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When New York City went into lockdown in mid-March and most research had to be put on hold, virologist Benhur Lee’s lab at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine was one of the few still running. The lab and its 10 researchers had pivoted their studies of various viruses to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
But with schools and daycare centers also closed, Jillian Carmichael—a postdoc and the only mother in the lab—couldn’t join the team. Instead, she spent two months inside a 600-square-foot apartment in Queens, taking care of her six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son as her husband, who works in healthcare, conducted telemedicine over the phone.
Although noise-cancelling headphones allowed her to get some work done from home, and her husband took on his fair share of childcare, her research on herpesviruses was put largely on hold, and she wasn’t able to contribute ...
