I’m Doron Weber, Program Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and This Is How I Work.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a non-profit organization that funds original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics through programs such as the Sloan Research Fellowship for Young Scientists and Scientists and the Alfred P. Sloan Award at the Sundance Film Festival “. As vice president and program director, Doron Weber decides who gets the most of these grants. He told us about his decision-making process, his messy workspace, his support for marginalized authors, and how he reads so many scripts.
Location: New York, NY. Current position: Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. One word that best describes the way you work: interdisciplinary. Current mobile device: iPhone 7. Current computer: IBM Thinkpad.
First of all, tell us a little about your past and how you got where you are now.
I was born on a kibbutz in Israel, raised in New York, studied at Brown University in Rhode Island and spent my 20 years in Europe studying French and Latin literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and English literature as a Rhodes Fellow at Oxford and wrote at for a year alone on the Isle of Skye before returning to New York.
Although all my initial training was in the arts, I published a couple of books on medicine and science, worked at Rockefeller University, the Nobel Prize-winning Institute for Biomedical Research, and gradually moved on to science and the Sloan Foundation where I signed my signature. The Public Understanding of Science and Technology program is dedicated to connecting the “two cultures” of science and art. Science and art, of course, are just two sides of the same human desire to understand and meaningfully describe the world around us and within us.
At Sloan, I help order, design, manufacture and distribute a variety of culture-defining products, including Pulitzer Prize-winning books , Peabody’s radio and podcasts , Emmy-winning television , Oscar-winning films , Tony’s theater, and groundbreaking ideas. new media that seek to illuminate and humanize science for the general public. This is a kind of dream job, which I basically revised to fulfill the main mission of the Foundation – research and education in the field of science and technology, while meeting the need of society to integrate fundamental achievements of science into our common humanistic culture.
Tell us about a recent work day.
I run a non-profit multimedia science company where I work as both the CEO and leader of each division, and also as a grumbler who goes through every application and takes notes, so this is a hands-on large-scale business. I have read the proposals that come through the transom and the proposals that I have requested or that I have agreed to consider. If I am interested, I will give very detailed notes and work with the applicant to shape his application in the best possible form. Sometimes they are almost perfect on the first draft, which is great, but mostly they are time consuming, sometimes for many months or even years.
I probably read several hundred scripts, plays, TV shows and book suggestions every year. By now I am my own focus group and I just need to read my internal audience counter to make a decision. In some cases, I need to do more research and then I consult with relevant scientists, engineers and mathematicians in their fields to ensure accuracy. I have about 20 institutional film and television partners who send me their selections of semi-finalists and then we discuss in person or during conference calls with their respective juries and committees.
For the book program, I am the first reader and reviewer, and if they pass my odor test, I pass them on to my book committee. In the theater program, several times a year I sit at the same table with theater professionals and scientists, and we are achieving this. I screen dozens of films and TV shows at various stages of production and attend many stage readings of the plays and scripts we develop. I also represent the Foundation at various festivals, events and workshops and explain our mission to different audiences.
What apps, gadgets or tools can’t you live without?
The smartphone, of course, and apps like Vimeo are very useful for watching the many movies and TV shows I need to watch. YouTube is for anything, as long as it’s targeted. Dropbox for the huge and bulky files they send me. Book Suggestions and Science Projects I prefer to read in print, but I will use my iPad for scripts, plays and TV dramas where I can quickly flip through pages. I’ve used Oculus headsets for some VR projects and Google Cardboard for some new gaming projects.
How is your workplace arranged?
Creative chaos. I work on many proposals at the same time, and I like to let things grow on me, so my desk, cabinets and shelves are overflowing with projects in all environments, and I give them time to send signals and challenge me to answer. Or not. But in this way I keep things alive and seek invisible connections between them.
Likewise, my desktop computer usually has hundreds of files open at the same time because I use multiple suggestions and capabilities. I’m instinctive and super-analytical, so I make a lot of quick decisions, but I also have a lot of faith in unconscious processes, so I like to let things sprout and seep until the answer is clear.
