Interview with Malia Jones

Troy Reeves 00:01

Okay, today is October 7, 2021. This is an interview with Malia Jones. This interview is being done for academic staff award winners oral history project. My name is Troy Reeves with the UW Madison Oral History Program. This interview is being done virtually. I'm in Madison and I will ask, I will ask you to say where you are when I asked you this question to help with sound quality, will you say your name, spell your last name? Just tell us roughly where you are in the world right now?

Malia Jones 00:31

Yeah, my name is Malia Jones, and Jones is spelled J-O-N-E-S. And I am in Madison, Wisconsin on the west side.

Troy Reeves 00:41

Great. All right. Well, thank you again for giving me your time. We have questions and we have about fifty minutes now to to get through them. I-- as I said before, I do reserve the right to do a follow up interview if we feel like it's it's necessary.

Malia Jones 00:57

Yeah.

Troy Reeves 00:57

But this first question is, is big and broad. And that's what brought you to UW Madison?

Malia Jones 01:04

Yeah. So I I spent the 20 years prior to coming here to Madison in Los Angeles. And I did my I did my, both of my graduate degrees at UCLA there. I also worked outside of academia for a while in Los Angeles. And at the time that I finished my postdoc at USC, um, you know, academic life kind of has cycles where you have to go look for another job. And this was one of those moments. And I, we had my husband and I, our older son was four. And, you know, I, I really enjoyed living in Los Angeles for like, 14 of those 20 years. And but when I had kids, it got really hard, it is a really hard place to have children. And so I decided I couldn't take LA anymore. And so I literally opened up some lists of best places in the United States to raise children and applied to every available appropriate job in each of them. And then simultaneously, it happened that the applied population lab, I had met the then director, Katherine Curtis, at a conference. And they were they were trying to expand their staff. And so they posted a position in health geography, which is an amazing fit for me. And so that came up right at the same time that I was, you know, my husband and I were making a decision, we had to get out of LA. And so I applied, I was very enthusiastic about it, because the job, like I said, it's a great fit still is. It's really exciting work. And I really, the APL is really cool. And we also 00:03:00have some family here, my husband's brother, and his wife are also UW Madison staff, well, what faculty and staff. So I got it. And here here, we ended up. We're not from the Midwest. We're not from I've had practically never been to Madison before we moved here. And so it was a transition. But sometimes people ask me if I miss LA and I so don't. It was, in every way, a good transition almost every way.

Troy Reeves 03:37

So what were your initial impressions, then? Since you said you really hadn't been here? Your initial impressions in those early days, weeks months of of becoming a Madisonian?

Malia Jones 03:49

Yeah. Well, I can talk a little bit about my impressions of Madison, and then my impressions at the UW Madison two. So the day we arrived, and if you've been to LA, one of the things I don't like about LA or I didn't in the end was that it doesn't rain, and I really like the rain. I'm just a person who if we talked about this before you turn on the recording, I like the rain makes me feel cozy and like refreshed. And so it was really wearing on me the consistent you know, just year after year of not raining and so the day we arrived, it was pouring I can remember we rented this house for six months, while we were shopping for a house to purchase and I can remember standing on there on the front porch of that house looking at this rain pouring down on the street and all the green and just like oh my god, this this is better this is way better. So so you know my overall impression. It feels really, really different in a lot of ways and I was really ready for something that's smaller, and, I don't know more manageable in terms of, of lifestyle. And then if it was, you know, another week later that I actually started working, and I work in ag Hall. Ag Hall has a particular feel to it. It's old and creaky. And and I really love it. I love you know, walking up those tippy stairs and past the dusty lecture hall that even has a smell to it, like an old lecture hall smell of its chalk or what but just kind of felt like I landed in somewhere that had a lot of, you know, a long history that I could become a part of. So it was really exciting.

Troy Reeves 05:57

That's great. I walk through ag Hall on cold days, on my way back to steenbock 00:06:00library. Well, pre pandemic.

Malia Jones 06:06

Yeah,

Troy Reeves 06:06

Yeah, I love a couple of what one retired faculty who had an office in there, and I enjoyed going over to that office, because I, it is, it's like, one of the quintessential academic buildings, like it--

Malia Jones 06:19

Very much is. Yeah. So if you walk through it to keep warm, you're only in the basement. And the basement is is really funky. That basement, like it has a smell too, but I'm pretty sure it's coming from the bathrooms. If you've ever seen the door to the boiler room open, there's a very impressive boiler and that keeps ag hall warm on the basement level. But I'm up on the third floor. And yeah, I love it for all of its creaky oldness. And

Troy Reeves 06:51

Yeah, yep, I have when I moved into my office and steenbock, they told me I could have a new desk and a new chair. And the chair needed to be new. But this desk was this old oak desk and like, there's no way in the world I'm getting a new desk. There's like their stories in this desk. I don't, I will never know them. But just to know that I sat at a desk that you know, lord knows who said before me,

Malia Jones 07:14

Yeah.

Troy Reeves 07:15

Lord know who before them sat in it. It just makes me feel like I'm at a place that has a history.

Malia Jones 07:20

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love that feeling of connection. Actually, the office that I'm in now has this shy, gigantic desk. And I'm, I mean, this thing was like, it had to have been constructed in place decades and decades ago. Definitely. I mean, it's not even that postwar style. It's old. But it's, it's really not very functional. I always, I mean, it's fine. There's so much space on it, that you can kind of find a spot that works. Okay, but every time I get frustrated with it, I'm like, who ordered this thing? It's probably 80 years ago, but.

Troy Reeves 08:01

Yeah, I suppose we could talk about old desks all day. But let's move on to that next question. And this kind of takes us back, you know, pre pre UW Madison and what factors led to your work and or research interests?

