COVER STORY: Elevating women in STEM

ELEVATING WOMEN IN STEM

Despite decades of messaging that “STEM is for boys,” the proportion of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics continues to rise. Today, women earn more than half of all PhDs in the biological sciences in the U.S.

Women in STEM juggle career goals, family and social expectations, while navigating the obstacles presented by systemic bias and an increasingly competitive job market. During the past year, they’ve also confronted challenges of conducting research during a global pandemic. But despite these hurdles, many women find careers in STEM highly rewarding.

Women at different career levels—from an undergraduate studying computational biology to long-time department chairs—talk about how their experiences at the University of Chicago have shaped and directed their research and perspectives.

STORIES BY ALISON CALDWELL, PHD

LEADING THE WAY IN THE BSD

Melina Hale, PhD’98

William Rainey Harper Professor, Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the College Vice Provost, The University of Chicago

Melina Hale, PhD’98, joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2002. “I was grateful to be able to come back to UChicago because I find our integrative approaches so engaging and productive,” she said. “I love to collaborate and UChicago’s valuing of cross-disciplinary work supports collaboration and tackling the sorts of questions I find compelling.”

Hale studies how motor behaviors are generated by the nervous system. Her research focuses on the mechanosensation and neuromechanics of movement systems, their development and evolution. When she started her lab at UChicago, she said, “It was exciting to have the opportunity to combine the evolutionary and biomechanics approaches of my PhD research with the neurobiological questions and approaches I had worked on since then.”

Her research model of choice is the zebrafish, which allows her to use the advantages of genetic models, including transgenic lines with fluorescent neurons and muscles, to zero in on questions of how hindbrain and spinal cord circuits drive movement and how mechanosensory feedback reports on body movement and is integrated into those circuits. Hale also studies a wide range of other species, including octopuses, to understand specializations in limb function and compare the neuromechanical strategies animals use to behave.

Along with her research, Hale has focused on training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and supporting University faculty through various leadership roles. She served as spokesperson of the Committee of the Council of the University Senate, dean for faculty affairs in the BSD and co-interim director of the Marine Biological Laboratory. For the past five years, she has held a position in the Provost’s Office as a vice provost.

During her time as both a student and faculty member at UChicago, she’s seen many positive changes for women. “It’s an exciting time. For most of my years at UChicago as a graduate student there were no women on the faculty in my department who were actively doing research. Now there are four of us,” Hale said, “and we’re putting much needed attention on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) more broadly. Our current graduate students are such a positive force in this work and great colleagues on these efforts.

“We need to keep our energy and focus on DEI. We still have a lot of work to do but are headed in a good direction.”

PHOTO BY NANCY WONG

HOW DO NERVE

CELLS IN THE

SPINAL CORD

CONTROL BODY

MOVEMENT?

Women are less likely to be represented on NIH study sections, which determine federal research funding. Diane Lauderdale, AM’78, AM’81, PhD

Louis Block Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences and the College Chair, Department of Public Health Sciences

PHOTO BY NANCY WONG

Diane Lauderdale, AM’78, AM’81, PhD, first studied religious history at UChicago’s Divinity School, then library science. In the midst of the AIDs epidemic of the 1980s, she realized that she is fundamentally a very quantitative thinker, and that epidemiology was a field where she could put that thinking to good use.

But as a mother of two children, Lauderdale couldn’t uproot her family to pursue a new career. She enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the only university in Chicago to offer a PhD in epidemiology at the time. “By extraordinary good luck, UChicago opened a department that included epidemiology as I was finishing my doctorate program,” Lauderdale said. “I was hired as the first assistant professor in the department.”

Lauderdale’s research has been diverse and interdisciplinary, shaped heavily by her experience of helping establish UChicago’s department. “There were no senior researchers in my field, no big studies on which I could build,” she said. “I ended up reaching out to people in demography and sociology, and also to faculty in general internal medicine. Typically, epidemiologists focus on one disease or methodology, and my career has been much broader than most.”

For the last 10 years, Lauderdale’s research has focused on sleep and its effects on health, developing methods to measure sleep behavior outside of the laboratory and in the home. “Sleep is clearly related to people’s circumstances, as well as to their physiological and psychological situation,” she said. “It’s also undoubtedly related to health, but maybe not in the ways that earlier studies relying on self-reported sleep behaviors have indicated.”

