29: What It Means To Be a Woman in Science - with Nicki Vo

Meet Nicki Vo:Nikki is an accomplished innovation leader with over 17 years in the chemical industry. She has held various roles as an individual contributor, manager, and senior executive leader. She holds a BS in chemistry from UW Whitewater, an MS in chemistry from UW Madison, and Executive MBA from our IT, which is consistently ranked as a top 10 school by US News and World Report. I didn't know Alrighty, so that's good to know. So, in 2018, she was named top 40 nationwide MBA students by poets and quants. So this woman is incredible and really smart and we're so happy to have her here. With the companies, she has worked for. She has developed a unique way of managing scientists that have helped the team she has led into being high performance, developing novel innovations. receiving multiple recognitions. Nikki is the founder and president of Knievel, she founded this company to help develop cultures of Innovation Excellence by teaching companies and scientists, the technical and professional skills that would help them reach their highest potential, and essentially, to innovate row in Excel. Erin: What advice do you have for other women in science?
Nicki: I think the biggest thing, which has helped me is having a frame of reference so as peanut Christina was saying, you know, now that we have more work talking about more, and we could see other women who have led this journey for us, we can start to see like oh, okay, since she has done it, You can do it well. So it is for me, I think. And one of the things that I love, what I do is, when I see other females who are either demotivated, they've lost them, their passion they're in the ignition is to, to talk to other females who may either have already done it or are successful, and try to understand from their journey, what did they do? How are they successful, what worked, what didn't work? And once we can get those frames of references, we can start filtering them and say, Ah, okay, so she tried this. And that worked. So maybe I could do the same. I could try it and see what works. And so I encourage women and all sorts of people to find frames of reference, and talk to other people and learn about their journey, what worked, what didn't work, but also read and watch movies. I think those are all great ways to give us the inspiration to help us move forward.
Erin:  Anything else that you would like to share with us about being a woman in the sciences, and what your takeaway is for the state of the state right now?
Nicki: I still feel there is room to grow but I do feel we have progressed quite a bit. And where I feel we've progressed more and more is we are taking a little bit more and how our personal, emotional, and mental state has a lot to do with how we perform in life. And this is something I highly encourage a lot of people to do is to get to know who we are as people, what are our strengths, and what are our values, and once we can understand that, then we can take that and do just a whole host of insurmountable things. So Well, I still think that there are a lot of areas for us to get into and grow and, and still progress. Progress as a society, I do feel that compared to 20 years ago, we are talking about it more, we're embracing, you know, the vulnerability side of things. And we're taking time to think through who we are as people. And rather than subscribing to the patterns that society or our environments tell us that we need to follow, we are starting to think through well, does this pattern fit me? And if not, how should I rewrite this pattern? And I think there's more and more, more and more people talking about it and embracing that. And I think that's, that's cool because there are so many great things we can do once we get to know who we are as people.
Kris: So Nicki, we're curious, is there something unique