You’re also an advocate for women in science. Where did that drive come from?

Nobody in my family had a graduate degree before me. Because my dad’s in sports, there wasn’t a huge emphasis on academics. Then I ended up in a space that — I don’t want to say I had no business being in, but I was around a bunch of people who I felt were smarter than me. They knew what they were doing. They knew what path they were supposed to be on. And I felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants.

I happened to have amazing mentors that helped me stay on a path I didn’t know I was on. And then, as I got older, I started to realize that I belonged here. I was just as smart as the people around me. That alone made me realize how much it matters to have people feel like they belong.

Instead of asking women to act like men to fit into a system built for men, maybe we should be changing the system to reinforce the things that we’re missing, which are things that women bring to the table — how they navigate the world, how they perceive things, how they support students. We benefit enormously from creating space for women.

You have played sports your whole life, including basketball in college. Do you think that has had any influence on your career today? 

The biggest things you learn in sports are how to push yourself to get better each day, how to come back from failure and how to rely on your teammates. When I was younger, these experiences taught me how to come to work after an experiment didn’t work and how to ask for help when I needed it.

During my training, I was the athlete playing the game. However, when I became faculty, I was all of a sudden the coach. My job is different now. It is focused on how I can get my team to get better. I have to figure out what each person’s strengths are and put them in a position to succeed. I am also here to help them fill the gaps with great teammates that are good at things they may not be good at. Sports have given me the skills to focus on working hard and being motivated, and they have given me a framework for how to create an effective team and motivate them to be their best.

Your dad, John Calipari, is a professional basketball coach. Was he a mentor to you?

He was an amazing mentor, but more with the things he did than the things he said. When I was in middle school, he got fired. Watching him get fired but then come back and say, “You know what, it’s fine; I’m going to get up and do this again” — that was really important for me, to realize that even when things feel like huge failures, sometimes it’s the beginning of something new.

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