When young, newlywed field biologists take their spouses on expeditions, some senior scientists applaud them, while others frown.
Amy Maxmen
In his memoirs, the zoologist and 1973 Nobel Laureate Karl von Frisch described how his recent bride helped him study honeybees on their honeymoon. “I believe my wife has never quite forgiven me for the fact that in the weeks that followed [the wedding] I was completely absorbed in my bees and made her wash the innumerable little dishes I needed for my scent training.”
Many young field biologists today are following von Frisch’s example, combining a field trip with their honeymoon. Some even use grant money to cover the expenses of new spouses who work as research assistants, doing everything from collecting Panamanian swamp larvae to catching frogs in Ethiopia. While some senior field biologists nod in approval, a minority quietly disapproves of the practice, on the grounds that having intimate relationships within a research team reduces efficiency and creates tension.
Entomologist and former Harvard graduate student Corrie Moreau takes a break from fieldwork while on an expedition in Australia with her husband Jay this past summer. The trip doubled as their honeymoon. (Photo courtesy of Corrie Moreau)
This disagreement, along with a lack of clear university policies on hiring spouses for fieldwork, causes some newlywed grad students to worry about whether to use their grant money to pay their spouses and how their honeymoon-field trips will look to other scientists in their community.
“No one tells you it’s bad, but it makes you look like a slacker,” says Ryan Kerney, whose new wife, Alexia Kerney, a middle school teacher, tagged along with him to Japan and Ethiopia in 2006 while Kerney was a grad student with Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Alexia collected and dissected frogs in return for food and lodging provided by Kerney’s grant.
Catch and count
The fieldwork portion of many grants covers the cost of food, lodging, travel, and other expenses for assistants to catch, count, and carry samples. Some even provide for salaries. Spouses can make good assistants because the job often requires no special training or background and field biologists sometimes have a difficult time finding trustworthy assistants who can take several weeks or months off from work or school to go on these trips. For ambitious biologists pursuing tenure and not able or willing to take too much vacation time, bringing a new spouse along on a field trip is sometimes the only way to squeeze in a honeymoon.
Most private grants don’t expressly forbid nonscientists from being hired as research assistants. “They just want to see the work get done,” says Paul Barber, a professor at Boston University who has hired his wife as an assistant on trips to Indonesia.
Federal grants, however, generally do. The National Science Foundation’s training grants program, for example, stipulates that awardees develop scientific infrastructure in addition to meeting the goals of individual projects, meaning that assistants should be students who would benefit from field experience.
Protection or distraction?
Grad students receive mixed messages from senior faculty members. Naomi Pierce, a Harvard biology professor who has spent decades studying animal behavior around the world, says young scientists who use their field trips as honeymoons are demonstrating dedication to their work. “People who combine honeymoons with fieldwork are a serious breed,” says Pierce. “They aren’t accustomed to the whole notion of a holiday.”
In particular, Pierce endorses the practice with female biologists, noting that one of the jobs of an assistant is to provide a measure of protection in remote and often politically unstable regions.
But Thomas Kunz, an ecology professor at Boston University, discourages researchers from taking a spouse on field trips and paying family members with grant money. “It’s an awkward thing both professionally as well as financially,” says Kunz. Having a couple on a trip can slow down the work and jeopardize the team dynamic. “Favoritism creates tension. I’ve seen it happen,” he says.
Work and romance
With this lack of consensus, biologists early in their career hesitate to request a salary for their spouses. Corrie Moreau, a former student of Pierce’s, had her husband working for free identifying Australian ants on an expedition with her in late summer of this year. “It would have cost a lot more had I hired an official assistant,” says Moreau. After three years of marriage, it was the Moreaus’ first trip together as a married couple.
Moreau’s husband, Jay, who works in information technology, says he was happy to be able to help his wife. Even on his days off, while she worked in the lab, he says he’d catch himself peeking under rocks for things that crawled. “There wasn’t much downtime, but at night and at meals, it was all about us being in a beautiful place together,” he says.