Svetlana Dubinkina is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics at VU Amsterdam and the President of the Dutch Association of European Women in Mathematics (EWM-NL). Svetlana was born in 1982 in Bratsk, a town in Siberia. After completing her studies in applied mathematics at the Novosibirsk State University in Russia, she pursued her PhD in mathematics at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) here in Amsterdam, under the supervision of Jason Frank and Jan Verwer. Svetlana then moved to Louvain, Belgium, in 2010, for a postdoc at the Georges Lemaître Centre for Earth and Climate Research, and in 2014 she returned to CWI as a tenure-tracker. In 2020 she then joined VU Amsterdam where, since 2022, she has been appointed as Associate Professor. Since March 2022, she is also the President of EWM-NL.
Raffaella Mulas interviewed her in May 2023.
It is a great pleasure to interview you, Svetlana. I would love to start from the quote of Helen Keller that you have on your website: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”. What does this quote mean to you and for your work?
Because I'm fascinated by interdisciplinary research and I work on applied mathematics, it is fundamental for me to collaborate with people from different communities, and I really enjoy this!
This is nice! I also find it interesting that you chose a quote specifically from Helen Keller, who was an author, disability rights advocate and lecturer, and the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in the US. So, she really wasn't an ordinary person! How did you get into mathematics? How old were you?
Well, as a very small kid, I wanted to become a singer, a dancer, or a doctor. But I think that this phase passed as soon as I started elementary school, and I was very little when it became clear to me that I wanted to study mathematics.
Haha! I had similar phases. And when did it become clear to you that you wanted to become a Professor?
I'm not a Professor! I'm an Associate Professor!
Okay, okay! When did it become clear to you that you wanted to become an Associate Professor?
When I was at school, as I said, I knew I wanted to study mathematics, but I didn't know yet what one could do with it. When I was in my last years of high school, my parents suggested I follow a course on preparing for a university admission mathematics exam. As it happened the course was taught by a mathematics professor from the local university. Not only he helped me with my preparation, but he also helped me in my choice of the university, since he showed me what mathematics really is and where you can study such math. Thanks to him I started to think about this kind of career for my future.
Today, what do you work on? You already mentioned applied mathematics and interdiscipinlary research.
I really want to contribute to the climate predictions from a mathematical perspective. This is really the field that fascinates me, and I have been working on it for some years already. My current project, in particular, is surprising and exciting me a lot, because I see that it could make a difference. I have been working on it for one year now, together with Jana de Wiljes from the University of Potsdam, and this is the idea: If you want to predict something in a probabilistic way, you want to have several states for the future of the climate, as well as probabilities of each of them occurring. So far, everything that has been done has been based on the assumption that all probability distributions are Gaussian, in order to simplify the problem from the statistical point of view. However, you could ask, "What if we allow more possibilities and not just Gaussian distributions?" The more general problem becomes extremely challenging, but we are showing that it is worth the struggle, by developing new methodologies. And this is great because, when we started this project, we didn’t expect it to get such a substantial improvement compared to the existing methodologies. Now I think that we are going towards a very promising direction!
Amazing! And it sounds like the project you are working on right now is also the one that you are most proud of – is this correct?
I would say that it's the one I'm most excited about!
So what's the achievement that you are most proud of?
I'm too young for this question!
Okay, I’m keeping two questions for the next interview with you. The first one is, "When did it become clear to you that you wanted to become a Professor?", and the second one is, "What is the achievement you are most proud of?". But, coming back to your project on climate prediction, what are you looking forward to in the future?
Working on even more complex models, and looking at the analysis of this methodology we are developing. My PhD student Nazanin Abedini also got the fever for this project, so I'm also looking forward to seeing where her part of the project will lead us to.
Great! Now, talking about another PhD student of yours, when I was preparing for this interview, I did quite a bit of internet stalking, and I found the thesis of Sangeetika Ruchi. In the acknowledgements, it is written, "Svetlana, [...] thank you mostly for showing faith in me when I had doubts on myself." Can you tell me more about how you support your students during their PhD journey?
All students struggle when they feel stuck for a couple of weeks or months. This even happens when they are focusing on reading the literature and they feel like they are not being productive. So it is very important for me to show them that their progress does not have to be measured in terms of the number of papers or number of pages. I also try to give my own example: for instance, Jana de Wiljes and I actually started the current project I was mentioning two years ago, but it only started to take shape one year ago. We could tell ourselves that for the first year we did not do anything, but this is not true. Also, I have the impression that women students, as for instance Sangeetika, need even more encouragement than menstudents in these moments, because they tend to doubt themselves more. Of course, I don't have such a large sample to draw conclusions from, but from my personal experience, this is what I saw.
Your students are very lucky to have this support! If you now had to write acknowledgements to the people who have supported you the most in your career, who would you mention?
Wow! Well, my parents would be the first ones on my list. They supported me even when it was not easy for them. I was seventeen when I moved out for university, and they could only see me twice a year. I would, of course, also mention the professor who helped me preparing the entrance exams for the university, as well as my bachelor and master thesis supervisor, who gave me the chance to attend an international conference in Brussels while I was still a student. And I would of course mention my PhD advisors. My answer is such a cliché!
It's a beautiful cliché. How did you become the President of EWM-NL, the Dutch branch of European Women in Mathematics? What does this role mean to you?
There was a call and I applied! And because it's a role that brings many responsibilities, I was actually the only one who applied. For me, this role mainly means putting women who work in the Dutch mathematics in the spotlight. The main thing for me is to say, "Look at these women and how bright they are! You should pay attention to what they do!". And we also offer support, to both women and men, through things like communities, grants, events, newsletter, mentoring network, and so on.
This is amazing! Can you tell me more about this mentoring network from EWM-NL? I'm also part of a mentoring network, as a mentee, and it's one of the main sources of support for me. So I appreciate how important these initiatives are.
Interesting! In the mentoring program from EWM-NL, the mentees are PhD students and postdocs, and the mentors are more senior mathematicians with different area of expertise who are based here,in the Netherlands. The network is open to everyone, independently of the gender. If someone wants to become a mentee, they can send an email to us, and we will try to match them with a mentor who will offer them support through regular meetings.
What is the thing that you like most of the mathematics department at VU?
The support that everyone gives here is incredible, and this has always been clear to me. Last winter my dad passed way. It was sudden, and I had to go back home immediately. I informed my colleagues, and from that moment they took care of everything I would have had to do otherwise, like the teaching and all other responsibilities. My PhD student Nazanin Abedini took care of my two Bachelor students. When I came back to the office, there was no pile of work waiting for me to do. The others had done everything for me. I will always be deeply grateful for this.
Besides mathematics and climate prediction, what makes you happy?
I can answer with another cliché – my family: My two children, my husband, my sister, and my mother. And you didn't ask this question, but what makes me relaxed? Yoga! I started practicing yoga during my PhD, while I was under a lot of stress and pressure, and I never stopped. It gives me the calmness that I cannot find at work or around my small kids.
Haha! Amazing. Thank you so much, Svetlana!
Thank you! This is a great initiative! Though Jan Bouwe raised quite a bar after his interview.
Well, I don't think you've made it any easier for the next interviewees!