Dissertation Detour

Alex Lockwood ’07 finished her Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology last year, but this fall, she’ll be reliving those stressful days of research, thesis writing and defense preparation over and over and over again.

It’s not “Groundhog Day”—she’s one of the stars of “The PHD Movie 2,” sequel to 2011’s “The PHD Movie,” based on the long-running comic strip by Jorge Cham. The first movie screened at more than 500 universities worldwide, and the new film, which has already been featured in Science and Nature, will be shown at the University of Maryland on Oct. 1, followed by a Q&A with Cham and Lockwood (top right).

“I got hundreds of messages [after the first movie] from people saying, ‘Thank you so much,’ ‘You kept me in grad school,’ ‘You gave me a smile when I was down about my work.’ I was so nervous, but people loved it,” says Lockwood, who currently works in scientific outreach at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. The new film “pokes fun a little more at some of the situations in academia. You realize you have to keep a lightheartedness about everything you do.”

Cham created the strip, called “Piled Higher and Deeper” but more commonly known as “The PHD Comics,” while he was a graduate student at Stanford in 1997. It chronicles the frustrations of finding funding and research setbacks, as well as the funnier side of graduate life, including the endless quest for free food and how to date as a poor teaching assistant.

Lockwood was in her third year of studying planetary science at Caltech when Cham sent out the casting call. With acting genes in the family—her grandfather was Academy Award-nominated actor Robert Strauss—and a bit of experience in high school plays, the outgoing Lockwood “just went and gave it a go.”

She was offered a starring role as “Cecilia,” a rare female computer science graduate student (though she connected more with the character of Cecilia’s roommate “Tejal,” a constantly-protesting social science grad student).

“When I was filming that movie, I was in a really tough place in grad school. Things hadn’t started moving that much in terms of my research,” says Lockwood. “Cecilia was going through balancing work and life and getting behind and Tejal gives her a line: ‘You need to stay passionate about what you’re doing. You can’t just work 24/7 and get where you need to go.’ It was art imitating life. That’s exactly what I needed to hear and think.”

The film was clearly an amateur project, produced, directed and acted by Caltech faculty, staff and students in their spare time. “It was a labor of love,” says Lockwood, who carved out one day a week for months to shoot.

To promote it, she and Cham traveled across the country and to the United Kingdom and Sweden. Along the way, they interviewed local graduate students about their research to create a YouTube series, which was her first foray into scientific outreach. Cham was spurred to write the second movie by the overwhelming support for the project—nearly 4,000 people pledged more than $160,000 on Kickstarter—and Lockwood’s imminent move to Saudi Arabia last summer (she filmed the sequel during a vacation in January).

Though she was successful in her research at Caltech—even finding water on a far-flung planet along the way—“The PHD Movie” freed her to consider a life beyond academia.

Today, she says, “my job is two-fold: One is educating the public so we don’t have things like people not believing in climate change or not vaccinating their kids. Two, it’s important to give a voice and personality to scientists because it’s a pretty thankless job in a lot of ways, even though it’s arguably one of the most important. In the media, scientists get portrayed pretty poorly, and I would like to change that perception.”