The STEM Culture Expert

I lead several research teams that study different aspects of STEM culture. That includes the culture of organizations and of disciplines more broadly; we focus on disciplines where women of color are most underrepresented. Recently that has included physics, math, and computer science. We are grounded in presenting solid, high-quality research evidence for what can make these disciplines more inclusive.

Using social science methods, we study the lived experiences of successful women of color, in part because we want to understand not only obstacles and barriers but how they overcome them. We also study how STEM culture is created and how it’s reified in policy, practice, and law—we focus on these things as features of a setting. We study how people encounter the way power is controlled and reproduced in a setting and how that impacts the way people move through, live, learn, or work therein.

I do this work as principal investigator (PI) for Eureka Scientific, Inc. (ESI). ESI was founded by astronomers looking for a way to help their colleagues manage research grants, primarily NASA grants. The corporation has since expanded and now handles National Science Foundation (NSF) and private foundation grants, as well as some consulting contracts. They’re an employer in the sense that I get a W2 for my covered labor, but ESI doesn’t choose or content filter my projects. Its staff focuses on grants management, while I provide content, project, and team leadership.

I didn’t set out with this career goal in mind. Most of the times that I have been at a change point in my life, I’ve considered several options and selected the one that seemed most appealing, most interesting to explore, or that had the biggest questions I wanted to answer.

My undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering. I went to graduate school in physics primarily because I got recruited to work on a specific LIDAR project by professors at Hampton University who worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center. While working on my PhD at Hampton, Joe Reddish, a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park (now retired), gave a colloquium about physics education research. Compared to the other options I was thinking about after graduate school, that sounded interesting, as did the idea of moving to the DC area, so I got an NSF fellowship and did a postdoc with Joe.

Joe was my first and probably best example of someone who was particularly focused on helping us—his students and postdocs—get to where we wanted to be, as opposed to having his own agenda for us.

Going into the physics education research postdoc, I knew my career was shifting gears. The predominant thing I learned there was how to listen to students. Joe would tell us that when supporting novice learners trying to understand fundamental physics concepts, our first job was to listen, to try and understand what people were saying, where they were coming from, and what they were thinking. Then he wanted us to consider how that informed the conversation we were having as researchers and instructors. This was good preparation for my transition into social science. My work now is mostly qualitative, observing people, physical spaces, how people use resources, and how people interact on every level.

One of the projects I’m working on now is with Angela Johnson, a professor at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland. We’re studying predominantly White STEM departments that graduate more women of color at the undergraduate level than the national average (to see how we determine this and where your department falls, visit women-of-color-in-stem.org ). We’re still studying what exactly they’re doing that makes a difference, but at some of the best places we’ve seen, everyone, even the administrative staff, is committed to the success of all of the students. In these really inclusive STEM settings, we hear students complain about how hard the science is—not about hurdles connected to who they are or their identity. That is a departure from what Johnson and I have spent most of our careers hearing.

If the STEM community wants its science to be better, we have to create environments where everyone who has talent, interest, and a willingness to work hard can contribute to it. When we’re not doing that, we’re not only missing the opportunity for our science to be better, but we’re also not being great humans.

Many people will mentor and encourage someone they see as a younger version of themselves or a student in whom they see something special or promising. We have to see that preciousness, that specialness, that promise in all of our students. To the extent that we can learn to do that, it will make our science better and the world we’re trying to create better.