Paulina Rodriguez: Building Credibility and Authenticity

Paulina Rodriguez 00:00

There’s no recipe to follow. It’s being your whole self is accepting who you are, understanding that your experiences that have led you here are what make you a valuable scientist. Your problem-solving techniques are not just about solving this math problem in a piece of paper but solving problems in life.

Sarah Webb  00:19

That’s Paulina Rodriguez, a Ph.D. student in applied math at George Washington University and the guest on this episode of Science in Parallel.

Sarah Webb  00:40

Paulina’s love of math dates back to childhood when she flew through multiplication tables with her father. But finding her path as a researcher involved years of searching for a compelling application, one that could make people’s lives better. Along the way, she explored education, science, coding, software development and work at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA. She continues to collaborate with the FDA on her current research, exploring the credibility of computational models for simulating medical devices, work she’s currently carrying out at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

Sarah Webb  01:22

I’m your host, Sarah Webb, and I invite you to join me and Paulina for a conversation about her scientific journey and the ways that she combines technical skills with personal experience and problem solving to bring her whole self to her work.

Sarah Webb  01:39

Paulina, it is great to have you on the podcast.

Paulina Rodriguez  01:43

Thank you for having me.

Sarah Webb  01:45

I’m interested in, when you were young, what your concept was of a scientist, of a mathematician? Did you have one?

Paulina Rodriguez 01:52

 I think growing up most of my ideas of what a scientist were, and this is a little bit funny, but it’s what was in the movies, pretty much probably a man scientist doing something in a laboratory. But I didn’t have any firsthand experiences with any scientist growing up in the communities I lived in: downtown Los Angeles, the inner city schools. We didn’t really have access to mentors or people who were scientists or engineers or mathematicians. We typically had the what you want to be when you grow up? A teacher, a lawyer like that never included a mathematician, a researcher. But over time, I think I always kind of gravitated to math and problem solving.

Paulina Rodriguez  01:53

The first inspiration I had was my dad. He loved math. He loved education. He was really good at solving his multiplication tables really fast. For him, it was like he was very prideful of it. My parents came from Mexico, and so my dad’s highest level of education was he started high school, but then he moved to the U.S. And so for him, he said he was great in school. He was so good. He was on top of it, but circumstances made it difficult. So when I started school and I started learning everything, my dad would always challenge me and push me and tell me, you know, I’m really fast at math. It made me curious about math. I was not scared of the challenge. It was just a fun problem thing that I would do with my dad, but growing up, the only idea I had of a career in math was to be a teacher. That was not a bad thing. I want to share that with other people, but I think that was the scope of my understanding of what you can do with math pretty much.

Sarah Webb  03:36

So as you got interested in math and thought to be what I want to be a teacher, what happened next?

Paulina Rodriguez 03:40

I realized that I had a passion for sharing math with other people. I figured it out. I know you can figure it out too. And not everybody shared that passion with me. For sure, they were like, I just want to get my math homework done and move on. But for me, and I had a math teacher who, in high school ended up telling me: You’re going to be a math teacher. You know, you’re really good at math. And then I was like, But isn’t there something else I could do? The biggest complaints I had from everybody I was trying to be like, don’t you love math, was, what’s the point of it? What am I gonna use it for everyday life? And I feel like I never had, like, a really solid, cool answer.

Paulina Rodriguez  04:15

And so that was kind of a pursuit. I like math. I want to do more with it. I want to share it with people, but I have to show them how cool it is. And how do I do that? I think it wasn’t until I started I went to college, math was the one thing I knew I was going to take when I got there. Everything else is kind of exploring. There’s something missing, and I think it was the application. So I was part of a lot of undergraduate research programs. I joined UC LEADS, which is a research program in California, and they give you an opportunity to conduct research in your lab for one summer and in your university with a professor of your choosing for one summer, and then the second summer you go to another UC-system university. I got that internship. And I worked with a math professor at UCSC, and she was working on analytic solutions of physics-based problems– so looking at symmetry, looking at ways to develop analytic solutions to Hamiltonian systems. And so that was my first introduction into this. Like we can tackle physics problems, and we can simplify them and look at them from the mathematical perspective. And I started finding that really interesting and the application area, so I wanted to keep doing more of that.