PHOTO BY ANTHONY BARLICH

As department chair, Lauderdale is excited about the development of a new master of public health degree program, as well as an MD/MPH program leveraging the connections between clinical, basic science and social science departments.

She is keenly aware of the importance of having more women in STEM leadership. “Women are underrepresented at leadership levels, where folks are making higher-profile decisions,” Lauderdale said. “When people are trying to recruit star researchers, either they don’t think as often of women or it’s harder to convince them to come. It’s an issue of hiring patterns. But the promising part is, I think these gender issues are not overwhelming, and can be overcome.”

Carole Ober, PhD

Blum-Riese Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Human Genetics and the College Chair, Department of Human Genetics

In the eyes of Carole Ober, PhD, human genetics has fared better than other STEM fields, “possibly because there have always been senior women in the field who served as great role models.” As a woman in leadership, she is well aware of the “subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, differences in the ways men and women are treated. Most meetings and committees are still male dominated, and it can be challenging to feel heard or that we’re all playing on a level field.”

For many years, Ober’s research focused on genetic mapping studies in the Hutterites, an isolated population similar to the Amish. Recently, due to groundbreaking advances in gene therapies, her work has shifted to focus more on helping Hutterite families access treatments, and even cures, for their children with severe recessive diseases. As part of her other genetic studies, she has co-led national and international consortia on asthma genetics and directed a March of Dimes Prematurity Research

Center, in collaboration with Northwestern University and Duke University.

Ober finds her many research collaborations to be the most rewarding part of her job. “It’s great for my trainees to be growing up in a world where science is collaborative and supportive, where you can learn how to be generous and share, and know when to step back and let someone else take the lead.”

Ober said that there is just so much more pressure on young people today that sharing research successes and failures with collaborators can help investigators feel less isolated and hopefully more bold. “Things were very different when I was starting out,” she said. “It wasn’t as hard to meet academic milestones, and the pace was slower overall. Yet, this rising generation of academics has so much more awareness of and desire to address head-on the social injustices and implicit biases that have held so many groups back. It gives me great optimism for the future when I see the energy and commitment of our students, postdocs and junior faculty to not just succeed on their own, but to make academia a more welcoming environment for everyone.”

PHOTO BY MICHELLE LITVIN

Joy Bergelson, PhD

James D. Watson Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution and the College Immediate Past Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolution

At the time she chose an undergraduate major, Joy Bergelson, PhD, had learned that ecology was a field where one could really gain traction. She appreciated that the research seemed to depend more on critical thinking skills rather than technical ones.

“Ecology is great because you get to travel and see interesting places, and at the time that I entered the field, it didn’t take a lot of money to do something novel,” Bergelson said. Over the years, technology has changed, and so has the field. “There’s now a lot of genetics, functional biology and chemistry in what we do. I learned new things along the way and now approach problems at a more detailed level than when I started.”

Over time, her research has evolved from understanding competitive interactions between species to a focus on plant-enemy interactions: how plants and the creatures that damage them respond and adapt to one another. This led to her study of the evolutionary costs of resistance, and eventually down a path to the interface between ecology and evolution, seeking to understand how plants and their pathogens drive one another’s evolution.

“My work has expanded to cross ecological and evolutionary time frames, expanded from single pathogens to microbiomes and expanded from a single host to the host community,” she said. “We learned five to 10 years ago that it’s really not possible to understand these species interactions in isolation or outside of their real context.” Reflecting on her own career trajectory, Bergelson said: “I don’t know what it would have been like as a man, because my experience is just my experience.” But she notes that even though women now receive over half of the PhDs awarded in biology, their representation at the tenured faculty level is not keeping pace—despite conscious efforts on her part to offer positions to diverse candidates.

“Once you know that biases exist against women in STEM, it’s possible to consider them in evaluations,” Bergelson said. “It helps to focus on where there’s an issue, assess it and adjust as needed. I don’t know what we can do besides being aware and then working at higher levels to take these challenges under consideration. Things get better, slowly.”

Victoria Prince, PhD

Professor, Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the College Dean for Graduate Education

Victoria Prince, PhD, is deeply conscious of the role she plays as a leader for trainees in STEM—and as a role model. “I think it’s important that young women don’t see barriers to their careers at an early time point,” she said.

