Schiller’s New Senior Research Fellow Studies How Organizations Can Be More Collaborative and Community-Oriented

by Maura Kelly

Throughout her academic life, Javiera Garcia-Meneses, Ph.D. has studied how communities work. She’ll continue that line of inquiry as the new Senior Research Fellow at the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society—a role she won after an exhaustive national search—by examining how interdisciplinary centers are structured and managed; how they function within a university; and how they can boost collaboration across departments. At the same time, Garcia-Meneses hopes to determine how Schiller and other centers like it can better communicate what they are doing both within and beyond the walls of the institute.

“What an incredible hire!” says Laura J. Steinberg, Schiller’s Seidner Family Executive Director. “Javiera wowed us with her intellect and curiosity, and her history of accomplishment. She also brings a unique lens to the study of interdisciplinarity in the academy; she is interested in taking into account the academy’s cultural and historical roots as she looks at how it can accommodate and encourage collaboration.” Steinberg adds, “Javiera will use the tools, methods, and perspectives of the social sciences and humanities to study how science is created.” 

Garcia-Meneses moved to the Boston area recently, after growing up in Chile. She also began studying for her Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Transformations there, at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. While she was completing her doctorate, two American universities hosted Garcia-Meneses as a visiting scholar: She spent five months at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, and a month at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Houston, TX. She’s excited to be in New England now. From her office above the Chestnut Hill campus, as she looks out at the majestic Gothic architecture of Boston College, Garcia-Meneses says, “I am waiting to see it in winter with snow,” she says. That’s not something that she saw much of in central Chile. 

In addition to dazzling Steinberg, Garcia-Meneses—whose big smile frequently lights her face—has made an impression on Ximena Soto, the assistant director of the Latinx Leadership Initiative (LLI) at the Boston College School of Social Work, who is also the former co-chair of Latinxs at BC (L@BC). At the end of September, she met with Garcia-Meneses so they could discuss the work of L@BC. “Javiera is already actively participating in the L@BC board,” says Soto. “This is an impressive commitment to developing relationships on campus and finding ways to connect.” 

Being at Schiller “is a discovery every day for me,” she says. “I think I’m the only social psychologist here, the only social scientist. It is really different for me to be in a building where there are engineers and labs on the next floor.” Prior to this, her co-workers were primarily those in the social sciences—as they were for a project she worked on as part of her doctoral study, looking at how women experience academia, with the goal of better understanding how to encourage them to stay in research positions. To do that, she explains, “We wanted to figure out the most complex elements of their work.” Simply interviewing subjects didn’t seem like an adequate approach, so Garcia-Meneses and her team went further: “We would follow them for a day so we could see with our own eyes the micro-relationships that make academia work.” At Schiller, she has spent her first weeks on the job “discovering what other people are doing and trying to understand my place here.” 

Though she is still very new, she’s already building relationships—including with the assistant dean for the doctoral program of the Boston College School of Social Work, Professor Christopher P. Salas-Wright. “I am excited to begin to collaborate with Javiera,” he tells SchillerNow. “We hope to look at the experiences of Venezuelan migrant youth and adults as part of my NIH-funded research and perhaps via my current Schiller project,” which aims to “understand motivations for emigration and how people transition from thinking about leaving to leaving their home country behind.” 

As her Schiller fellowship unfolds, Garcia-Meneses plans to study not only Schiller, but other similar organizations. “We want to look at how centers around the country work with the funding they receive, for example, and how they manage that funding to do interdisciplinary work.” Her plan is to consider a number of related questions: “If different centers do interdisciplinary work differently, why? Why do they have different elements? But also: How does interdisciplinary work feel? Comfortable? Or like hard work? Why?” The answers that she discovers will ideally help her and Schiller to develop new strategies to push their work forward, while enhancing existing strategies. She adds, “We also want to help researchers connect more with society—that is the main definition of interdisciplinary work.”

Research is her main interest—but she knows that a human touch means at least as much as facts and statistics. “Academia can be a really hostile place,” she points out. “In the university, people don’t often hear, ‘You are doing it right, you’re doing something really good.’” If she has anything to say about that, though, they will. What’s key to building a collaborative spirit, in her mind, is “acknowledging people’s work and making them part not only of one lab but part of the organization.” 

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