STEPHANIE PFIRMAN

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

A leading scientist and advocate for advancing women in the field of science

Stephanie Pfirman, chair of Barnard’s department of environmental science, has spent much of her academic life tracking glaciers and sea ice in the Arctic. So it’s no wonder she’s emerged as an expert on the Arctic environment. But Pfirman wasn’t always so sure that her chosen field of study would be so critical. In fact, back in the mid-1980s when she was considering doing postdoctoral research on the forces that cause Arctic ice sheets to become unstable and surge, she had a major crisis of doubt. “I was thinking, ‘Who cares about surging glaciers, anyway,’” recalls Pfirman, who received her PhD in marine geology and geophysics through a joint program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “It seemed like such a remote issue. I thought I should do something that was more important. It’s funny because now everyone wants to know more about glaciers given concerns about global sea level rise.”

Graduate school was followed by a stint in Washington, D.C., as a U.S. congressional committee staffer, pulling together congressional hearings on arid lands agriculture and contraceptive technology for the developing world.

Pfirman later came back to the Arctic continuing to build a rich, varied career that has included a half-dozen research expeditions north of the Arctic Circle, three and a half years of research in Germany, as well as assessing potential offshore oil lease sites as an oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey. In the early 1990s, she worked as a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, where she helped create an award-winning (and prescient) exhibit on global warming for New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

Pfirman recalls a dream she had during that time in which she looked down at the Arctic sea and saw that almost all the ice had melted. “It seemed like science fiction,” recalls Pfirman, who joined Barnard’s faculty in 1993. “It was something that might happen in a hundred years.”

Since then the Arctic ice has been disappearing far faster than anyone predicted. Late this summer, Pfirman says she was as stunned by satellite images showing that in the past two years alone, almost 25 percent more of the polar sea ice had melted—a phenomenon that she believes will only compound the problems of global warming, since the Arctic ice serves to reflect heat away from the earth.

At Barnard, Pfirman, who holds the Alena Wels Hirschorn ’58 and Martin Hirschorn Chair in Environmental and Applied Sciences, has used some innovative methods to help students understand the implications of the changes. In her first-year seminar, for instance, she has had students immerse themselves in the history of the early polar explorers of a century ago, and then plot their own virtual expeditions based on current conditions. “There are whole new passageways opening up,” says Pfirman. She notes that the melting ice is already spawning major development plans, which will bring more stress on the food chains that support whales, polar bears, and other Arctic wildlife.

Beyond her work on polar sea ice, Pfirman is also a big proponent of boosting the ranks of women scientists. With the help of a 2004 National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant to Columbia’s Earth Institute, Pfirman has been working with a team of researchers to study the obstacles that keep women from advancing in the sciences. And she has also devoted a good portion of her time to training young female scientists on how to negotiate and manage the academic ropes.

The good news, says Pfirman, is that the gender balance has definitely improved since the days she was a young researcher on Arctic expeditions, when she’d be lucky to find more than a couple other women on the ship. Indeed, on one month-long trip she recalls being the only woman scientist on a ship with 30 men. “You were always in the minority,” she says.

Pfirman notes that she did wind up meeting her future partner, Environmental Science Professor Peter Schlosser, on one of those expeditions. The two moved to New York in 1989, when Schlosser joined the Columbia University faculty. They have one child, a 9-year-old daughter they adopted from Russia in 1998.

Being one of the few women in a male-dominated field probably helped her land speaking invitations to academic conferences, which in turn helped her to build her visibility and reputation. On the other hand, she’s definitely had her share of frustrations, and like other women scientists she has worked hard to win the respect of male colleagues, and overcome what she says are subtle gender biases.

“It’s a lot of little things,” says Pfirman. For example, women in meetings often find their ideas attributed to men, and women scientists can expect to be grilled much harder on the grounds for their interpretations.

That said, Pfirman believes things are continuing to change for the better, and she plans to keep doing her part to keep women scientists moving ahead. “Women make up half the population,” she says. “I’m hoping that soon they’ll make up half the scientists.”