A developmental biologist, Prince studies the Hox genes, which are critical for developmental

Women earn more degrees in biology than men, with over

60%

of bachelor’s degrees going to women.

Sources for statistics: National Center for Education Statistics; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; National Science Foundation; Nobelprize.org; Science; bioRxiv; Nature; JAMA Network Open.

Women receive

$40 K less

than men in their first funding award from the NIH.

PHOTO BY NANCY WONG

patterning in all animal species. This work fits neatly at the intersection of two of her academic interests—evolution and developmental biology. “These genes have been well studied in lots of organisms and are very well conserved, and yet the details of how they do their job help to make different species different from one another,” she said. “Understanding how that is has important evolutionary and developmental impact.”

But her favorite thing to study, she says, is the neural crest. “These cells are a vertebrate-specific innovation,” said Prince. “These cells migrate all over the body turning into different things. I’ve loved looking at some older questions with newer technology and imaging approaches that were not available before.”

Programs like myCHOICE at UChicago are an important resource for women in STEM, she said. “I’m all for people pursuing whatever kind of career they’re interested in,” Prince said. “But there is a leaky pipeline in science, and I think that in some cases it’s got to do with the challenge of a demanding career that conflicts with having a family. We lose a lot of people at the transition points. MyCHOICE offers popular workshops on the business of running a lab, facilitating conversations on topics like how to staff a new lab, write your first grant— how to transition from being a member of a lab to leading one.”

One benefit to these programs is that they help early-career women in research get advice from and network with investigators in a variety of fields. “It’s very important to have a strong support network,” said Prince. “It doesn’t fix the problem, but it can help you navigate the problem. Seeing women support other women has helped me realize how powerful and meaningful that can be—ultimately, that can help us come out on the other side with a more unified front.”

BEYOND THE BENCH

Meet three BSD alumni who have followed career paths outside of academia

For decades, the traditional career path in science— from PhD to postdoctoral research to tenuretrack faculty member conducting independent research—has influenced resources and training provided by graduate programs.

But an increasingly competitive job market for a shrinking number of faculty positions has spurred more PhD graduates to pursue careers in a variety of sectors. In 2017, only 23 percent of PhDs in the life and health sciences held a tenure-track position in academia, down from 33 percent in 1997.

Gabrielle Edgerton, PhD’10

Founder and Principal Consultant, Red Pen Scientific, Inc.

Gabrielle Edgerton, PhD’10, realized early on that a career in academic research wasn’t her first choice, but while exploring positions in science policy, she saw how a PhD could open doors.

“I was right at the transition point between when it was really taboo to talk about not doing a postdoc and now, when people are encouraged to talk about it,” said Edgerton, who has a doctorate in neurobiology.

The aha moment came when she submitted a successful application for a National Research Service Award grant from the National Institutes of Health. “It made me realize those were the days I

really looked forward to as a student—days where I was just sitting with the data, thinking about how you would convince a reader that something is significant, important and interesting, and revising and editing the writing.”

She ultimately decided to pursue a postdoc, but soon discovered that she faced the choice between moving cross country to continue working with her advisor or finding some other opportunity. “I talked to my advisor about this idea I had—like, can I just be a pinch hitter in a lab to write what needs to be written?” she said. Her advisor introduced her to a colleague who ran a gigbased writing business. Several years later, Edgerton struck out on her own with Red Pen Scientific. Now, she works full time as a writer, editor and consultant for other scientists. Through her work, Edgerton finds that she gets to talk to scientists about all kinds of exciting research questions. While operating her own business can be tough, she loves her work. “I’ve been doing it for 10 years, and I haven’t looked back,” Edgerton said.

Sapana Vora, PhD’14

Deputy Team Chief, Biosecurity Engagement Program, U.S. Department of State

Sapana Vora, PhD’14, first began considering a career in science policy after chancing upon an advertisement on LinkedIn for the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship program, which gives scientists and engineers firsthand experience in policymaking.

“The program is all about taking the skills developed in an academic research environment and making it more impactful, more public facing,” she said. “How can you make a bigger difference with what you know? From that moment I was sold.”

Now deputy team chief in the Biosecurity Engagement Program at the U.S. Department of State, Vora works with foreign partners to identify security needs and provide safety training and other resources to enable groups to respond quickly and adequately to biosecurity challenges.

