacts on forestry in in France, in the areas where you working, is it? Do you expect a change in species or do you? Do you expect a change in climate conditions?

00:08:40 Pep Serra-Diaz

Well, there’s a lot of these things we don’t know. I mean, I think in general that could apply to a lot of other forests, but it depends where you are in France. The forest is very productive, so there’s like a production issue there. Like you know, wood needs to come from somewhere and you either import it from the tropics or you try to have your own, you know, which is what they’re trying to do, but at the same time you know that’s a problem for conservation, depending on what rate you do it and how and where do you put that. So where do we put the effort for extraction of the resource versus where do you know…. the land sparing/land sharing thing that you know we’ve been through that for many years. But so basically like the questions regarding climate change is a little bit like in terms of forest is like: what is the rate and what kind of management we are trying to pursue here; what rate should we be extracting and identifying target tree? How do you cut them so that there’s less of an impact? Big questions on how and under which conditions for us we will be able to self-sustain and regenerate? Or you might need some help whether the species that have been planted actually in the past are actually a good idea. We see they’re not anymore. So basically there’s this question of changing species versus changing the sources of the species. So one one of the things we, the big question is like whether you want to change to a different kind of system with new species, or whether you want to give it a shot at trying to get to a different provenance of the same species because different populations of the same species might be adapted differently.

00:10:36 Pep Serra-Diaz

Of course, when you talk about trees, you’re talking about, you know these are organisms that you know even when it’s gonna take 40 to 50 years till you eventually get some you extract. So that is something that you don’t want to get it wrong, right? Because it takes a while. There’s other questions regarding like under which management conditions we are more resilient to forest disturbances including like fires or wind. It’s also like a question of not individual land owners, but also like community in terms of like it doesn’t really matter….this is something we tried to talk about a little bit…..doesn’t really matter what you do individually if your neighbor goes a different strategy and under which conditions, a diversity of strategies enhances the resilience of the whole system? Sometimes it’s not a matter of everyone doing the same thing. Might be you know at a larger scale, kind of risky, if we get it wrong. So these are like key questions you know also in the changing of species, I think sometimes we forget that changing species and resource system it’s a little bit it takes a little bit of energy. I mean, I think that for some of us like, well, you change species to adapt to climate change. But for instance sometimes changing to a different species the silviculture, which is has a lot of cultural implications of that species, it’s not present in that country, so you know you might change to a different species, but we don’t really know whether that wood is actually we could use them, if we have the infrastructure to actually use that the wood that we could extract from that species. It’s kind of complicated and sometimes you know that it’s, well, you see it has a lot of ramification.

00:12:27 Silvia Ceausu

I know that a large part of your job is also teaching, so can you tell us a bit about how your work looks like, how much of it is teaching, how much of it is research?

00:12:40 Pep Serra-Diaz

That’s a hard question. I don’t know how to count teaching. I mean if I were…. so just to put it this way, like there’s out of the year, there’s three months in which teaching is the main thing. And especially where I am, because so there’s one thing that I’m really happy and proud to be working at this institution is that we do a lot of translational ecology, so there’s a part of teaching which would be like a course with their labs, you know, computer labs or field lab, you know. There’s another course that I’m teaching that it’s based on basically project based learning and it’s a translational project. So basically what we do with students, it’s like we create like a small company or a little corporation if we want it. And every year we work with a, you know, a Regional Park or a natural park. We develop like the target, the goals and then what we do.

00:13:42 Pep Serra-Diaz

It’s like they establish, like you know, the calendar they establish like a system of, you know how we’re going to communicate. They organize the whole project. We go to the field in that place. We take measurements for 15 days and then, you know, they write a report, but basically it’s a management report where these are the kind of actions with prioritization, so it’s a project from A-Z. And we present that project to the municipalities, to the natural park managers and so far it’s super rewarding for them and for me because you see things that they’ve been applied, right?

00:14:23 Pep Serra-Diaz

So for instance, just to give you a little bit of an example like last year we went to this small protected site. It was a Natura 2000 site where they wanted to… they had several issues regarding like how do we conserve forests here when we have a lot of priorities and we see that there’s like wood encroachment, but we still don’t wanna get the forests out of there because then they’re we’re gonna have landslides. And there’s also climate change. There’s also fire. So what they did is like they created like they have a low so they created like a little company for the whole year with a logo and an e-mail, really professional. We went there. We took some measurements of the wood encroachment. We did a diagnosis of which sites and on which conditions wood encroachment would make sense. And what would be the potential actions regarding like you know, introduction of sheep, introduction of …well, different cattle in general.