Malia Jones 08:19

Yeah. Well, I mean, I have always loved maps. Just I just, I, I'm a very, very spatially oriented person. I mean, I just talked about my first impressions of Madison. And they're both it's kind of what's what was the space like answers right? When I was a kid, I love just I would stare at the atlas the world atlas for hours. My dad was a sailor, and he taught me to navigate with nautical charts. And I've always loved maps. And so when I, when I was in an undergrad, I did a I never could decide what I wanted to do. So I ended up with a major in 00:09:00philosophy, and also a major in anthropology. And I focused on archaeology, which is really the study of the impressions that we leave on our space. Right. And so from there, I kind of lost the thread a little bit for a little while, I ended up working in a few random different jobs after college, wasn't totally sure where I was headed in life. And then I got a job at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, as a project director. While I was there, I attended a talk. One of these weekly talks they would bring in a speaker and the speaker was Dr. Anne Pebley from UCLA, and she was there talking about this new project that she had going on called LA FANS and LA FANS is the study of how how neighbor hoods are demographically and socially and how they change over time in Los Angeles. So it's a sample of the people in the neighborhoods. But it's also a representative sample of neighborhoods. And I was like, wow, that is what I want to do, I want to do that. And so, you know, fast forward a few years, I ended up applying to do a master's in public health at UCLA, and then ultimately asked, Anne to my PhD advisor and worked on LA FANS. So I really, I followed that path, because it sounded interesting. The health connection was a little bit accidental, to be honest, but it has worked out, it has worked out well. Turns out, I am interested in public health, so but I was principally interested in in, you know, the idea of, of the places we go, the places we spend time in and how they affect us as people.

Troy Reeves 11:02

Great. Thank you for that. So, you know, when asked, cuz I assume you are asked, How do you describe what you do?

Malia Jones 11:15

Yeah, that's changed a little real last two years.

Troy Reeves 11:20

So maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe pre pandemic? And since we do have a question about COVID, we can you can either jump into that now, or we'll get to it later.

Malia Jones 11:28

Yeah. So, um, what I do generally, and this is true, even post pandemic, what I do is study how people cluster in neighborhoods and other places in specific ways that are driven by their social status and race, and sometimes their ideology and desire to send their kids to certain kinds of schools and all of those social factors. And I do that in several different contexts. I've studied 00:12:00segregation, and I've studied political clustering, and gerrymandering. And I also study how people who don't want to vaccinate their kids tend to cluster in certain schools. And that's, that's really about herd immunity, and kind of the spatial scale of herd immunity. And so that work really, I ended up getting sucked into the the public conversation about the pandemic, as a result of that, that line of my work. And so now, what I do is actually a lot of science communication, I talk a lot about and study a lot about how people get and process scientific information, much of it, also driven by their social characteristics.

Troy Reeves 13:05

So which one of those did you? Well, maybe, maybe this-- I guess my question is, so you give the least these three three major buckets, if you will, sort of segregation, gerrymandering, and well, I typed down anti vaxxers, which probably shows my bias, but did you--

Malia Jones 13:28

We call that we like to say vaccine hesitant people. Not all people who have questions about vaccines are anti vaxxers, but some of them are.

Troy Reeves 13:37

That's yep, that is exactly.

Malia Jones 13:38

Some of them are ideologically committed to the idea of not vaccinating their kids for themselves. Not everyone.

Troy Reeves 13:45

Right. Thank you. Um, so which one of those did you study? Was that something you were studying? Like, all at the same time? Or was it something that you start like, started studying segregation?

Malia Jones 13:58

Yeah.

Troy Reeves 13:59

Okay.

Malia Jones 13:59

So I studied segregation in that was what my dissertation was about, I studied segregation in neighborhoods in Los Angeles. I studied how segregation predicts obesity and hypertension, and particularly over time. So living in a segregated neighborhood, we know has associations with obesity and hypertension and other health health issues. And I looked at, at a you know, two time point sample to see if if like a duration of exposure could predict more hypertension or obesity. I also looked at how people use the all the different you know, not just their residential neighborhood, but all the different places that they go in a day, and a type of study called activities spaces. So I, I looked at how people move through space on a daily basis and what that collection of neighborhoods is like. So people might be very segregated at home, but actually 00:15:00spend most of their day in a very different kind of a place. And so, you know, when we think about exposure to neighborhood, it's not just residential neighborhood that we're thinking about it. It may be other places, too. So I was doing that when I was in, that's my dissertation work I was working with Anne and then I had children and I in Los Angeles. And you know, I'm a well educated white mom, living in Los Angeles, trying to negotiate all of the kind of social milieu of that. And I found myself encountering a lot of people who were otherwise very much like me who were not vaccinating their kids. And I got really curious about this. And I started working with Alison Buttenheim who is a professor at Penn. She also she was one of Anne's students also. So we not at the same time, but we had a connection through Anne as well. Allison's a behavioral economists, and she studies in part vaccine uptake. And so we started talking about, you know, why is it that certain, we see this clustering in social groups around vaccine hesitancy. And that's, so that's where there's actually a really tight connection there, Alison reached out to me specifically, because she had this great idea to use measures of segregation, to measure vaccine hesitancy levels in schools. So looking at segregation, of vaccine hesitant parents within the schools that they send their kids to. So we wrote a couple papers on that, and that was the tie in between segregation and vaccine hesitancy. But I got really curious about it, and and have pursued that much more. And I have a major grant. Now a KO1 award that looks at vaccine hesitancy and spatial clustering. And that was all pre pandemic, so.

Troy Reeves 17:14

Okay. Yeah. That was the 20. Is that the 2018? Grant?

Malia Jones 17:19

Yeah,

Troy Reeves 17:20

Yeah. So

Malia Jones 17:20

I, I started applying for that in basically, as soon as I got to UW Madison. So 2015, I started working on the application for that, and then actually was awarded in 2018, after like, the longest wait of my life, that was such a long time to wait for that to come in.

Troy Reeves 17:38

So it really took that long from the time the application went in until you got funded?

Malia Jones 17:45

Well, so the KO applications, if you have to collect a team of mentors, which is, you know, it's people don't have time to mentor some rando who emails them like, hey, I'm really interested in your work. So. And I also wanted to do something that is, there is not a really clear home for at UW Madison. So I had 00:18:00just kind of cobbled together a team. And it took quite a while to get the mentoring team together. So I submitted it the first time in 2016. It got scored pretty well, but not well enough to be funded. I resubmitted it. And I think it was the February 2017 deadline. And then yeah, it took another eight, almost 18 months for them to award it.

Troy Reeves 18:31

Wow.

Malia Jones 18:33

It was, yeah. These NIH timelines are. It's really hard right now, because I want to propose these studies about vaccine hesitancy in COVID. But what can you propose knowing you can't even start for two years? You know, like, I don't know what we're going to be doing in two years. With respect to COVID. I have no idea. How do you predict that?

Troy Reeves 18:56

Right. Yeah.

Malia Jones 18:58

You have to come up with something that you could do, no matter what happens, which is just very hard. So.

Troy Reeves 19:05

Mm hmm. You've alluded to this a little bit in some of your answers, but I always like to ask, understand, you know, I put the word typical in quotes, but sort of what tasks comprise a typical day. And this could be you know, pre pandemic, typical day, if you want to think about it that way.

