Albert Wandui attended Missio’s launch service in January 2018, completed his PhD in Physics from Caltech this Spring, and just started his postdoc at JPL. He also serves on Missio’s leadership team. Len interviewed Albert recently, and the interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Many scientists point to experiences of wonder in nature as the starting point for their journey. Can you share your origin story of becoming a scientist?
Being a scientist was the first thing I ever wanted to do. I hadn't met a single scientist at that point. I was pretty young, but I was like, “I'm going to be a scientist.” Both my Dad and my granddad were pretty big influences in helping me get on that journey. My granddad and Dad used to work as guides for tourists on safaris, so they would bring all these books on the animals or birds of East Africa. So I would spend all my free time going to try and find bugs and stuff. And I was pretty notorious for it. I would get to school very early in the morning and find discarded bottles and go collect as many locusts or grasshoppers as I could find and put them in my desk. I was trying to classify them and name them and all that stuff. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.
In some sense, I feel like that sense of curiosity has been preserved. Leading into grad school, I think it especially came back. And so I feel a lot of affinity with that little kid who was trying to collect insects all over.
Tell us more about your journey as a scientist.
The thing that drove me to come to the US in the first place was I wanted to get a PhD in physics. I had very little understanding of what that actually meant. I had a sense of just the technical aspects of it: I'll get to do research in a lab, but nothing about what it means in terms of the people aspects and the environment and the culture. The sense of being a scientist really solidified pretty late - it was the end of COVID. After that, I really found my own place in the lab. I think I'd learned enough that I could trust my own voice.
And I felt like a really big part of what it meant to do a PhD was to be a good citizen of the lab, and to be a good advocate for the people I was working with and to make sure we were all having as good an experience as we could. And I think that still continues to influence how I think about both the grad school experience and the entire research ecosystem in general.
Where do the concepts of “citizen” and “advocate” come from?
I think part of it definitely grows out of my own walk with God and the journey I've been on in faith. Where does the PhD, where does the science fit in to the broader picture of what I'm doing and what the concerns of the world are? I feel my PhD was shaped a lot by the COVID years. George Floyd was a huge part of my reflection of what it looked like to do a PhD at Caltech. Especially at that time, there were only 11 Black graduate students on campus. In some sense, the science mattered very little in comparison with the bigger issues at play.
Definitely one of the things I'm most grateful to God for was that my world expanded as I went along in the PhD. There were more issues happening on campus, in Pasadena especially, and in global circles. Missio for sure has been a place where I got exposed to the racial reconciliation workshop, and we've had many chances to revisit the issues and hear people's stories and see that things are not always how they had to be.
One thing I'm definitely hopeful for for the future is that I will continue to lean further into it, to get to hear more people's stories, to hopefully attend more city council meetings and see what decisions get made there and to pray about this community and to partner with people who are working with improving housing and all the other many issues that we are trying to tackle in our city.
So many significant things happened during your tenure – COVID, George Floyd, the renaming of the Caltech buildings, the incident of racial profiling that you personally experienced in San Marino – those were all parts of your journey of experiencing life as a Kenyan, but also as a Black man in America, right?
As a Black scientist, there are profound implications. I went to a conference last year, and there were a thousand scientists and I was the only black person there as a researcher. So I got that sense of, how did I end up in this place? Lots of people don't get to consider this as a path that they could take. There's lots of insider knowledge that you need people to help you through - “this is how you apply for this,” “this is how you get this fellowship.” There's all that experience that is needed. You need people to mentor and nurture you into that.
That kind of weighs on me as I move on in my career. How much time do I spend doing my own research versus trying to advocate to get other people in? I'm hoping in both big ways and small ways to help to promote this by sharing both aspects of my story, but also helping to provide spaces for other people to also step into it and to encourage them and say, “Hey, you should really consider doing this.”
How do you reflect back on that journey as a whole?
It took like 11 years through undergrad and grad school to get there. It's definitely been bittersweet. I feel like there are lots of challenges in grad school that brought their own sense of frustration, but looking at them through the lens of this new season, I'm refilled with hope that there's a way in which those experiences led me to this point and they've taught me a lot.
I thought I would feel different at the end of the PhD, but I went into lab and I was like, “there's still so much I don't know.. And I'm still figuring things out. So that also humbles me. The world is still so big and there's still ways in which I can sit next to people and just learn from what they're doing. And I think for me, the biggest lesson has been to also trust my own voice in that I have things that are worth hearing and I should feel confident in sharing those things when I feel like the time arises, but also to be willing to learn and to listen to other people's expertise and experience and collaborate with them. And my prayer is that a sense of God's abundance would abide. And so I wouldn't feel like we're all just scanning for the same limited resources,, but that there's a sense of abundance, and that perspective can work its way through how I think about doing my own research or proposing new research. Yes, there is competition, but there's also working together and helping each other and working for the good of the whole community.
It's not a zero-sum game. I feel like I have become acutely aware of the kind of ways in which academia can bend you into that sort of mentality - “you gotta get there first.” Or “you gotta work until you drop” because otherwise you're never gonna get to the finish line. And so I think I'm slowly trying to bring in rhythms of pause and celebration of even small milestones, and being willing to take the time to help other people too. So I can at least bring the ways in which God shapes me and shapes my approach to the work that I do