YSM Issue 93.3
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Yale Scientific
THE NATION’S OLDEST COLLEGE SCIENCE PUBLICATION • ESTABLISHED IN 1894
NOVEMBER 2020 VOL. 93 NO. 3 • $6.99
5
ADVICE
TO
WOMEN
IN STEM
12
NOT-SO-
DARK
MATTER?
28
HEE OH:
COMING
FULL
CIRCLE
T A B L E O F
VOL. 93 ISSUE NO. 3
More articles online at www.yalescientific.org & https://medium.com/the-scope-yale-scientific-magazines-online-blog
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Not-So-Dark Matter?
Christopher Poston
Earth’s Evolution through Eons
Cindy Kuang & Jerry Ruvalcaba
The Duality of Sex Differences
Catherine Zheng & Raquel Sequeira
The All-Female Flannery Lab
Beatriz Horta & Mahnoor Sarfraz
Coming Full Circle
Mirilla Zhu
How We Got Here and Where We Are Going
Eamon Goucher & Alexandra Haslund-Gourley
Building Polymers and Building Community
Jenny Tan & Rayyan Darji
A Doctor Who Writes
Dhruv Patel & Matthew Fan
2 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
C O N T E N T S
5
8
ADVICE TO
WOMEN IN
STEM
SHORTS
Mariel Pettee • Madison Houck & Victoria Vera
Laura Niklason • Tiffany Liao
Ashley Schloss & Jennette Creso • Meili Gupta
Tamar Geller & Taylor Chapman • Raj Pandya
Barbara Ehrlich, Forging Her Own Path • Veronica Lee
Why Representation Matters • Alexa Jeanna Loste
Men and Women are Physiological Unequal • Sophia Zhuang
Major Depressive Disorders are Underreported and Prone to Recall Error •
Anjali Mangla & Victoria Ouyang
22 SPECIALS
38
46
51
FEATURES
SHEA
LETTER
A Timeline of Firsts • Cynthia Lin
Women in STEM Whose Discoveries We Use Every Day •
Arushi Dogra & Cathleen Liang
By the Numbers • Ishani Singh
Life in Motion • Lucas Loman & Agastya Rana
Adding the “A” to STEAM • Kelly Chen & Hannah Huang
Paving the Way for More Inclusive Science Storytelling •
Alex Dong & Angelica Lorenzo
Academia Within an Ending Universe • Brianna Fernandez
Thinking Space • Britt Bistis
“OkZoomer” Platform Connects Isolated College Students • Clay Thames
What Is Meant for Us? • Leleda Beraki
Rocking the Boat • Athena Stenor
“This is What a Scientist Looks Like” • Gonna Nwakudu
What still needs to be done to improve gender equity and inclusion
in STEM? • YSM Masthead
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 3
The Editor-in-Chief Speaks
In conjunction with the campus-wide 50WomenAtYale150 celebrations,
this special issue of the YSM celebrates the accomplishments of women
in STEM, both at Yale and beyond. This magazine issue has been a long
time in the planning—the editorial board and YSM members spent the
summer brainstorming about what type of content to feature, how best to
structure this issue, and, perhaps most importantly, who to feature. From
planning to execution, this project has presented unique challenges that
every member of the team has met with zeal, even amidst the uncertain
circumstances for academic life and, by extension, for YSM operations.
From the start, we wanted to infuse our coverage with as much variety
as possible, be it in STEM disciplines, the backgrounds of women featured,
or the nature of the content. What you will see in the following pages are
creative efforts by our editors, writers, and artists—many of whom are
women in STEM—to step outside the conventional YSM structure and
provide a fitting celebration of incredible achievements by women in STEM.
Our “Shorts” section comprises four pieces of advice to women in STEM,
written by women in various stages of their careers. Four short research pieces
thereafter serve to highlight recent scientific advances led by women. The
“Focus” section comprises five in-depth profiles of women leaders in academia
and industry, as well as three articles on cutting-edge, women-led research at
Yale. We hope that telling the stories of women who have succeeded will be
both inspirational and instructive, viz. the challenges and pervasive biases that
they were required to overcome at every step of the way. Our “Features” section
spotlights both women outside Yale and women who have blazed their own trail
in pursuing unconventional STEM careers. Peppered throughout the magazine
are the Special Sections that cover the history of women in STEM. Also in these
Sections is an incredible collection of pieces written in partnership with the
STEM and Health Equity Advocates at Yale that address the unique challenges
faced by underrepresented minority women in STEM.
As much as this is a celebration, it will hopefully be apparent that much more
needs to be done at every level before true equality is achieved. On p. 51, our
editorial board details our perspective on the current and future states of women
in STEM. Finally, there is so much more to be celebrated and said about women
in STEM than we could fit in this issue; even so, we hope you will find inspiration
and insight to work towards a more inclusive and equal playing field in STEM.
Marcus Sak, Editor-in-Chief
ABOUT THE ART
While the presence of women in
STEM has been historically low,
insitutitons and individuals are
currently undertaking efforts to
steadily bridge the gender divide. In
this issue’s cover, we celebrate just a
sliver of our female contemporaries in
academia, industry, and medicine—
our relentless trailblazers who
harness their crafts to both improve
and inspire future generations.
Sophia Zhao, Cover Artist
MASTHEAD
November 2020 VOL. 93 NO. 3
EDITORIAL BOARD
Editor-in-Chief
Managing Editors
News Editor
Features Editor
Articles Editor
Online Editors
Copy Editors
Scope Editors
PRODUCTION & DESIGN
Production Manager
Layout Editor
Art Editor
Cover Artist
Photography Editor
Webmasters
Social Media Coordinator
BUSINESS
Publisher
Operations Manager
Advertising Managers
OUTREACH
Synapse Presidents
Synapse Vice President
Outreach Coordinator
STAFF
Ismihan Abdelkadir
Leleda Beraki
Britt Bistis
Kelly Chen
Rayyan Darji
Arushi Dogra
Alex Dong
Matthew Fan
Brianna Fernandez
Meili Gupta
Eamon Goucher
Alexandra Haslund-Gourley
Beatriz Horta
Madison Houck
Hannah Huang
ADVISORY BOARD
Priyamvada Natarajan
Sandy Chang
Kurt Zilm, Chair
Fred Volkmar
Stanley Eisenstat
James Duncan
Stephen Stearns
Jakub Szefer
Werner Wolf
John Wettlaufer
William Summers
Scott Strobel
Robert Bazell
Craig Crews
Ayaska Fernando
Robert Cordova
Doyoung Jeong
Cindy Kuang
Veronica Lee
Cathleen Liang
Tiffany Liao
Cynthia Lin
Anmei Little
Lucas Loman
Angelica Lorenzo
Alexa Jeanne Loste
Angali Mangla
Gonna Nwakudu
Victoria Ouyang
Raj Pandya
Christopher R. Poston
Marcus Sak
Kelly Farley
Anna Sun
Xiaoying Zheng
Hannah Ro
James Han
Tiffany Liao
Maria Fernanda Pacheco
Nithyashri Baskaran
Serena Thaw-Poon
Lorenzo Arvanitis
Brett Jennings
Antalique Tran
Julia Zheng
Ellie Gabriel
Sophia Zhao
Kate Kelly
Siena Cizdziel
Matt Tu
Megan He
Sebastian Tsai
Jenny Tan
Stephanie Hu
Cynthia Lin
Michelle Barsukov
Katherine Dai
Chelsea Wang
Blake Bridge
Agastya Rana
Jerry Ruvalcaba
Mahnoor Sarfraz
Sydney Scott
Raquel Sequira
Ishani Singh
Athena Stenor
Clay Thames
Isabel Trindade
Victoria Vera
Sherry Wang
Sherry Xu
Catherine Zheng
Mirilla Zhu
Sophia Zhuang
Astronomy
Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Chemistry
Child Study Center
Computer Science
Diagnostic Radiology
Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Electrical Engineering
Emeritus
Geology & Geophysics
History of Science, Medicine, & Public Health
Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry
Molecular, Cellular, & Developmental Biology
Molecular, Cellular, & Developmental Biology
Undergraduate Admissions
Yale Science & Engineering Association
The Yale Scientific Magazine (YSM) is published four times a year by Yale
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Advice
SHORT
ADVICE TO
WOMEN IN STEM
MARIEL PETTEE never decided to be one
thing or another. As someone who was
enthusiastic about both the sciences and
the arts, Pettee assumed that a time would
come when one of her passions would have
to speak louder than the other. “I [thought]
that when I got to college,” she said, “maybe
one of [my] two interests would reveal itself
to be more important in my life. I think
instead I just found that I was able to charge
ahead and do both as much as I wanted
to.” And so, she did. As a physics graduate
student at Yale, Pettee finds the time to
simultaneously research the Higgs boson
particle and choreograph a musical about
Elon Musk and the colonization of Mars.
The Higgs boson—the object of
Pettee’s research—is part of a much
larger explanation of why particles have
mass. The discovery of the particle at
the European Organization for Nuclear
Research, or CERN, was the final piece
in the puzzle of the Standard Model of
Particle Physics: a theory developed in
the 1960s to describe the fundamental
forces and elementary particles in our
universe. However, according to Pettee, the
Standard Model is not a complete theory. It
does not consider gravity and comes into
conflict with other evidence, unearthed by
astronomers, surrounding dark matter and
dark energy. Using data from the CERN’s
Large Hadron Collider—the biggest and
most potent particle accelerator in the
world—Pettee explores this obscure area
of particle physics. As Pettee observes how
the Higgs boson behaves, she is looking for
MARIEL PETTEE
BY MADISON HOUCK & VICTORIA VERA
something that would differ from Standard
Model predictions. Any deviation would
give physicists something new to investigate
to expand the Standard Model or even to
create a new, more comprehensive theory
for particle behavior, Pettee explained.
When she’s not working at the forefront
of particle physics research, Pettee finds
outlets to combine her passions for physics
and dance through artificial intelligence.
What was born from a place of curiosity, she
said, just “wanting to see what AI would do
if [I] trained it to generate dance,” has now
evolved into much more complex work. She
now collaborates with scientists, artists, and
dancers, leading an independent team that
investigates the analysis and generation
of choreography by AI. The intersection
between artificial intelligence and the arts
has “opened up a whole new avenue of
research,” which Pettee finds exciting.
Her love of performance isn’t only
reflected in her research, but also in
many independent projects. During
her undergraduate years, Pettee was in
rehearsals from six to ten p.m., only to
leave afterwards to work on her problem
sets deep into the night. Mariel’s passion
for the arts seeps through her experiences
as a teacher. When she spoke about her
lessons, she said that she tries to “connect
with [her] students sort of like if [she]
was connecting to an audience.” For her,
it was through teaching that the overlap
between science and the performing
arts first became clear, and from there
on, these two areas became one for her.
From focusing her side projects at the
intersection of artificial intelligence
and dance to choreographing the latest
Elon Musk-related musicals at the Yale
Cabaret, Mariel has shown us all that the
chasm between the arts and science can,
in fact, be bridged.
Mariel’s passion for performance led
her to participate in different outreach
programs throughout her career. She fondly
remembered a physics slam—Windy City
Physics Slam—in which physicists from all
over the world gave ten-minute talks about
their research in whatever format they
desired. These enthusiastic presentations
were promptly followed by kids running
around the stage, excited by the enthralling
complexity of particle physics. She noted
that these events turned into spaces for
audiences—both young and old—to ask
playful questions about topics that would
have otherwise been inaccessible to them.
Mariel Pettee has led an awe-inspiring
life in more ways than one. But even more
admirable than her cutting-edge research
and performances is her warm personality,
which shines through her words and
work. Pettee underscores the importance
of not second-guessing yourself and
asking for help when necessary. In her
own words, “Don’t count yourself out.”
For many, following aspirations in the
sciences can seem like a far-away dream.
But every day, women like Pettee show
that it is possible, and that one doesn’t
necessarily have to put other passions to
the side in order to do so. ■
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 5
SHORT
Advice
DR. LAURA NIKLASON is a world-renowned
professor at Yale who studies vascular and
lung engineering. She is a recent inductee
of the National Academy of Engineering,
and the founder of her own biotech startup
Humacyte. Among many accolades, Time
Magazine named her work on lab-grown
lungs one of the top 50 inventions in 2010.
As a woman in STEM, you learn the
importance of balance in many
respects, including balancing
ambition and guilt. With twenty-four hours
in the day, it can be hard to find that balance
between family and career—taking care
of my home life and finding the time and
ASHLEY SCHLOSS & JENETTE CRESO
INTRODUCTION BY MEILI GUPTA
ASHLEY SCHLOSS is the Tech Coalition Manager at Reboot
Representation, an organization and coalition of leading tech companies
dedicated to decreasing disparities for women in color in technology.