00:15:19 Pep Serra-Diaz

So they worked with people, so they did interviews, they worked with data, ecological data, they worked with models. They did also some climate change models. We have 30 people working, even if it’s for a month on a project, there’s and you know….

00:15:31 Silvia Ceausu

That’s 30 students working…

00:15:32 Pep Serra-Diaz

30 students, yeah. I like to call them also people because at that point I feel like they’re almost professionals, right? So I’m coordinating that a little bit, but it’s really their job and I’m there just to enhance the learning process.

00:15:50 Silvia Ceausu

So you’re doing less actual teaching in class, and a lot of it is project based?

00:15:56 Pep Serra-Diaz

So half of it it’s project based and half of it is more like teaching in class and then computers, which I also like. Depends. I really enjoy it. It’s some part of the job where, uh, well, I’ve always been interested in, you know, education sciences so for me, the learning process in itself, it’s already…..it’s all science in itself and I just get to, you know, try and experiment new things every time, every year. And that’s really cool. And it’s also like it helps the professor sometimes. I don’t know how others feel about that but it kind of anchors you to the reality. At some point, you know, you’re like teaching things…… like when I teach, sometimes climate change and climate change adaptation I always get like some of these like simple and naive looking questions, but they’re super difficult to answer from students, right? These questions that are like: ohh OK, yeah, I never thought about that. And so they kind of inspire me.

00:16:56 Pep Serra-Diaz

I really like that also, there’s something where you know, as I was saying before, sometimes the pure academic knowledge in itself, it takes a little bit of time to get it right and ready [for] implementation. There is where you see that when people are learning things like that is where you see that your job is also very valuable. So yeah, I don’t know. I find it super cool. It’s really hard to juggle with all the you know, duties that you have as a professor, uh, at least, uh, you know, a assistant professor, but I think it’s totally worth it, you know, for me.

00:17:39 Silvia Ceausu

What’s the thing that you find the most challenging or [that] you like the least about teaching?

00:17:44 Pep Serra-Diaz

I don’t know, it’s hard to answer. I think sometimes what I really dislike is that when you teach, you are part of a bigger structure that that you need to organize all the schedules with a lot of other people. And sometimes things don’t make sense in terms of pedagogy: why do we do this first? And it’s basically a matter of, you know, bureaucracy, so that’s the part that I don’t like. Also, I think that I get a little bit of frustrated sometimes with certification and evaluation in terms of like how I like to, you know assess people. It’s, you know, it’s different. So the grading part sometimes it’s a little bit, uh, frustrating. And then you realize all the issues that come with it, I mean, there’s a whole science on how to grade and how you wanna do it, and sometimes you like to do it better, but there’s no time for it. Or there’s you know bureaucratic or scheduling constraints and you can do it the way you want it, but you know, you have to live with that.

00:18:51 Silvia Ceausu

You have so much experience across several research and education systems. And the French academic system is more focused on elite engineering schools and you’re actually working at one of these elite engineering schools. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of such a system?

00:19:12 Pep Serra-Diaz

That’s a really difficult question, because, uh, well….. OK advantages…. what I see as an advantage? It’s I think a little bit obvious like you get some, you can go really far in the content let’s say of some things because some of these things and these people have been highly trained and they’re like super, you know, good students in the sense of, you know, they’re fast learners. And they’re quick and they give, you know, fast responses. And because they have been highly trained, let’s say you could go further with some things. Just to give you an example….. like you know I could be, you know, just a lab on how species are going to change their distribution and then you prepare some exercise. Typically here in a lot of places you need to explain like how to code and, you know, and all these like R basics, whereas here, this is given, you know.

00:20:24 Silvia Ceausu

The students already come with this knowledge

00:20:28 Pep Serra-Diaz

And those who don’t, they learn it in 48 hours because they’ve been coding in another language…. just to give you an example, right? That’s the general picture. Not everyone but you know…. Also, you know they’re like genuinely interested. They like studying a lot, you know, so that’s like the good part.