Malia Jones 19:26

Yeah. Well, pre pandemic typical day would be I mean, I do a ton of emails, to be honest. I, one of the things that I think we all really try to work on in academia is not dying of emails, and like doing anything else, that's not emails. So typical day involves a lot of emails, but it also usually involves meeting with collaborators or the students who occasionally work for me. I have um I've had a number of undergraduate interns and a few graduate students who I've worked with, and, you know, keeping them on track in terms of getting achieving their aims and achieving our collective aims and mentoring. I also do, I don't have I don't have a big lab. So I do much of my own data analysis. So I do some coding in STATA, and in net logo. And, and writing, you know, writing grant applications, or papers. I also had, in that in between time, when I was waiting for my KO1 award, I got a Baldwin award grant from the university to do science communications work in partnership with this news media outlet called WIscontext. Wiscontext is now unfortunately defunct, but it was this great NPR 00:21:00or Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, and at one time extension partnership. And their goal was really to put, like, current events into demographic, social and historical context. In news media style reports, and so pre pandemic here at UW Madison, I was doing a fair amount of writing with the editor Wiscontext. And we wrote a bunch of really cool pieces that I'm very proud of, there's one about gerrymandering. There were a number about the demography of Wisconsin, and how, how it really does drive a lot of what happens in Wisconsin, as elsewhere. And there's a whole list of those. So I did a fair amount of writing and collaborating with the intent to the audience being the Wisconsin Wiscontext readership, which is a more general public than an academic would normally be writing for.

Troy Reeves 22:09

Thank you. I'm just trying to take a few notes here. Alright, so what we've been talking about, or what you've been talking about is not that we haven't been talking about COVID In the pandemic, but a lot of sort of pre pandemic stuff. I usually ask the people who have worked, worked at UW long times for the technology questions. So I might, I might skip that unless you feel like there are things, you know, change, recent changes in technology that have changed at work, and instead sort of focus now on, you know, once, March of 2020 happened, of course, the the COVID was before March of 2020. But really on our campus, it was, you know, around St. Patrick's Day 2020, where our world changed.

Malia Jones 22:54

March 13. Yeah, was the day my world changed.

Troy Reeves 22:58

Yeah, my last day that I felt like I was on campus normally was St. Patrick's Day the 17th. For me, but yeah, it's it's that time, basically that week between the 10th and the 17th. Most people say they have it, they have a day, that that felt like

Malia Jones 23:14

Yeah,

Troy Reeves 23:16

You know, day number one or or the last day, however you want to look at it. But anyway.

Malia Jones 23:20

Yeah.

Troy Reeves 23:21

So let's talk about the pandemic. And however you want to approach it. My question, you know, is how did it change your work? But a lot of people have chosen to take this question, you know, any way they choose, so feel free?

Malia Jones 23:35

Okay, well, so as you know, I already kind of alluded to this, but I got really involved in science communications during the pandemic, and my work changed quite dramatically. It was a really big shift for me, and not just in terms of like work from home shift, but in what I was doing every day. And even you know, I think this, I know, this will have long, permanent effects on my career, what 00:24:00I study. And so I'll just talk a little bit about the project that I launched and how it all started. So I was in spring of 2020, semester, I was auditing a couple of courses. One of them was Ajay Sethi, infectious diseases, epidemiology of infectious diseases, I think, in pop health. Coursework as part of my KO1. And so actually, that course was not listed in my grant proposal itself. But the way Ajay runs that course is really interesting. He just brings in experts from all over campus and ask them to talk about their infectious disease studies. So it's, it's really a cool way to get a kind of a survey of what's happening on campus, all kinds of things that I don't know anything about, like mad cow disease, and how do you raise mosquitoes in a lab to study mosquito borne illness and so it's a really cool course to audit. I went to class one day in January of 2020. And Ajay said, Hey, is anybody heard about this virus in China? We talked about it a little bit in class. That was the first I heard about it. And I started following it pretty closely. At that point, there was not a ton of news. It was like, kind of something that was happening over there. You know, from, from our perspective here in the United States in Wisconsin. I had a vacation planned with my husband, my husband and I went to Iceland for two weeks on my birthday, which was late February, and we left Feb I think was February 15. We left and I can remember looking at the numbers. At that time, it wasn't called COVID yet even, but I was looking at the numbers of the novel coronavirus. There were some cases in Italy. There were some cases in Korea. I was definitely worried that we were going to get stuck in Iceland. We weren't taking the kids, the kids. The kids stayed with grandpa grandma. And so getting stuck in Iceland was for more than one reason kind of a scary prospect. And we talked about canceling the trip. My husband was like, hell no. We have been planning this trip. And looking forward to this trip. Like this is our first vacation without kids ever since we had kids. You know, the kids are 10 years. So we went and we had a great time in Iceland. When we landed in Iceland, we got a text messages from the Iceland public health department asking us about COVID symptoms, which I was like, Oh, they're way more on top in the United States. We had a nice time in Iceland. I bought a ton of yarn. Iceland in February is 00:27:00really a thing. I had no idea what we were getting into there. I thought that you know, I live in Wisconsin, and I know what cold is and we can handle this. But it's a whole different kind of cold on a on a rocky island in the North Atlantic, nearly the Arctic Circle. It's not as cold but it's so windy. So it was really interesting. The whole time we were there. I was like checking promed to see how the numbers were doing Italy was a disaster by then. And I was like really worried that. I mean, I could see there was a pandemic at that point. You know, once once you've got some new virus with four or five global hotspots and numbers increasing like you know, exponentially. That's a pandemic. Nobody would call it a pandemic yet, but I was like, Oh boy, here we go. So we left on February 29. The day before Iceland had discovered its first case. We actually tried to leave a day early to get home but because things were like cookin in Europe and but we couldn't get a flight so we left on the 29th um you know, it was an overnight flight we landed into the Chicago airport on March 1. And I can remember being in customs in the Chicago airport was was so gross feeling like it was just it was just literally hundreds of people and packed together in this one sweaty room it felt damp. People were really extra on edge like it was awful. Some people a few people were wearing masks but the people who were wearing masks everybody was like, oh god you're the you know your your case zero stay away from me. Um, and I was standing in line to get our bags and I looked over to the side in the customs area and there's this table folding table with two CDC people wearing vests with CDC on them and they have pulled aside three passengers. One of them and these three people are sitting in chairs. One of them is wearing a surgical mask. One of them is wearing like a face you know face shield, medical face shield. And then the third one was wearing a pair of costume steampunk goggles. And they all looked like really sick like really, you know, febrile sick ill and I I was standing there like, Oh my god. This is what 00:30:00we've got for a pandemic. So that was my first real like, what the fuck moment. Oh, whoa, that's what CDC brought. Okay. So we got out of that customs line, I went to the bathroom and like, washed as much of my body as I could get access to in the bathroom of the airport. And we took the bus home. And that was last time I was when it really anywhere. was last time I've been on an airplane for sure. We got home on the first I went to work the next day. And you know, the the world was like falling apart by then. There- news was everywhere. It was crazy. There were no tests anywhere in the United States, CDC had apparently no idea what to do. Trump was saying all kinds of things. It was clear that he was no scientist was was informing what he was saying. So I think that was like a Tuesday, that Thursday, March 4, I woke up early, CDC had changed the rules about who could be tested. So they changed the rules that had been you could only be tested for COVID-19 If you had traveled to one of the hotspot areas, and they listed Mainland China or Iran, Korea, or Italy. Right. But by this time, it was everywhere. And they changed the rules to say you can be tested if you have symptoms, which is which was their. That was an admission that this was spreading. You know, we have no idea where it is. It's it's spreading community wide. And lots of places like that was that's a pandemic almost by definition. Although wasn't for another week or so that the WHO said pandemic. So the I woke up that morning and wrote an email to my friends and my family members that was like, here's what I think is happening, here's what I think you can expect. And that email went totally viral. It got sucked into the vacuum of information. It got picked up by it ended up on Facebook and Reddit and Twitter and eventually, I mean, within the week, USA Today ran it as an opinion piece on their cover on the weekend edition. Dr. Phil called me so I I was getting a lot my email address was on that that email. And so people started emailing me like completely, some of them people I knew, but many of them lots of emails from people I did not know who were just had questions just wanted to know what was going on. What were they supposed to do? You know, like practical questions like 00:33:00questions about their risk questions about reducing risk questions about all sorts of things. Also crazy people, some crazy people emailed me with all kinds of ideas about the pandemic, and its origins. And I was really overwhelmed. I called Alison. And we talked about kind of what was happening and what to do. We laughed about how famous we. She was also getting a bunch of attention. And we laughed about how famous we were could you know academics don't really get famous. So this was funny at the time, and we joked ah, next, Dr. Oz will be calling us and then the next day Dr. Phil called me like, Oh my god. This is really this is really gotten out of control. So I ended up appearing on Dr. Phil, that that next week. Um, they begged me to fly to Los Angeles. By that time LA had cases, they begged me to fly to Los Angeles and appear in person to deliver the message that no this is really a pandemic and we really are in trouble here. And I was like no, no, fear it out. I'm not flying to LA right now. You gotta be kidding me. So I appeared virtually on Dr. Phil. And then the other thing Alison and I talked about was okay, how can we consolidate and like be a little more efficient and get people these answers that they desperately need without having to like repeat ourselves and do this one by one right like it's it was the volume was so much. And so she put together the Facebook page called Dear Pandemic. We recruited a few friends, who were also kind of in the social media space in the infectious disease epi space, and started answering people's pandemic, questions on that Facebook page publicly. And so that was the origin of Dear Pandemic. And deer pandemic has now grown to considerably over 200,000 followers. And it's a collab. It's a wonderful collaboration of 30 women who are all contributing their time for free to help people navigate the pandemic. and answer questions. And so I mean, as that launched, it really did take over my whole life. It was, it was a big, big lift.

