Claiming Your Expertise: An Onstage Conversation about Impostor Syndrome

She has garnered awards from the National Science Foundation and from several corporations for her research as a chemist, as well as several teaching prizes from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she served on the faculty for more than a decade and three years as department chair. Today she is dean of Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.

But for most of her professional life, Valerie Sheares Ashby says, she experienced impostor syndrome. And over time, she learned to overcome it. Today she delivers talks around the country about ten strategies she uses to identify and resist the strong tendency for scholars to discount their own abilities and doubt their successes. 

Valerie Sheares Ashby became the Dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University on July 1, 2015. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from UNC-Chapel Hill and completed her postdoctoral research at the Universitat Mainz, Germany in 1994 as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and NATO Postdoctoral Fellow.

Ashby went to Duke from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill where she chaired the Department of Chemistry from 2012-2015. As a faculty member at UNC since 2003, she has held numerous leadership positions and has experience at all levels of academic administration. She also directed the UNC National Science Foundation Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, aimed at increasing the number of underrepresented students completing doctoral degrees and continuing into the professoriate in science, technology, engineering and math, and social, behavioral and economics fields. As a researcher, Ashby’s work focused on synthetic polymer chemistry with a present focus on designing and synthesizing materials for biomedical applications such as X-ray contrast agents and drug delivery materials. She is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Development Award, the DuPont Young Faculty and 3M Young Faculty Awards. As an educator, she was recognized with the UNC Chapel Hill General Alumni Association Faculty Service Award, the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching and research, the J. Carlyle Sitterson Freshman Teaching Award, the UNC Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, and the Johnston Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching.

Susanna Widicus Weaver is an Emory University associate professor of chemistry and the director of graduate studies in the department. She holds a B.S. degree in chemistry from Illinois Wesleyan University and completed her Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology (2005). She was a postdoctoral scholar in the Departments of Chemistry and Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Widicus Weaver joined the Emory faculty in 2008.

Widicus Weaver conducts research in the emerging field of prebiotic astrochemistry. Her lab investigates the chemical mechanisms in space that lead to the development of biological systems through interdisciplinary work in laboratory spectroscopy, observational astronomy, and astrochemical modeling. It is common for astrochemists to focus on only one of these areas, and only rarely does a researcher cross disciplinary boundaries. Widicus Weaver's expertise in all three areas of astrochemistry is unique.