What’s your best shortcut or life hack?
Timing is my best shortcut or incentive to take action. I need to feel their breath on my neck.
As far as the sheer number of scripts I go through all the time, I enjoy reading them on airplanes. I fly a lot and an airplane seat is a very efficient workplace where you are tied and distracted. I stuff a dozen scripts into my baggage, then flip them through the air – I read every page of every single script – before writing my comments on the cover, keeping one thin cover page and leaving 119 others behind. text pages. Therefore, when I get off the plane, I feel much lighter with a sense of accomplishment.
Who are the people who help you achieve results, and how do you rely on them?
I have one part-time assistant who has worked with me for 20 years and knows me better than I know myself, and one full-time employee who is only allowed to stay for three years, but I have there were three and they were all amazing. I hire really smart, energetic and ambitious people and tell them that in addition to all the other work I give them, their job is to constantly pester me about schedules and deadlines.
How do you keep track of what you need to do?
Daily to-do lists, calendars, weekly appointments, strategic planner, assistant. I do not process emails instantly, I often forward my colleague to return them to our weekly meeting. We operate on a quarterly board meeting cycle, so I send out quarterly updates / highlights that don’t just inform others; it’s my way of keeping track of the huge volume of media products we produce every quarter.
What do you enjoy doing the most and how do you deal with it?
The last thing I like to do is say no to people, and I have to do it 95% of the time. I try to be as quick and direct as possible so that they can switch to another sponsor. One day I got into trouble because I rejected something too quickly because it looked like I hadn’t paid enough attention to it. But I had; you usually know right away. I’m sure I’ve made a lot of people disappointed and angry. It comes with territory and you just have to pull it in.
How to recharge or take a break from work?
I go to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and chat with colleagues. Or sometimes, during lunch or after work, I go to the gym, swim, run or ride a bike, whatever, to give my brain a rest, and just stare blankly at these TV programs.
What’s your favorite side project?
I’m a writer who has published four books and wrote others, so I usually have a book, or at least a review of a book or article I’m working on. Right now, I’m choosing between a new science fiction book that my agent is crazy about, a reworking of a spy novel I wrote many years ago, or the beginning of an ambitious new historical fiction.
What are you reading now or what do you recommend?
I read several books at once. Biography of Alan Turing, The Mystery of Andrew Hodges. It was the basis for the 2014 film The Imitation Game , which we supported with a Tribeca Film Institute grant, and it tells the story of a visionary mathematician who foresaw and began to reinvent the world of computers and machine intelligence that we now live in. …
And I am reading two books by Ta-Nehisi Coates: “A Beautiful Struggle” and ” Between the World and Me” , which, nevertheless, are devoted to a different aspect of the world in which we now live.
Fill in the blank: I would like _____ to answer these same questions.
William Shakespeare, Charles Darwin and Jay-Z.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Fate helps a man if he has good courage.
What else would you like to add that might be of interest to readers and fans?
It was a watershed year for the role of women in society, and it is no coincidence that many of the long-advocated works on women scientists have been published or will soon be published, including: Hidden Figures , a story about African American women mathematicians, and engineers. at NASA we supported with a book grant in 2014; film and television grants for BOMBSHELL: The Hedy Lamarr Story , about the technology pioneer responsible for cell phones and Wi-Fi, and the upcoming Lamarr miniseries; The Black Hole Apocalypse , the first in the history of NOVA, orchestrated by a female scientist (cosmologist Jeanne Levin); and Photo 51 , a play starring Nicole Kidman as X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, which we hope to turn into a screenplay. We have also supported many other books, plays and films about prominent women scientists such as Marie Curie, Liz Meitner, Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, Mary Claire King, Katie Wright and many more.
At the same time, we are experiencing a particularly polarized and even dangerous moment in our history, and as someone who specializes in finding common ground between two cultures that often speak two seemingly different, mutually exclusive languages, I think we should all rise. above our narrow affiliation and try to better understand each other. Americans in general are very decent people, no matter who they voted for, and as scientists and artists, we must acknowledge and embrace our common humanity.