Brandeis Magazine

By Danna Zeiger, GSAS MS’13, PhD’14

Danna Zeiger and her son
Courtesy Meredith Bodgas

Have an “aha” moment you’d like to share in Turning Points?

Please send a query letter to mgaseau@brandeis.edu.

My husband and I had been in a supportive, loving marriage for 13 years. Now he thought I’d lost my mind.

I was telling him I felt I needed to resign from my professorship, pull our kids out of school and homeschool them.

It was the beginning of the pandemic. My career was thriving; I was on the cusp of a big promotion. My passion was finding ways of making STEM accessible. This had involved six grueling years of graduate school, countless midnight nematode experiments and bacterial DNA replication assays, a PhD defense (scheduled on my 2-year-old’s birthday) and seven years of leading the college biology program I’d founded.

I loved my job. I loved my students. I was exactly where I’d hoped to be.

Then came the email. The human resources office at my workplace couldn’t guarantee me remote-work accommodations. My husband and I had a newborn and a toddler, no child care, and immunocompromised family members to protect. I looked at the equation — every version of it — and homeschooling was the only solution that didn’t collapse.

Who could blame my husband for thinking the pandemic had made me snap? Homeschooling wasn’t a concept we’d ever imagined for us. I’d been a professor, not a teacher in my own living room.

When I submitted my resignation, my boss, a fellow working mother, was genuinely shocked. My colleagues were flabbergasted. Handing over my department, emptying my office, and dragging boxes of textbooks and lab notebooks into storage was painful. Had I lost my identity? Would my world shrink without my work life?

My professorship had been a sphere of innovation. I was an adviser, a builder of creative partnerships. I helped mold lives. Immigrants (like my family) and first-generation college students emerged from my program ready to work at prestigious scientific companies or attend graduate schools.

Yet someone had to shepherd the tiny beings my husband and I had chosen to bring into the world.

Partly to avoid my sense of loss and partly out of necessity, I threw myself into research on homeschooling, which, it turns out, has its own Hogwarts-houses assortment of philosophies: unschooling, gameschooling, worldschooling, the Charlotte Mason method, classical education.

Friends began asking me how to make science fun, so I launched a free online platform, DrZatHome, to bring cool college-level activities to kids. It was different from the world of higher education, but I still got meaningful thank-you notes, now written in crayon.

Through homeschooling, my kids and I discovered new versions of one another, as teacher and students. I know their challenges and strengths intimately. We’ve taken countless field trips — to museums, nature reserves and any other adventure we think will be interesting.

We devoured hundreds of books each month (thank goodness for libraries). Watching my kids read — and knowing I was the one who taught them, through obstacles and successes —brought tears to my eyes.

One day, while reading a book by Chris Van Dusen, I had a light-bulb moment: an idea for a children’s book. I told my husband about it. “You have to write that book!” he said.

This time, I thought he’d lost his mind. Though writing children’s books was on my bucket list, I had no clue how to go about it.

But writing, for me, has always been a plunge into creativity, into my own choices. So, during naptimes and playtimes, I explored how to share the best parts of science with kids.

Last September, my first children’s book, “Rewriting the Rules,” was published. It’s a biography of a neuroscientist with cerebral palsy who followed her dreams and overcame adversity (she also happens to be my friend and mentor). Writing the book gave me permission to swim against society’s expectations — which homeschooling had already taught me to do — and dive into the icy waters of a less lucrative but personally fulfilling career.

As a writer, I’m still finding ways to make STEM accessible to all.

The pangs of leaving academia haven’t totally faded. But I haven’t lost sight of my mission, as I feared I might. I’m molding a career shaped around the values of flexibility, creativity and connection, with a much younger, much larger audience.

What began as a crisis almost six years ago has become an unexpected gift.

Danna Zeiger, a former director of and professor in Fisher College’s biology program, is the author of “Rewriting the Rules: How Dr. Kathleen Friel Created New Possibilities for Brain Research and Disability” (Millbrook Press, 2025).