Troy Reeves 35:50

So you said that March 13 is your demarcation day so why?

Malia Jones 35:59

Yeah, March 13. My that was last day my kids went to school. It was the last day 00:36:00I was on campus. And it was also the day that it was clear that the university was gonna have to shut down Madison was I think Madison had had a case back in February. But it was an isolated case that didn't spread to any anyone. And I think March 13 was around when it was, you know, COVID cases are starting to crop up in Wisconsin and in, you know, nearby Chicago. And so that was the day that I had to start working from home and kids were homeschooled. So that was that was the first that it really started to affect my like everyday life.

Troy Reeves 36:44

And so I mean, just to if you don't mind just carrying on with this thread a little bit. So what were some of the ways I mean it, for a lot of us on campus that that was particularly those of us on campus with kids. That's, that's a similar ish story that we all came home, our kids came home. How did that affect? How that affects your work? At least as far as you can you know, remember, not that it was that far back? But

Malia Jones 37:15

Yeah, but we all have PTSD about it. So it's actually hard to remember, right?

Troy Reeves 37:18

Yes. Yep. So if there are if there are things that stand out about how, you know, being going from the the office, to the home office, and having your children in the home office, maybe not in the room, but in the building?

Malia Jones 37:34

Oh in the room are you kidding me?

Troy Reeves 37:37

How did that affect, you know, the not only what you're trying to do, you and your colleagues were trying to do to put out information about the pandemic, but also, you know, the other, your other parts of your job that you're trying to do?

Malia Jones 37:50

Yeah. Well, I will say the, so that first week was so chaotic, right? The kids were home. Everybody kind of had the sense that it was going to be about two weeks. I thought it was going to be longer than two weeks. But I did not predict how long I thought maybe like end of summer, things would be weird. So we were all kind of it wasn't like, okay, everyone has to adapt to this new reality. It was more like, alright, we're going to put the we're going to put everything on pause. Right, until we get back to normal. And so I would say there was actually not a ton of adaptation happening because it didn't feel like we were going to have to permanently adapt, you know, like, I just parked my butt at my kitchen table, and opened my laptop. And you know, the kids were right there trying to do and the teachers at their school were just like putting together whatever 00:39:00they could on videos to keep the kids semi occupied. Frankly, my kids did not really participate in virtual learning during those weeks at all. I mean, I basically was like, you know what, I'm really busy. Why don't you post go downstairs and watch My Little Pony? Like, we're just gonna take some time. And we'll you know, when we get back to normal, you can reserve resume your learning. I didn't really think the teachers tried super hard under the circumstances, but there was not a ton of like, really high quality education happening anyway, so I wasn't too worried about my kids like missing some super important content. My children were that year, kindergarten and fourth grade. So especially the kindergartener, you know, it's like what are you going to learn in kindergarten on Zoom calls? So we kind of just gave up on school and kids watched a ton of TV. My normal work, I also put completely on pause and focused only on dear pandemic, and trying to help, you know, trying to bring I really felt moved to bring the expertise that I have, and and try to help the mission of public health in a crisis. And so I put everything on, on pause. My husband also got laid off from his job at that time. And so he was, like, very distressed and distracted trying to figure out what he was going to do. So there was a ton of chaos in our house. I mean, it was it was crazy. Crazy time.