Ashley earned her PhD from the Yale School of Medicine, where she
worked in the Regan Lab studying protein-protein interactions.
In today’s world, knowledge in STEM prepares you for just about
any job. But, if you are entering a STEM field where you often find
yourself as the only one in a room—the only woman, only person
of color, only person from your school—there are some skills that you
need. These skills enable you to carve a space and shift a system that
was made by those who might not have seen you coming.
Focus on the three C’s: community, communication, and confidence.
Community: There are likely other people on campus or in
other departments who are also the only or one of a few. Look for
affinity groups where you can find community and assistance.
Talk to people—you might find shared experiences, tips on
overcoming loneliness, and more.
Communication: Self-advocate: email your professor with that
nagging question, ask your TA to grab a coffee, connect with that one
person who graduated a couple years ago on LinkedIn, sign up to give
a presentation. Networking is daunting, but it is important. The more
people who know about your work, your goals, and your passions, the
easier it is for them to support you and amplify your success.
Confidence: This is an uncomfortable one, but confidence comes
from practice. If you are nervous about a presentation, application,
interview, etc., practice with any and everyone who has the time. Allow
people to give you feedback, implement the feedback, and practice
more. Sounds boring, but it works. My biggest failures came from not
seeking feedback and my biggest wins came from practice.
You got this! I believe in you. ■
LAURA NIKLASON
INTRODUCTION BY TIFFANY LIAO
energy to pursue my career ambitions in
the lab. The way I address that is by brutally
simplifying my life down to family and job—
not too much shopping. From my startup
experience, one of the important lessons
I learned is this: if you’re doing it for the
money, it’s the wrong reason! The rewards are
for the long term, and you have to be able
to stick to it (fifteen years and running for
me!) Now, for the first years: Focus on what
you like and what you are good at, NOT on
what is fashionable right now. When I started
working on engineered blood vessels, there
was this unspoken pressure to pursue what
was fashionable like gene therapy, which
died for fifteen years before coming back.
So, pursuing your interest is better in the
long run. If you’re thinking about learning
hard sciences, do it NOW. I studied physics
and minored in biophysics in college and
through my career experience, I can tell you
that it is MUCH easier to learn the hard
sciences in a structured setting. For all the
women out there, I will leave you with this:
one of the most fascinating phenomena
I have seen is the difference between how
women and men perceive achievement
and difficulty. Women are not comfortable
being in front of their own success, but very
comfortable being in front of their own
failure. This is disadvantageous—give
yourself the credit you deserve! ■
JENNETTE CRESO received her Bachelor’s degree in Chemical
Engineering from the University of California, Irvine, during which
time she conducted research in yeast metabolic engineering. She
is currently a PhD candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Yale,
studying the use of engineered heart tissue to model and evaluate the
hereditary genetic mutations that cause heart disease. She is also an
Executive Board Member for the Yale Society of Women Engineers.
Fear of starting something new can be a tall barrier when it
comes to finding the right career path. It’s not a secret that the
learning curves in STEM are steep; changing fields can mean
learning a whole new foundation of vocabulary and techniques.
This is particularly challenging in an academic environment,
where it can feel like everyone else in the field
The
confidence
to change
trajectory is
essential for
finding the
right fit.
is miles ahead of you. I know firsthand how
intimidating this can be; I changed from premed
to chemical engineering in undergrad,
before changing again to biomedical
engineering in graduate school.
The confidence to change trajectory is
essential for finding the right fit. Settling for a
research project, a thesis topic, or a degree that
is just “good enough” is never going to bring you
a passionate or fulfilling career. The time you
spent doing something else is never a waste, but
rather it is what led you to a new career that is an even better fit.
So, my advice is to gain as much exposure as you can along
your journey. Take a different class from your friends, sign up
for more events, and talk to people in various fields to gain new
perspectives. Most importantly, don’t let the fear of change keep
you from starting on a better path for yourself. ■
6 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
TAMAR GELLER & TAYLOR CHAPMAN
TAMAR GELLER ’23 is an Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science major at Yale. Her work has led her to different corners
of the world: Israel, where she created an award-winning poster
on a transistor’s electronic properties; California, where she was
a research assistant at the Center for Health Policy at Stanford;
and most recently, New Haven, where she does research at the
Intelligent Computing Lab.
One of her recent personal projects is called “Following the
Footnote,” a database created with the Python programming
language that interconnects three thousand different books and
determines the most influential authors in a sample.
At Yale, she is one of the first female Co-Chairs of the Yale
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (Y-IEEE), an
engineering club that works on high-toned projects such as sending
radio messages to the International Space Station or lighting up
campus towers. Since electrical engineering is a traditionally maledominated
field, Tamar feels empowered to serve as a leader of this
branch and as a member of the larger national organization.
When I was in fifth grade, my teacher placed me in the
advanced math group. I should have been honored
and excited. Instead, I dreaded it.
The group consisted of me and five other boys at a time when
cooties were the top concern. The math sessions were long and
lonely—I didn’t feel comfortable asking my
peers to clarify questions or show me their
methods for solving problems. It quickly
became clear to me that success in challenging
STEM fields requires more than just academic
accomplishment. It is built upon friendship,
support, and collaboration.
At Yale, I have been so fortunate to
develop strong friendships within the STEM
community which have paved the way for
academic growth. Whether it is a challenging
problem set, a complicated research project, or
an amusing (yet nerdy) joke, I have friends and
peers to turn to. They give me the confidence
to take on harder classes, and ambitious STEM
projects that I wouldn’t have been able to do on
my own. Our shared passion for technology
and problem solving creates bonds that go
beyond just problem sets and labs. These bonds
represent a common way of thinking and
approach to everyday life.
To my fellow women in STEM: take advantage
of those bonds. Build your community early on
and know that it is a give and take. Ask for help—
you don’t have to do everything on your own.
STEM is an inherently interdisciplinary
field. Building a successful prototype or completing work in a
lab requires collaboration from those with diverse perspectives.
Friendship and support not only makes that collaboration
possible, but also sometimes fun. ■
www.yalescientific.org
INTRODUCTION BY RAJ PANDYA
When you are
only person in
the room from an
underrepresented
background, it
can also feel like
there is a strict
mold in which
you have to fit to
meet the idea of
what it means to
be a scientist, an
engineer, or even a
student in STEM.
Advice
SHORT
TAYLOR CHAPMAN is a junior at Yale majoring in Electrical
Engineering and Environmental Studies. Before coming to Yale,
Taylor received an Associate’s Degree in Electronics Engineering
Technology at Horry-Georgetown Technical College while
simultaneously finishing high school.
At Yale, she continues to gain experience in energy-related fields, such as
alternative energy technologies, power distribution networks, and energy
efficiency techniques. After research experience at Yale’s Optoelectronics
Materials and Devices Lab through the Science, Technology, and Research
Scholars program during her first summer, Taylor sought to learn more
about power systems and renewable energy technologies last spring
while studying abroad in Ireland. At the same time, she also conducted
research at University College Dublin’s Energy Institute.
Taylor is one of the first two female Co-Chairs of the Yale Student
Branch of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (Y-IEEE),
which is currently spearheading many unique engineering projects. “I’m
very excited for what we will all be able to accomplish. Because [recently]
I feel like the doors [are] opening a lot more,” Taylor says.
As many of us would agree, STEM is extraordinary! It
is a field that contains a whole world of curiosity and is
constantly shaping our society with each new discovery.
Combined with the community of passionate people it houses,
STEM is delightful to be a part of!
Yet, while STEM is all those wonderful
things, it can simultaneously present itself as
daunting and restrictive. With our meticulously
laid out curriculums and stringent benchmarks
and GPAs requirements for post-graduate
opportunities, it often seems like there is a
very defined path to follow. When you are only
person in the room from an underrepresented
background, it can also feel like there is a strict
mold in which you have to fit to meet the idea
of what it means to be a scientist, an engineer,
or even a student in STEM.
However, in the time since I started my
own journey in engineering, I have found that
STEM’s restrictiveness is an illusion. You could
say there is an enormous “margin of error” in
which you can take risks, do unconventional
things, and be yourself while still being the
engineer (or other type of scientist) that you
dreamed of being. By wandering off the path
a bit, you might find yourself traveling and
studying abroad (like me!), learning a new
language (I know STEM students who have
taken Acadian and Egyptian!), becoming a
dancer or musician (I’m sure the Ballroom
Dance Team and the marching band benefit
immensely from their STEM students’ counting skills), and the list
goes on. I have learned that being in STEM does not mean we can’t
embrace our passions, be proud of our identities, or explore new
curiosities outside of STEM. In fact, it only makes us stronger! ■
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 7
SHORT
Pharmacology
A POTENTIAL THERAPEUTIC
ROUTE FOR WOLFRAM SYNDROME
Barbara Ehrlich, Forging Her Own Path
BY VERONICA LEE
ART BY ELLIE GABRIEL
From the beginning of her career, Barbara Ehrlich has been
break to attend a lecture,” Ehrlich said. But nevertheless, she
interested in using basic science to address problems in
forged her own path. She combined her two thirty-minute
human health. As a professor of pharmacology at the
coffee breaks into an hour break so that she also could attend
Yale School of Medicine, she leads her research team in the
search for new drugs that can help patients suffering from
Wolfram syndrome: a pediatric genetic disorder characterized
by childhood-onset diabetes, loss of vision and hearing,
neurological and psychiatric symptoms, and often early
death. Recently, Ehrlich and her team found that abnormal
calcium signaling—a mechanism used for communication
between cell structures—may cause the disease. In light
of this discovery, the group proposed a potential
new treatment involving two existing drugs:
ibudilast and a calpain inhibitor. Ehrlich’s
findings are especially exciting because
there is currently no treatment for
this lethal disorder. In addition
to studying Wolfram syndrome,
Ehrlich also investigates polycystic
lectures. After that summer, she went back to Brown and began
to pursue scientific research under Dr. Cserr’s guidance.
In graduate school at UCLA, she was the only female student
to advance past the first year. Oftentimes, she was sent to
conferences and events where she was the only woman in the
room. “There were times where I couldn’t get anyone to talk to
me,” Ehrlich said. But despite the adversity she faced, Ehrlich
says she was blessed by generous people at different points
in her career. She recalls a specific moment during
graduate school when a highly-respected
senior male scientist loudly exclaimed,
“This is so interesting!” while publicly
discussing her work to encourage his
peers to accept her into what was
very much a “boys with MD/PhDs
club.” Ehrlich recalls that, even
kidney disease—a condition
though it happened a long time
that causes cysts to grow in the
ago, the moment remains special
kidneys—and
chemotherapy-
to her to this day.
related pain in the hands and feet.
However, research is only part
of what Ehrlich does—she has
also dedicated her life to mentoring
According to Ehrlich, those who
encourage the research of the others,
especially underrepresented scientists,
are important allies. When she joined
students in STEM. “The most
the faculty at Yale twenty-three years
rewarding thing is when my former
students tell me ‘You know, I was going
to call you for some advice, but then I heard
your voice in my head and I knew exactly what
you were going to say,’” Ehrlich said. Ehrlich says that
she learns a lot from her students about expectations and
assumptions, and loves seeing them succeed.
In a way, Ehrlich is passing the torch of mentorship from
when she received guidance as a young scientist. Throughout
her life, Ehrlich said that she’s been blessed with many
wonderful mentors, including Dr. Helen Cserr—a “tough
woman,” as Ehrlich described her, who “had to fight for
everything she got at the university.”
Throughout her career, Ehrlich has also experienced the
impact of working in a field long dominated by men. When she
was still an undergraduate student at Brown, she got her first
job working in at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole,
Massachusetts. “Back then, the only job available for girls was
chambermaid. Only the boys were allowed to take an additional
ago, Ehrlich was part of a special program
to increase the number of tenured women at
the School of Medicine. At that time, only sixteen
to seventeen percent of tenured professors were
women. Now, that number has jumped to twenty percent—a
definite improvement, but not enough according to Ehrlich. In
her opinion, further change remains necessary.
But she’s not just waiting for this change to happen. Ehrlich
continues to advocate for her female students and encourage
them to persist in the face of challenges. As Ehrlich describes,
confidence, a positive attitude, and being able to bounce back
from failure are key for success, and are attributes that she
tries to instill in all of her students.
“They always find a way to my door,” Ehrlich said of her
female students, “and I hope it stays like that as long as I’m
here.” Indeed, Ehrlich has not only forged her own path as
a woman in science, but continues to have an impact on the
next generation of STEM leaders—especially supporting and
amplifying the voices of other women in science. ■
8 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
WHY REPRESENTATION MATTERS
Holistic Approaches to
Treating the Human Brain
When Kelly Cosgrove was a graduate student in clinical
psychology, she started out her research in behavioral
neuroscience, with a focus on human addictive
disorders. But in the course of her studies, she became intrigued by
the association between the brain and behavior. This fascination
led to a transition into studying Positron Emission Tomography, or
PET, for brain imaging in neuroscience. She is now a Professor of
Psychiatry and of Neuroscience and of Radiology and Biomedical
Imaging at the Yale School of Medicine.
PET imaging begins with the injection of a radiotracer—a chemical
compound labeled with a radioactive isotope for easy detection. As
the radiotracer decays, it emits positrons, subatomic particles that
have a positive charge, which collide with electrons and form gamma
rays that are detected by a PET camera. Different radiotracers can
target specific chemicals or proteins in the brain, giving researchers
an understanding of neurobiology at the molecular level. PET differs
from other brain imaging techniques in that it can detect quantifiable
levels of neurochemicals, whereas other methods, including a few
types of magnetic resonance imaging, focus on brain structure,
volume, and electrical activity. This method enables researchers to
track detailed changes in neurochemical activity in real time and can
be leveraged to understand how the brain recovers from addiction.
Currently, Cosgrove's lab investigates a wide range of addiction
disorders—including alcohol use disorder, nicotine addiction,
opioid use disorder—and psychiatric disorders—such as PTSD
and depression, which can often develop simultaneously.
Volunteers come in for an intake appointment and are subjected
to psychiatric and medical screenings before getting a PET scan.
Different specialists, from physicists to radiochemists, are involved
in gathering and analyzing the resulting outcome measures. "It's
really team science to do PET imaging in people," Cosgrove said.
Some of the team’s most intriguing findings have stemmed
from their exploration of biological sex differences. Among these
interesting observations is what the group has unearthed about the
mechanisms underlying addiction to tobacco smoking. Cosgrove
explained that, in the field of neurobiology, multiple studies have
shown that animals administered with drugs release dopamine in
the ventral striatum, which is a reward center in the brain.
However, the majority of these studies used only male rodents as
subjects. Upon doing a similar study in people and comparing the PET
imaging results in males and females who smoke cigarettes, Cosgrove's
team found that female smokers released significantly less dopamine
than male smokers. "Smoking is a good example because they've found
sex differences in treatment, too, that women don't respond as well
to the nicotine patches," Cosgrove said. The finding highlights the
importance of increasing representation in the subjects of studies, in
this case in terms of sex, due to biological differences that ought to be
accounted for when providing the most appropriate treatment to every
patient. "Otherwise, the default is men. You're treating everybody based
on half the population," Cosgrove explained. Cosgrove emphasized the
importance of normalizing research in the field of sex differences.
www.yalescientific.org
BY ALEXA JEANNE LOSTE
ART BY CHARLOTTE LEAKEY
Cosgrove suggested that the previous lack of focus in the area
could be due to insufficient gender representation among the
researchers themselves, as scientific academia has been historically
male-dominated. She shared that she was inspired to do research
in this specific field as a result of having female mentors when she
was in graduate school and as a postdoctoral student.
Recently, Cosgrove has been working in neuroimmunology,
a field that draws connections between the brain and
immune response. Her work has found that people who are
psychiatrically compromised have blunted immune responses
compared to those who are healthy, which could explain why
disorders such as PTSD or addiction are correlated with many
medical comorbidities. "I think [this] speaks to a holistic,
transdisciplinary way of treating people, which is important...
Team science is more impactful," Cosgrove said. This suggests
that targeting the immune-related systemic diseases might also
improve an individual's psychiatric condition.
Moving forward, Cosgrove is involved in establishing the new
Yale-Specialized Center of Research Excellence (YALE-SCORE).
The center will investigate sex differences in alcohol use disorder,
specializing on understanding sex-specific issues and developing
treatments—a particularly relevant focus because the disorder
prevalence is currently increasing among women.
Cosgrove's experiences as a female scientist with a clinical
psychology background speaks to how increasing representation—in
terms of sex, academic background, and other identities—can lead to
new ways of approaching problems in science. More holistic scientific
research paves the path to more appropriate methods of treatment. ■
November 2020
Neuroscience
Cosgrove, K. (2019, September 24). Yale School of Medicine.
Retrieved from Cosgrove Lab: https://medicine.yale.edu/
lab/cosgrove/
Cosgrove, K. (2020, September 17). (A. J. Loste, Interviewer)
SHORT
Yale Scientific Magazine
9
SHORT
Physiology
Men and Women are
Physiologically Unequal
AN EQUAL RESEARCH EMPHASIS
BY SOPHIA ZHUANG
ART BY ANASTHASIA SHILOV
Until almost thirty years ago, half the United States population
was excluded from scientific research. It was not until 1993
that the NIH Revitalization Act required researchers to
include women in scientific studies. Male and female physiological
systems are inarguably different and consequentially express separate
immune responses. To further explore this sex-based distinction,
Nina Stachenfeld, a senior researcher at the Yale School of Medicine
(YSM) and the John B. Pierce Laboratory, has helped the Federation of
American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal compile a series of
reviews, “Sex as a Variable in Human Research: A Systems Approach.”
This series recognizes sex differences in physiological responses to
diseases like addiction and high blood pressure as well as today’s
changing concept of gender identity and how this affects research.
In the past, many scientists excluded women from studies, believing
that physiological responses were identical between sexes. Many later
complained that women presented difficulties in hormonal regulation.
“Estrogen, for example, has an impact on blood pressure regulation. [So,]
if we’re studying women, we want to ensure that we’re controlling for
estrogen levels and being cognizant of when we might test them in the
[menstrual] cycle,” Stachenfeld explained. Regulating these factors may
seem painstaking, but Stachenfeld counters that these aspects can be easily
screened for and monitored. “Physiologists who do these kinds of studies
control for [fickle factors] all the time, and they’re not easy to control
for, but we do it,” asserted Stachenfeld. Scientists are already precisely
regulating factors like environmental temperature, so including women
in research may only require additional preliminary surveys regarding
menstrual cycle timing, contraceptives, and pregnancy possibility.
Ultimately, hormonal regulation in females is a minute inconvenience
when compared to the necessity of including women in research.
Stachenfeld explained that once scientists were forced to
conduct research on women, they began noticing big differences
in female systemic regulation and treatment response. “It could
[even] be as simple as dosages being too high, given that women
are generally smaller than men,” Stachenfeld described, referring
to blood pressure medication. Including women in research
has elucidated many simple differences, profoundly affecting
treatment development and clinical practice. In her own research,
Stachenfeld focuses on cardiovascular disease, which often presents
incongruously between sexes. “When a woman comes to the doctor
and describes certain symptoms, the doctor can recognize that she’s
maybe having a mild heart attack; in the past, the doctor might
have thought that it was just indigestion,” Stachenfeld notes. These
distinctions are invaluable to clinical care and were recognized
only when women began to be included in medical research.
In August, a study by Yale researchers highlighted how men and
women express different physiological responses to COVID-19, with
men exhibiting weaker immune responses (see p. 16 of this issue).
By including women in studies, researchers began recognizing that
these sex differences actually exist in physiological responses and
could even offer insight into the disease’s underlying mechanism.
These understandings may lead to new developments for researchers
working in drug discovery and vaccine development, which is
especially important in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Previously, many researchers believed that all mechanistic work
had to be done in animals, because humans posed numerous ethical
concerns. However, “Scientists have come up with incredibly creative
ways to examine humans and their responses,” Stachenfeld explained.
Animals remain crucial to research, but they are not the same
as humans. “Eventually, we do have to take that step [to reach our
ultimate goal] to improve and impact human health,” Stachenfeld
pointed out. As scientists urgently perform trials and research for
COVID-19, they must also focus on the sex-specific physiological
responses in humans and the subsequent implications.
When considering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,
Stachenfeld has echoed YSM Dean Nancy J. Brown’s sentiment
that the pandemic offers a unique opportunity to create structural
modifications at Yale. Stachenfeld believes that the pandemic is
motivating necessary changes in YSM related to both COVID-19 and
gender equality. Additionally, Stachenfeld co-chairs the Committee
on the Status of Women in Medicine (SWIM), which advocates for
improvements in YSM’s structure surrounding sexual harassment
and gender equity policies as well as the perception of women and
their role in medical academia.
Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of women at Yale, we must
recognize that our differences underlie
and enrich our unity. Women and
men have varied perspectives,
but these diverse experiences
supplement the entire community
with a more comprehensive
mindset. Similarly, female and
male physiological systems
are distinct; recognizing these
sex differences in research
contributes to advancements
in not only women’s health but
also treatment development,
which benefits all sexes. ■
10 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Major Depressive Disorders
Are Underreported and
Prone to Recall Error
NEW STUDY BY THE
YALE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH FINDS
BY ANJALI MANGLA & VICTORIA OUYANG
ART BY SARAH TENG
Policy
SHORT
Mental health is an increasingly prevalent issue in the
United States. As more attention is given to mental
health disorders, public policies that seek to prevent the
occurrence and recurrence of mental health disorders rely on the
accuracy of national survey data. Specifically, major depressive
episodes (MDEs) are key contributors to mental health disorders,
such as major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. The
National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) defines an
MDE as a period of at least two weeks in which a person experiences
a depressed mood, loss of interest in activities, significant weight
loss or gain, insomnia, fatigue, and thoughts of suicide. Previous
data from the NSDUH shows that more than thirty-four million
adults (17 percent of women and 10.7 percent of men) reported a
history of at least one depressive episode in 2017.
A group of researchers, led by Jamie Tam, assistant professor in the
Department of Health Policy and Management at Yale, found that the
data provided by the NSDUH presents an irregularity–the number of
lifetime depressive episodes looked to actually decrease with age. “I
had to investigate why the data were showing that, when we know
that for virtually every other health condition, lifetime prevalence
should always increase with age,” Tam explained. Ultimately, the
team found that the NSDUH survey is extremely likely to contain
recall error, wherein participants may have experienced depressive
episodes, but they failed to report them. Indeed, recall error is an
important factor in the misreporting of depression prevalence in
the U.S. “Essentially, in the whole of the U.S., maybe you think some
proportion of the population has had a history of depression, but if
you correct for recall error, that proportion is much higher, actually,”
she said. In particular, the researchers found that older adults are
especially likely to underreport their history of depression.
The team developed a simulation model that corrected for recall
error, using NSDUH data from 2005–2017. They found that, with
the simulated model, the true proportion of American adults who
have experienced MDEs is estimated to be 30.1 percent in women
and 17.4 percent in men, results that are significantly higher than
those reported by the NSDUH.
Tam hypothesizes that women report more depressive
episodes than men due to the way society trains women and men
to process emotions differently. Depression may also manifest
differently in women compared to men; women are proven to
typically process emotions with a sadness response, whereas men
tend to respond with anger. Consequently, men with depression
are more stigmatized, whereas women are more likely to seek
treatment for mental conditions.
As for the link between recall error and underreporting within
older American populations, major depressive disorders are linked
to social isolation. “Elderly people who are more socially connected,
who have communities of support have much better mental health
than those for example who are living single,” Tam said. People
sixty-five and above tend to look back on histories of depression and
downplay those symptoms, naming them as something like “growing
pains.” Separately, younger adults from ages eighteen to twenty-five
are more likely to experience depression than ever before. Reported
cases among young adults have increased significantly in the past few
years, but this helps researchers understand the patterns of depression
that manifest with age. This research helps scientists understand the
different situations of depression with different age groups.
Tam sees this research as promising towards U.S. mental health
policy. Currently, the U.S. has an underinvestment of resources to
prevent depression, especially in prevention of subsequent depressive
episodes among individuals who have a history of depression. “We do
have a broader problem of mental health programs failing to get the
attention, resources, and support that they warrant. Mental health
conditions are very common and affect such a large portion of the
U.S. population. It’s really a shame that government decision-makers
haven’t really allocated the same level of resources for mental health
compared to physical health. Part of the goal of studies like this is to
identify the scale and scope of the problem,” Tam said.
By providing a better understanding of the sources of error
underlying the reporting of depressive episodes, this study lays the
groundwork for more accurate estimation of the cost of depression to
society, in terms of productivity and quality of life, and opens doors
to more effective data-driven solutions to come. ■
Tam, J., Mezuk, B., Zivin, K., & Meza, R. (2020). U.S. Simulation of
Lifetime Major Depressive Episode Prevalence and Recall Error.
American Journal Of Preventive Medicine, 59(2), e39-e47. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.03.021
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
(2018). 2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: public
use file codebook [Ebook]. Rockville, MD. Retrieved from
https://bit.ly/330oMar
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 11
FOCUS
Astrophysics
NOT-SO-DARK Cosmologists
Discover
Substructures
MATTER?
Inconsistent With
Current Theory
BY CHRISTOPHER POSTON
ART BY CHARLOTTE LEAKEY
If you’ve ever read a schlocky scifi
novel or tuned into an episode
of Cosmos, you’ve probably heard
of dark matter, the mysterious sister to
ordinary baryonic matter that makes up
some eighty-five percent of our universe.
So-called because it doesn’t interact with
electromagnetic radiation or normal
matter, dark matter has only ever been
observed indirectly via its gravitational
influence. What is it made of? No one
is quite sure—candidate explanations
range from new elementary particles
to primordial black holes. Nearly all
of the major schools of thought in the
astrophysics community subscribe to
a “cold dark matter” (CDM) model, in
which the constituent particles move
slowly and larger structures emerge
hierarchically from the bottom up. But,
while the consensus CDM model has
been very successful, there are still some
inconsistencies with observation—and
another big one has just emerged.
The Findings
In a recent high-profile study published
in Science, several cosmologists using the
Hubble Space Telescope and the aptly named
Very Large Telescope in Chile observed
eleven different galaxy clusters, studying
gravitational lensing effects—the warping
of light from distant background galaxies
under high gravity—to map out their dark
matter distributions. What they found was
consistent with expectations on the cluster
scale. However, upon deeper inspection,
the cosmologists uncovered a shocking
phenomenon on smaller scales (five to ten
kiloparsecs): within the individual cluster
member galaxies, the dark matter was
so concentrated that it produced lensing
effects stronger than predicted by a factor
of ten! In other words, the dark matter in
these galaxies was packed together much
more tightly than it should have been.
This was an incredible discrepancy,
but the researchers made sure their
methodology was airtight. They arrived
at their predictions by generating a
probability metric for lensing effects
using models of similar galaxy clusters
in various numerical simulations. First,
in the real universe, they determined the
speeds of stars in several cluster galaxies
using spectroscopy, which enabled them
to constrain the dark matter distribution
with high precision. They then analyzed
simulated galaxy clusters with similar
masses and distances from Earth and
compared the resulting dark matter
distributions with their observations. To
top it all off, this procedure was repeated
with several numerical simulations and
methodologies developed by independent
research groups. And the outcome? The
discrepancy was virtually unchanged across
all simulations: a full order of magnitude.
A Quest for Contradictions
This method for investigating dark
matter distribution,
which has
recently
become the
standard in
the field, was
originally
developed by
team member
Professor Priyamvada
Natarajan of Yale
University. Natarajan has made seminal
contributions over the years to topics
like black hole physics and dark
matter physics, particularly the use
of gravitational lensing distortions to
put theoretical predictions to the test.
“Lensing is as direct of an observation
as you can make to derive the spatial
distribution of dark matter,” Natarajan
said. “In my PhD, my first paper was
actually a conceptualization of the dark
matter distribution in a cluster that
would make it amenable to be tested with
cosmological simulations of structure
formation in the universe. I have
always been interested, scientifically, in
confronting observations with theory.”
Indeed, Natarajan’s publication
history is speckled with similar studies
of dark matter distribution conducted
in intervals of roughly five years, each
aiming to harness the best available
simulations and compare them
with high-power observations
to probe for newly detectable
differences. “In the past
we found broad-based
agreement,” Natarajan said,
“but initially because of the
data quality, we couldn’t
push the theory too much.”
For instance, previous
studies that
could only
compare
t h e
12 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Astrophysics
FOCUS
number of dark matter clumps (the
granularity of the dark matter) with
predictions found no discrepancy—
because there was none. Only in 2017,
when Natarajan led a study with her
collaborators that used these events
to map the spatial distributions and
internal structure of dark matter in
individual galaxies, equipped with the
best available Hubble Space Telescope
data and state-of-the-art simulations,
did small discrepancies begin to appear.
“In 2017, we saw a small hint… But
finally now, the quality of the data and
the resolution of the simulations have
sort of converged and we detected this
gap,” Natarajan said. By collecting highquality
observational data en masse and
comparing it with simulations based on
current theory, Natarajan has subjected
the CDM theory to ruthless scrutiny—
and it seems the model may have finally
cracked under the pressure. “We did
this computation for many different,
independent simulations. And they all
agree with each other, but not with the
observational finding—so it’s something
fundamental, it’s a missing ingredient,”
Natarajan said.
The Missing Ingredient
Hence, the situation: the simulations
have been independently produced, the
results verified, the process peer-reviewed,
www.yalescientific.org
and the conclusions
published. An
undeniable gulf
now yawns between
observation and
theory. What, then,
could be missing?
Natarajan excitedly
identified two
major possibilities:
“When you find
a gap, usually it
means that the
current model you
have is missing
something—you
can often just
add in [some
new parameters]
and get things to
match. But very
occasionally, you
find a mismatch that absolutely cannot
be explained with the current theory, but
instead points the way to a future theory
with more explanatory power.”
To drive home her meaning, Natarajan
produced two poignant examples from
the history of science. In the early 1800s
when the orbit of Uranus was first properly
mapped, it did not fit the projections of
Newton’s and Kepler’s laws. Using only
pencil and paper, the French mathematician
Urbain Le Verrier explained the discrepancy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
by predicting the existence of Neptune.
Le Verrier mailed a letter to the Berlin
Observatory, and the planet was discovered
the very night it arrived—no change to
the laws of physics was required. Later in
1859, a similar problem would crop up with
the unexplained precession of Mercury’s
perihelion in its orbit about the Sun. Le
Verrier again predicted an undiscovered
planet—Vulcan—but this time, the proper
explanation had to wait fifty years for the
arrival of Einstein’s theory of general relativity
and its complete upheaval of prevailing theory.
“So, you never know, when there’s a gap,
whether you’re in the Uranus situation or
the Mercury situation,” Natarajan said.
It could be that there is some unknown
process which occurs, for instance, as
galaxies are pulled toward the center of a
cluster, that strips or otherwise impacts the
dark matter within in ways we cannot yet
comprehend. But the unexplained density
of dark matter in these galaxies could also
indicate a misunderstanding of the esoteric
substance’s fundamental nature. Things tend
to condense because some force is pulling
them together—perhaps there are unknown
interacting or self-interacting properties of
dark matter? If so, would it really be “dark”
after all? Could this discrepancy even be a
clue on the long and winding trail toward
a quantum theory of gravity? One thing is
clear—to one degree or another, it’s back to
the drawing board with dark matter. ■
CHRISTOPHER POSTON
CHRISTOPHER POSTON is a third-year Mathematics/Computer Science major in Pauli Murray
College. In addition to writing for YSM, he works as a student software developer at the Peabody
Museum and belongs to the Yale Undergraduate Math Society. In his free time he enjoys playing
fingerstyle folk guitar, reading hard science fiction, and spending time with his two puppies.
THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan for her time and
enthusiasm in describing her research.
FURTHER READING
Meneghetti, M., Davoli, G., Bergamini, P., Rosati, P., Natarajan, P., Giocoli, C., . . . Metcalf, R.
B. (2020). An excess of small-scale gravitational lenses observed in galaxy clusters. Science,
369(6509), 1347-1351. doi:10.1126/science.aax5164
Natarajan, P. (2020, September 25). Science Magazine Interview [Telephone interview].
Natarajan, P., Chadayammuri, U., Jauzac, M., Richard, J., Kneib, J., Ebeling, H., . . . Vogelsberger, M.
(2017). Mapping substructure in the HST Frontier Fields cluster lenses and in cosmological
simulations. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 468(2), 1962-1980.
doi:10.1093/mnras/stw3385
Natarajan, P., De Lucia, G., & Springel, V. (2007). Substructure in lensing clusters and simulations.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 376(17), 180-192. doi:10.1111/j.1365-
2966.2007.11399.x
Natarajan, P., & Kneib, J. (1997). Lensing by galaxy haloes in clusters of galaxies. Monthly Notices
of the Royal Astronomical Society, 287(4), 833-847. doi:10.1093/mnras/287.4.833
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 13
FOCUS
Geophysics
EARTH’S EVOLUTION
THROUGH
EONS
BY CINDY KUANG
AND JERRY
RUVALCABA
ART BY
NOORA SAID
Using the
history of
argon as a
constraint
of
continental
evolution
How can we study crustal development?
Scientists have long sought to understand
the development of the Earth—in
particular, what exactly has allowed it to
transform into the only known life-harboring
planet? Yale graduate student Meng Guo
and her advisor Jun Korenaga have aimed
to build a piece of this complex puzzle in a
recent publication in Science Advances. In
the paper, the team looks into understanding
the development of Earth’s crust through a
process known as argon degassing.
The development of Earth’s crust has been
an important area of study since the 1960s;
an accurate look into the evolution of crust
can shed light on much about the geology
and nature of early Earth. Because of this,
there have been many different models
made to try to accurately predict how Earth’s
crust came to be; however, there has been
tremendous variation in these estimates.
To track the evolution of continental crust
is a complicated task, with many different
factors. “[Crustal development] contains
two aspects: how the mass of continental
crust has evolved through time and if
the continental crust’s composition has
significantly changed,” Guo said.
Previous attempts to constrain and
detail this development have used a
variety of methods, such as mantlebased
methods, which directly track
the loss of the mantle over time and
inferring crustal evolution accordingly.
“Geologists consider the mantle and
crust as complementary, so they sum
up to a constant volume. This means if
you generate crust you have to lose the
same amount of mantle. So, the mantlebased
model is the most traditional and
direct method,” Guo said. However, in
order to bring a new perspective to this
controversial topic, Guo looked to the
changing argon content in the atmosphere
to indirectly track crust development.
When the Earth’s crust is created, noble
gases are released and go off into the
atmosphere, a process which is traceable.
By tracking the concentration of argon in
the atmosphere, her model would infer
how the crust developed through time.
Guo’s model benefits from new data
published in Nature in 2013, which provided
estimates on the Archean atmospheric argon
ratio using hydrothermal quartz. “Nobody
can get a reasonable crust evolution
throughout the entirety of Earth’s history
using only today’s atmosphere composition,”
Guo said. Thus, with this data as a source
of argon concentrations in the distant
past, along with the calculated current day
concentration, Guo was able to create this
new constraint on her model.
Additionally, Guo’s model took a
multidisciplinary approach and introduced
a plethora of other constraints to calculate
crust development, incorporating
robust observations from geophysics,
geochemistry, and geology. These were
combined to produce a model for
development which Guo believes gives
a self-consistent story of continental
formation. Her results indicate that there
was rapid crustal growth during the early
stages of Earth. The model also showed that
the crust was potassium-rich during this
period. Guo sees that this model will have
important ramifications in further studies
of plate tectonics, surface environment, and
mantle convection for early Earth.
14 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Geophysics
FOCUS
Navigating STEM: Meng Guo’s journey
Guo remarks that the geology department
at Yale—recently renamed the “Department
of Earth & Planetary Sciences”—was one
of the first institutions in the United States
where geology was taught. Guo is hopeful
about the future of women in geology: “It’s
a really good time for female scientists to
thrive. People are more aware of
the gender issue in academia, in
STEM, and people are trying to
embrace female scientists.” When
she first matriculated at Yale for
her PhD in geophysics in 2018,
there were ten new PhD students
in her class and six were female.
“Knowing how welcoming my
department was to female PhDs
was very nice,” she said.
When it comes to advice, Guo has one
mantra she wants to pass onto younger
students who may want to pursue a similar
career path: “Explore any interest you have.
Don’t think that if you get into this subject,
this major, that this is what you’ll have to
be for the rest of your life. Don’t think that
way.” This advice is reflected in her own
experience; Guo started by completing
an undergraduate degree in chemistry,
switched to geochemistry for her master’s,
and is now studying geophysics for her
PhD. Ultimately, she reflects that the
hardest part of this journey was having
to decide between staying with what was
comfortable and risking pursuit of her
dream. This choice presented itself when
she was working a few years before her
master’s degree, at a time when she was sure
that current job would be her career.
“You’re facing a major life-changing
decision and you have to know what you
really want in life to make a decision that
DON’T CONFINE YOURSELF,
EXPLORE THE INTERESTS
YOU HAVE, AND YOU MAY
BE SURPRISED WHERE THEY
LEAD YOU.
you won’t regret in the future,” Guo says.
With the financial aid of the Fulbright
Scholarship, she made the choice to quit
her job and begin pursuing her master’s
degree—bringing her to where she is today.
Looking to the future
She encourages students to pursue their
interests in interdisciplinary spaces whenever
possible. She attributes her success with this
new argon degassing model to her past
education. “If I hadn’t had the background
in both geochemistry and geophysics, I
wouldn’t have been able to build this crossdisciplinary
model,” she said.
