I grew up in a home of domestic violence and alcoholism, and with a mom of just unconditional love and this indomitable spirit to overcome. And she gave all of her kids — all four of her kids, but the three that I grew up with — she gave us this really sense of self, this strong character that we all have, this belief in the possible. She always emphasized education. She would say to us things like, “Maybe you’re poor, but nobody can take away your education. Education is very, very important.” So my mom was, without question, the most important influence in my life and the person who I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to. There are a lot of people who have come in my life that I have looked to and look up to, but nobody has had the influence on my life that my mom has.

I had some amazing teachers and coaches. I had a history teacher in the eleventh grade in American history named Norman Schmitt who was wonderful. He just made American history burst forth, and I was entranced by it. I always liked to study and get good grades, but there were always kids smarter. I might be in the top — oh, I don’t know — six percent of my class, but that meant there were five percent that were smarter, and indeed they were. I also had an amazing track coach, ironically named Jack Armstrong, very much like an all-American boy, and indeed, he was. When we ran competitively, we were second in the country in the AAU junior championships. His teams — as a testament to him, rather than any of the individuals like myself — when I graduated from high school, until that time, he had been 107 and 2 as a record in dual meets, which meant that he went through many different generations of kids, and the kids always mysteriously ended up being enormously capable, which was a testament to him. He would have all kinds of wonderful ways of motivating people. We used to train in the winter as well as the summer. We trained outdoors in the freezing cold, ran sprints and middle distances on frozen parking lots, which is a real challenge as the wind’s whipping and you’re wondering if your legs are going to go out from under you. No matter how miserable you felt, he would be there smiling, and as you rounded the location where he was, he’d say, “You’ve got to make some deposits on training day to make some withdrawals on meet day,” and he was very cheerful because, after a while, you were wondering why were you going through this level of agony. So I realized what I was doing was making these horrible deposits of sort of bashing myself physically, so when it was time to actually compete, it was effortless. So I’ve learned many lessons from great inspirational people. But that seemed totally practical to me, unfortunately, and I hated every minute of it, but I liked the winning when we had meets. That was just an example. But the camaraderie on the team was fantastic.

My family, I would say, my mother, and my maternal grandparents. I grew up with them. My mother was a teacher in a little school, and she believed in freedom and equality for people, and did not have the notion that we were supposed to live as we did, under legally enforced racial segregation. She didn’t believe in it.

The person that inspired me the most was Judah Folkman. He was the man that I worked with when I was a postdoctoral fellow. He was really an inspirational person for a variety of reasons. One, he was a big thinker, and lots of people told him that his ideas wouldn’t work or that they were impossible. He persevered in spite of that, and did very, very well. And secondly, he was very encouraging, very sort of like positive reinforcement, in terms of how he would deal with me and others. So I would say he certainly had a pivotal influence on my career when I was a postdoctoral fellow.

Yes, and, I'll turn your comment around and say it's fairly close to the biological ratio of men and women. It's all the other fields that are aberrant. … This is the normal field, right? Because it is a much more even distribution between men and women, absolutely.