Troy Reeves 40:47

Yeah. Yeah. So I actually want to wrap up now. Not that it's a great place to wrap up. But I realized that I have an 11 o'clock appointment that. But if you're amenable to it, we'll stop the recording here. And we'll talk a little bit about a possible follow up interview if that's okay, because there's certainly more I want to talk about, including the award itself. So

Malia Jones 41:16

Yeah. Sure.

Troy Reeves 41:17

So this concludes the first session with Malia Jones, thank you so much for your time.

Malia Jones 41:24

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Troy Reeves 41:26

Okay, since we just had a chat about it, I can say today is November 1, 2021. This is the follow up interview with Malia Jones. My name is Troy Reeves. This interview is being done for academic staff award winners project. This interview is being done remotely. I'm in my home office in Madison, Wisconsin. As we did for the first interview to help with sound quality, could you start by having tell me your name and spell your last name?

Malia Jones 41:55

Sure. My name is Malia Jones. And my last name is J o n e s.

Troy Reeves 42:00

Excellent. Thank you. I'm just going to turn it up just to touch but you can 00:42:00just speak at that tone. And it should record us both just fine.

Malia Jones 42:06

Okay.

Troy Reeves 42:07

So we were I would say I balls deep into COVID talk when we when we finished up last time. And that's not specifically what this you know, interview is about, but it certainly is what the last 18, 19 months of the world has been. So I have one more question about that. And maybe depending on how your answers go, I might have some follow ups. But I've been trying to ask people because we do have a COVID 19 Oral History Project. So I have been trying to ask the people we interviewed for that project, particularly, you know, white folks like me how COVID has influenced or changed your thinking about DI or DI work diversity, inclusivity equality work?

Malia Jones 42:54

Yeah. So before prior to the pandemic, I was actually pretty deeply involved in in some anti racism training for white people in Madison. And I led a number of workshops starting in my own neighborhood, which is on the west side of Madison. But the goal of the workshops, it's a workshop that's available online called witnessing whiteness, and it's avail its purpose is to help white people kind of grapple with what is our role in anti racism work, it often feels like it's easy, I think, relatively easy for white people to imagine that it's somebody else's problem. But from my perspective, it really, very fundamentally is our problem. And so, I had been involved in that work for a number of years, since moving here from Los Angeles, which is a much more diverse place, in many ways, particularly my neighborhood in Los Angeles, compared to my neighborhood in Madison. So I kind of had a pretty what I felt was a pretty solid background in, you know, what is the role of a white person like me, in racial justice, social justice work, I also study racial disparities to some extent. So it's also kind of it's also as part of my, my professional work. During the pandemic, a couple of new things and a couple of old things really came up for me, one of the new things was that, you know, as we talked about last time, a lot of my work over the past 18 months has been about vaccine hesitancy and traditionally, researchers including myself have looked at vaccine hesitancy as as largely a problem of privilege. A lot of parents who don't want to vaccinate their kids are are white, and are even tend to be more affluent and higher educated whites. 00:45:00And they tend to be either very, very conservative, you know, libertarian values that lead them to not want to vaccinate, not not want to vaccinate, but not be told that they have to vaccinate, which leads to resistance. There's also very, very progressive groups of more affluent whites who don't want to get vaccinated because it's they've somehow got the idea that it's not natural, not that sort of not aligned with their natural parenting ideologies. And then we have whites who are less well educated, but very religiously conservative. And those are kind of the three big groups traditionally, when we look at vaccine hesitancy, so it was a little bit of a reckoning, I think, for me and a lot of other researchers to to get around this idea that, Oh, new vaccines, new drugs are big, our big challenge to the lived in justices of especially black people in this country, like that didn't really fit into the model at first. But I think, now we've got kind of a better understanding of how that fits into the way we think about vaccine hesitancy and how important it is, I think there's still a ton of work to be done to figure out, you know, how we could best be involved in that conversation. And so, you know, one of the reasons that we still see these racial disparities in vaccine uptake, if you look at Wisconsin, the City of Milwaukee is overall doing okay. But if you look at it by subgroup, the least well covered group is actually older blacks. And, you know, those are people who remember tuskegee. So what I personally have learned is that I am probably not the right messenger, for, you know, promoting vaccine confidence in those groups. And that it's quite hard to find the right messenger, because we have a very systemic shortage of black epidemiologists and black researchers in vaccines. So those are some of the some of the things that came up for me, the other thing, you know, I was really pleased to see so many of my peers who are white, all of a sudden, really grappling with this idea that like, oh, gee, maybe white people do have a role in anti racism work, you know, because that's something that I've been pushing on for a number of years, and it all of a sudden felt a lot less radical than idea, which was nice from my perspective. It heartened me to see a lot of white people really trying to make change, and, you 00:48:00know, all of a sudden, Black Lives Matter posters up all over Madison, including in many of my white neighbors yards, when it had been two years before a pretty radical position for a white person to take. So that was heartening. You know, also just it's a, it's a, the academy has a long way to go at, at fixing these problems. And so also very disheartening to, to see, see it kinda, you know, laid bare and and have everyone trying to grapple with the long history of, of, I call it oppressive whiteness in academia all at once. It's a lot.

Troy Reeves 49:00

Thank you, for all of that. So maybe, maybe one more thing, and this is, you know, a bit crystal ball-y, but you know, what the hell. So it's November 1 2021.

Malia Jones 49:14

I don't have a crystal ball with me. I used to keep one on my desk.

Troy Reeves 49:20

And some of the other thing, another thing that I asked because we've been doing well, we sort of fell into doing longitudinal interviews with our COVID folks. So you know, every six months, six to eight months, we've been coming back to them. And so I've always asked them, you know, what they think the world would be like when I when I would come back to them in six, eight months, and not that I'm, you know, coming back to you in six to eight months. But, you know, six to eight months does get us to the summer of 2022. And I'm wondering if you care to venture, what we might be like in terms of our country in the world in relationship to this pandemic.