In the future, Guo is interested in building
a new theoretical framework of coupled
crust-mantle differentiation. She’d also
like to conduct more careful geodynamical
work to ascertain whether mantle
convection had switched from a different,
more archaic mode (involving stagnant-lid
tectonics which was commonly
believed to exist at the time) to
modern plate tectonics during
early Earth conditions, which is
currently a highly debated topic
in geoscience.
As mentioned in the paper,
the most important feature
of this argon model is the
simultaneous application of
multiple observational constraints
to ensure the internal consistency and
convergence of the known thermal
evolution, crustal evolution and degassing
history of the Earth. Just as she needed to
combine these different aspects of the early
Earth to successfully build her model, she
reminds readers: “Don’t confine yourself,
explore the interests you have, and you
may be surprised where they lead you.”
After all, it was this very intersection of
her diverse perspectives and experiences
in academia that led her to develop this
new model indicating rapid crustal growth
during the early ages of Earth. ■
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CINDY KUANG & JERRY RUVALCABA
CINDY KUANG is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight college, majoring in Neuroscience and History of Science, Medicine and Public Health. Outside
of YSM, she is involved in the Chinese American Student Association, Asian American Health Advocates, Danceworks, and HAVEN Free Clinic.
JERRY RUVALCABA is a sophomore MCDB major in Timothy Dwight college. Apart from writing for YSM, he’s involved in research at the Malvankar
Lab where he focuses on elucidating the mechanisms by which Geobacter sulfurreducens bacteria are able to utilize electron nanowires.
THE AUTHORS WOULD LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE Meng Guo for her time and her enthusiasm for her research.
FURTHER READING
Guo, M., & Korenaga, J. (2020). Argon constraints on the early growth of felsic continental crust. Science Advances, 6(21), eaaz6234. https://doi.
org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz6234
Guo, M. (2020, September 28). Argon constraints on the early growth of felsic continental crust [Online interview].
Korenaga, J. (2018). Crustal evolution and mantle dynamics through Earth history. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical,
Physical and Engineering Sciences, 376(2132), 20170408. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2017.0408
Rosas, J. C., & Korenaga, J. (2018). Rapid crustal growth and efficient crustal recycling in the early Earth: Implications for Hadean and Archean
geodynamics. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 494, 42–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2018.04.051
Sobolev, A. V., Asafov, E. V., Gurenko, A. A., Arndt, N. T., Batanova, V. G., Portnyagin, M. V., Garbe-Schönberg, D., Wilson, A. H., & Byerly, G. R. (2019).
Deep hydrous mantle reservoir provides evidence for crustal recycling before 3.3 billion years ago. Nature, 571(7766), 555–559. https://doi.
org/10.1038/s41586-019-1399-5
Pujol, M., Marty, B., Burgess, R., Turner, G., & Philippot, P. (2013). Argon isotopic composition of Archaean atmosphere probes early Earth
geodynamics. Nature, 498(7452), 87–90. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12152
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 15
FOCUS
Immunobiology
THE DUALITY SEX OF
OF SEX
THE DUALITY
Sex Plays a Role in
Both COVID-19
Immune Response
and the Careers of
Women in STEM
BY
CATHERINE ZHENG
&
RAQUEL SEQUIERA
ART BY
MIRIAM
KOPYTO
Scientists, like English teachers, always
ask “What?” then “Why?” First observe
a pattern—of metaphors in a novel, of a
phenomenon in nature—then investigate
the reason for it. Months into the
coronavirus pandemic, the majority of published
research was still answering “what” questions: What
age is at greatest risk of hospitalization? Which sex
is more likely to recover? But when it came to why
these differences were observed—and how to use
that information to develop better treatments—the
Iwasaki lab at the Yale School of Medicine was uniquely
poised to find answers. Their latest research revealed
sex differences in the immune response that might
explain differences in COVID-19 disease progression.
The Iwasaki lab, headed by Akiko Iwasaki, focuses on
16 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Immunobiology
FOCUS
innate immunity against viruses and how it
generates adaptive immunity. They work on
projects ranging from the role of autophagy
in innate viral recognition to the effect of
temperature on the common cold virus.
Their research has also provided them
experience with several high biosafety
level viruses. This experience with more
dangerous viruses prepared them well for
this COVID-19 study.
When the COVID-19 pandemic
hit, Albert Ko from the Yale School
of Public Health spearheaded the
launch of the COVID-19 biorepository
study framework called Yale IMPACT
(Implementing Medical and Public health
Action against Coronavirus (Connecticut,
CT)), allowing researchers like Iwasaki
to start collecting patient samples from
Yale New Haven Hospital to participate
in COVID-19 research. This allowed
researchers to analyze patients’ immune
responses from day one and throughout
disease progression to identify different
signatures associated with the immune
response against SARS-CoV-2.
A Tale of Two Immune Responses
For their “immunophenotyping” study of
sex differences in COVID-19, researchers
in the Iwasaki lab zoomed in on the
characteristics of an individual’s immune
response to SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Specifically, the researchers compared
four immune response markers in male
in female patients: viral concentrations in
nasopharyngeal swabs and saliva, anti-
SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and cytokines
(immune signaling molecules) in the blood
plasma, as well as the relative amounts of
different kinds of immune cells.
As the blood samples started to come
in, lab members went into hyperdrive.
According to first author Takehiro
Takahashi, this study was an intense
collaborative effort of immunophenotyping
experiments, data collection, and extensive
data analyses. “Blood came into the lab
usually in the afternoon, then processing
and preparation took around six hours, then
after that we ran it in the [flow cytometry]
machine, so the entire workflow often
went past midnight every day,” Takahashi
said. To identify and analyze blood cells,
researchers use fluorescent antibodies—
www.yalescientific.org
molecules that bind their specific targets
like unique magnets. To quantify cell
types, they use a flow cytometer machine
to separate cells based on shape, size, or
other distinguishing characteristics.
The study was broken down into two
comparisons. Volunteers from among
healthcare workers were the healthy control
group, and a group of non-ICU patients who
had not received any immunomodulatory
drugs were labeled Cohort A. The first,
baseline analysis of patients’ initial immune
response compared male and female
healthcare workers in the control group to
male and female patients from Cohort A at
the first sampling time point. The second
comparison was a longitudinal analysis—
comparing the immunophenotypes of male
and female patients across multiple time
points of disease progression.
The longitudinal analysis included
patients who were further along in the
disease, including some in the ICU or
those receiving immunomodulatory
treatments. For this analysis,
epidemiologists mathematically corrected
for variables other than sex, such as age,
BMI, and treatment status. Still, there are
limits to these statistics. The sample size
was relatively small, and options were
limited for the healthy control group.
“Of course, there are no seventy-yearold
healthcare workers, so we just had to
mathematically adjust,” Takahashi said.
From the mosaic of immunophenotype
analyses across time in the two cohorts,
two different immune response patterns
began to emerge. At an early stage of
infection (represented by Cohort A), male
patients seemed to have a stronger innate
immune response than females, indicated
by higher levels of innate immune cells
and the signaling molecules they secrete,
such as interleukin-8. In contrast, female
patients had a stronger adaptive immune
response, indicated by higher levels of
activated cytotoxic T cells, which are
activated by the presence of a virus to
recognize and kill infected cells. These
two patterns carried over into later stages
of COVID-19, as lower levels of T cells
(adaptive immunity) were correlated with
a worse disease progression in males,
while higher levels of innate immune
molecules were correlated with worse
disease progression in females.
While the researchers urge caution
extrapolating too far, their results align
with previous findings that a higher innate
immune response is associated with
worse outcomes for COVID-19 patients.
These findings could be used to study sexdifferentiated
treatments: male patients
might benefit more from boosting the T cell
response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while
female patients might benefit more from
tamping down the innate immune response.
Takahashi hopes that this research can
impact future COVID therapies for both
male and female patients.
Looking forward, the Iwasaki lab wants
to look into the effects of COVID-19 on
different organ systems. For example,
autopsies of COVID-19 deaths have
IMAGE COURTESY OF UNSW SYDNEY
Artist render of flow cytometry, a method used to sort blood cells with fluorescent sorting and acoustic sorting.
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 17
FOCUS
Immunobiology
IMAGE COURTESY OF YALE MEDICINE
Photograph of Professor Akiko Iwasaki.
revealed evidence of infection in the
brain. In addition, Iwasaki’s lab plans to
investigate underlying immunological
mechanisms of why some patients are
facing long-haul syndrome—severe longterm
consequences of COVID-19.
While these studies are exciting for
the Iwasaki lab, Takahashi mentioned
the intense need to disseminate results
of our COVID-19 research rapidly,
adding pressure to publish quickly.
The lab published the sex differences
study as a preprint, meaning it has not
yet gone through the time-consuming
process of peer review. Nevertheless,
there are benefits to this way of sharing
research. “Preprint is important because
publication takes two or three months or
even longer...but in this kind of pandemic
you have to share information with people
quickly and discuss more openly; and the
pandemic has changed how the preprint
papers are perceived,” Takahashi said.
contribute as a woman in science. “We’re
seeing less and less of women being able to
contribute scientifically because of all these
other obligations...I have a double sense of
duty…not just [to be] doing science, but
communicating science,” Iwasaki said.
Even prior to the pandemic, the lack of
women in STEM has always been a major
issue, and one that Iwasaki is passionate
about. Iwasaki was born and raised in Iga,
Japan. With her parents as role models—her
father was a physicist and her mother fought
for women’s rights in the workplace—
she decided from a young age to pursue
science. Inspired by her immunology
professor at the University of Toronto,
where she majored in biochemistry and
minored in physics, Iwasaki got her PhD
in immunology. She spent two years as a
postdoctoral fellow at the NIH, where she
studied the roles of dendritic cells.
Iwasaki went on to do groundbreaking
research after joining Yale’s Department
of Immunology. She developed the
ERVMap—a tool used to map endogenous
retroviruses (ERVs) in the genome—and a
two-stage vaccination strategy called prime
and pull, which focuses on enhancing T cell
response. Taking after her mother, she is a
fierce advocate for women and minorities
in the sciences. At the undergraduate and
graduate levels, more than fifty percent
of STEM students are women. However,
attrition really begins in graduate school
all the way through to professor levels.
While more serious issues like sexual
harassment must be addressed, more covert
discrimination actually plays the biggest
role in women being pushed out of science.
Reflecting on her own experiences,
Iwasaki says that women are often left
out of discussions, decisions, and other
opportunities. When their voices are being
overshadowed, it’s important that they
have a support group they can rely on so
that they can be heard. Iwasaki mentions
that tackling these issues requires a
fundamental restructuring of meetings
and decisions to incorporate more women,
and more awareness needs to be spread
about the lack of representation so more
people can recognize the discrimination
and stand up for their female colleagues.
These are things she implements into her
own work, always making sure there is
more than one woman in every meeting
and raising awareness of issues facing
women so that her male colleagues
can promote female voices. On a more
practical note, Iwasaki also says that since
women tend to stay home and take care
of children, having accessible childcare is
also needed to better support women.
Looking back on a career filled with
plenty of challenges, Iwasaki says there’s
nothing she would change about her
choices and her experiences. “Obviously
I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career
and you learn from that, but I don’t regret
anything,” Iwasaki said. “Finding out what’s
going on in the COVID patients and being
able to hopefully inform future therapy and
potentially vaccines, that’s what motivates
me.” While her lab’s COVID research, her
many other contributions to immunology,
and her work empowering women in STEM
have helped shape the world of science,
Iwasaki’s research has also shaped her. ■
Sex Differences on the Macro Scale
Sex differences, however, are not
limited to immune responses and disease
progression. While gender barriers have
always existed in academia, they have
become especially prevalent during the
coronavirus pandemic, drastically affecting
women’s careers. For example, women with
children or those who need to take care of
loved ones cannot risk going back to work.
While Iwasaki is fortunate enough to be
able to work from home, she recognizes
the issues that many other women—
including trainees in her lab—are facing.
Seeing these barriers drives her further to
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CATHERINE ZHENG & RAQUEL SEQUEIRA
CATHERINE ZHENG is a sophomore BME major in Pauli Murray college. In addition to writing
for YSM, she’s involved in research and other organizations on campus, and loves going out to
eat with friends.
RAQUEL SEQUEIRA is a senior MB&B major in Timothy Dwight College. In addition to writing
for YSM, she loves to play soccer and to sing in the Glee Club.
THE AUTHORS WOULD LIKE TO THANK Prof. Akiko Iwasaki and Takehiro Takahashi for
sharing their time and enthusiasm about their work.
FURTHER READING
Takahashi, T. et al. (2020). “Sex differences in immune responses that underlie COVID-19
disease outcomes.” Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2700-3.
Viegas, Jennifer. (2018) “Profile of Akiko Iwasaki.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
of the United States of America. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6294888/
18 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
OB-GYN
FOCUS
THE ALL-FEMALE
FLANNERY LAB
IMAGE COURTESY OF DIABETES.CO.UK
The Flannery lab, whose research is focused on the intersection between
endocrinology and obstetrics at both the molecular and clinical levels, is
special for being an all-female research group.
BY
BEATRIZ HORTA
&
MAHNOOR SARFRAZ
ART BY
MILA COLIZZA
Dr. Clare Flannery was not always planning on going
down the path of medical research. In fact, she was
a doctor prior to starting her research group. Her
divergence from a career working as a doctor in a clinical
setting to a researcher studying the conjunction between
endocrinology and reproductive medicine began as
a way to address the “number of problems that were
not solved.” As an endocrinology fellow, she realized
there was a gap in knowledge in the field: no one really
understood how the hormone levels in women affected
their intrauterine environment. Flannery’s turning point
came when she encountered a young woman with
IMAGE COURTESY OF DIABETES.CO.UK
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 19
FOCUS
OB-GYN
type II diabetes and a pre-cancer in the
uterus but could not find answers in the
literature on how to treat her patient. This
horrified her. “It was obvious that we had
no idea of the solutions, so the problem
begged to be dissected out, figured out.”
So, Flannery took it upon herself to start
investigating the relationship between the
two. “My goal was never to be a scientist; it
was to be a better physician,” Flannery said.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ROBERT LISAK VIA YALE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
Dr. Claire Flannery (right) leads a research team examining changes in the uterine lining as related to the
development of uterine cancer.
endometrial cancer. She is studying
how obese women with endometrial
cancer may differ in their underlying
metabolism. In particular, she is
examining the hypothesis that women
with obesity have a different intrauterine
environment, and that their placenta
works as a metabolic organ. “The fetus in
turn will have long term risk of metabolic
disease, such as diabetes. We found that
the placenta in obese women has a higher
level of triglycerides (fat), but the real
question is: what regulates it? Since we
know the placenta has insulin receptors,
does insulin actually regulate the fat
content in the placenta?” Anam said.
The lab also looks to mice as a model,
particularly those that have become
overweight with time. The researchers aim
to study how the mouse endometrium
changes in terms of metabolism and DNA
damage. Kate Kelly, an undergraduate
research assistant at the lab, has been
analyzing mouse uteri at the molecular level,
to discover how exposure to the hormone
estrogen affects mice that are resistant
to insulin, in the hopes of untangling
yet another connection among different
components of the endocrine system.
“These mice were exposed to estradiol,
a potent form of estrogen for six months,
and I’m currently looking for markers of
pre-pre-cancer, including differential RNA
expression and DNA damage,” she said.
When asked about her favorite aspects
of her research program, Flannery said,
The Research
Flannery describes her lab as a cyclical
project. Her lab collects tissue samples from
a patient, studies this tissue on a molecular
level, and then returns to the patient
in the clinic with insights. By studying
numerous cells under a microscope,
members of the lab begin to have a sense
of what is normal and abnormal. Through
this understanding, they are able to
contrast the normal cell to its reaction to
hormones. Flannery also sequences the
DNA and RNA in the tissue, looking for
a genetic marker that indicates “pre-precancer,”
or endometrial hyperplasia—
an overgrowth of cells that have not yet
become cancerous. Endometrial cancer
develops over decades. By looking at a
twenty-year-old woman’s tissue, Flannery
can predict whether the patient will have
endometrial cancer in thirty years.
Anika Anam, an endocrinology fellow
at the lab, works with human samples
to understand the pathophysiology of
IT’S THE
UNEXPECTED RESULT
THAT SHAKES MY
THEORIES AND
MAKES ME TAKE THE
RESEARCH IN A NEW
DIRECTION.
20 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
OB-GYN
FOCUS
MY GOAL WAS NEVER TO BE
A SCIENTIST; IT WAS TO BE A
BETTER PHYSICIAN.
“It’s the unexpected result that shakes my
theories and makes me take the research
in a new direction.” For Flannery, this
process of pondering new hypotheses
is addictive. Her ultimate goal as a
researcher is to make endometrial cancer
a preventable disease. “This is going to
take my entire career and lifespan as well
as the careers and lifespans of some of
my mentees,” Flannery said.
The Women-led Lab
One of the most interesting aspects
of Flannery’s lab is the all-female
environment. All of the lab’s members at
the moment are women, and, since they
are studying obstetrics, all of the patients
are women too. Her research’s focus on
obstetrics and endocrinology has led
Flannery to inadvertently surround herself
with female peers and create a welcoming
environment for women scientists, which
is often rare. “It wasn’t a specific decision
on my behalf; it was because women are the
majority of the people who show interest in
working in the lab,” Flannery said.
Flannery believes that what led the lab to
become all-female was that women were
the ones most interested in her area of
research. “There have been men in the lab,
and I look forward to them joining again,”
she emphasized. “I am open to all gender
identities.” She also hypothesized that it
had something to do with her mentoring
style. In medicine specifically, the
importance of a mentor who aligns with
your research interests and learning style is
immeasurable. According to Flannery, she
believes she has created an environment
conducive to learning, where members
support each other instead of competing.
www.yalescientific.org
Anam praised Claire’s strengths as
a mentor. “Women tend to be more
cognizant of other people’s perspectives,”
Anam said. “I’ve been working in the
lab since July 2017, and I’ve found it to
be a very supportive environment.” She
also emphasized that one of the greatest
strengths of the lab was the collaborative
relationship between members. “We do
a lot of cross-teaching on all levels; it is
not hierarchical.” After learning about
the lab’s research from a second-year
medical student, Anam understood
that Clare helped foster this
collaborative environment. “Clare
has been incredibly open and
supportive,” Anam said. “She
thinks very broadly, which
is one thing I struggle with
because I’m very detailoriented.”
Kelly explains that
Flannery chooses the
lab members, evaluating
how each individual
will contribute to the lab
environment. Kelly also
emphasized the strong
relationships between
lab members: “Each
one of us is working
on our own projects,
but the collaboration
is constant,” Kelly
said. In her previous
lab, Kelly felt she was
often compared to male
counterparts or seen
as “less of a scientist”
because of her gender.
Her experience in
the Flannery lab is
incredibly different. Members of the lab
understand the importance of sticking
together, as women in STEM have all
faced discrimination at some point in
their careers. “I have worked in scientific
settings before where I felt the need to
prove my value as a scientist to other
people, especially men, over and over
again,” she said.
The researchers in the Flannery lab
are particularly proud of their work on
the clinical front, which requires that
researchers be especially aware of their
subjects’ needs. The women believe
that being an all-female lab has given
them an advantage in understanding
and supporting their (female) patients,
contributing to a safe environment where
they feel comfortable being treated.
The part of Flannery’s research that
brings her the most pleasure is watching
“people develop in their ideas and launch
in their own careers.” For Flannery, success
is defined by mentoring a future generation
and watching them blossom as they discover
their own passions. ■
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 21
SPECIAL
Past
A TIMELINE
OF FIRSTS
Recognizing brave female
pioneers in STEM
BY CYNTHIA LIN
1732
After becoming one of the first
women to receive a degree
from an institute of higher
education, LAURA BASSI
(1711–1778) became the first
salaried female professor in
the world. She taught at the
University of Bologna until her
death, and during her time at
the institution, she was also
appointed the chair of the
Physics department.
1754
Throughout our early education, we
were taught the history of science,
along with the names of pioneers
who made groundbreaking
discoveries and developed methods
of science that we continue to use
to this day. Often missing among
these names are the women: women
who had the ability to become
great scientists yet were barred
from education; women who made
groundbreaking discoveries and
contributions but weren’t credited
for their work. This (by no means
inclusive) timeline of the first
women in STEM will bring to
mind many familiar names, as
well as many new names, in order
to acknowledge the courage and
passion it takes to break any
barrier for the first time. ■
ART BY SARAH TENG
While working as a teacher, ELIZABETH
BLACKWELL (1821–1920) noticed a dire
need for female doctors, so in 1849, she
became the first licensed female doctor in
America. Later in her life, Blackwell opened her
own practice, started a medical college in New
York, and became a professor of gynecology at
the London School of Medicine for Women.
1894
c.1793
Though she lived in the highly conservative society
of the Qing dynasty, the self-taught WANG
ZHENYI (1768–1797) became an accomplished
astronomer, mathematician, and poet. She became
the first individual in China to correctly explain
lunar and solar eclipses. Through writing various
textbooks, she dedicated her life to providing
education to those who were traditionally denied it.
1849
YALE GRADUATE SCHOOLS allowed women to enroll for the first time in
1892. Of the twenty-three women who joined, seven successfully received their
doctorates, and two of them were in STEM fields. Margaretta Palmer received
a PhD in mathematics and became a pioneering astronomer, working at the
Yale Observatory until her death. Charlotte Fitch Roberts received a PhD in
chemistry and took up professorship at Wellesley upon graduation.
Inspired by Laura Bassi’s achievements,
DOROTHEA ERXELEBEN (1715–
1762) fought for her right to study
medicine, and eventually became the
first licensed female doctor in the
world. Much of her life was dedicated to
advocating for the education of women.
1843
Through her collaboration with Charles
Babbage, ADA LOVELACE (1815–1852)
wrote the first algorithm for his “Analytical
Engine,” making Lovelace the world’s first
computer programmer. Her novel idea
that computers could be used for more
than calculations was vastly ahead of her
time and would go on to frame the basis
of modern-day programming.
1864
REBECCA LEE CRUMPLER
(1831–1895) was the first
African-American woman
to receive a medical degree.
Working as a nurse first, she was
recommended by the doctors
she worked with to attend
medical school. In 1866, she
joined other Black physicians in
caring for freed slaves.
22 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Past
SPECIAL
1969
1942
During the war, MARY G. ROSS
(1908–2008) was hired as a
mathematician for Lockheed
Corporation in California. During
this time, she became the first
Indigenous woman to receive
a professional certification in
engineering. She continued to work
for Lockheed until 1973, where she
worked on preliminary designs for
satellites, manned space flight, and
developed ballistic missile systems.
1993
Through her mission aboard the
Discovery space shuttle, ELLEN
OCHOA (1962–) became the
first Hispanic woman to go to
space. She embarked on three
more missions during her career,
and she is currently the Director
of the Johnson Space Center.
In 1969, YALE COLLEGE allowed women to enroll
for the first time. Two hundred and thirty women
enrolled as freshmen at Yale, and another cohort of
women enrolled as transfer students. The women who
transferred as juniors graduated in 1971, becoming
the first women to graduate from Yale College.
The first woman to be awarded a Nobel
Prize, MARIE CURIE (1867–1934) was
honored in 1903 for her work with her husband
on spontaneous radiation. After her husband’s
death, Marie took his place as professor of
general physics at the University of Paris,
receiving a second Nobel Prize in 1911. She
dedicated much of the rest of her life supporting
research on radium at various institutes.
www.yalescientific.org
1903
1958
FLORENCE BINGHAM KINNE
(1863–1929) was hired to teach
at the Pathology Department at
the School of Medicine, becoming
the first female instructor at
Yale. When she was hired, she was
likely to have been one of the only
women in the entire School of
Medicine, since the first female
students were admitted in 1916.
In 1958, MARY JACKSON (1921–2005)
became the first woman of color
engineer at NASA. After publishing
various papers during her two decades
there, Jackson became the Federal
Women’s Program Manager at NASA’s
Langley Research Center, where she
helped to promote the hiring and
promotions of female mathematicians,
engineers, and scientists.
1905
1983
2014
MARYAM MIRZAKHANI (1977–2017)
was the first woman to be awarded
the Fields Medal (the “Nobel Prize
of Mathematics”) for her work in the
dynamics and geometry of Riemann
surfaces. Before she passed, Maryam was
a professor at Stanford University.
As a crewmember and flight
engineer of the Challenger STS-7
shuttle, SALLY RIDE (1951–2012)
became the first female American
astronaut. She participated in two
missions. After her retirement
from NASA, Ride worked to
improve science education for girls
and founded Sally Ride Science, a
non-profit that supports young
women in STEM.
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 23
SPECIAL
Past
WOMEN IN STEM
When you think of famous scientists, who comes to mind? Maybe
Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, or Isaac Newton—names you
were first introduced to in your middle school science class. But
where are the women? According to a 2019 report by the UNESCO Institute for
Statistics, only twenty-nine percent of workers in research and development
are women. Despite that, women are behind many key innovations that
improve our everyday lives. Here, we highlight some famous leaders in STEM
whose work we use every day.
BY ARUSHI DOGRA
CATHLEEN LIANG
ART BY MILA COLIZZA
LYNN CONWAY (1938–) is a transgender computer scientist and electrical engineer.
Conway attended MIT, only to drop out due to mental health issues related to her
gender dysphoria. Later, she completed her education at Columbia University.
During the 1970s, Conway was responsible for very large-scale integration (VLSI),
which revolutionized efficient circuit design, and invented microchips that serve as
the foundation for modern-day cell phones. Recently, it was also revealed that she
made significant contributions to computer architecture and design as part of IBM’s
Advanced Computing Systems research team in the 1960s, before she was fired for
undergoing a gender transition. Conway kept this information under wraps for years,
fearing that she would have to restart her career again if she revealed the existence of
her previous identity.
Both beauty and brains, HEDY LAMARR (1914–2000) was an actress regarded as
both “the world’s most beautiful woman” and “the mother of Wi-Fi.” While most know
Lamarr for her many leading roles under MGM Studios and Warner Bros., she was a
prolific inventor whose creations include traffic lights for movement-disabled people
and modifications to the Concorde supersonic aircraft. Most notably, along with
colleague George Antheil, Lamarr pioneered a “frequency-hopping” communication
system that prevented Axis powers from hijacking torpedoes during World War II.
This technology is the underlying basis for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth today. Lamarr was
inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
24 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Past
SPECIAL
WHOSE DISCOVERIES WE USE EVERY DAY
The unsung heroines who used science to build the world we know today
GLADYS WEST (1930–) is an African-American mathematician who has spent her
career as a public-school math teacher, a human computer for the U.S. Air Force, and
an innovative technological pioneer. Only the second Black woman to be hired at the
Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren, West was an integral part of the effort to
develop the modern Global Positioning System (GPS). She was able to use satellite data
to program a computer to detect the irregular geoid shape of the Earth with increasing
precision, a model that sits at the core of GPS technology. She has also conducted
award-winning research on the motion of Pluto relative to Neptune. In 2018, West was
inducted into the Space and Missiles Pioneers Hall of Fame, one of the highest possible
honors presented by the Air Force Space Command.
After its first case appeared in 1959, Haemophilus influenzae type b bacteria (Hib)
became the leading cause of meningitis in children under five, with more than twentythousand
cases a year. With both a high mortality and morbidity rate, an estimated
seven million lives would have been lost by 2020 without RACHEL SCHNEERSON’S
Hib vaccine. Schneerson (1932–) was a senior investigator at the National Institutes of
Health from 1988 until 2012. There, Schneerson and her colleague John Robbins would
create not only the Hib vaccine, but also the first conjugate vaccine, an advancement
that made vaccines both safer and more effective than before. Shortly after the Hib
vaccine was available worldwide, mortality from Hib dropped by as much as ninetyfive
percent. The conjugate vaccine technology Schneerson developed would also be
used for the creation of the pneumococcal and meningococcal vaccines.
MAMIE PHIPPS CLARK (1917–1983) was a social psychologist who specialized
in child development. The first African-American female to earn a psychology
doctorate from Columbia University, Clark’s research was centered around race
issues in very young children. Today, she is most known for her iconic “Doll Test,”
which revealed that the majority of Black preschool children preferred white dolls
over Black dolls. Clark’s study showed that students in racially mixed schools feel
more distress due to internalized racism than do those from segregated schools.
Her findings, which suggested that desegregation of schools could lead to healthy
child development, were used as key evidence in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board
of Education Supreme Court case.
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 25
BY THE NUMBERS:
WOMEN IN STEM
Education: “The Leaky Pipeline”
• 49.2% of women who originally intend to major in Science
and Engineering as a first-year switch to a non-STEM major,
compared to 32.5% of men.
• Nationally, women make up 57.3% of bachelor’s degree
recipients but only 38.6% of STEM bachelor’s degree recipients.
• At Yale, in 2019, women made up 47.5% of bachelor’s degree
recipients but only 39.2% of STEM bachelor’s degree recipients.
• Women represent 57.3% of undergraduates but only 38.6% of
STEM undergraduates, or about two-thirds of the expected
amount based on undergraduate enrollment. Moreover,
underrepresented minority women represent 16.6% of
undergraduates but only 9.16% of STEM undergraduates,
or approximately one-half of the expected amount based on
undergraduate enrollment.
• As women move through the “leaky pipeline” of higher
education, they become increasingly underrepresented.
While women receive 50.1% of STEM bachelor’s degrees, they
only receive 44.3% of master’s degrees and 41% of doctorate
degrees. Subsequently, they comprise 36% of postdoctoral
fellows and 29% of employees.
• For underrepresented minority women, once again, the
disparities are even more severe. Underrepresented minority
women receive 13.3% of STEM bachelor’s degrees, 12.4% of
master’s degrees, and 6.8% of doctorate degrees, and they
make up 4.8% of the workforce.
Pushing Women out of STEM
• Only 37% of STEM professionals portrayed in the media
are women.
• In science education materials, 75% of adults depicted in a
science profession were men, and only 25% were women.
• When asked to draw a scientist, only 28% of kids (boys
and girls) drew a female scientist. Boys almost always drew
men, and girls were twice as likely to draw men as they were
to draw women.
• This difference got worse with age, as 70% of 6-year-old girls
drew a woman, whereas only 25% of 16-year-old girls did.
• 50% of women in STEM jobs have said that they have
experienced discrimination in the workplace.
www.yalescientific.org
BY ISHANI SINGH
ART BY SOPHIA ZHAO
Employment
Present
SPECIAL
What do statistics
reveal ab o u t o n g o i n g
gender disparities?
• Women represent 52% of the college-educated workforce, but
only 29% of the science and engineering workforce.
• BIWOC are even more underrepresented:
- Latina/Hispanic women make up only 2.3% of the science
and engineering workforce
- Indigenous women make up only 0.07%
- Black women represent only 2.5%
• Women hold 76% of all healthcare jobs but represent only 40.8%
of physicians and surgeons.
• Women make up 34.5% of STEM faculty at academic institutions.
- Black women make up only 1.5%,
- Latina/Hispanic women 2.0%, and
- Indigenous women 0.08%
• Women only make up 28.2% of tenured STEM faculty.
- Black women make up 1.4%
- Hispanic/Latina women make up 1.3%
- Indigenous women make up 0.04%
• At Yale, 38.3% of STEM faculty are women, and 17.6% of tenured
STEM faculty are women.
- 10% (2/20) of Directors of Undergraduate Studies in STEM
departments are women
- 11% (2/18) of STEM department chairs are women
• In STEM occupations, women earn 81.6 cents to the
dollar of men.
• In healthcare occupations, women earn 71.7 cents to the
dollar of men.
• Of the 616 Nobel Laureates in Physics, Science, and Medicine
and Physiology from 1901–2019, only 19 were women.
• A study of NIH funding from 2006–2017 found that female firsttime
principal investigators received a median grant of about
$40,000 less than their male counterparts, when controlling for
research potential.
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/data.cfm
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19304/data
https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/InstitutionProfile.aspx?unitid=130794
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
http://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/majors-in-yale-college/
https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=S2411&tid=ACSST1Y2019.
S2411&hidePreview=true
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-prize-awarded-women/
htts:// doi.org/10.1001/jama.2018.21944
https://seejane.org/research-informs-empowers/portray-her/
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0165037
https://www.edutopia.org/article/keeping-girls-stem-3-barriers-3-solutions
https://www.edutopia.org/article/50-years-children-drawing-scientists
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/women-and-men-in-stemoften-at-odds-over-workplace-equity/
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 27
FOCUS
Math
HEE OH
Coming Full Circle
BY MIRILLA ZHU
ART BY KAREN LIN
On a snowy February
evening, thirty
u n d e r g r a d u a t e s
gather inside a brightly lit
classroom on the first floor of
Leet Oliver Memorial Hall. At
the front of the room is Hee
Oh, the Abraham Robinson
Professor of Mathematics at
Yale, drawing crisp white circles
on the board with a brand-new
stick of Hagoromo chalk. By
the time she turns around, she
has traced out three perfect
circles, each touching two
others at a single point.
28 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Math
FOCUS
Between every three mutually tangent circles, there are
exactly two circles tangent to all three of them.
Oh studies Apollonian circle packings,
which are created by filling the space
between three mutually tangent circles
with successively smaller tangent circles. As
she draws the smaller circles on the board,
she talks about her fascination with circle
packings, connecting them to centuries-old
theorems of Greek geometers and to recent
developments in hyperbolic geometry. The
students listen with undivided attention,
captivated by her every word.
Twenty-eight years earlier, Oh had
been sitting in the classroom next door,
similarly entranced as a grey-haired
professor lectured about connections
between geometry, number theory, and
dynamics. At the time, Oh was a firstyear
graduate student at Yale who had
just arrived from Korea; the professor,
Gregory Margulis, was a Fields medalist
who had come to Yale the previous year.
Oh had taken a number of math courses
as an undergraduate at Seoul National
University, but Margulis’s class was the
first time she saw how the three topics
could be brought together in such
unexpected ways. When it came time to
choose a thesis advisor, Oh decided that
she wanted to work with Margulis.
The problem Margulis gave Oh was
to show that a certain class of discrete
subgroups were arithmetic, meaning that
they could only be constructed using
number-theoretic methods. Margulis
suggested an approach that would prove
the result for some specific cases, but
he was surprised to find that, by the
time she had finished graduate school,
she had proven arithmeticity in nearly
all cases using a result called Ratner’s
theorem. According to Margulis, Oh
worked exceptionally hard. “It’s difficult
to predict what will happen with any
student in ten or fifteen years,” Margulis
said. “But even at that time, it was clear
that she was capable of coming up with
the kind of ideas that are necessary to
become a leader in the field.”
Despite her mathematical acumen, Oh
hadn’t always intended to be a professor.
When she first began studying math
in college, she thought that being a
mathematician meant working alone
on obscure problems, as if she could
disappear from the world and no one
else would notice. Halfway through her
undergraduate studies, she felt that she
wanted her life to have more purpose.
“If I spent my time helping the weak and
oppressed, I thought that would be a
meaningful existence,” she said.
This conviction led Oh to pursue a
calling as a social activist, organizing
protests against the military dictatorship
that had taken over the South Korean
government in the mid-1980s. Oh recalls
standing in the front line of student
demonstrations, facing off against a wall
of armed police. At one point, she was
knocked unconscious on the street. But,
in spite of her sacrifices, she wasn’t able
to make significant progress on the social
issues she had set out to solve, at least by
her own standards. “There were no single
bulletproof solutions like the ones I was
used to in math,” she said. “I liked the
clarity of mathematics, and I missed it.”
After a year of working as an activist,
Oh decided to return to studying math.
She credits the experience of standing
firm during protests with giving her
the persistence necessary to reach key
points of her academic career, from
finishing her PhD in 1997 to navigating
her first positions at Oklahoma State, the
Hebrew University, and Princeton. By
the time she received a tenure offer from
the California Institute of Technology
in 2003, she had started a family with
her husband with a two-year-old son,
and a daughter later to come. Once she
became a mother, her respect for other
female mathematicians grew immensely.
“I didn’t know what they were going
through before,” she said.
Oh learned about circle packings
in 2007 from Peter Sarnak, a number
theorist at Princeton she met while
working as an assistant professor.
Sarnak had been trying to count circles
in circle packings that were no smaller
than a given radius, having realized
that the task was equivalent to counting
points of an orbit on an infinite-volume
hyperbolic manifold. Because Oh was
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 29
FOCUS
Math
working on similar counting problems
in finite-volume spaces, he thought she
would be well-equipped to look into the
problem. One of Sarnak’s former students,
Alex Kontorovich, had been trying to
understand the structure of this space
using partial differential equations, but Oh
saw that they could use an approach from
representation theory instead. Oh and
Kontorovich spent the next several months
working out the details of their proof,
encountering roadblocks and false leads
along the way. Nevertheless, they pursued
the problem with what Kontorovich calls
a “keen tenacity,” and by the end of 2008,
they had arrived at a solution they felt
confident enough to share.
Oh gave the first talk on their results in
October of that year, and she later wrote a
paper with Kontorovich, which would go
on to be published in one of the leading
journals of mathematics. Oh describes
the process of finding the solution like
climbing up a mountain—sometimes she
wasn’t sure if she was looking at the right
mountain, or if there was a path to the
summit at all. “You often go halfway up,
only to find that the path doesn’t take
you where you thought it would,” she
said. But once she and Kontorovich had
completed the proof, the implications of
what they had done became clear. They
had made it to the top—and they couldn’t
help but marvel at the view.
The techniques Oh used opened up new
avenues of research, leading to numerous
collaborations through which she sought
to investigate related properties of circle
packings. For her work on circle packings,
Oh received several national honors and
awards—the Satter Prize, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, and the Ho-Am Prize, the
last of which described her work as a
“technical tour de force” that brought
together an interplay of ideas from
different areas of mathematics. Among
the distinctions was an offer of a faculty
position at Yale, which she accepted in
2013 to become the university’s first
tenured female math professor.
