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Juneteenth, 2024, by Roger F. Malina, ArtSciLab, Bass School and Physics Department, University of Texas at Dallas.
The UT Dallas ArtSciLab as A Safe Place
Upon reading “A Neuroscientist’s Duty to Black Ancestors” by Chandler Wright, the concept of desirable migration is deeply embedded in my family history, and was a trigger for my first career as a space astrophysicist, then publishing, then bureaucrat then an Artscience researcher and who knows what next. I am trying to be an amphibian.
The university just informed me that they have renewed my endowed chair, funded by Edith O’Donnell, until 2030 when I will be 80. They are giving our lab a million dollars.
My father was Frank. J. Malina; 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 a 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 or live in a village. Ironic that I am now part of a group developing a cybervillage. My mother is rolling in surprise, but digital culture makes villages private and work online attractive.
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 Leonardo over for a while after he died and built a team that functioned bottom-up since I had no expertise as an Editor. Thank you, Rick Wilson, Pam Grant Ryan, Theo Ferguson, and Nick Cronbach… teams can have genius, not individuals anymore.
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 of turbulence using mathematics. My colleague Cassini Nazir, co-founder of our ArtSciLab, has written extensively on how to train people’s curiosity. My parents were maestros at curiosity development. 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. Please don’t read Strange Angel.
I research and teach at UT Dallas. Our lab champions migrants (physical and Intellectual), but also hybridity or being in “two places’ at once, even amphibians (walk, swim fly). Thanks, Alex Topete.
Metaphors matter as Dr Tina Qin, now a lab member again, declared in her thesis that applying metaphor theory to data visualization can catch crooks more easily who have different cultural approaches to thieving. Omkar Ajnadka got his first job, in part, based on his visionary work in developing AI to detect levels of sarcasm.
I got my first degree, a BSc at MIT in Physics. But rapidly joined Saul Rappaport and Hale Bradt’s 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 with the ArtSciLab at UT Dallas. Values include heterogeneity as advocated by the US National Institutes of Health. We welcome international students, US military veterans, indigenous 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. However, 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 authored by Swati Anwesha. My colleague Laura Kim advocates being ‘blobby’ rather than fitting into one box intellectual or geographical. 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, UX/UI design, and graphic arts. Who knew that ArtSciLab could help you get a job at Goldman Sachs?
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 been given to enable successful ‘migrancy’, and heterogeneity and hybridity. Thank you Chandler Wright for helping me think aloud.
Roger Malina
Physicist | Astronomer | Executive Editor
Roger Malina is a physicist, astronomer, Executive Editor of Leonardo Publications at MIT Press, distinguished professor at UT Dallas, and Associate Director of Arts and Technology. His work focuses on connections among digital technology, science, and art. He is an Associate Director of the ATEC Program at The University of Texas at Dallas.