Paulina Rodriguez  05:30

My second summer with that program, I was at UCLA, and I also joined this RIPS program, which is another summer research experience. And with them, I worked on an aerospace application looking at orbit transfer. And in that I was able to do a different application, completely different than what I was doing, and I really enjoyed it. But here is when I started seeing that I needed some computational background. I was doing analytic solutions. So we were a pen and paper, like reading and doing everything. But when I started working on that project. I realized I need to code. I need to do more of this. And that was the last summer research experience I did before deciding that I wanted to go to grad school, and so I wanted to get my master’s. I wanted to do more research. I switched my degree from math education to an applied math degree.

Paulina Rodriguez  06:19

There were only two computing classes. We had a MATLAB one where we were trying to implement some simple ODEs. And then I took a C++ class, which was my first big introduction into coding. And I love the algorithms, writing algorithms, everything in my hand. I was like, I love the problem solving, figuring it out. But we also had labs where we had to start coding and implementing our algorithms using code, and I still remember my TA. . . So I was, I guess, to put it in perspective, at that point, I was a little hesitant about calculators, and I was like, Can we really trust them? We don’t know what’s going on in there. I’m gonna always double-check my calculator with some some calculations, which was super nobody understood me. They’re like, You do math, you should trust calculators. And I was just like, I just, I don’t know what’s going on in there. I don’t know what’s happening. Let me just, you know, do these additional calculations. And so when I took my first coding class in C++, I was like, you want me to write a Hello World algorithm? What is it doing? How is this computer reading this? And I was like, nitpicking every little thing. I was like, I have to comprehend every single thing that’s happening here. And my TA was, was just telling me, like, it’s just a Hello World. Just type in, get your output, understand that the code did some stuff and you got an output. And I was like, that is such an unsatisfactory answer. I want to know more.

Paulina Rodriguez  07:39

And so that was kind of like my first experience with coding. I wanted to do more, but that’s when I also realized that there was a lot more coding I needed to do, to do more of these kind of complex applications of math. So I did go to get my master’s. I did continue coding. I started doing some more statistical analysis, which I also enjoyed, but that was not quite as applied as what I was trying to do, but I realized overall that I just needed more hands-on coding experience. So the C++ class at UCSC was the place where I kind of got my feet wet when I went for my master’s at Claremont Graduate University. It was an applied math program.

Paulina Rodriguez  08:22

So after my master’s, I decided to work, and I figured, if I go work at a company that requires me to code, I’m going to get hands on experience just solving whatever problems we need. And at this point, I had moved to New Orleans, my husband was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane, and I said, You know what? I want to work with a startup company. Startup companies make you do a little bit of everything. So I started doing some web development, then I started doing some software development, but I started getting more familiar with really good practices with coding. So having quality assurance, having version control, having just really good practices that I didn’t get in school. But in these cases, I was working for a company and troubleshooting problems and understanding just best practices overall. And so I felt a little bit more confident, maybe not so much though that I was the best coder out there, but enough that I had good practices to build good quality code. So then I decided that I wanted to go back into research, and I had the opportunity to do an internship at the FDA.

Sarah Webb  09:23

What drew you back to research?

Paulina Rodriguez  09:25

I wanted to go back into research, or at the very least, tackle problems that were a little bit more like helping communities, helping other people. So when this opportunity came up with the FDA, I figured public health, now that I have coding in my tool belt, you know, I could go back and tackle these problems differently.

Sarah Webb  09:44

So how did you find out about an internship at the FDA? I don’t know that the FDA is the first place I think of for someone with your skill set at that point in time.