Malia Jones 50:03

Well, here's one of the things I can't remember if we talked about this last time or not. So stop me if we already covered this territory. But, you know, when I learned how to do epidemiological models in school, they seem they, you know, somehow I was left with the impression that like, it's not exactly easy, but it's pretty straightforward. You have the inputs, you model the curve of the pandemic, ba ba ba, you know, what's going to happen, right, this modeling thing, it's a predictive model, and I was kind of left with the impression that it was pretty good at predicting. But it turns out, it's not. It's terrible at predicting what's going to happen. And so early on, I was like, you know, full of confidence about, about all all of the models that were flying around, and all of the different, you know, here's what will happen if we flatten the curve this much, or that much. And what I have learned is that the world is a very, 00:51:00very unpredictable place, a pandemic is a very, very hard thing to predict. And so I can tell you what I think will happen if everything stays on the rails the way it is right now. But that's not the most likely scenario, right? It's probably going to go off the rails, and then I, I will be very, very wrong. But I think, if everything stays on the rails, that I think kids vaccines are going to be approved this week. And for kids, five to 11. And in some places, that will there's enough support for vaccination, that that will probably put us over the threshold for herd immunity, which will mean that at least in some areas, the pandemic will start to die down. You know, and herd immunity isn't. It's not the it's not an end point. It's it's the threshold where it would be hard for another outbreak to happen another wave to happen. And but but not impossible, right. And it's also not an off switch. So I think what we'll start to see is like smaller and smaller little waves, in the places that have pretty good vaccine coverage, once kids are vaccinated, I think there are a lot of places where even among adults, vaccine coverage is very poor, even in the United States, and certainly worldwide. So there are literally millions and millions and millions more cases before we're out of this worldwide. And every one of those cases is an opportunity for there to be a really dramatically different version of the virus, which will make all of our vaccines worthless. And then we could be back right back to square one. Or it could be something in between those things. Who knows what? So I don't know, there's a lot of random chance involved in what happens with the virus going forward.

Troy Reeves 53:13

All right. Thank you. I was hoping for a far more, you know, upbeat, positive, but you know, I know it's we've also all lived through this film.

Malia Jones 53:22

I mean, you you know, exactly. If you want an upbeat perspective on what's coming with the pandemic, you should definitely not ask a an infectious disease epidemiologist about

Troy Reeves 53:32

Yeah.

Malia Jones 53:33

So it's not been an update kind of time.

Troy Reeves 53:37

Yeah, point taken

Malia Jones 53:39

It's pretty bleak.

Troy Reeves 53:41

But thank you, I know that I know, none of us like to sort of put ourselves on record about what the future might be, but I appreciate you taking a stab at it.

Malia Jones 53:50

I mean, that's, you know, that's, that's what it might be.

Troy Reeves 53:53

Right?

Malia Jones 53:54

Might be a lot of other things, too, that none of us has much control over.

Troy Reeves 54:01

Okay, so we will, we'll move past COVID. Now, unless they're, I guess what I should say is, is there anything else? Understanding that we may have touched on some of the last time anything else about, particularly the last 18,19 months that you want to talk about since you know, we're doing this oral history?

Malia Jones 54:24

I can't think of any thing at the moment.

Troy Reeves 54:26

Okay.

Malia Jones 54:27

But it comes up. I will.

Troy Reeves 54:29

Okay. Thank you. All right. So we have a few more questions. And these are are sort of non COVID related, but it might touch on them, depending on how you answer them. The first I ask this of all the Academic Staff Award winners, and that's if they were involved, or have they been involved in academic staff governance or groups. And then depending on your answer, there might be some follow up questions.

Malia Jones 54:51

Yeah, I'm not super recently, but I was involved in a committee. It was charged with making a recommendation about the new professor of research title. And we did a number of we did some activities doing, you know, research on how professor of research titles were used at peer institutions and made a recommendation as a committee that UW Madison add a an academic staff position called research professor, which made did make its way very, very slowly through all of the the chain of commands and through HR and and was ultimately approved. Although I haven't heard of anyone who actually has it yet. I understand that it is available now. So that was the one committee work that I have been involved in.

Troy Reeves 55:53

Okay. So how do you feel you what would what do you feel you offered to that? I know said one, just a one one case example. But what do you feel like your expertise or your interest offered to that discussion and debate?

Malia Jones 56:11

Well, as somebody who is in the scientist track, I am, my career is really challenged by differences in how UW sees a person with a PhD who does research full time and what were called. So most institutions would call someone in my job as a professor of research. Sometimes those are actually part of, you know, that are part of the the same governance that faculty operates under, sometimes they're not. But the title professor of research or research professor is pretty well understood within academia, what that means, it usually means that your PI 00:57:00on your own projects, you submit grants, and are expected to bring in enough money to fund your work. And that you you know, you're a full time researcher, independent researcher. Scientist at most other institutions is called is is like a postdocs, or, or some, you know, what we might call the research. Someone in the research track here at UW Madison. So So a person who is a full time researcher, and may even have a PhD, but mostly operates or entirely operates under someone else's PI-ship. And so is making contributions to a research lab, that's really, you know, under someone else's leadership. And so when I submit a grant proposal to NIH, for example, I have actually gotten written feedback from review panels that says stuff like, I don't understand why this scientist is Pi-ing this grant. And it's just a disconnect in the language that UW Madison uses versus other similar institutions. And so I was really interested in seeing if I could resolve that by getting a, you know, an equivalent job title on the books.

Troy Reeves 58:29

But you said, as of now, you don't know if anyone actually has a title, which makes me which makes it sound like you, at this point don't have that title?

Malia Jones 58:38

No, I don't. I think I would qualify for it. And the challenge is that, like many other things, the decision making process. So it's a HR says, this is this is a real title, you can hire someone and call them a research professor. They're still academic staff, and they don't they're not tenure track, you know, the expectation is that that person would generate most of their own funding through extramural sources. So that's pretty much exactly describes what I do. But the how this really works was left to each college and department. And I guess there's a whole bunch of red tape to do the first one, that as far as I know, no one has actually done at least on in CALS. So I discussed over the summer with my department chair, whether it would be worth me doing that and trying to get a title change. And we decided that we would wait for this separate title and total compensation study that UW Madison is currently has just concluded and then kind of go from there just to not mix up the the 01:00:00different streams of change administrative changes that were happening. And also like maybe kind of hoping that somebody else would navigate what it means within CALS so that we didn't have to be the trail breakers there. Because it does seem like maybe a lot of work.

Troy Reeves 1:00:18

Yeah, I would guess it's going to be a lot of work.

Malia Jones 1:00:21

Yeah.

Troy Reeves 1:00:22

So, so good luck with

Malia Jones 1:00:24

Involves writing a lot of memos. And, you know, describing a lot of things formally with Deans' signatures on them. And.

