Episode 40: Pregnancy and Career

In this episode: Two Computer Scientists, one a Professor and the other an entrepreneur, talk about how they navigated their pregnancy at a critical time in their respective careers. Featuring lots of advice! 

Episode Guide

In this Episode: Pregnancy can affect the career of women researchers and entrepreneurs, with some choosing to (alas) abandon one for the other. In this episode we talk to two distinguished Computer Scientists: one a Professor and the other a successful Entrepreneur. They describe how they navigated this critical stage of their lives: having their first baby while also simultaneously being at a pivotal stage of their careers. This episode contains amazing and concrete advice! Featuring: Thamar Solorio (Prof U. Houston) and Soodeh Farokhi (Founder C2RO and VP Nakisa).

• mm.ss: Segment Info (Index)
• 1.20: Act 1 – Thamar Solorio, Professor U. Houston (Immigrant from Mexico to USA)
  • Having a baby in her first semester as Assistant Professor, 2009! 
  • “Maternity leave in the US (academia) is non-existent.”
  • What helped stabilize things after that hectic first semester as faculty?
    • “Dream job”
• 7.26: Act 2 – Soodeh Farokhi, Founder C2RO and VP Product at NAKISA (Immigrant from Iran to Canada)  
  • “Have an empowered plan… there will be no panic for the VCs”
  • “We need to be agents… we should not be passive as women. We need to have an impact. We need to talk about it. We overcame many challenges, and why are we not sharing it with others.”
• 13.17: Wrap up.

Episodes Like This One 

This is a remix episode from Season 2. If you’re interested in hearing the full interviews with these two Computer Scientists, they are available respectively in Episode 10 and Episode 34 of our podcast.

IYou may also like the other remix episodes of Season 2 (see section “Recently on Season 2” below).

Stay tuned for more remix episodes coming up during summer 2022!

Featured in this Episode

• Thamar Solorio, Professor of Computer Science at University of Houston. And in 2021-2022 a Visiting Scientist at Bloomberg Labs. [LinkedIn] [Twitter]. Renowned researcher in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.
  • Thamar Solorio’s Full Interview: Episode 34
  • Research Areas: Natural Language Processing (or NLP), Machine Learning (ML).
  • Awards
    • 2014 NSF CAREER award
    • 2014 Denice Denton Emerging Leader ABIE Award, a Recognition by the Anita Borg Institute
    • National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT) Fellowship for MS and PhD studies in Mexico, 2000-2005
    • Program Committee Co-Chair of NAACL 2019, the topmost conference in computational linguistics
  • Thamar Solorio’s Immigrant Journey
    • 1970s, 80s, and 90s: Childhood and Schooling in Chihuahua state, Mexico
    • 1996-2000: BS in Computer Science and Engineering at the Facultad de Ingenierıa, Universidad Autonoma de Chihuahua, in Chihuahua, Mexico
    • 2000-2005: MS and PhD in Computer Science from Instituto Nacional de Astrofısica, Optica y Electronica, Puebla, in Mexico
    • 2005: Immigrated to US in 2005. as a CS Lecturer at University of Texas at El Paso
    • 2005-2009: Lecturer and Research Associate in Department of Computer Science at Univ of Texas at Dallas
    • 2009-2014: Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Sciences, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
    • 2014-Present: Associate Professor and then Professor, of Computer Science at University of Houston
    • 2021-2022: Visiting Scientist at Bloomberg Labs

• Soodeh Farokhi (LinkedIn), Founder C2RO and VP Product at NAKISA
  • Soodeh Farokhi’s Full Interview: Episode 10 and Episode 9
  • Select Awards: Top 750 digital innovators worldwide from DataBird journal, 2018; Innovator transforming the AI Video Analytics industry by SAP, 2021.
  • Soodeh Farokhi’s Immigration Journey
    • 1980s: Born in Iran
    • 2008: Bachelors Degree, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
    • 2011: Masters Degree, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
    • During her Masters, founded tech startup Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture Institute
    • 2013: Immigrated from Iran to Austria, for PhD
    • 2016: PhD in Computer Science from Technische Universität Wien (Vienna Institute of Technology)
    • 2016: Immigrated from Austria to Canada to start her company C2RO in an incubator. C2RO received over $6M in equity and non-equity money, and has 23 employees, and still growing. Soodeh served as outward-facing Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of C2RO 2016-2021.
    • 2021: Started as VP at NAKISA

Useful and Relevant Links

• Maternity Leave by Country (WorldPopulationReview.com)
• Paid Maternity Leave Benefits Across the World in 2022, Trevor Wright, 2022 (Businessnews.org)
• The World ‘Has Found a Way to Do This’: The U.S. Lags on Paid Leave, Claire Cain Miller, Oct 2021 (New York Times)
• Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, USA. [Wikipedia]
• Pregnancy Discrimination Act, USA.

