Double tenure: ScholCommLab co-directors celebrate a career milestone together
Six years ago, Juan Pablo Alperin and Stefanie Haustein sat down at a bar in Amsterdam after a full day of participating in a conference. They came for a drink and an opportunity to connect over shared interests, but they left with an ambitious plan that would change both of their careers. On the backs of beer napkins, a project aimed at understanding the societal impact of research with the help of altmetrics started to take shape. The gin-and-tonic-inspired grant was successful, and, with that project, the ScholCommLab was born.
At the time, Juan was a newly minted Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University and Stefanie was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montreal. More than half a decade after embarking on that first journey together, the two lab co-directors are celebrating a second career-defining moment: tenure.
“Being tenured is a huge milestone,” says Stefanie, who became an Associate Professor at University of Ottawa, School of Information Studies (ÉSIS) on May 1, 2021. “I felt so much excitement and relief when I received the (anonymized) letters of the external reviewers—they were extremely generous and kind.”
“It is great to be unencumbered from expectations and from any sense of having to prove myself,” agrees Juan, an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University’s Publishing Program as of September 1. “That feeling of freedom manifests itself whenever I decide to accept or turn down an invitation or opportunity. In the last few months, I have always been more certain that if I say yes or no, it is because of my own interests, and not out of a sense of what I should be doing.”
“That feeling of freedom manifests itself whenever I decide to accept or turn down an invitation or opportunity. In the last few months, I have always been more certain that if I say yes or no, it is because of my own interests, and not out of a sense of what I should be doing.”
Juan Pablo Alperin
The two co-directors celebrate this milestone from a place of transition—Stefanie returning from maternity leave, Juan preparing for his first sabbatical. Both look forward to reconnecting with friends and colleagues and continuing the work that has brought them to this moment.
“I am excited to continue working on existing grants on data citations (funded by Sloan) and metrics literacies (funded by SSHRC) and one on open science practices that we recently received from the Wellcome Trust,” Stefanie says. “But what I am most excited about is seeing the Ottawa team and students face to face again—it’s been way too long and I miss everyone!”
“I am using this opportunity to reconnect with my colleagues in Latin America,” Juan explains. “There is a lot of interest in the region to develop Open Science policy, and so I have been reaching out to everyone I know to see how I can be most helpful.” He’s also been applying for several major grants, with the hope of returning from sabbatical to a very active lab.
While both are grateful to start this next chapter of their careers, neither expects that their new title will change the nature of their work.
“I’ve never been a really strategic person, so my research has always focused on what I am most interested in rather than what looks good on my CV,” Stefanie explains. “I don’t anticipate that having tenure will actually influence how I work or what I work on.”
“I became a tenured professor doing the things I love, not doing what others wanted me to do,” Juan explains. For him, the key to tenure was “to think about it enough to make sure I participated in and accomplished the things I wanted to showcase to the committee, but not enough that I lost sight of myself while trying to tick boxes.” He adds that, to get tenure, “You want to do you.”