Paulina Rodriguez  09:54

I had mentioned my husband was doing his Ph.D. at Tulane, so part of his research required having a regulatory component to a biomedical application. And so when he started working in there, he met Matt Myers, who was doing modeling research, but he came kind of from the physics/math background, and he needed somebody to help him develop a model for at that point. I think they were looking at e-cigarette projects. And so he brought up my name, and he was like, you know, my wife’s trying to get back into research. She does applied math. And was there anything you think it would be a good fit? I spoke to him. He was really open to collaborating, working together, and it was a short internship, maybe about six months, just to kind of get the model, and then I just want to get some more practice.

Paulina Rodriguez  10:38

I ended up staying at the FDA for about four years before deciding to go back to grad school. But then the project kind of switched over, and I started working with a new person, with Tina Morrison, and she was looking at using a model and looking at how do you implement verification and validation practices. But she wanted somebody who can incorporate good software development practices, verification, validation and uncertainty quantification. I will be referring to it as V&V is looking at: Verification focuses on the accuracy of the code and the software. How correct is it? And then validation is focusing on representing the physical world. You have code that is working now how, how good is it as representing the physical world? So typically, you compare with physical experiments to make sure that your code is grounded in reality. And uncertainty quantification is the study of accounting for uncertainties in your model based on inputs, boundary conditions and any other kind of set quantities that you use and how that propagates through your model. And if you do have experiments you’re comparing with, accounting for uncertainty in the experimental measurements and operating conditions.

Paulina Rodriguez  11:52

All of this was still fairly new at the FDA. There was no program at that point that was focusing on credibility of computational models. She was a person who introduced me to kind of just credibility of computational models. But at that point, we didn’t have a process or anything in place. So she by introducing me into all of that, I started to see a little bit more about verification and validation that was being done by the national labs, aerospace and the nuclear field. And so we started talking about ways to incorporate credibility into computational models for medical devices. They’re starting to look into how do we assess them? But there was no standard protocol from the FDA at that point, so we were trying to, like, look into all these topics.

Paulina Rodriguez  12:33

And Tina Morrison was actually one of the people who helped develop the ASME V&V 40 standard which looked at assessing credibility of computational models. She’s the one who had initially suggested what my kind of ultimate goals were, and like, did I want to go back to grad school? Did I want to continue at the FDA? And she was a really good role model. She was a strong leader, encouraged me to pursue any ideas I had, trusted my experience, and I was able to see her a person who was authentic and empathetic. And so I was very much inspired by her and her support. And so I decided to go back to grad school. I wanted to continue some of this project. I wanted to look at an end-to-end case study, looking at medical devices and credibility, but I also wanted to incorporate what had already been done in other fields, so looking at verification and validation in the nuclear field, the aerospace field, and apply some of those techniques to the medical device application area. So we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. So we have some examples to go off of and to encourage everybody to use more computational modeling.

Paulina Rodriguez  13:39

I think at that point, a study was performed, and there was not a whole lot of computational modeling being submitted to the FDA for regulatory submissions, but the ones that were using it to support computational modeling use cases, there was just no standard for assessing them. So there was no clear way of understanding how the FDA was using that information and using it for decision making. Here you have a device you want to use it for maybe submitting, for regulatory submission. How do you develop the model? What do you include in the model? What do you include in the communication? How do you share the assessment that your model is good enough? And then, how does that all come together to make risk-informed decisions in the end? And what could that look like? I decided to go back to grad school to work on my Ph.D., and this was the type of problem I wanted to tackle. I decided to incorporate more transparency into the work I was doing. So I wanted everything to be publicly available, shared. I want anybody to take this example, take the decision making components and be able to utilize it or understand the process. And I ended up joining Professor Lorena Barba’s lab, and she works on one of her focuses is reproducibility, open source code, having a reproducible work. And that’s where I think I found my connection and the work I wanted to do. Credibility is one thing is making sure that your model, what you’re trying to make predictions with, is correct, but reproducibility provides a level of reliability, because you can trust that you’re always going to get the same result, not just in your model, but also in your credibility assessment. If you tell me your code is correct and you give me these plots to show me your results, I should be able to redo the model and get the same results, and I can trust that, and that trust, at least in the medical device world, doesn’t quite exist for computational models the way it does for experiments. These are all ideas that was kind of brainstorming, like, how can I bring this together? And then I applied for the DOE CSGF fellowship.