00:20:37 Pep Serra-Diaz

The bad part? I think in general is that the range of perspectives that you can find when you have a diverse classroom is diminished, you know, and the range of experiences. Also the different kind of ways of learning of different people. You know it’s a little bit like they’ve been so much trained into learning one way that sometimes….. I mean it’s really comfortable for the teacher, right, in a way. But because you have less diversity, sometimes, you know, you need to address different kinds of types of intelligence and different types of…. But yeah, but I think there’s a lot of other things that we are missing when you just don’t have this kind of diversity.

00:21:28 Silvia Ceausu

So you find that your students have similar backgrounds? Very similar backgrounds?

00:21:34 Pep Serra-Diaz

Compared to other institutions where I found at least that’s my experience. It’s really hard to generalize on a sample size of 1, which is me. But compared to you know I’d say yeah, compared to that, yeah, there’s…. I just, you know you miss this kind of diversity in class, sometimes, you know in terms of the learning process. Not to mention you know ethnicity or other kind of diversities.

00:22:03 Silvia Ceausu

You’ve also worked quite a bit in United States, right? For how long have you worked in the US?

00:22:10 Speaker 3

So I did three months during my PhD and then I was there for…. Uh……four years, something like that … for five years.

00:22:22 Silvia Ceausu

So what did you find most surprising about working and living in the United States?

00:22:30 Pep Serra-Diaz

Well, the most surprising thing that…. What I really liked…. There’s a lot of things that I liked, at least as a European, it’s the sense of possibility. It’s a little bit naive because we underneath we know that not everything is possible but at some point everyone makes you believe and everyone around you is kind of a dreamer where they say you have an idea and everyone’s job is almost to push you to get to that idea and that dream of yours. Whereas I found that in Europe sometimes the ideas are like very closely examined and sometimes in a negative way, and I don’t think people mean wrong. You know it’s not that they mean bad here, it’s just that they are trying to analyze it so to make it better, but in the negative way. Whereas there it’s just this sense of possibility that you could do anything you wanted.

00:23:35 Pep Serra-Diaz

If you know if it’s a good idea, it will work and everyone’s work is to make that happen. That’s the thing that I miss the most. So the other thing where at least I felt like they don’t really care a lot about nationalities and things like that, it’s really like an open system. It’s very open and in that regard it makes you feel at home right away somehow.

00:24:15 Silvia Ceausu

And you find that that’s less the case in Europe?

00:24:19 Pep Serra-Diaz

In Europe, yeah. I mean, cultures are very strong in Europe and heritage it’s very important. So you know there’s things that you know, wouldn’t happen here, you know. I, you know I was at the time, for instance, just to give you an example at Arizona State University. There was a new president coming in and you know, he just redone, remodeled all the structure of the departments and mixed anthropologies with evolutionary ecologists. And he did like: we need a new thing. This would be almost impossible to think about that, at least in the places where I’ve worked in Europe, right? Because there’s departments with their weight, there’s a weight of heritage and bureaucracy and people, and just less flexible. Everything is more structured here, whereas there, everything is more flexible, let’s say.

00:25:16 Silvia Ceausu

And what did you find the most challenging or the most difficult about living in the United States and working there?

00:25:24 Speaker 3

I didn’t find anything particularly difficult to be honest. I mean, I think some people might, you know, I’ve heard some people that struggle with the idea of, like you know, your dedication to your work life is really high compared to Europe. And maybe, you know, when you want to have more like a structured family in the European sense of family maybe, or like the Southern European, you know, that might be difficult and you know there’s not a lot of like, uh, social benefits. It’s more about like the work-life balance there that people struggle and also the idea that you’re basically on your own, so there’s no safety net, so for good and bad you know. So there’s people who deal really well with that and there’s others who don’t. But I didn’t find anything of this system particularly difficult there. Also, I was a postdoc, so you know it’s a very different, you know…. I mean probably if you talk to professors in the US, might tell you different stories.

00:26:43 Silvia Ceausu

In what way do you think it would be different as a professor?

00:26:46 Pep Serra-Diaz

So yeah, so for me as a postdoc, basically, I was really lucky to work with people that I really liked. All my supervisors have been really cool and my collaborators, and basically they were helping me a lot and they would…. I never struggled with anything about bureaucracy. I never struggled about like you know, money or anything like that. So my job was to do research nonstop and their job was to create the best conditions possible, but I was not attending faculty meetings. I was not attending, you know, all these other things that come with the job. You know, once you get to the professorship so you grow up in a different way, I don’t know how it would be now.

