ACM-W Above and Beyond: Dr. Veronika Cheplygina’s Journey
Veronika Cheplygina is the head of the PURRlab (Pattern Recognition Revisited) research group where she focuses on meta-research in the fields of machine learning and medical image analysis. She has followed a unique path seeking to live in accordance with her values and push the field to improve. In addition to her academic writings, she shares on social media about her life including frank discussions of open and inclusive science, failure, and cats.
Current role, organization: Full Professor at IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Year of Scholarship: 2013
Country of Origin: Netherlands
Country of residence at the time of receiving ACM-W Scholarship: Netherlands
What has been a highlight of attending the conference utilizing the ACM-W Scholarship?
I had previously attended the conference and was interested in attending again as many people I had cited in my Master’s thesis were expected to attend. I was also excited to travel to Nanjing, China. I was excited to receive the award – I can’t believe I wrote my application in a single draft directly in the web form. Beyond the monetary assistance, I had learned the importance of these honors as currency in academia. While I enjoyed presenting the paper and the discussions, I also learnt of some questionable academic practices. Within the small conference, there had been acceptance rate gaming to make the conference seem more prestigious. If nothing else it was “interesting and informative for how academia works”.
Reflecting back on the conference, did it impact your career path?
The conference came at an interesting point in my career. I had completed my Master’s at Delft University of Technology and was beginning my time as a PhD researcher there. The norm among my classmates was to work as a Big 4 consultant, but after getting more insight into the role I decided that I wanted a position that would challenge me more academically. But an equally important motivation was that “a PhD offered a 4 year contract”. Similarly, the conference experience was one of many on my path to discover what I do and don’t do within academia – for example that I would rather attend workshops than traditional sessions, but that I will not engage with questionable practices because of “the incentives”.
What has been your career highlight? What are you most proud of?
It is somewhat ironic that I write about failure but then I got promoted to full professor. When it seemed I would not get a permanent position after my tenure track, I resigned and believed I was likely leaving academia – I was certainly not searching for academic positions abroad. But then after reading my social media posts about my resignation, a (female) professor reached out and suggested I apply here. The person responsible for hiring, reached out to two of my female co-author peers for reference (rather than my advisors, which I assumed was the typical thing to do).They both responded that they could not give an impartial reference which was most likely a reference in itself.
What aspects of your career have you found challenging?
The advice to persevere no matter what is one that I don’t find useful. The bar of expectations moves every year. Instead I suggest advice I received from a colleague who did her PhD a few years earlier to seek “not what you want to do, but who you want to be, with what values”. This pointed me away from several employment options throughout my career. There have been occasions where I chose to leave the expected path. When many people look at academia they may not realize how their dataset might only consist of the examples that “made it”. Their view is influenced by survivorship bias and has missing data. The pipeline in academia is leaky and many people exit the path over time. Your gender, country where you were born, and/or disability might create barriers for you. I have had obstacles throughout my career related to complex relationships and mental health challenges.
Was the connection to ACM-W helpful or important in any immediate and lasting way?
While it was not directly through ACM-W, I have recognized the importance of mentorship and role models. In my life several mentors were instrumental in my deciding to pursue a postdoc. Currently, I am mentoring female master’s students who could apply for the ACM-W scholarship to present their thesis at a workshop on fairness in medical imaging. Even though they are not currently interested in PhDs, it is possible that they may be interested in a few years.
If you would like to know more about Veronika you can check out her blog or one of her lectures:
