IMPACT

As children, most of us were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Quipping dreams of ballerinas, firefighters, doctors or mythical characters — how many of us actually pursued them? Camrie Smith always said she wanted to work with animals. And it stuck.

Earlier this fall, more than 6,000 people gathered for the nation’s largest STEM diversity event of the year, the 2023 National Diversity in STEM (NDiSTEM) conference, hosted in Portland, Oregon.

The Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics will present “Women Leaders in STEM: Challenges and Rewards” on Wednesday, Dec. 13. The event is partially funded by the College of Science’s Gender Equity Leadership Fund, awarded to Biochemistry and Biophysics Head Elisar Barbar in 2023 to implement projects for the advancement of women faculty and those assigned female at birth in the College.

Teaching faculty in the College of Science working to increase access, equity and inclusion in STEM education can create change by collaborating with a supportive community. The the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Inclusive Excellence grant creates a resource for enhancing STEM pedagogy.

Shaping challenges into opportunities is what chemistry Ph.D. student Abdikani Omar Farah has done nearly all of his life. After growing up in East Africa and experiencing firsthand what it meant to lack access to medicine, Farah now wants to use his career to fill this drug scarcity and give back to his communities.

Actinide chemistry is defined by its cutting-edge research, which graduate student Jenna Bustos has a passion for pursuing. From becoming a member of the Nyman Research Group at Oregon State to interning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Bustos is well-versed in the field and eager to see what it brings next for her.

This past summer, Ph.D. student Savanah Leidholt set out to create a summer “bootcamp” for area high school students to draw more students from BIPOC, LGBTQ+, low-income and other diverse backgrounds to the study of microbiology.

Oregon State University Assistant Professor Swati Patel and two colleagues wanted to do something to counter systemic inequities in mathematics. In response, they founded the Math For All conference at Tulane University in New Orleans. Math For All is now a national conference that hosts regional conferences annually throughout the country, including a satellite location at Oregon State.

Students from Oregon State University along with thousands of other attendees from across the nation were welcomed to the National Diversity in STEM (NDiSTEM) Conference Oct. 27, 2022. The event was built to serve as a reminder that culture and science are not mutually exclusive or contradictory. NDiSTEM asserted that science is not a place to shed culture, but a place where it should thrive.

I call on all members of the College of Science to challenge systemic, organizational and individual racism and implicit biases shaping our notion of who can thrive as part of a science community. Through our actions, we express the power of the College of Science to help create a just society.

National Science Foundation CAREER award recipient Marilyn Rampersad Mackiewicz will present the inaugural 2022 College of Science Inclusive Excellence Lecture, “Empowering Cultures of Belonging: Thriving, Innovating and Solving Global Challenges.”

Wanting to spend more time with his partner and one-year-old son, Angulo Barba applied for the Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science (GEM) Fellowship, a national program that promotes the participation of underrepresented groups in post-graduate science and engineering education and the technical workforce.