Sarah Webb  15:37

The DOE CSGF is the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. This podcast is a media outreach project of that program.

Paulina Rodriguez  15:46

And then when I got the fellowship, it completely opened my mind to high-performance computing and how to integrate it into my research because that wasn’t an initial resource I was going to use. And when I got the fellowship, I got to learn a lot more about high-performance computing. How can I integrate it into my verification and validation studies to make them rigorous enough so that they could be used for high-risk application areas? I also had the chance to go to the Sandia National Lab and work with the Verification, Validation, Uncertainty Quantification and Credibility Processes department. (My mentor at Sandia is Brian Carnes, and my other mentor is Sarah Kieweg) and learn from them their techniques and the methods that they were using so that I could incorporate that into a medical device application area. I didn’t see a need for recreating the wheel and having to utilize these resources from very different industries and application areas, I thought was really interesting. Understand the techniques, understand the methods and then apply them to this different application area with, I would say, a pretty comparable high-risk kind of designation. It’s just in a very different application area. Without the fellowship, I don’t think I would have been aware of these kinds of connections or applications.

Sarah Webb  17:00

You’re in the midst of doing this. What are the pieces of this puzzle that you feel like you have relatively well worked out? And what are the things that you’re tinkering with right now?

Paulina Rodriguez  17:08

It’s a massive project. I had run a test case with this study using commercial software initially because industry and the FDA, most of the submissions were using commercial software. I decided to switch over to using open source numerical solver. I’m now working with the labs trying to figure out how to parallelize all of my validation studies so that I can generate large statistical samples so that I can trust in the results of my studies. I’m trying to figure out kind of how to put them all together. I’ve ran simplified test keys that I can work through, but I’m in the process of troubleshooting the challenges of this problem specific for medical devices: one of them in particular, having small sample sizes. When looking at medical device studies, the type of experiments, we tend to have small sample sizes because the experiments are so expensive to run. So looking at types of validation metrics that are useful for small sample sizes, and how to mitigate some of those challenges, as I’m trying to implement some of these methodologies.

Sarah Webb  18:10

We talked a little bit before about your view of what it means to be a scientist, and I’d like to hear a little bit more about how you, Paulina, view yourself as a researcher, as a mathematician, and what it means to you to be those things now,

Paulina Rodriguez  18:29

I think, over the years, because my path has been so nonlinear, I’ve had interactions with a variety of mentors and scientists that I can see myself in and I’ve now started to develop into my own authentic, complete scientist self. I’m gonna tell the story.

Sarah Webb  18:48

Tell me the story.

Paulina Rodriguez  18:50

In high school, in the school that I grew up, when we didn’t have labs in our schools. There was no funding; there was no resources. And so I decided to take a chemistry class at a local community college, and I think that was the first female scientist I met. Her name was Muriel Walker, and she was a chemistry professor. And I was like, one of the only high school students in there, when I got there, she was like, I’m not gonna treat you any different. You’re gonna step up and do the work. And I was like, Okay, I’m excited. We did actual physical laboratory experiments, which I didn’t have. And she was passionate. She loved the science. She was a really good communicator. I was just so interested. I wanted to learn more. We did do a lot of problem solving and chemistry that did not require being in a lab. And so I think seeing her passion and her excitement and problem solving, I didn’t really think I could be a chemist. It was the first lab I’ve ever done in my life. But I think seeing her passion, seeing her way of communicating, and now I think I have the word for it, but her democratizing that science, where it was like, you’re a high school kid from this school, I don’t care. You’re gonna do this, and I I believe you’re gonna do it, and you’re gonna pass my class, and I expect no less. And having her communicate that way, share science that way, really did make me feel like that’s something I could do. But I think it was the first taste I had at what a scientist could look like, and she was a strong woman, and her standards were high, and she expected all of us to succeed, and if you needed help, she was supportive.

Paulina Rodriguez  20:31

Then when I was in undergrad, I went to a SACNAS conference.

Sarah Webb  20:34

SACNAS is the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science.

