How Actress Mayim Bialik Encourages Girls to Love Science
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CELEBRITY PROFILES OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2018 BY ABBY ELLIN How Actress Mayim Bialik Encourages Girls to Love Science ~e Big Bang ~eory actress is dedicated to inspiring young women to consider science as a career, on and oo screen. In the early 1990s, when she was 15 years old, Mayim Bialik had a life-changing experience. She was the star of Blossom, a sitcom about Blossom Russo, the only daughter of an Italian-American family of three kids. Blossom, whose mother had left the family to pursue a career, was creative and opinionated—not unlike the actress who portrayed her. Mayim Bialik, 42, says a biology tutor on the set of Blossom nurtured her interest in the sciences. But being a TV star wasn't what changed Bialik's life. It was a biology tutor on set who cultivated Bialik's interest in science and gave her the confidence to pursue it. "I was a diligent student, but science didn't come naturally to me," she says. "Because of that, I didn't think it was open to me as a career." That life lesson has stayed with Bialik, who thinks a lot of girls get sidetracked from science because their interest isn't nurtured. Crushing on Science Thanks to that biology tutor, Bialik went on to UCLA after Blossom to pursue an undergraduate degree in neuroscience with a minor in Hebrew and Jewish studies, before getting her doctorate in neuroscience in 2007. But school continued to be challenging. "I was not at the top of the class in college or graduate school," she says. She persisted, however, because science thrilled her. "I specifically fell in love with the action potential and the electrical properties of the neuron when I was in my first semester at UCLA," she explains. "I love understanding the way we think and feel and communicate—and neuroscience is the science of all that." Upon graduating with her PhD, Bialik assumed she was headed for a professorship. But after marrying and having two sons, she and her now ex-husband, Michael Stone, wanted to raise their children without the help of babysitters or daycare, and a teaching schedule didn't provide the flexibility she needed. She wasn't planning to return to acting, but her soon-to-expire health insurance made her reconsider. Connecting with a Character Maybe, Bialik thought, she could take a few acting roles and get insurance through the Screen Actors Guild. She had kept her toe in television, appearing in episodes of Bones, a crime drama that aired on Fox until 2017, and Saving Grace, a drama that aired on TNT until 2010. Later in 2010, her manager got Bialik an audition for The Big Bang Theory, a Mayim Bialik as Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler show she had never seen but with which with Simon Helberg, who plays Howard Joel Wolowitz, an aerospace engineer she felt an instant connection. She liked the and ex-astronaut. Courtesy Penguin subject matter, and the hours were ideal: Random House; CBS Shooting runs from August to April, and only during "school hours." And in an uncanny case of art imitating life, the role was almost too good to be true: She was to play Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler, a late-blooming, brainy, fashion-challenged, socially awkward neurobiologist. Bialik doesn't fully identify with her TV alter ego, but she certainly feels a connection. "I love that Amy is a late bloomer," says Bialik. "She isn't shy about it, and she's really attempting to enjoy her life with all the things she has learned socially with this new group of friends." Bialik is also proud that the show, which ends in 2019 after 12 seasons, depicts many female scientists, such as microbiologist Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz, played by Melissa Rauch, and Sara Gilbert's Leslie Winkle, an experimental physicist. "We love that the show shows a lighter side to people who are often kind of pushed to the outside of society," she says. How to Be a Girl A few years after landing the role of Dr. Fowler, Bialik was approached by a publisher to write a book for adolescent girls and their parents. Called Girling Up: How to Be Strong, Smart and Spectacular, the book, which was published by Penguin Random House in 2017, offers commonsense advice for teens and biological explanations for everyday occurrences, like why you feel butterflies in your stomach when you run into your crush. She drew much of the inspiration for the book from her own years as a nerdy tween and teenager, grappling with normal adolescent issues like her changing body and boys. "There are many books about puberty, but what I would have been interested in as a girl and as a young woman would have been more about the full experience of being female—psychology and sociology and body image and all of those things," she says. That's the book she set out to write. Encouraging Science Bialik is also dedicated to inspiring girls to consider science as a career. "I'm using my visibility to encourage girls and young women to take an interest in science and give them a deeper understanding of what they can do in that world," she says. She was "definitely in the minority" in all of her science classes. To try to combat this, in 2013 she teamed up with DeVry University in Downers Grove, IL, and the HerWorld Initiative to get high school girls excited about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM. Men earn more undergraduate degrees in almost every science and engineering field. In some areas, such as physics and computer science, women earn only 20 percent of undergraduate degrees, according to a 2015 report by the American Association of University Women. As an undergraduate and graduate student, Bialik says she was at times "painfully aware" of the differences between how men and women were treated. Nerd Power The Big Bang Theory's popularity has given Bialik a unique opportunity to share her values with a larger community. To that end, she founded GrokNation.com, a website that covers contemporary issues in a direct, articulate, and "unapologetically nerdy" way, in 2015. Bialik started the site after spending a number of years writing, mostly about parenting and Judaism, for the Jewish website Kveller. She sought a larger platform, and decided to do it herself. On any given day, the site might feature articles about fashion and vegan lipstick alongside stories on mental illness, a subject Bialik writes about often. She's very open about her own struggles with depression, which she has managed with both medication and meditation. She's also a champion of psychotherapy; she stresses the importance of getting counseling and works to combat the stigma surrounding therapy. About the Boys The success of Girling Up led, perhaps inevitably, to a companion book for boys. Called Boying Up: How to be Brave, Bold and Brilliant, the book dispenses no-nonsense advice to teenage boys about their journey from boys to men, including facial and body hair and relationships. The book is "a matter-of-fact mirror that reflects reality and respect, not bewildered embarrassment," notes a Kirkus review published in May 2018. While her first book was based on her own adolescence, her second book draws on her experience parenting 9-year-old Frederick and 13- year-old Miles, who she admits she initially related to as girls. "I was trying to make them operate like girls," she says. "When they were upset, my inclination as a parent and a mom was to hug and talk about it. But their natural tendency was to conquer. This is something they acted out in their play." She works hard to keep the lines of communication open, even when her sons may be reluctant to talk. "I'm trained as a neuroscientist to understand the male and female body," she says. "It turns out I had a lot to learn about boys." Insights Into Prader-Willi Syndrome For her doctorate, Mayim Bialik researched obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in adolescents with Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare genetic disorder characterized by low muscle tone and poor growth early in life, as well as behavioral problems and mild cognitive impairment. Those with the condition, which occurs in about one in every 15,000 births, are insatiably hungry and eat compulsively, and they quickly become obese, says Shawn McCandless, MD, section head for clinical genetics and metabolism at Children's Hospital Colorado and the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora. Newborns with Prader-Willi are floppy. Between the ages of 2 and 5, they develop an obsessive appetite. It takes two to three times as long—and two to three times as much food—for the satiety signal to reach the brain. A Genetic Component "Prader-Willi is caused by a lack of the paternal copy of the small region of chromosome 15, which is typically turned off in the area you get from the mother," says Dr. McCandless. "It's the same chromosome whether you get it from the mother or father, but the version you inherit from your mother has a group of genes that are turned off. Anything that prevents you from having an active copy of chromosome 15 that you inherit from your father causes Prader- Willi." Obsessive-Compulsive Tendencies Through her own research, Bialik discovered that OCD is about four times more prevalent among adolescents with Prader-Willi than in the general population. "Almost every person with Prader-Willi has overly obsessive behavior," says Dr. McCandless. "They hoard things.