Recently on Season 2

Season 2 featured 22 episodes where we visited 5 continents, and 7 countries. Check them out!

• Remix Episodes: [Random Ways to Start Research] [Impostor Syndrome 2] [Comparing oneself to others]
• Anonymous 2 (Finale of Season 2): Featuring multiple anonymous stories and a hate mail response from the host [Episode 36}
• Latin America (Central and South America): 2 Episodes
  • Interview with Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Prof. Northeastern (Silicon Valley), Entrepreneur, Yahoo! Labs Worldwide VP and Leader. Immigrant from Chile. [Episode 35]
  • Interview with Thamar Solorio, Prof U. Houston and stalwart researcher in NLP and ML. Immigrant from Mexico. [Episode 34]
• Romania Segment: 3 Episodes
  • Interview with Rada Mihalcea, Prof U. Michigan, and stalwart researcher in NLP and ML. [Episode 33]
  • Interview with Ion Stoica, Founder/Creator of Apache Spark, Ray, Mesos, and founder of Databricks, Anyscale, Conviva. Prof at UC Berkeley. [Episode 32]
  • From Romania: Episode featuring 2 distinguished Computer Scientists (Ion Stoica, Rada Mihalcea). [Episode 31]
• Israel Segment: 4 Episodes
  • Interview with Regina Barzilay, Prof MIT, and Cancer Survivor. Double Immigrant from Moldova to Israel, and then Israel to US. [Episode 30]
  • Interview with Moshe Vardi, Prof Rice Univ, and Winner of Gödel Prize and Knuth Prize. [Episode 29]
  • Interview with Tal Rabin, Prof UPenn and Head of Research, Algorand Foundation. [Episode 28]
  • From Israel: Episode featuring 3 distinguished Computer Scientists (Tal Rabin, Moshe Vardi, Regina Barzilay). [Episode 27]
• India Segment: 3 Episodes
  • Interview with Pratima Rao Gluckman, author of book “Nevertheless, She Persisted: True Stories of Women Leaders in Tech”, and immigrant from India, and leader in Silicon Valley. [Episode 26]
  • IIT Madras, Computer Science Batch of 1998: Interview with 7 graduates from that batch (comprising about 25% of the batch). 4 PhDs + 3 Masters. 3 entrepreneurs, 3 industry long-timers, and 1 Professor (host). [Episode 24, Episode 25]

In case you missed it | Season 1 

Season 1 featured 13 episodes where we visited 5 continents, and 7 countries. Check them out!

• Remix Episodes featuring Impostor Syndrome, Balkan Wars, Wars in Lebanon and Egypt, Industry vs. Academia, Computer Science in 1970s and 80s, Diversity and IOI, PhD and Entrepreneurship.
• Several anonymous narrators, from across many continents. (Episode 15).
• Our interview with Danqi Chen, Gold Medal winner at IOI (Informatics Olympiad) in 2008 (only woman Gold medal winner), and student in famous Yao Class at Tsinghua University. (Episode 14).
• Our interview with Jelani Nelson, “immigrant” from US Virgin Islands and creator of AddisCoder program in Ethiopia (Episode 13), especially his last segment on IOI data inequity analysis.
• Our third segment (Episodes 9, 10, 11, 12) on Middle East, featuring entrepreneurs and a famous academic family from Iran, Lebanon, and Egypt, starting with the Middle East Entrepreneurs lead episode.
• Our second segment (Episodes 5, 6, 7, 8) featuring Computer Scientists from Brazil, all of whom spent careers in both academia and industry, going To and Fro between Brazil and US, and to and fro between academia and industry.
• Our first segment (Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4) featuring Computer Scientists from Yugoslavia, A Country That No Longer Exists?
• Check them out!

• Credits
  • Music Credits for Podcast
  • The caption picture at top of page is a sunrise in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota, USA. Photography taken by Indranil Gupta.

 The Immigrant Computer Scientists Podcast is available for free on your favorite devices & apps: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and many more!