Troy Reeves 1:00:31

So, either good luck to you, or the first person who makes it easier for the second, third, fourth, and so

Malia Jones 1:00:38

I hope it's not me not that I don't really want that title. Because I do actually think even all else equal, I think just having that title would make my life easier when I go for grant applications.

Troy Reeves 1:00:52

So you just touched on this in your discussion about, you know, professor of research versus scientist. But my next question is, you know, so I'm assuming the answer to this is yes, but we should never assume. So do you think about do you think about the relationship between faculty and staff? And if so, you know, what are your thoughts about that relationship?

Malia Jones 1:01:13

I do. Yeah, I think about it a lot. And I, I, since I have the same degree, and qualifications as a lot of my peers who are kind of junior to mid career tenure track professors. I feel like I get to see a lot of contrast in in how faculty and academic staff are treating each other and are treated by the administration. And and so yeah, I do think about it a lot. UW Madison makes it structurally very hard for academic staff to get extramural funding. Even though people who are in the scientists track like I am, it's our job to get extramural funding. They make it very easy, or, you know, as easy as it can be. It's not very easy, ever, but they make it easier for faculty to get extramural funding through a variety of different systems. And I think that's really antiquated. I think that's a really antiquated policy that reflects a view of, of what it means to be faculty and what it means to be successful academic institution from probably 50 years ago. You know, I think it's fundamentally a huge problem for UW Madison to stay in, you know, that coveted top 10 for extramural funding for research funding, and also put up barriers to some of its well qualified researchers to actually get that funding. So it irks me. And it's also like, I 01:03:00mean, to be honest, I think it's good if it's ultimately it'll probably be the reason I can't stay in this job anymore. I think it's enough of a limitation that I just won't be able to get all of my own funding at some point. And then I'll probably have to leave, I'll move on to some other job. And I can talk more about the specifics of what makes it hard to for academic staff to get funding if you want. Or I can talk more about the the more like the squishier parts of the relationship between faculty and staff, which I also see.

Troy Reeves 1:03:40

Well, why don't we? I mean, why don't we try both? Why don't we start with the what you feel is the the reasons why it's more difficult for academic staff to get that type of funding, as opposed to faculty understanding, as you said, is difficult either way, but

Malia Jones 1:03:57

Yeah, it is difficult either way. So that there are two main additional barriers that academic staff have to overcome. And one of them is depending on your department, it can actually be pretty easy to overcome. But academic staff even who have PhDs do not automatically automatically get PI status. And even me, I have a reasonably long track record of very successful grant funding at this point. I don't have permanent PI status, I have to reapply every few years to maintain my my PI status and it's under the it's under the supervision or the you know, the deciders on that are my department chair, who is of course faculty, and the dean and the Dean of Research. So so my department makes it fairly easy. They really want me to be applying for grants and getting funding and so they are they are happy to sign off on this paperwork, other departments make it really hard and set the bar really high for someone like me to get a PI status. And if you don't PI status, you actually can't apply for grants. It's also just like, why, what is the point of putting that extra hurdle in there, every other institution that I'm aware of gives PI status to anyone with a PhD. That's actually what it means to have a PhD is that you are have demonstrated you can independently conduct research. So it doesn't make a ton of sense. That's the first one that one is fairly easy to work around institution, within, at least within my department. There is a channel for it, the the second one is a much bigger limitation. And there is not a workaround for it really. And that is that only faculty, or people who have permanent PI status can apply for most 01:06:00of the intramural grant funding. And the way things work in my world, if I wanted to go to NIH, and apply for a big grant to do, like a trial of something, I would need pilot data. And someone has to fund that pilot data. And typically, the way you get funding for your pilot study is an intramural grant. And so I just don't have access to those. And that's why I say ultimately, this is probably well, I'll have to leave this job because I can kind of go along without doing one of those bigger grants for a while. But I won't be able to forever, at some point, I will need to have pilot funding in order to pilot some intervention project that I want to get a big NIH grant for, and I just I can't here. They won't there's no intramural fund, like the fall competition and the what do they call the match grants in CALS that their faculty only.

Troy Reeves 1:07:08

And so, you know, being a part of the libraries, there's no, there's no faculty. You know, there's no faculty in the libraries anymore. I think our last faculty member, you know, retired in 10 years ago, and that was the last faculty member. So it's an intro to asking, what would be the process to just for you to become faculty? And is it a process you would want to even look into?

Malia Jones 1:07:41

Yeah, so there's not a process to just convert a, I have looked into it, there's not a process just convert a scientist into a member of faculty, because they really are just two different jobs, you know. And there are rules around, you can't just kind of like, change someone's title into something that is written to be competitive, open search type positions. So but there could be a situation where my department has a new faculty job, they want to hire another member of faculty, and I applied to it. And I really hope that someday that can happen. There's some enthusiasm in my department for that happening. Because I've been so vocal complaining about this limitation that, like, I just, you know, I can't do the thing you're expecting me to do under, under these restrictions. This idea that I'm going to, like build an independent lab that in spend my research career here, like it's not going to happen, unless I can access these resources that I need. And so I think they that my department does understand that and, and so hopefully, someday, there will be a position that I can apply to a 01:09:00faculty position within my own department. That's another one of those things that's not really in my control. It's up to the, you know, department funding situation and the dean's priorities and all the other things, all the usual things that need a new faculty line to be opened.

Troy Reeves 1:09:27

Thank you. So the the final set of questions before we just asked, oh, actually, no, because you did you did say that you might be interested in talking about as you call it, the squishy differences.

Malia Jones 1:09:39

Oh, yeah.

Troy Reeves 1:09:40

So I wonder if you might give a for example or two about the as again, as you call them, the squishy differences between academic staff and faculty?

Malia Jones 1:09:48

Yeah, I think it it varies from maybe even one person to another person, but I've certainly had people who you know, value and respect the work I do equally with members of faculty. And then I have also seen clear evidence that my work is not valued the way the work of members of faculty is valued. And, you know, you can find examples of that from. So one example, I mean, there's institutional examples, you know, these policies that I've been talking about are really evidence that the university does not value, an active member of academic staff in the same way that they value a member of faculty least when it comes to funding their research. There are other examples, some centers and working groups on campus won't let someone affiliate who is not a member of faculty. So it's only faculty affiliates, not any kind of non faculty affiliate. I've also had, you know, examples of people who kind of somehow think that my job is is like, much easier, because I don't have to teach, which, in some ways, it is. In some ways, that's true, I also get paid half as much as even though I don't have to teach, I have no job security, you know, I have to fund myself or, or my job won't exist anymore. So there's a different kind of pressure that I think is sometimes not seen at all by by members of faculty. Which is not to say that I think it's easy to be a member of faculty, I think it's, it's it's a really crappy job in a lot of ways. It's not that I think, like, it's just one of these grass is always greener things, you know, both are hard and have their challenges.

