Community Talks: Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer

Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Yale University. She is currently Associate Director of Ethics and Engagement at Variant Bio, a genomics company based in Seattle, WA. Previously, she was a Senior Consultant for ReD Associates, as well as a Lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University, the University of Heidelberg, and Yale University.

Your background experience is based heavily in cultural anthropology and related practices. Why do you think having an anthropological perspective is important in the field of consulting?

In consulting, you work with clients from across a range of different industries. You look at different cultural contexts for each one – each organization, each partner, each industry is a sort of culture unto itself. So as a cultural anthropologist, you're used to putting yourself in the role of a nonexpert coming into something and seeing it from the outside. You can have an outsider’s view where you can see things from angles that, when you're deeply embedded in a context yourself, you become blind to.

How has the practice of participant observation specifically prepared you outside of consulting?

I work in biotech for a genomics company. I work with people with backgrounds in molecular biology, genetics, epidemiology – a lot of the hard sciences. I come in with this very different background and training and so I'm basically doing participant observation within our organization for our organization. I'm helping the scientists I work with see how we can communicate our message to people who are not so familiar with what we do, doing so in accessible ways and for different people we might be partnering with around the world.

They need the language of the kind of work we do translated in a way that that non-specialists can understand, that makes sense and is also appropriate to different cultural contexts. So when you're working within the industry of genomics, with all its different scientific points of view, you're not necessarily able to take that outside lens, and think, ‘How could I communicate this to different audiences in different parts of the world?’

What were some of your most valuable takeaways and learnings from your time at ReD?

I came to ReD after finishing a PhD in cultural anthropology where I was doing extended and immersive fieldwork for several years with the same people. And when I got to ReD, I was suddenly tasked to projects in different geographies with very different topics, with much shorter periods of time for fieldwork. So I had to learn how to scale down ethnographic fieldwork under much tighter time constraints – as well as working within a budget and considering businesses’ priorities.

Another key question I had was, how do you translate the insights in a way that makes sense for clients who are not necessarily anthropologists themselves? You have to be able to tell the story in a way that translates [to them]. So being able then to speak to clients and to partners around what you found in the fieldwork is a very different kind of translation process of insights than it would be in academia.

For the genomics company I work for, part of what we work on is community engagement. But we can't necessarily be on the ground ourselves, so we identify people who can be the bridge to [these] communities and then train them on how to most effectively engage communities through the tools that I started using at ReD – like developing a field guide or having media-release forms.

Can you elaborate a bit more on when researching and studying populations of people, how ethics are an especially important consideration and play a very important role, particularly within the medical field? Did you find your time at ReD gave you any perspective on this, in a way that's applicable or relevant to your current position?

Yes, and not necessarily only through the projects that I was involved in. For example, talking with people at ReD about doing work with people living with HIV or diabetes or depression raised a lot of different ethical concerns. Or [there were questions] around how to ethically recruit participants for a project [on a sensitive disease like HIV]. When you're building rapport with someone, and you're talking about depression, there can be tricky issues of the person seeing you as a confidant and maybe a [source of] support in some way. How do you then navigate that as a field worker, when you're going to walk away at the end of the day? Ethical issues like that are certainly relevant to the work I do now with a genomics company looking at populations with high disease burdens, and when thinking through questions around how to make sure the work we do with them is not exploitative.

Even though I wasn't involved in a lot of healthcare projects at ReD, I worked on a project with Syrian refugees in Jordan – where we were asked for help and resources in a situation that was quite challenging and vulnerable for a lot of the respondents. That project informs how I think through some of the issues I work with today in these genomic studies with underrepresented populations in parts of the world with extreme power imbalances and historical and ongoing legacies of inequity and colonialism.

Tell us about an eye-opening or interesting experience you had in the field.

There were so many. When I was working on a healthcare project on allergy immunotherapy, I was in northern France talking to different health care providers about the concept of allergies. I had gone into that project thinking of that as any other health condition, and what I realized was I collected as many different opinions as there were people I spoke with - so every different healthcare provider I spoke with had a different worldview on allergies.

It was eye opening to see that with something I thought of as having a consensus [opinion] amongst professionals, there was actually such diversity of opinion. And then how you navigate that as a as a patient is really complex. There’s a lot of power in the words that come from a doctor to a patient. But the next one over down the street could have a completely different message for you.

Another example is from when I was in Jordan. I met with this family multiple times, an example of the value of, even if not super longitudinal research, returning to see the same participants. This was a Syrian refugee family, a widowed man and his three young children, in the outskirts of Amman, in a very under-resourced setting and not legally able to work. And I couldn't figure out how they made ends meet at all based on the total lack of support they were getting from international relief organizations and so on. The father was not legally allowed to work and he never spoke about any work that he did. So in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, how did they ever make ends meet? But when I first went there, I noticed the kids were really involved in feeding and training some birds. It was only maybe the third visit that I went back that they opened up to me that they were training and selling those birds to people informally. And that was basically how they were making ends meet. It was through building rapport and trust that you find out a much more complex or nuanced aspect of someone's life.

How do you go about something like that - building up trust? And how do you build that up when there are short time limits?

This is an ongoing question that I’m always considering. I think that limits will always exist when you can't return to speak with people.

But first of all, how you're introduced makes a big difference in how trust is established in the beginning. So if there's a way to have a trusted bridge be the connection to you being introduced to people, that opens the doors in a way that might be different than if you have a whole lot of explaining to do right off the bat around who you are and why you're there.

And then I think sharing aspects of yourself as well, revealing some vulnerabilities about yourself as opposed to just coming in and asking a bunch of questions. The more that people see you as someone with challenges and concerns in life, the more that they might feel open to sharing their own.

Any final thoughts?

Much of my PhD work was focused on contemporary issues around migration in Japan and Brazil. That was my focus area and if I had stayed in academia, I probably would have stayed focused on these places my entire life. But at ReD and in my position now, I have to think across so many different geographies. I think ReD prepared me well to accept that you’re not going to be so deeply versed in the different places that you're working. But it's still an incredible opportunity to learn a lot in a short amount of time about a place you may have not known much about to begin with. And to sit with that discomfort of accepting that you just don't know much and that you're there to learn.