“We fund work that helps make people’s lives safer and more secure,” she said. “The importance of the work we do has really been brought home in the middle of a pandemic. We can’t do everything, but we have the ability to provide people with the resources, training and knowledge they can’t get on their own that make a difference.” Vora, whose doctorate is in cancer biology, said she wishes she’d been more aware of the breadth of University of Chicago resources when she was a student. “I did not take nearly enough advantage of the Harris School of Public Policy as I wish I could have,” she said. “But now I’m helping develop a science policy course for BSD, PSD, and other graduate programs through the myCHOICE program, and it’s been a sign to me that there should be more opportunities fostered between these phenomenal schools at the University.”

Courtney Burrows, PhD’15, MBA’17

Commercial Leadership Program, AbbVie

After deciding early on that she could have a bigger impact if she went further down the scientific development pipeline, Courtney Burrows, PhD’15, MBA’17, set her sights on a career in industry.

“I started to get interested in the business side of things while doing my PhD,” said Burrows, whose doctorate is in human genetics. “I got involved in the tech transfer office, working on startups out of UChicago, and started taking classes at the business school. Those experiences clarified that I wanted to take the full step to get the MBA.”

Burrows is now in a commercial leadership program at AbbVie that she considers the perfect match between her expertise and skills as a scientist and her training in business. While this position is preparing her for a leadership role in the commercial

47.7%

of biological scientists are women.

of women with full time jobs in science leave or go part-time after having their first child.

K-12 female students perform just as well as their male classmates in mathematics and science.

40%

side of the industry, she has been surprised by the multitude of opportunities in pharma. “There’s so much you don’t even realize is out there until you’re in it. There’s an enormous variety and good opportunities for PhDs that I would never know about if I wasn’t already in pharma.”

Burrows is grateful for the ecosystem at UChicago, which allowed her to feel plugged into the biotech and life sciences industries even before her MBA. “The myCHOICE internship program was a big evolution for grad students that I think has served people very well,” she said. “Now students can get that exposure in a safe and supported way.”

Burrows finds that this career path has been the perfect fit for her needs and interests. “I have fantastic work/life balance and a pension,” she said. “I think academia is more entrepreneurial, when you’re running your own lab, but you can be an entrepreneur outside of academia, too.”

becoming an assistant professor myself, I realized that not every faculty member will lead a life like that,” Chen said. “You can lead a very balanced life. I chose this job for the flexibility of being able to study anything I wanted.”

IN THE LAB

Four scientists discuss their research in human genetics

Mengjie Chen, PhD

Assistant Professor, Departments of Medicine and Human Genetics and the College

RESEARCH FOCUS: Developing new technologies for high-throughput single-cell analysis, measuring gene or protein expression at the single-cell level. This work has applications for cancer, where understanding intratumor heterogeneity can be key for identifying ideal treatment approaches, and neuroscience, where understanding differences between individual cells can help us better understand the structure and composition of the brain.

FAVORITE PART OF HER JOB: Reviewing a data set and discovering something that hasn’t been noticed by other people yet. “We can see something entirely new, a new phenomenon from the data, and try to explain why we’re seeing this,” Chen said.

SOMETHING SURPRISING ABOUT HER EXPERIENCE IN STEM: Initially, Chen was discouraged by the prospects of a career in academic research as she watched mentors juggle large labs, administrative work and conference travel. “After

WHAT SHE’D LIKE MORE PEOPLE TO KNOW: Just because there is no immediate clinical or translational application doesn’t mean that the work isn’t relevant or useful. “We don’t have many opportunities to be introduced to the general public, because a lot of the research is only loosely related to disease treatment,” Chen said. “We need more opportunities to talk to younger generations if we want to attract more students and to help the general public learn about the existence of this field. It’s not highlighted often, but it’s very important.”

Looking back at key discoveries by women in the BSD

U.S. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE

1923

Psychiatrist Esther

Somerfeld-Ziskind, SB’23, Rush MD’26,

was an early proponent of group psychotherapy and helped pioneer groundbreaking psychiatric treatments such as lithium for treating depression.

1967

Lynn Margulis, PhD, LAB’54, AB’57,

published a landmark paper arguing for endosymbiotic theory, which says that cellular components such as mitochondria and chloroplasts evolved from formerly free-living single-celled organisms. She weathered years of criticism, but by the 1980s, the theory had become widely accepted.