Troy Reeves 1:12:05

Thank you. So again, the final set of questions before asking if you have any final thoughts is the story behind the Academic Staff Award? Some some questions that you might touch on, when discussing it would be you know, did you know you were nominated? What were your thoughts when you heard? And then if there, there were a reception? What was your thoughts about that?

Malia Jones 1:12:28

Yeah, um, I didn't know that I was nominated. I assumed I would have no chance of getting it at all, because it was my understanding that these things, you know, there are many, many, many, many more nominations than there are awardees. And that they preferred people who've been in service roles for a long time. And I've been at the university for six years, so not not really a long time. And so I was very surprised when I got it. I was also I don't think I quite understood what a big deal it was going to be. You know, like, I didn't understand how important this was in advance. It wasn't something I had paid a ton of attention to. Previously, and so I was I was kind of surprised, like, I was a little overwhelmed by the response and by how big of a deal everybody, everybody's reaction to it was. And then of course, the ceremony, there was a virtual award ceremony in which they actually did four awardees. And because they hadn't done any in 2020. And so they did the 2020 awardees and the 2021 awardees and one ceremony. And we were virtual, but the the regents were in person, their meeting was in person. And so we were sort of like zoomed into an in person meeting. And I got to listen to the other three awardees and was it's I can't overstate how deeply struck I was by the fact that all four of us were all four relatively, you know, young to middle aged women with families. All four of us our speeches involved the prompt was what does it take to be excellent? Right, the staff word for excellence. So what does it take to be excellent in your role? And all four of us talked about how it was basically just like working our asses off to the to the detriment of our families, and our work life balance and our own health. It was really I was really struck by like, wow, what kind of value system is 01:15:00that. Itt left me a little broken, I was really like, oh my God. Like, I didn't mean to do that to myself or to my family or to. Or, you know, I just kind of got involved in this project. And I did put my heart and soul into it and, and, and my health, my sleep, suffered my health suffered my meant time, I wasn't spending with my family. And then I saw these other three women who had done the exact same thing, you know, in a time of crisis to step up and, and do something really extraordinary for their work. But it meant that they were sacrificing something in terms of their own work life balance. And it was the same time as the CDC. I think it was May, when they lifted the mask recommendation for people who were vaccinated. Those two things coincided and and between the two of them, I was really, I reached my limit that week, I was like, oh, wow, this, this whole situation is unfixable. And, like, I don't know if I can keep doing this. And I reached a level of burnout that week, in part because of this award ceremony and the speeches from these other three women, which were so similar to mine. That I was just like, wow, this is this is a systemic problem that like we three women are, you know, killing ourselves over. And meanwhile, CDC is like, Oh, this pandemic's basically over you can all take your masks off now no big deal. And I was just like, okay, I can't, I, I was completely burned out after that. It took me like, eight weeks most of the summer to, to pick up the pieces and get myself back together and start being a productive human being again. So now, what I think I learned is to be a lot more protective of my own boundaries, and not give quite so much of myself. So ironically, winning this award maybe taught me that excellence, as it's defined, is really not my goal.

Troy Reeves 1:17:31

Yeah.

Malia Jones 1:17:32

Maybe what I need is balance.

Troy Reeves 1:17:33

Yeah, I was gonna be, I was gonna be glib and say, this is the first time I interviewed somebody who won an award and then felt significantly worse after, after winning it, but it sounds like. It sounds like if there were a silver lining it did. It did. It did. Maybe forces is too strong a word to think about self care, and self maintenance, and how, if you want to keep doing this work, 01:18:00how to do it going forward in a way that's, well, it's better for you for again, for lack of a better word.

Malia Jones 1:17:44

It really did. That's sustainable. And, you know, sustainable for me, as well as for my family and all of my other commitments. And the thing that really struck me was the the individual level effort that was going into these, these different projects that, you know, the four of us won awards for when there are systemic problems that that are like, you know, it just felt like like, here I am killing myself putting a post in the ground over something and meanwhile, there's a, an earthquake. So, it did make me feel kind of it was the combination of that and that CDC that CDC policy, which was really a misstep by the CDC that I was just like, you've got to be kidding me. Individual people can't fix this. Individual people, you know, like, we have a systemic problem here. We we have a, a high level flaw that I can't fix, and I need to stop trying to fix it. You know, I can do my one little thing. And, and my one little thing is not unfortunately, it is not going to be to save the world to do a little bit of research, like, you know, move, move the line of knowledge a little bit in my lifetime. So that's what I'm doing now. I'm doing research. I actually really love doing research. So I back to a place where I'm very happy with the job I have. I really like this work. I really want to keep doing research. But I am probably not going to win another Excellence Award.

Troy Reeves 1:19:58

And it sounds like that's okay.

Malia Jones 1:20:02

That's great. I love it. I'm super grateful that I, you know, I thought it was actually really important that that the folks who are recognized some of some of the folks who were recognized with the award, it was service. And I was really pleased that the regents recognized someone who was doing who was in a research role, as well, you know, I did think that was a really important signal that the university at the system level values, the kind of direct, I mean, it's really the Wisconsin idea, you know, this, the project that I won the award for participating in is really research to the public translation. So reaching out with whatever the state of the science is, you know, day by day on social media, trying to get people information about the pandemic. That was that's current and 01:21:00grounded in science. And I thought that was that was lovely that they recognized the Wisconsin Idea in that way and, and value it. So I was really grateful to have received the award and surprised and and also, you know, it was a moment for me to really step back and ask myself, like, can I keep doing this? And do I even want to?

Troy Reeves 1:21:35

Right.

Malia Jones 1:21:35

And the answer was no.

Troy Reeves 1:21:39

Right. So we've reached the the moment where I asked you if if you have any additional things you want to say so any final thoughts before we wrap up this session and the oral history in total?

Malia Jones 1:21:54

No, I can't think of anything else.

Troy Reeves 1:21:57

Okay. Well, I'm gonna I want to chat with you for a few minutes after we shut off the recording. So this ends the second session and the oral history with Malia Jones. Thank you, Malia for your time. For both sessions of your time. I certainly appreciate it.

Malia Jones 1:22:13

Yeah, thank you.