Paulina Rodriguez 20:41

And that was the first time I saw a math professor, Erika Camacho, who had grown up in the neighborhood I had grown up in. She struggled through school. She had some of the similar challenges I had. And she was a professor; I think she was doing applied math. And seeing her be her authentic self, being proud of where she came from, what she did, being unapologetic about the struggles that she was encountering, and still being a mentor and inspiring others. Again, I was like, this is something I could do, someone who’s had my struggles, someone who’s their whole self. I saw that, but I didn’t know how to get there. I didn’t understand what it took. I knew what it took to do the academic side, the science, the work, the classes, the technical things, but I didn’t know how to bring those two sides of my authentic self and where I’ve come from and focusing on the science. And so I continued just the science route. We got to get that done. I can figure the other stuff out later. It was kind of my idea most of the time.

Paulina Rodriguez  21:45

And then when I finally got to the FDA and I saw Tina Morrison, who was a doctor, she was a leader, she was passionate, she was strong and empathetic, again, unapologetic about who she was, and that made her a better leader. I started to finally have more conversations with her about, like, Okay, I want to be leader like you. How do I get there? Like, what is the recipe? There’s no recipe to follow. It’s being your whole self is accepting who you are, understanding that your experiences that have led you here are what make you a valuable scientist. Your problem-solving techniques are not just about solving this math problem in a piece of paper, but solving problems in life, resourcefulness, understanding that you have to be adaptable and figure things out. But it doesn’t mean ignoring who you are and where you’ve come from, because that’s what’s led you to where you’re at. I guess asking the real hard questions about what kind of science do you want to do? What kind of scientist are you? Where do you want to work? What kind of problems do you want to tackle? And I think starting to ask myself those things about what I really want for myself versus what I think is an expectation that I must meet to be this ideal scientist that exists in this world.

Paulina Rodriguez  23:03

I think having those questions really grounded me in the reality that I can be that scientist already. It’s not just my grades and what tests I pass and how fast do I graduate. It’s really my problem-solving skills, and that incorporates components not just from the academic world and classes, but my personal life and how I’ve adapted and tackled those challenges that has made me a creative problem solver, that it’s okay if it’s a different perspective to look at the problem, it’s okay if my algorithm for this code is slightly different than the other people in my class or in this lab I’m working in, because it’s about tackling the problems, utilizing all of your resources. I had this idea that a scientist was perfect, like they know all science. You’re not that scientist until you know it all, and you live and breathe science. And that was very unrealistic, because the scientist is not just the science. They’re a complete person.

Paulina Rodriguez  24:06

I’ve come to accept now that a lot of failure is okay and it’s not really negative. It doesn’t feel great, but you learn a lot from your failures, and that’s okay. That makes you a better scientist, similar to the way I saw leaders and all these really strong women. I want to be my whole self.  I want to be authentic.

Paulina Rodriguez  24:24

One of those things that I have not described so far has been owning my power. None of that matters if I don’t have a voice. And I think for the longest, it was a little bit more of like, I’m learning a lot. keep my head down, just kind of keep learning as much as I can till I reach this level of perfection. And part of being a scientist is also communicating and asking questions and discussing and sharing opinions and thoughts. And I think I, for the longest, would maybe hold myself back a little bit, because until I knew I had that perfect answer, it drew me back from kind of per. Participating in a lot of these environments, and I think being part of the DOE CSGF fellowship, having the ability to drive my own research, the ideas, the topics I want to work on, I think that’s really helped me gain that power, gain that voice.

Sarah Webb  25:16

What do you think might be next for you after you finish up the Ph.D.?

Paulina Rodriguez  25:20

Research wise and work wise. I want to continue working in the validation space. I do want to keep figuring out how to kind of translate over some of the techniques and methodologies developed at the Sandia Labs and figure out how I can apply it to a more broad range of application areas. Since I have the medical device example, I’ve been working on, maybe seeing if there’s others I can work on.

