Professor Valerie Stoute - A life of academic excellence through hard work and Service

Last week, Sunshine Today published only a part of Professor Valerie Stoute’s CV and we had to use a full centre spread to do just that part. We promised it would be continued this week. However, Professor Stoute, who had not anticipated that we would have attempted to print her very long CV, made the following remarks about having it published.

‘When I saw a part of my CV in print, several things went through my mind. I wondered if people could grasp what it meant or see the work reflected in the part printed, which essentially covered my UTT years. It was good because it showed up, if people cared to look, some of the good work that not just I, but a core group of my co-authors, did at UTT. But, it doesn’t tell the whole story even of my UTT years, which are key because that is what is germane to people of Trinidad and Tobago. I remarked only recently that what people do before coming to UTT is important but they should not expect to rest on those laurels, while they relax here. What you do at an institution brimming with facilities and critical masses of colleagues in your niche area with whom you can work will not count for much when you get here and realize the facilities are not the same and one person is working in this and another is working in that, all silos of one. One has to know how to adapt to circumstances. One does the work which is required for the place where one is currently. This is what I have attempted to do at UTT. Through all of my activities – research, teaching, and outreach - I tried to tackle problems pertinent to Trinidad and Tobago. I thought that is what I was supposed to do. Somehow somewhere somebody decided that was wrong and for 18 months and counting, I have felt besieged by those who seem bound and determined to make the arguments that there was no way that I could have done what I did. So, forget the CV or the rest of the CV. There are so many people these days submitting to predatory journals and bogus conferences, padding their resumes and Research Gate profiles shamelessly that a big raucous CV doesn’t tell the real tale. In fact, it doesn’t tell any tale. In the case of some people, it can’t be trusted at all. What I would like is an opportunity to give some highlights of my training and of the work I have done at UTT. I want to do the first so that I could show why I could do the second. I also want to expose, via elaborating a bit on the work done at UTT, the quality of the research done with colleagues in two other areas, Biomedical Engineering and Agricultural Sciences.

St Joseph’s Convent -The Early Years

I had the kind of High School Education at St Joseph Convent, Port-of-Spain, that had I been in North America or the UK, would have required my parents putting out a great deal of money at some elite private school. It was absolutely delightful. I went there from Tranquility Girls School, also a delightful experience, both in terms of training and in the sheer joy of all those grounds with all of those fruit trees and all of those vendors with every tasty treat to gladden a child’s heart. At Convent, I focused on languages- Latin, English, and Spanish. I was always good at mathematics but the school did not do it at ‘A’ levels at that time. So, it was languages and set books, all of which I remember, and a whole lot of discussion, philosophy and Thematic Analysis. That is where I learned, in a sense, how to extract secondary information - themes and sentiments - from words. It was where I was trained also to think on my feet, to be able to look quickly at a topic and just speak extemporaneously on it. These are skills which have served me in good stead since then and which I use up to today. The experiences from those days of free flowing discussion and critical thought are what I infused into my Introduction to Research course at UTT, one I always felt epitomized the true University class. I still believe, in spite of those who would argue to the contrary, that when I taught it, it provided UTT students with valuable training.

UWI and Beyond

My excellent ‘A’ level grades notwithstanding, I entered UWI in what was then a preliminary year, designed to prepare students to take on the Sciences. I took on the Sciences and graduated four years later with a double first class honours in Chemistry and Mathematics. The UWI Postgraduate Scholarship I won could not be taken up because I headed to Canada, to the University of Toronto (U of T) to read for a degree in Chemistry. I got off to a rocky start because the University felt that my having done both Chemistry and Mathematics, my Chemistry would be somewhat deficient so they made me do make-up courses – 6 make-up courses, which were exactly the same courses that the ‘regular’ students were doing and I had to do them in ONE year, whereas the others did theirs in 3 years. I also had to demonstrate/teach extra periods to make money. You know what that did? It forged me like steel. I ended up doing 13 postgraduate courses at U.of T., compared with 6 for other graduates. The Chairman apologized to me after two years for the bad logic of that decision but to me, it was God’s hand. I got training up my ying yang and people should note this when they presume to judge my competency now.

