End of an Era: Carnegie’s Goodbye Stanford Symposium

Earlier this year, dozens of alumni from Carnegie’s former departments of Global Ecology and Plant Biology gathered on the Stanford University campus to look back on eight decades of collaboration and discovery. The gathering represented current researchers, as well as past postdocs, grad students, and faculty members, who reported on their recent work and shared some of their favorite community-building memories.

From lab-made “lemondrops” to late-night jam sessions, attendees reminisced about the culture that made Carnegie’s presence at Stanford so special. And they uniformly celebrated Carnegie’s long-standing commitment to fostering an environment where intriguing scientific mysteries could be explored from new angles and novel career directions could be safely pursued. Many alumni talked about how they have replicated aspects of the Carnegie way of doing things in their current academic and industry labs.

“I was thinking about how rare it is to have a space for experimentation and failure, and dreaming and innovation, and thinking about what it is that contributes to that,” said Margaret Torn of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory during the gathering’s lunchtime memories session. She worked with founding Global Ecology Director Chris Field as a Stanford postdoc in the 1990s.

In the afternoon, Dominique Bergmann, a former Carnegie postdoc and, later, adjunct faculty member who is now a Stanford professor shared a scan of her first offer letter from Carnegie, as well as a job listing from another Carnegie department. Together, they are emblematic of the institution’s approach, she said, paraphrasing the ad to include everyone in the room: “We just have the insight, resources, and courage to investigate the margins of what is feasible and respectable. And so, I think that is what I aspire to.”

The day-long program also featured a display of historic artifacts, including a French pressure cell, invented by Carnegie plant biologist Stacy French, as well as a selection of archival photographs and guestbooks from the institution’s former Inverness retreat, which community members were able to reserve for spending time with friends and family away from work.

“What I think has been so wonderful and unique about the institution is that it had one foot in being a major high-powered scientific institution and another foot … in being a family,” said Field, who is now the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford. “And that that duality has just been the secret of the institution’s success, of this site’s success.”

At the end of the day, a surprise was revealed by Staff Scientist Devaki Bhaya, who had worked with a local artist to create a painting about Carnegie’s legacy, not just at Stanford, but worldwide.

Special thanks to the Celebration of Science organizing committee—Liat Adler, Andrea Citrini, Jeffrey Dukes, Andrea Nebhut, Terri Tippets, and Renate Weizbauer—for all their work in making this program a success.