Paula Olsiewski; funding research, air quality, Coronavirus and raising exceptional daughters

About this episode

Paula Olsiewski, a chemistry PhD (Yale, MIT) and program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, walks Vance through her career funding basic scientific research into indoor air quality, the microbiology of the built environment, and pandemic preparedness. Sparked by the 2001 anthrax attacks (which hit her own building, Rockefeller Center), she describes funding the tools and researchers that catalog what actually lives in indoor air and dust — work that later revealed, via Amish vs. Hutterite children, that early exposure to farm microbes reduces childhood asthma. She details her unconventional grant-funding philosophy: rather than issuing open calls for proposals (a system she says is biased against women and risk-averse toward novel ideas), she seeks out passionate senior scientists in adjacent fields and personally invites them to redirect toward new questions, evaluating lab culture and inclusiveness via an "eyeball test." The conversation moves through her own experience facing chemistry-department hostility toward women at MIT, into a long discussion with Vance about raising exceptional daughters — balancing nurturing opportunity (a NYC gifted-math summer program, Stuyvesant High School) against the value of productive stress (echoing Vance's jalapeño-breeding metaphor: too much comfort can suppress the very qualities you're trying to grow). The back half pivots to concrete COVID-19 mitigation science: aerosol transmission physics, HVAC filtration (MERV ratings, HEPA, UV-C), why outdoor air/sunlight/dilution matter, her own personal calculus for attending church and dining out, and her volunteering for a vaccine trial.

“The government's process generally is a call for proposals... but that particular system is fraught with all sorts of biases... my approach is to study a problem, bring together experts from the different fields, talk to them and try to figure out where is the novelty.”

“Underrepresented groups, including women, often don't fare well in that [RFP] system... novel ideas are just too risky. They want to see some preliminary data.”

“One life is a job interview. Two, always be open to new ideas. And three, I can never know too many people... all sorts of opportunities have come my way that I didn't even know existed.”

Key moments

• ~5%: Anthrax attacks (2001) as origin story — Rockefeller Center receiving a contaminated letter reframed indoor air as a biosecurity concern.
• ~17%: Discovery that a room's microbial profile comes to resemble its human occupants within hours ("Jack Gilbert" research) — a strange, underappreciated finding from basic research once dismissed as a "fishing expedition."
• ~22%: Amish vs. Hutterite children study — traditional farm-animal exposure correlates with significantly lower childhood asthma, an unresolved but consequential pattern.
• ~38%: Grant-making philosophy — avoiding standard RFP bias against women/novel ideas by personally recruiting senior experts from adjacent fields ("finding people who have a Damon").
• ~50-52%: MIT chemistry department hostility toward women graduate students in the 1980s (unstudyable cumulative exams, crying in the basement bathroom, dismissive peers) — used to explain her deliberate "eyeball test" for lab culture before funding.
• ~57%: Jalapeño-breeding metaphor — stressing a plant (or a student) can be necessary to produce its full character; parallels raising high-achieving daughters without over-sheltering them.
• ~64%: Beam Bridges program — NYC advanced-math initiative for low-income sixth graders, and the structural problem of accidentally landing in a high school without calculus.
• ~86%: Peter Piper breath-exhalation demonstration — visceral illustration of how talking/singing/shouting propels virus-laden aerosols, motivating the HVAC/ventilation/UV-C discussion that follows.
• ~93%: Her three-part life philosophy — "life is a job interview... always be open to new ideas... I can never know too many people."

Notable quotes

“One life is a job interview. Two, always be open to new ideas. And three, I can never know too many people.”

“So one of my fellow graduate students says to me, well, the only reason you're passing is biochemistry is easier... so I said, well, it's so easy, why didn't you take that test?”

“If you don't have the right conditions, can you grow corn everywhere?... jalapeños became less and less hot [in perfect conditions]... the plant has to produce this thing because it believes it's in that stressed environment.”

“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers... did you feel anything on your hand? ...that's what's in the air when you talk, sing, or yell.”