The Royal Exhibition of 1851 Fellowship

At the end of my Ph.D. at U. of T., the University submitted my name for the prestigious Royal Exhibition of 1851 Fellowship. I was the winner of one of only two fellowships offered to graduate students from ALL Canadian Universities. The University of Toronto was ecstatic at my ‘win.’ Winners could go to any University in the UK to study since acceptance was guaranteed. I opted for King’s College in London to study under Sir Victor Gold. When I went there, researchers from that institution had already won six Nobel prizes in Chemistry. Besides that I wanted to be in London. This scholarship has, as its patrons, the British Royal Family. Scholars had to meet for white glove dinners with Prince Phillip, who was repeatedly intrigued by the fact that I wore a tag saying ‘Canada’ to these dinners. (A curious note is this. This fellowship/scholarship is 168 years old and they only started admitting engineers within the last 10 to 20 years and even then to a sort of applied status, since it was intended by its Royal founder to be a Scholarship for scientists. Engineers are still not designated as scholars. Ironic.) I was invited by the Princess Royal, the fellowship’s current President, to attend the 10th anniversary of the Alumni Association at Buckingham Palace in December 2016. There were 4 non-white scholars, myself included, out of about 200 (several Nobel Laureates included) at that reception. Sadly, it came home to me then that I am more than likely the only person from the Caribbean to have ever won this scholarship.

Back at UWI and off to NYU

I returned to UWI from London, now with several of my old lecturers as my colleagues. I was immediately thrown into the deep end, given the tough courses in Physical Chemistry, such as Statistical Thermodynamics, with which no one could cope. For my 14 years at UWI, I remained the only woman in the Chemistry Department, the individual with the largest teaching load, with the toughest courses, and with the biggest variety of courses. I taught all years of Physical Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry, and Chemistry in Agriculture. I also supervised/co-supervised research students at the M.Phil. and Ph.D. level, five of them to completion during my time there or after. To effect the supervision of one student and to help with others, who were not under my direct supervision, I felt I needed more training since I could not get the Statistics support I wanted at UWI. So, I took a leave of absence from UWI and entered the Master’s programme at New York University’s Stern School of Business. It was one of the best periods of training I ever had because I went in with research problems that we had not been able to solve in the Chemistry Department because my undergraduate Statistics could not cut it and I came out with solutions. I graduated Suma cum Laude and won the W. Edwards Deming prize for coming first in Statistics. When I returned to UWI the technical and supervisory support I could give to Doctoral students in Analytical Chemistry improved tremendously.

New York Training

In New York, I honed my soft instrument skills. This is training you don’t get in the classroom. For years I would do at least 5 online surveys a day as part of different panels. I have literally done thousands of surveys. Subjecting myself to that taught me how survey respondents react, what turns then off, in particular. This was training in how to increase reliability in responses. I was sitting in Bryant Park in New York City one day when someone came up to me and asked me if I wanted to participate in a Focus group. The rest is history. I participated in and facilitated Focus groups, using many different formats. Again that is training one cannot get in a classroom or in which one can hold a certificate. (Maybe some people at UTT should learn the value of no-orthodox training before they presume to pronounce on what anyone can and cannot do.) It is also the training which allowed me to train students in the Research courses I taught at UTT.