COURTESY OF LYNN MARGULIS ESTATE

KELSEY, ROWLEY AND LINDQUIST PHOTOS FROM UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE, HANNA HOLBORN GRAY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS RESEARCH CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARY

1923

Pathologist Florence B. Seibert, PhD, developed new lab equipment to reduce bacterial contamination in intravenous fluids, reducing the risk of infection in patients. Later, she helped develop a reliable test to identify tuberculosis.

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ARCHIVES

1961

Frances Oldham Kelsey, PhD’38,

MD’50, a pharmacologist and drug reviewer for the FDA, refused to approve the anti-nausea drug thalidomide for use in the U.S. without clinical safety data, despite considerable pressure. Thalidomide was found to cause severe birth defects.

1966

Infectious disease researcher Dorothy Hamre, PhD, was the first person to isolate a strain of a coronavirus, which she described in a paper co-authored with John J. Procknow as “possibly associated with mild upper respiratory illnesses of man.”

PHOTO BY VERNON TAYLOR, U.S. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE

NAU.PH.93.37.2.7.3. DOROTHY HAMRE AND KENNETH ALEXANDER BROWNLEE PHOTOGRAPHS. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CLINE LIBRARY, NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

1981

Susan Lindquist, PhD, one of the first professors in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, studied how heat shock proteins play a role in the cellular response to environmental stressors, and pioneered the use of yeast as a model organism for studying protein biochemistry.

1930s

Sara Branham Matthews, SM 1920, PhD’23, MD’34,

studied the flu virus. While working at the NIH, she isolated and identified Neisseria meningitidis, a bacterium that causes meningitis.

1972

Janet Rowley, LAB’42, PhB’44, SB’46, MD’48,

identified chromosomal translocations linked to leukemia, providing some of the early evidence that chromosomal abnormalities play a role in some cancers.

As of 2015, women represented only

28%

of the total number of people in science and engineering occupations in the U.S. Megan McNerney, PhD’05, MD’07

Associate Professor, Department of Pathology

RESEARCH FOCUS: Studying how and why some patients respond well to treatment while others do not in blood cancers, specifically myeloid malignancies. A large focus is on understanding why high-risk patients, who don’t respond to treatment, are frequently missing a portion of chromosome 7 in their tumor cells, and how that leads to treatment resistance. Her research has identified a gene called CUX1 on chromosome 7 that acts as a “master regulator” of the genome; if you remove this gene in mice, they develop myeloid malignancies.

PHOTO BY JEAN LACHAT

MOST EXCITING THING HAPPENING IN HER FIELD RIGHT NOW: “Next-generation sequencing and uncovering somatic mutations that occur in cancer have opened up the door for finding new tailored therapies for cancer,” McNerney said. Instead of using systemic chemotherapy for all cancers, which targets all proliferating cells in the body, personalized inhibitor treatments are based on specific mutations in cancerous tumors. “This is a super fun time to be in cancer research,” McNerney said. “We have these specific drugs we can give patients, the outcomes are better, patients feel better, and it’s less toxic.”

FAVORITE PART OF HER JOB: “I’m interacting with smart, creative, motivated people that are inspiring and engaging, and it’s very intellectually stimulating. Even if I won the lottery, I would keep my job.”

HER ADVICE FOR WOMEN IN STEM: “Learning to say no is key. Women often get stuck with the so-called ‘pink labor,’ and in science it’s still a huge problem. As women in leadership positions, we need to foster an environment where we’re enabling our junior investigators to thrive and stay focused on their priorities.”

Maanasa Raghavan, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Human Genetics and the College

RESEARCH FOCUS: Reconstructing human population and demographic history in order to understand the origins, past migratory patterns, and adaptive and disease trajectories of different populations all around the world. “We all have a shared history leading back to Africa, but since the migration out of Africa between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago, unique cultural, societal and biological evolutionary processes have caused different populations around the world to drive in unique directions,” Raghavan said. Her team is not only seeking to understand the biocultural trajectories that have shaped our human species, but also to diversify the genomic literature in a sustainable and equitable fashion, working with Indigenous communities to better understand their histories, build community partnerships for sequencing diverse populations of people, and help build and support scientific capacity HOW HAVE ANCIENT HUMANS in collaborating AND THEIR countries. ENVIRONMENTS

SHAPED

PRESENT-DAY

MOST EXCITING THING HAPPENING IN HER FIELD RIGHT NOW: “In the last 10 years, there’s been a revolution with the advent of next-generation sequencing techniques. Coupled with that has been the development of methods to generate large genomic data sets from ancient samples. We’ve learned that human populations have mixed around a lot in the past. It’s hard to look around today and find a ‘pure’ population. We now have exciting new avenues to explore these questions that are already well studied in some regions, like Europe, and start taking that to more underrepresented populations. Increasing representation in genomic data sets will bring forth new insights, and create opportunities to work collaboratively with communities and their existing knowledge.”