00:27:35 Silvia Ceausu

There’s never really been as much discussion as now about diversity and inclusion and it really looks like, especially in the United States, that’s a more advanced discussion than in Europe. Is that how you feel? Do you think the discussion related to that is more advanced than here?

00:27:56 Pep Serra-Diaz

Yeah, I think. Yeah, it’s more present in academia, certainly than in here for a lot of historical reasons, of course, and also systemic issues of the United States. You know you can’t obviate the fact that you know a lot of racism is in place [as] in Europe. But I’d say that in Europe for everything it’s kind of a milder version sometimes. But yeah, I think in the United States they have those things more sorted out, whereas in here our traditions have not been really…. I mean they have hampered, you know, the way we talked about this openly, but it’s quickly changing, you know? So basically, just to give you an example, because I’m talking like really… But I think that in Europe the tradition is like…. the assumption is that we’re all equal, we all have the same rights on paper and you know, and because of that, we don’t want to think about who you are and everything, because we are all the same, you know? That’s why, for instance, when I recruit, it’s really hard for me to recruit based on gender or recruit based on other kind of minorities. I can’t, the law does not allow me to add that because what they say is that you can’t advertise on that because then you’re creating discrimination, even if it’s positive. So you have to be aware where you are, you can do it anyways and things are quickly changing, but I think that Europe still need to learn that basically it’s not that we’re all equal, it’s that we’re all different, and that’s what’s beautiful about it.

00:29:57 Pep Serra-Diaz And so that’s our job is to create like this heterogeneity, right? Like we talk about working with biodiversity. It’s basically the same. You know you want just to create as many backgrounds, people coming from, you know, different backgrounds, different experiences. And also boost, you know, that there’s people who have been, you know, not banned from academia but really hampered through systemic and structural issues and we need to break those barriers.

00:30:30 Silvia Ceausu

So you cannot add to your job descriptions, for example, that we encourage people from, I don’t know, different cultural backgrounds to apply or women or different sexual orientations?

00:30:44 Pep Serra-Diaz

Yeah yeah, so basically I do add that line where, you know, I encourage minorities in science, especially in engineering and forestry and forest sciences, I encourage them to apply. But I think that sometimes for the official positions, you know, when you get civil servants and things like that this is not part of, this cannot be part of the advertisement.

00:31:15 Silvia Ceausu

So as a as a gay man in academia, but also as a teacher of young people starting their education in university and so on, do you think there [are] particular measures that we can take to make everyone feel more welcome, to attract people, considering this limitation in terms of employment?

00:31:39 Pep Serra-Diaz

Well, I’m not an expert there, but you know, uh, there’s certainly a lot of things that we could do in our teaching practices. And also as well as in our, you know, daily life as you said, as a gay man, I mean, I’m not someone who I could say that I struggled with that, but certainly I’ve seen a change. You know, sometimes a lot of people did not wanted to talk about that, like they feel like they don’t want to talk about…. It’s almost like talking about sex with your colleagues, right? It’s just like: no. Some people feel really uncomfortable when like just you know, some comments are not appropriate, some comments are not really cool. And I think that’s just the fact of being there helps a lot. I mean, it helped a lot. Some of my colleagues too. Just shift, you know or realize that, oh OK, so that’s not really cool.

00:32:35 Pep Serra-Diaz

So unless you don’t have like one-on-one experience, everything on paper is just very theoretical. Now things we could do. Basically you know things that I’ve implemented. I just take the class list, the student lists, and I just go through it, going only using last names and make them tell you their first name, so you make sure that you’re not calling someone something they don’t want to be called, so you know, they tell me their names and their pronouns. This is something that I do because we don’t have the system to put their own pronouns. This is something that helps quite a lot and a lot of students told me. Also I’m being open about like who you are. You know, some people take it, like “ ohh, I don’t discuss private life with students”. And it’s just, well, I don’t discuss my private life either. I just, I acknowledge, you know who I am and what my pronouns are and where I was born and where I was raised and just as part of like the context. And that’s especially important for some of those project-based learning experiences, because sometimes I’m with them in the field for 20 days, so you have to develop a little bit like this confidence.

00:34:00 Pep Serra-Diaz

And also I guess you know, also, for me data it’s really important. I think that we need to track, because otherwise this diversity efforts, they’re in vain if you cannot have proof of evidence right? And this is something I’m struggling with, like here, like trying to just look at the numbers. Just write down and see. So yeah, I think that just being open about who we are, encouraging recruitment, recruit people from different ethnicities, gender identities, and all other kind of minorities. And I think that also in Europe it it’s something that probably maybe in the US we don’t talk so much about it but also cultural minorities. You know, cultural minorities are important.

