This wake-up ritual between Amy Bug, professor of physics and chair of the Physics Department, and 6-year-old son Moses heralds the start of a new day in her household. Juggling family time, classes, appointments with the provost, meetings about the women’s studies capstone seminar, preparation for a physics colloquium in Virginia, and planning her older son’s bar mitzvah, she hardly has time to squeeze in an interview.

“I recognize that I’m a slave to my children,” says Bug, laughing, although these days 13-year-old Murphy makes fewer demands. No longer interested in breakfast, his early-morning presence is manifested by teeth brushing or the sound of the television, as he waits to run out to the school bus. “What’s the plan this afternoon?” his mother calls. “Jazz band. I’ll be home on the late bus,” he answers. The door bangs. Murphy is on his way, as is Bug’s husband, Bill. “He’s a biologist and senior systems analyst at Drexel University,” she says. “He takes the train into Philadelphia.” He knows she can cope. “Amy is the best physicist, mother, social activist, and pedagogue I could ever imagine in one package,” Bill says.

Bug helps Momo to dress, not because he needs it but because he likes her to be there. She likes it too. She offers him pants. “No, not those. The cool ones,” he says. They search the clean laundry for cool pants.

While Moses eats toast and cream cheese with juice, Bug dresses. Petite, slender, with tumbling dark hair, blue jeans, and a loose flowered cotton shirt, she could easily pass for a student herself.

After dropping her son off at the Swarthmore-Rutledge School, where he currently attends first grade, Bug drives to her office in the DuPont Science Building, wishing that she could stop in Kohlberg Hall Coffee Bar, where some of her Physics Department colleagues and other faculty members meet for morning coffee and chats. “I’d love to join them more often,” she says.

Bug spends the morning reading scientific papers, preparing talks and classes, and dealing with the numerous issues that a department chair must field. Within her field of computational chemical physics, she specializes in the simulation of absorbed species in solids. “It’s exciting and deeply interesting,” she says, “to try and understand how a solid environment modifies the properties of something like a hydrogen molecule, which is used in fuel technology, or a positron, which is used in medical diagnostics.” Her recent publications include articles written in collaboration with Peter Hastings ’01; Lisa Larrimore ’02; and Melaku Muluneh ’03, an honors student. “Doing mainstream research in physics and astronomy with our students is something that we value greatly in our department,” she says. “It’s hard, and sometimes, you might have to make a choice between doing something that’s truly cutting edge and bringing the student along.”

“It’s usually on days when I have a critical project due,” she says, “that the phone will ring, and it’ll be the school nurse, saying, ‘Mo doesn’t feel well. You need to come and get him.’” Smiling, she adds, “I can’t deny that this provokes an amusing blend of maternal love and impotent rage.”

For years, Bug has been doing research and lecturing in physics; more recently, she has also been researching and speaking on gender and science at colleges and universities nationwide. She feels lucky to be at Swarthmore, enjoying the support of “wonderful colleagues,” and where she says the administration “is knowledgeable and responsive about issues of gender and ethnicity.”

This semester, Bug is holding a three-hour, weekly seminar on gender and physical science as well as co-coordinating the women’s studies capstone seminar. The physics seminar has a vast syllabus, including topics on the historical view of science; science as a world without women; the question of whether our minds have a sex; female-friendly science; and feminist contributions to physics and nonphysical sciences. For the capstone seminar, she leads a unit on feminism and science. She uses a drawing by Moses called “Mommy Being a Scientist” as a point of discussion about young children’s perceptions of what constitutes a scientist. Bug’s most recent article on the topic—titled “Has Feminism Changed Physics?”—appeared this spring in Signs.

Bug says: “Those individuals who choose nontraditional careers, such as men who are social workers or women who are neurosurgeons (or physicists), have to find a way to transcend naive, culturally ratified gender categories.

“You have to be creative about your sense of self,” she says, “if you really want to see yourself doing [that kind of] job.”