FAVORITE PART OF HER JOB: The opportunity to explore new, never-before-asked research questions. Also, “being able to work with the next generation of scientists,” Raghavan said. “Postdocs and students become your colleagues, and you’re all working together as a team. We’re all sharing this knowledge and process of learning and teaching— it’s not just one way.”

WHAT SHE’D LIKE MORE PEOPLE TO KNOW: Raghavan said one of the things she struggles with is the conflation between genetics and race in ways that are not biologically or scientifically supported. “Sometimes papers get misinterpreted, or data gets used in nefarious ways by people with an agenda,” she said. “We can’t expect people to pick up a paper and understand the jargon. With social media and the power for scientists to be more visible, it’s up to us to simplify our science.”

Anindita “Oni” Basu, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine and the College

RESEARCH FOCUS: Basu has combined innovative droplet technology with genetic sequencing technology to develop high-throughput methods for single-cell sequencing, a technique called Drop-seq. While many commercial platforms have been developed for this type of analysis, Basu describes hers as “home-brewed” and “open source,” and her team is working on expanding the technology to biological systems that have not been easily accessed by existing systems. “I would say 40 percent of our work is still development,” she said.

MOST EXCITING THING HAPPENING IN HER FIELD RIGHT NOW: “In single-cell genomics, we mainly look at RNA, or gene transcription. But there are new techniques coming in that look at epigenetics, which affects how genes and their functions are regulated. This provides information on how gene regulation might be different among different populations. We are seeing some indications that we can understand disease from a population perspective, which is valuable for medical applications, but also for understanding how our genomes might make us more susceptible to different conditions.”

FAVORITE PART OF HER JOB: “I really enjoy collaborative research. I love to work with all of these interesting scientists who think in different ways, and getting to see things from their perspective.”

SOMETHING SURPRISING ABOUT HER EXPERIENCE IN STEM: How exciting the field can be, and how quickly progress can be made. “I came to systems biology in a roundabout way,” Basu said. “I thought I was going to be an engineer, and got into physics, and then into systems biology because I enjoyed it so much. It’s been a very honeymoon experience. Not to say that physics is not exciting, but it’s a very old field, and the new findings that come out tend to be incremental. In genetics, it’s like a child going to the fair. There are so many exciting things happening, and we’re finding big and bold insights because the field is so new. That’s not a given for all fields of science, and we’re lucky to be where we are at this point in time.”

Female authors are underrepresented in high-profile journals.

Only

14%

of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2017-2018 in STEM fields were earned by women of color.

YOUNG VOICES

A college journalist. A South Side native. A medical student. A PhD candidate in biochemistry. How four women are following their own paths in STEM.

Male postdocs are

90%

more likely than women to have an advisor who is a Nobel laureate.

“I would say to a young girl interested in a career in STEM — you are smart enough.” Emma Dyer

College Class of 2021

Emma Dyer started out thinking of herself as a writer, not a scientist. A physiology class changed her mind.

Dyer is co-editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon, where she has been “working on building infrastructure for data journalism and science writing.” She plans to pursue a master’s degree in bioinformatics and eventually become a physician.

Currently, she works as an undergraduate researcher with Alexander Pearson, MD, PhD, where she’s learning how to use machine and deep learning algorithms to improve image processing and diagnostic pipelines for head and neck cancers. “I dream about going into orthopaedic medicine and using computation to support athletics and movement research,” Dyer said. In the summer of 2020, Dyer had a unique opportunity to work as a Data Core analyst with the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. “It was awesome to work with a powerhouse team of female data analysts,” she said.

Finding female mentors in the field has helped bolster Dyer’s confidence in her skills and helped to cement her career goals. “Not getting As in math class doesn’t mean you can’t be a scientist. STEM isn’t about being good at math, it’s a way of thinking that you learn over time.”