Work at UTT

I have ‘facilitated’ to completion at UTT 18 research graduates- 3 at the M.Phil. and 15 at the Doctoral level at UTT. Of these, I count myself as the sole or main research supervisor for 15, the thesis supervisor for 17 and the advisor for 1. These are in multiple disciplines. I defy anyone to tell me that I did not know what I was doing or was not in control in all but one of these. (In that one, I learned what I didn’t know.) I have also supervised/ co-supervised 170 taught Master’s programme research projects. These are smaller projects than the M.Phil. but many of them have involved excellent advanced work. That is NOT padding. Note, in my CV, I report these as a total. I do not quote each one, not in 5 lines or one. How could I do this? First, as I have said, I am not a hobbyist. I have multidisciplinary advanced training. Further, I had a significant amount of supervisory experience before I came to UTT. Finally, I worked like a donkey, seven days a week, long hours every day. More fool me!!! A lot of good work, completed by research graduates of UTT is remaining on the shelf, buried in theses. Results, in many cases potential solutions to real problems, are not being actualized. They are not filtering back into the society and being implemented in the areas where they are needed. People dismiss research which is not commercializable or not rushed into publication as useless. This is based on the false premise that value comes from earning money or earning a line entry in one’s CV. (It is this latter which may have led so many people to publish rubbish in predatory journals, paying mightily to do it, and others to pad their resumes and profiles shamelessly.) To me, any work which addresses a problem in Trinidad and Tobago and offers a solution is valuable indeed and should be encouraged and done at the National University. If you clean up and also protect the nation’s environment, that is not going to earn you money but it raises general quality of life through protecting the health of individuals with clean air, water, soil, and their enjoyment of the areas of natural beauty, now under threat in Trinidad and Tobago. No one wants to bathe in a sea of oil or a river of solid wastes. We also don’t want to eat fish, exposed to either. One cannot put a price on that. At UTT, we had a strong Environmental Studies programme up until 17 months ago when it was precipitously closed. In researching real problems in that area, we managed to do work which has and could have international significance. We also managed to develop a nexus of applied science researchers between Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Studies, and Agricultural Sciences. Working with UTT’s first Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Amalia Hosein, and with her supervisor, Dr. Natasha Ramroop Singh, Environmental Studies managed to offer technical support in the development of two cardiovascular disease risk models, which outperformed the international standards for a sample of our population. We have applied for a patent but, more importantly, this is work we did to contribute to solving a serious health problem here in Trinidad and Tobago. It is a big wonderful work and the hope was that a lot of insights coming from that could be infused into the health sector and lead to improvements. Realizing this now be very difficult.

Establishing an antibiotics registry

With Biomedical Engineering, we were looking too at establishing an antibiotics registry which could lead to the mapping of antibiotics resistance here in Trinidad and Tobago, where over-prescribing and inappropriate use may both be leading to germs becoming resistant to the common antibiotics available here. One of our research students in Environmental Studies, besides having a large public survey out on antibiotics use, is looking at extracting natural anti-microbial from marine sponges. We also worked with Dr. Marcus Ramdwar in areas of the Agricultural sector such as improving the extension services and food security – via testing soil amendments, exploring indigenous alternatives to imported greens, and pest control. Dr. Ramdwar’s work in looking for ways to control the Giant African Snail is getting noticed regionally and internationally but I still feel that the results of his work with Farmer’s groups and the extension system which serves them have not been exploited locally. In our main programme, we have developed multidimensional indexes, tools to capture abstract characteristics like Urban Intensity, Air Pollution, and Quality of Life. I believe that these are very important, not just to Trinidad and Tobago but internationally. I am looking to talk to ministry personnel, to state agencies, and to NGOs about using these tools, at the same time that some at UTT are proclaiming that my ‘license to be admitted to any UTT campus and to remain on one has expired.’ It is going to be a satisfying day for me when they are made to offer an explanation for that conundrum.

My work has been disrupted, my research students scattered

For 18 months, I have worked at UTT with the unnecessary evil of targeted malice in the form of persistent obstruction, harassment, and defamation of my character and reputation, among other senseless and unwarranted attacks. I have had colleagues bring specious charges against me to advance their own agenda. My work has been disrupted, my research students scattered, all of this perpetrated for reasons known only to the perpetrators. Yet with all this, I have probably managed to do more provable work than most. These elements continue to attempt to stain me with a lack of specificity, depending on the public to fit a crime to the extreme punishment. I will continue to resist. Those who try to curry favor in secret with abusers and connivers must examine their own consciences but I do want to warn that this has gone way past any the protection of any anonymous lying and backstabbing. The time has come to stand up and declare, possibly under oath, all that you say in the dark and watch me in the eye while you are doing it. I am a researcher. I believe in evidence. When I conclude, I do so with evidence. No one should try to counteract that with broad, baseless statements.