Speaking of the kinds of discrimination that female scientists can experience, she mentions dissertation advisers failing to encourage female doctoral candidates to publish papers or not introducing them to visiting scientists. She describes a case where a male science professor misses a departmental meeting to take his daughter to a ballet class and is labeled “a great guy, great scholar, wonderful father,” whereas a female professor, called away from work to take her child to the doctor, is “not serious about her job.”

Although she rarely finds herself in similar situations, she says: “The pressures are intensified by race. For example, African American physicists, regardless of gender, typically have a very hard time surviving in the mainstream.”

Noon approaches—and passes. Bug almost never goes to lunch. “I have a healthy candy bar in my backpack,” she says. “It’s rare that I interrupt the flow between morning and the day care dash. You become intent on using every single moment profitably.”

It’s almost 1:15 p.m., and Gender and Science is due to begin. Students drift into DuPont 142B. Encouraging them to run the seminar, Bug sits among them rather than up front.

A couple of male students write on the blackboards. They spend the first 20 minutes finishing up a topic from the previous week. Words like “cutthroat, exclusive, competitive, passion, arrogance, pettiness, us-them, male dominated” appear.

The lists grow as others contribute. The students examine the words as definitive of the culture of science and ways in which it compares with other cultures. “Science is uninterested in defining its own culture, leaving others to examine it,” someone says. Bug suggests a “culture of no culture.” “Is it similar to any other culture, of cutthroats, for example?” someone else asks. “How about athletics or politics?” another student answers. They move on, discussing differences in social or “soft” sciences and physical “hard” sciences and the crossover areas like biology. Of the 11 students present, some speak more than others, but most participate. They end with more questions than answers.

Later, they work on solving physics problems, such as whether the amount of mass energy in a pea surpasses that produced by a power plant. It does. Students teach the class, presenting their solutions, listening to variations from their classmates, and finding each others’ answers “cool.” Occasionally, Bug makes a suggestion, guiding them quietly and unobtrusively. Three hours fly.

Senior Robin Smith, an honors physics major and founder of Swarthmore Women in Astronomy and Physics says: “I’m committed to encouraging prospective female physics majors and find that Amy’s seminar gives me new tools for mentoring and supporting these fellow Swatties.”

In Gender and Science, “I give huge amounts of reading,” Bug says. “The material excites me. It’s completely involving, both emotionally and intellectually. The students are lovely.”

She contrasts teaching a physics course for majors, saying: “It’s a totally different experience. One teaches differently to a group of people for whom the class is required and/or who want to acquire the skills of a physicist. There’s a whole different vibe in that class.”

Bug’s day on campus draws to an end. “I wish I could take the College dance classes,” she says, “but I just don’t have the three hours.” She does, however, make time for playing her electric bass.

“When you’re a professor,” she says, “it’s mentally healthy to find a way to put yourself in the student’s chair once in a while.” Currently in search of a band, she most recently performed at Murphy’s bar mitzvah, playing Weird Al Yankovich’s “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi.” “I kicked butt,” she says conspiratorially.

It’s dinnertime, and the family is enjoying a roast—Bug has uncharacteristically taken a few minutes in the afternoon to rush home and slip it into the oven. “If we could get to the supermarket more often,” she says, “we wouldn’t need to have so many dinners from Renato Pizza.”

During the evening, Bug sits and works beside her children as they watch television or read. Murphy says: “Mom comes home every night and tells us about the problems she has to deal with as chair, but then she’s just able to have fun with us. She always wears a smile. I can’t imagine how she can do that. I love it how she’s never sad.”

At bedtime, both parents read to the children. Amy reads The Pig’s At Home, followed by Bill with The Prince and the Pauper. Then, it’s time to sleep.

“Mom?”
“Yes, Murphy.”
“Mom, you’re gonna do your homework in here, right?”
“Yes, Murphy, I’m going to do it in here.”
“Good.”

It’s 9:45 p.m. Bug lies down on the floor of her children’s room, covers herself with a blanket, and opens up whatever she needs to prepare for the next day. She reads, squinting in the low beam from the nightlight, aware that she has three hours of work ahead of her and knowing that she’ll only last 15 minutes. She falls asleep on the floor.