Tamica Collins, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology

Tamica Collins, PhD, got hooked on science early in college. “When I started learning about science and doing research, I just found that it worked for me in a way that nothing else had,” she said.

Now a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, Collins is investigating strategies to inhibit cell growth in BRCAdeficient and triple-negative breast cancers. She recently was named one of 1,000 Inspiring Black Scientists in America by Crosstalk Cell Press Blog.

“These two kinds of cancer predominately affect African American women,” she said. “Because I’m from the South Side, I’ve seen these diseases that affect my community. Being able to come to the lab and do the research to try and fix this, that’s a great experience that a lot of people don’t have.”

Collins says pursuing a postdoc was one of the best decisions she ever made. “I’ve been able to get an NIH grant, to learn more about health disparities, to really think about and understand what I want to do after I finish,” she said. “This is a great opportunity to decide whether or not I want to have my own lab and to see how I would want to shape it. It’s really helped me see my potential.”

“There’s a need to create spaces where women feel comfortable in the field, and people need to understand that minorities and women bring a diverse and different perspective to research that will change the game.”

“It’s not lost on me that it will be challenging to maintain the work schedule that I’ve maintained, but at least seeing other women who have accomplished what I’m trying to accomplish makes it feel possible.”

Christine McIntosh, PhD’20, MS3

Growth, Development and Disabilities Training Program

Unlike most MD/PhD students, Christine McIntosh, PhD’20, didn’t decide to pursue the dual degree until after she started medical school. “I took a cell and molecular biology course and I realized I didn’t want the course to end,” she said. “I felt like if I didn’t pursue research, that was going to be the last time I’d get to sit down and focus on the mechanisms of disease.”

She joined the Growth, Development and Disabilities Training Program, a unique opportunity available to Pritzker School of Medicine students who decide to pursue an advanced PhD degree after they have started medical school.

As a PhD student in the lab of Maria-Luisa Alegre, PhD’93, McIntosh studied the immunology of organ transplantation. She hopes to identify new treatments that can retrain the immune system following an organ transplant so it will accept the donor organ without the need for long-term use of immunosuppressant drugs. “The faculty here were willing to help me carve out a path doing whatever I felt most drawn to, as long as it was valuable to patients in some way,” McIntosh said. “And Marisa was an incredible mentor, making sure I made a presence for myself in the scientific community and making sure I learned how to be an independent scientist.”

PhD candidate, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

In her dissertation research, Christina Roman, SM’20, engineers antibody fragments that can act as crystallographic chaperones for RNAs. These antibody fragments facilitate the crystallization of RNA targets so X-ray crystallography can be used to reveal the RNA’s three-dimensional atomic structure. This is important because, in her words, “Viruses often use structured RNAs to hijack cells. Knowing the structure of those RNAs gives us an avenue to combat those viruses by designing drugs to mess up those structures.”

The first couple of years of graduate school were tough for Roman. She struggled with a project that wasn’t getting off the ground, and, as a woman of color in a field composed mostly of white men, she was confronted with regular microaggressions and systemic discrimination.

After shifting her focus to a new research project, her work took off. “Over the pandemic, I sat down and dug into solving crystal structures. In just a couple of months I managed to solve multiple RNA crystal structures because I took the time to try stuff and teach myself with trial and error.”

Roman is one of the creators and a former leader of the Graduate Recruitment Initiative Team (GRIT)— an organization of STEM graduate students at UChicago who work to recruit and support diverse students. Her work at GRIT has helped open her eyes to what a career in STEM can actually look like, and helped her see opportunities outside of academia’s ivory tower.

“I wish I’d considered what made me happy as a person more when I first considered a career in STEM,” Roman said. “When others questioned my abilities as a scientist, I found my own definition of success that didn’t depend on their validation through grassroots organizing in diversity and inclusion work. The contributions that I can make to this field are so much bigger than good experiments. What makes me proud to be a woman in STEM is not just my research, but rather my ability to work and succeed while disregarding the arbitrary structure and barriers of academia.”

WHAT KINDS OF

STRUCTURES

CAN RNAS

FORM AND HOW

DO THOSE

STRUCTURES

MANAGE TO

INTERFERE

WITH OUR OWN

BIOLOGY?