A Hybrid Professional’s duty to Migrant Ancestors

Roger F. Malina, ArtSciLab, Bass School, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W. Campbell

Upon reading “ A neuroscientist’s duty to Black Ancestors’ by Chandler Wright.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp0690

The concept of desirable migration is deeply embedded in my family history, and a trigger

for my first career as a space astrophysicist.

My father was Frank. J. Malina’s; his parents migrated from Central Europe, Bohemia, to

Texas in the 1880s. After WWI Led to the first creation of the Czech republic, they migrated

back to Central Europe. Then the great depression hit, and they migrated back to Brenham,

Texas.

My mother Marjorie Duckworth’s family was from the North of England, in a small village

called Elslack. My mother fled the village because of lack of privacy and motivating

employment. She joined the UK army during WWII and then migrated to Paris as part of the

Team that set up UNESCO. She did not want to work in her father’s textile mill.

My father was the first director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab but fled back to Europe at

the end of WWII motivated by the dream of the United Nations. He was accused of being a

communist by McCarthy and lost his passport and ability to do paid work. He became a

renowned artist introducing emerging technologies into art from electricity to kinetic art.

He then founded the Leonardo publications to champion the work of art that bridged

science and art and technology, and where artists just like scientists wrote about their own

work.

I took over for a while after he died, even though I had no expertise as an Editor.

Migrants often learn by doing not by diploma.

I grew up in a family where changing home locations and changing professions was natural.

My mother taught me mathematics because she had a degree in accountancy, my father

taught me to make model rockets and water wheels and curiosity-driven experimenting.

One day when I got back from elementary school, I saw my father trimming his beard onto

 his painting. He said he was trying to create interesting structures. Just as his PhD advisor

Theodore Von Karman had taught him to describe patterns in turbulence using

mathematics.

My colleague Cassini Nazir has written extensively on how to train peoples curiosity

 ( https://unknowing.design/inviting/ ): my parents were maestros at it.

My father also explained to me that ‘one had to have a high tolerance for strange people.

We live in a culture, where I live in Texas, where migrants are often viewed with suspicion.

And people with different cultures are usually to be watched at a distance.

I research and teach at UT Dallas, where our lab champions migrants ( physical and

Intellectual), but also hybridity or being in “two places’ at once, even amphibian ( walk,

swim fly). Metaphors matter as Dr Tina Qin, now a lab member again, declared in her thesis

applying metaphor theory to data visualization to catch crooks more easily who have

different cultural approaches to thieving.

I got my first degree, a BSc at MIT in Physics. But rapidly joined Saul Rappaport and Hale

Bradt’s  https://physics.mit.edu/faculty/hale-bradt/ MIT space science lab.

I became a space scientist working for NASA at UC Berkeley, the European Space Agency 

and Directed an Observatory in France. Like my father’s first career.

I currently co-operate the ArtSciLab at UTDallas (https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/ ).

Values include heterogeneity as advocated by the US National Institutes of Health (

https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/organization/crs/research-initiatives/team-science-

field-guide/collaboration-team-science-guide.pdf ).

We welcome international students, US military veterans, indigeneous Texas and a variety

of other human characteristics.  

But as reminded by our lab manager Evan Acuna, we hire people on their merits not their

physical characteristics. But by having an open door approach, heterogeneity emerges

without specific action. Our notorious weekly seminar- the Watering Hole- provides a

safe place for people from different disciplines who kill each other all day, to talk and drink

water safely at the oasis that our lab can be.

Students Hiring Students White paper is now legendary; you  will find it our first book

https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/asl-over-the-years/ authored by Swati Anwesha.

My colleague Laura Kim advocates being ‘blobby’ rather than fitting into one box

intellectual or geographical ( https://www.lauraonsale.com/blob.html). We are blobby.

We encourage intellectual migrancy; one lab member has an MA in Physics and is now

earning an MA in Finance. We have professional soccer, basketball, and cricket players

 who transfer their sports expertise to the better operation of the lab and their own

disciplinary careers in cybersecurity and UXUI design and graphic arts.

As explained by neuroscientist Chandler Wright in his Science Past as Prologue, we

Continue in our university so that our shoulders will be prepared for the weight of future

migrants.

 I feel I have a responsibility to my family and ancestors to use the privilege I have

given to enable successful migrancy and heterogeneity and hybridity.

Thank you Chandler Wright for helping me think aloud.