Paulina Rodriguez  25:42

I do think kind of on the personal side, I’ve always had a passion for helping people and sharing like I want other people to know what’s going on, and I want them to be able to do it too. And I think along the way, I’ve lost my engagement in that, and I’ve been wanting to do more of that. But I’ve been feeling like it’s either one or the other: I continue down this path of very rigorous science, or I go to work with my community and share the teaching side of the things I like to do. And I’m starting to see now that it shouldn’t be separated. I cannot stop doing those things because it’s what gives me energy, what gets me excited. And so I one of my personal efforts that I’m starting to work on is I want to encourage more Chicanas and more Latinas to get into science. In particular, I want them to get into verification, validation and uncertainty quantification.

Paulina Rodriguez  26:33

I’m a little biased, but I want to bring them into this field. It’s a very small field. The community is not that large. There’s not a lot of women, but I want them to have the support to succeed in that space. And so I wanted to start having, just initially, some informational sessions: share what V&V is. I was trying to go to the SACNAS conference. Is the one I’ve been focusing on to share my research. I wanted to start doing workshops to share about opportunities, maybe in national labs or other application areas with verification and validation and uncertainty quantification, but also to do more mentoring, to share more of this information with some women who are starting their careers and also share more of my experiences. I think for me, the most valuable mentors and women that I saw as leaders that I worked with or got a chance to talk to where people that were authentic and shared their real experiences and stories, sharing what these struggles can be like, and supporting each other, I think, will make a big difference.

Sarah Webb  27:30

This episode is part of a series on creativity and computing, and you’ve used the word creative already in our conversation. You were talking about creative problem solving, but I wanted to get you to talk a bit about what creativity means to you right now.

27:45

Initially I was to give them more like artistic interpretation of creativity, but I realized that as we’ve been talking like creativity is also a way to utilize your resources and your experiences to help you problem-solve. I’ve had to kind of navigate a lot of firsts. My parents didn’t have the resources to help me figure out how to get to college, how to find my career path, how to do the next few things in life. And I’ve had to utilize resources in a very creative way to make sure I can find out what I don’t know. And I think that creativity and determination together, because you can be very determined, and if you’re not creative in how to access your resources, you’ll be stuck. And I think that creativity has helped me access networks, access communities, access resources that I didn’t know I needed. It’s given me the flexibility to adapt to a lot of these environments that I had never encountered and my family had never encountered. Whether it was going to college, going to grad school. If I wanted to go to grad school, what did I need to do? Being creative, and how I got access to that information, asking the right questions, asking the wrong questions. I think that gave me a level of flexibility to problem-solve in a way I didn’t expect.

Paulina Rodriguez  29:08

I think of it a lot as my experiences give me this perspective, but it’s my experiences and creativity, because to be truly resourceful, you need to have a little bit of creativity in how you tackle problems and determination, because if not. I was not quitting, not gonna happen. So I think I’m gonna interpret creativity in that way that it’s it’s a way that’s helped me problem-solve and has made me a better scientist. Because if I hit a dead end, I’m gonna think of every possible way I can go across that threshold and figure it out.

Paulina Rodriguez  29:44

I wish my creativity answer was a little bit more artistic, but I think it’s a lot more practical. From my hands on experience trying to navigate life and all the academic and nonacademic challenges I’ve encountered, so creativity in a slightly different way.

Sarah Webb  29:57

Well, it’s interesting because everyone I’ve a sked this question has had a different answer.

Paulina Rodriguez  30:04

Oooh, I like that!

Sarah Webb  30:06

So on that note, thank you Paulina. This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

Paulina Rodriguez  30:11

Thank you for having me.

Sarah Webb  30:13

To learn more about Paulina, V&V research and other resources and organizations mentioned in this episode, please check out our show notes at scienceinparallel.org. Keep up with our new episodes by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. Science in Parallel is produced by the Krell Institute and is a media project of the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program. Any opinions expressed are those of the speaker and not those of their employers, the Krell Institute or the U.S. Department of Energy. Our music is by Steve O’Reilly. This episode was written, produced and edited by me, Sarah Webb.

Transcribed with Otter.ai then copyedited.