Dr Angeliki Rigos - Scientist & Executive

“Monitoring is as important as preventing”

”Monitoring is as important as preventing! People are not checking on themselves!” This is how Dr Angeliki Rigos started our conversation about burnout. She is a successful professor of Chemistry, and a Cornell graduate, who later obtained an MBA before taking the helm of a research centre at the prestigious MIT.

What is striking as we talk about burnout is how much Angeliki cares. She has seen people who reached the stage where they couldn’t even read. These hard-working scientists remained unable to work for years. Angeliki doesn’t want this to happen anymore. She is hopeful because the new generation of undergraduate students and postdocs is very aware of the importance of work-life balance. ”They don’t answer emails during weekends!”, she says.

This was not the case when Angeliki was a young researcher working hard to secure her tenure. After she did, she felt the impact of burnout and learned to meditate, which enabled her to recover fully. Now, she still practices meditation daily, movement therapy twice a week and yoga on the other days.

”Letting the thoughts come in and observing what is obsessing you helps figure out what matters. The next step is to understand why, instead of ‘putting it in a closet’ until the closet explodes, and burnout affects you.”

Angeliki encourages everyone to include meditative activities in their daily life; no matter whether it’s through meditation practice, knitting, painting or anything that people will look forward to and is restorative.

As we conclude our conversation, she insists on the importance of being self-aware and doing something that makes us happy every day. 

Recommended book: ”The wisdom of yoga” by Stephen Cope

Dr Angeliki Diane Rigos is the founder of a non-profit (Epistimi) that offers leadership courses to women in science.

Burnout forces you to go deeply into your core and find your true SELF.