00:35:01 Silvia Ceausu

What do you mean by cultural minorities?

00:35:04 Pep Serra-Diaz

So there’s groups that having minoritize sometimes. In Europe, there’s a lot of like you know what I’m talking is just like people coming from cultural backgrounds. Like you could say France, right? Let’s say France and you’re getting a French person and we call it French, but within France and we know Europeans quite well, there’s quite a huge difference. And sometimes for instance, the fact that you have an accent is perceived as like you’re someone from the field, or you’re not very cultured, right? Or sometimes you know the way you express yourself it’s different, you know, and these kind of biases should be somehow erased by recruiting people from different cultural backgrounds. Well, cultural backgrounds and cultural origins. You know, I’m Catalan. I’m also from a language minority in Spain. I think it’s just a matter of acknowledging that diversity in a different level.

00:36:05 Silvia Ceausu

Do you have a Catalan accent in Spanish?

00:36:11 Pep Serra-Diaz

Yeah, at least my partner thinks so, so I guess so.

00:36:20 Silvia Ceausu

Do you think that your Catalan accent affects the way you’re treated in Spain?

00:36:25 Pep Serra-Diaz

Depends who. I don’t think in academia I don’t think in academia, at least in my experience. It did not happen. But as a regular citizen it has.

00:36:40 Silvia Ceausu

Have you experienced in the last years any kind of direct discrimination? Do you think that’s still a problem in academia? Or it’s more about openly talking about, how do we do diversity and inclusion?

00:36:58 Pep Serra-Diaz

I myself have not. Also, maybe because of Corona I was at home so… But I have not really experienced direct discrimination about that. Not really in in academia. Sometimes I wonder, you know how, especially you know I don’t do a lot of social sciences, but sometimes, you know, I work with some people in the field and I always get the assumption that I’m a heterosexual person and I have to use different, you know ways. And I perceive a change in some people, I perceive that like they are…. the automatic reaction is: well, I don’t care. It’s like you don’t have to justify yourself. It’s OK, you know, but you know, I know that somehow it changes their view.

00:38:05 Pep Serra-Diaz

You know sometimes, they thought they were getting a white male, forester scientist. Uh, coming and see that and all of a sudden that’s what they get right? And it’s just like wow. But then you know this is like the first moment, so I don’t take that defensive, you know, I’ve been through that so I don’t take it in a defensive way. I think it’s just… I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and it’s just their surprise because of a matter of statistics. They don’t get a lot of those maybe. And then after that you know I just, you know, engage [in] a conversation. It’s more about the difficult thing. And I I’ve heard also some women talking about that. I don’t know if that’s your case, but that sometimes I feel like under some circumstances you need to do more than the rest because you need to prove yourself to the rest.

00:39:05 Pep Serra-Diaz

So typically, right? Yeah, you need to walk faster. You need to endure more. You need to climb the tree higher. You need to be able to show that you can core trees as good or more than the rest because to show them that you know, and sometimes that’s a little bit tiring. I’m more relaxed that way right now, but, but definitely that’s something.

00:39:31 Silvia Ceausu

Just one last topic. You mentioned briefly work-life balance related to academic work in in the US. Is that something you’re actively pursuing right now, what do you do to kind of relax from work or kind of just take a break from work.

00:39:51 Pep Serra-Diaz

It’s a good question. I’m actually well, I do a lot of, I mean, basically I do a lot of sports like running. I like basically running and just get as much…. go dancing with some friends. Try to have my little… I mean something that I’m trying right now it’s just to have a little pause just to have some kind of rite of passage from work to non-work stuff, you know, sometimes like 10 minutes meditation or things like that just to allow my brain to, you know detach from all my thoughts that come through the day. And it’s really hard I have to say. Because I think, our level of you know, engagement with our brain is so hard that it’s just like… you can’t just stop it and say, you know, stop. You know it’s not like stop running and you stop running. It’s something that it’s just on the back of the brain, your computer’s working. So anyway, so yeah, that’s what I do. You know basically a little bit of sports, seeing friends, just family and running.

00:41:03 Silvia Ceausu

Thanks so much Pep. This was a wonderful conversation and thank you so much for joining.

00:41:05 Pep Serra-Diaz

Thank you Silvia.