In some ways, Oh’s career has come
full circle since returning to Yale.
She now runs the Group Actions and
Dynamics seminar that Margulis started
thirty years ago, and her office is located
across the hall from the classroom where
her interest in geometry and dynamics
was first piqued. For the past several
years, Oh has also mentored graduate
students, who have become her frequent
collaborators and coauthors. “Watching
them grow mathematically has been very
rewarding,” she said. “By proving some
of the conjectures I’ve proposed, they’ve
realized my own mathematical dreams.”
Wenyu Pan, who completed her thesis
under Oh’s supervision in 2018, recalls
how Oh helped her develop the same
mathematical confidence that she says
Oh exhibits in her own research. “Hee
challenged me to solve some really
difficult problems, like the ones she
herself would solve,” Pan said. When Pan
couldn’t figure out one of Oh’s problems
the first time around, Oh would give her
an easier problem to solve, or encourage
her to discuss ideas with other
mathematicians until she was ready to
try again. “Even at my lowest points, she
just kept encouraging me,” she said.
Perhaps one reason for Oh’s
encouragement is that there are so few
women studying math in the first place.
About one-third of math graduate
students in the United States are female,
but at Yale, the gender disparity is even
more stark—only one of the thirty-two
PhD candidates in the math department
last year was a woman. There is no clearcut
fix to the gender imbalance—the issue
more closely resembles the social
science problems that Oh
dealt with as an activist
than the math
problems
thinks about
now—but
she
mentoring graduate students and
conducting research are ways that Oh is
trying to approximate a solution. “If you
see female mathematicians doing great
research around you, you begin to feel
that you can be one of them too,” she said.
As a graduate student, Oh had been
inspired by the work of a woman named
Marina Ratner—the ergodic theorist
who proved the central result she used in
her thesis. Now, a younger generation of
students is looking up to Oh. For Jingyi
Cui, a former math and economics major
who took Real Analysis with Oh last
spring, Oh was the first female professor
outside the humanities she had during her
four years at Yale. “It was so refreshing to
see someone who looked like me address
a room full of students,” said Cui, who
started her PhD in economics this fall.
“It gives me motivation to imagine that I
could be like that one day.”
Cui recalls seeing Oh in the dining
hall, eating lunch with other math
professors before class. What stood out
mostly clearly to her, Cui said, was how
self-assured Oh had been at the table
full of men. She contributed frequently
to the conversation, and when she
spoke, they listened. In that moment,
Cui was reminded of why she had
chosen to pursue a career in academia.
“She showed us that the ceiling could be
broken,” Cui said. ■
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MIRILLA ZHU
MIRILLA ZHU is a rising junior in Saybrook College majoring in
mathematics. Besides writing for YSM, she enjoys reading poetry and
exploring New Haven in search of the city’s best bubble tea.
THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK Professor Oh for her time and
generosity with the interviews, in addition to sharing her knowledge
of measure theory, fractal dimensions, and drawing the perfect circle.
FURTHER READING
Kontorovich, A., & Oh, H. (2011). Apollonian circle packings and closed
horospheres on hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Journal of the American
Mathematical Society, 24(1), 603-648.
Mackenzie, D. (2010). A Tisket, a Tasket, an Apollonian Gasket.
American Scientist, 98(1), 10-14.
30 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
HOW
WE
Astrophysics
GOT
FOCUS
HERE
AND
WHERE WE
ARE
GOING
Meg Urry’s
Insights into
the Universe
(including
Inequality in
STEM)
BY
ALEXANDRA
HASLUND-GOURLEY
& EAMON GOUCHER
ART BY
CATHERINE ZHANG
www.yalescientific.org
A
few million light years away, a black
hole at the center of a galaxy spins
at immense speeds, turning matter
into light; on the screen in front of us, the
scientist who figured that out made an edgy
joke about how terrible adulthood is. We sat
(virtually) in Professor Meg Urry’s office,
listening intently as she tells stories about her
career, her research, and her life. Hanging
on the wall were three framed pictures,
including a black and white portrait of who
appears to be Isaac Newton. Seems fitting
for one of the most acclaimed astrophysics
experts in the world. Throughout our
discussion, the conversation kept returning
to the same thought—what is the driving
force behind science? For Urry, it is about
bringing different ideas and perspectives
into conversation with one another. It is
about diversity and representation—who
is at the table, what they brought, and how
they got there. Urry’s own journey is a case
study into the sociology of science.
Urry was born in St. Louis, MO, in 1955,
but spent most of her childhood in West
Lafayette, IN. Her father, a professor of
chemistry at Purdue University, was Urry’s
first real exposure to the field of academia. “If
I had to pick one reason why I am a professor,
it’s because of my family—I knew what that
job was, I knew it existed,” Urry reflected.
She pauses before going on to mention
that science was not her favorite subject
growing up—it felt too static, too centered on
memorization rather than deep learning.
During her freshman year at Tufts
University, Urry enrolled in an introductory
physics course that nearly succeeded in
deterring Urry from pursuing a major in
physics. Not only was Urry the only woman
enrolled in the course, but she found that
her professor tended to obfuscate rather
than clarify what should have been simple
concepts. The first semester of familiar
Newtonian physics passed uneventfully, but,
as the curriculum slid into the unintuitive
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 31
FOCUS
Astrophysics
world of electromagnetism, Urry faced the
first of many trials of her academic career.
“I absolutely bombed the first exam second
semester of freshman year—I got the
worst grade on anything in my life,” Urry
chuckled. “I think at that moment I had a
choice. Do I say, ‘This isn’t for me’ because
I was plenty good at other things. But then
I thought, ‘You know, this cannot be that
hard. Thousands and thousands of people
have succeeded in learning physics.’”
For Urry, this epiphany was a step
through a barrier that even today holds
many people back from pursuing science.
She recognized that her performance on
the test had nothing to do with her innate
capabilities or gender—it was merely a
reflection of the teaching style and her
studying methods. Propelled by this
realization, she began to teach herself the
material directly from the textbook. By
the end of the semester, electromagnetism
began to make more sense and suddenly, “It
just clicked. I finally saw how this all works
and why. Once I mastered that, I started to
see physics as more fun,” Urry remarked.
Following this passion, Urry spent
the summer after her junior year gazing
across the universe at the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville,
Virginia. Even through our Zoom video
call, Urry’s excitement for research was
palpable. She lit up as she recalled her first
research project where she made her first
significant astronomical discovery. Urry’s
survey required her to painstakingly take
punch cards with specific coordinates to
parts of the sky, find the corresponding
filing cabinet, pull out huge sheets of
photographic paper, and meticulously
analyze the images produced by radio
sources from the distant universe. After
peering through hundreds of images of
the night sky, Urry found an anomaly:
two identical astronomical bodies
situated impossibly close to each other.
Unbeknownst to her at the time, Urry
had discovered the first example of
gravitational lensing. Yet, when asked
about the experience, Urry humbly said,
“That was new knowledge—coming from
a few measly photons that came off our
way. Suddenly, I realized that this was what
I wanted to do.” That summer gave her the
confidence and intellectual motivation
to pursue astronomy in graduate school
at Johns Hopkins University. At JHU,
she found herself the only woman in the
class—again. But she never thought much
of it at the time, noting, “The fact that it
was all men… that was just everywhere.”
It was not until her postdoctoral
fellowship at MIT that Urry realized the
role sexism played in STEM. Towards
the end of Urry’s fellowship at MIT,
she applied for a permanent faculty
position at the institute but was rejected.
Her colleague who ultimately got the
job reassured her that there were many
other opportunities because, due to
affirmative action, “Everyone has to
hire women,” an idea Urry rejected. This
sentiment was incredibly unsettling for
Urry. “It just felt terrible. You never want
to feel like you had an advantage or that
someone gave you a leg up,” she said.
This experience, along with many
others, has inspired Urry to try to
understand and untangle the intertwining
strands of history, culture, sexism, and
racism that have resulted in a lack of
diversity and representation in science.
Just like in a physics problem, Urry has
identified the force that has shaped
the field: a gravitational pull towards a
perpetuation of similar scientists. “We
believe that [selecting faculty] is about
[one’s] publications and their stature
and the quality of their ideas, but also,
it’s about our comfort level with them
and our sense that they are really good
people—which often turns into an issue
of self-validation. Are they like me? Did
they go to a similar school? It ends up
being a homogenizing process,” she said.
In 2001, Urry accepted a faculty position
at Yale. She knew from the very beginning
that she wanted to teach introductory
physics, helping students make that
critical first leap into the world of physics.
For many students—particularly students
from groups that have been historically
underrepresented in science 1 —this
“barrier moment,” as Urry calls it,
completely turns them off from pursuing
physics. The central question then follows:
how do we eliminate this barrier? Urry’s
goal in- and outside of the classroom has
always been to engage students and make
physics personal, interesting, and, most
importantly, accessible.
For instance, she has continually
experimented with her teaching style,
notably incorporating a flipped classroom
structure, so that her students get a deeper,
more intuitive sense of the physical world.
It has been a few years now since Urry has
taught introductory physics. She currently
teaches a course entitled “Expanding Ideas
of Time and Space,” which she told us is one
of the most-requested first-year seminars
offered. As she said this, Urry leaned back,
threw up her hands, and put on her humblebrag
face—we could not help but laugh.
1
This is the institutional jargon commonly used to describe the lack of representation of historically marginalized groups. However, this terminology in itself is passively problematic
as it refuses to place any accountability for the people, practices, and policies that marginalized these groups.
32 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Outside of the classroom, Urry works
tirelessly to make science accessible to all
people. Urry is a regular science contributor
for CNN and has written pieces on NASA,
astrophysics, and the experience of women
in STEM. In 2017, she helped jump-start
the Global Teaching Project, an EdTech
initiative dedicated to bringing advanced
coursework to “rural and underserved
communities.” Since then, the project—
currently focused on in the Mississippi Delta
region—has continued to grow, reaching
over four hundred students to date.
Urry has also enacted waves of change
within the Physics department at Yale. Serving
as chair from 2007 to 2013, her primary focus
was on addressing equity issues within the
department. Urry’s legacy in this area cannot
be understated. When she arrived at Yale in
2001, she was the only female physics faculty
member. Now there are seven women faculty
members, six with tenure. It is clear though,
that these changes have not been easy to enact.
Urry told us that after continuously being
labeled “overly ambitious” and having her
intelligence questioned that “there have been
days when I’ve gone into my office and cried.
I want people to know, though, that if you
power through bad times with confidence,
that things will even out. After all, in the end,
it’s about the work you do, what you learn.”
www.yalescientific.org
Even from a cursory look at her research,
it is clear that Urry has stayed true to this
resolve. Studying the evolution of galaxies
over the last twelve billion years, Urry has
made incredible leaps forward in the field of
astronomy. By analyzing spectra from distant
galaxies, Urry and her team have identified
the rate at which the matter accumulated
around black holes is converted into light—
Astrophysics
We need more conflict,
more argument, more
difference. That’s why
excellence in science
is so closely tied to
diversity. All kinds,
different paths, people
who are not the same.
proving that black holes are spinning at
their maximum possible speed. This is no
small finding. It implies that the growth of
black holes comes from matter falling into
them, which tends to spin them up, rather
than from mergers of big black holes, which
on average should decrease the spin.
Science is as much about data as it is
about people. “The most power in science
comes from the clash of ideas. Every big
discovery is a paradigm shift. To get there,
you have to reject the current paradigm. We
need more conflict, more argument, more
difference. That’s why excellence in science
is so closely tied to diversity. All kinds,
different paths, people who are not the
same,” Urry explained. From a humanistic
and a scientific perspective, equity and
diversity are essential. “What would [life]
be like if we had really opened the doors
and made it possible for everyone to thrive
[from the very beginning]?” Urry muses.
Although she mourns the generations
of women’s and other underrepresented
people’s voices that went unsupported and
unheard in the scientific community, Urry
is clearly excited for the future of science.
Through the thousands of students that
she has inspired and guided, she is helping
to bring about a new diverse generation
of scientists rich in differing perspectives,
ready to explore the universe and solve
humanity’s most pressing problems. ■
Global Teaching Project. (2019, October 18). About Us. https://www.globalteachingproject.com/about-us/
FOCUS
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 33
FOCUS
Chemistry
DIONDRA
DILWORTH
Building Polymers and Community
By Jenny Tan & Rayyan Darji
really motivates me
is being able to spread
“What
the joy and the thrill
of science,” Diondra Dilworth says.
Dilworth is a third-year PhD candidate
in chemistry at Yale, researching how
ribosomes can act as catalysts. She
is committed to spreading her love
of science and creating a supportive
scientific community for her peers
and students. Dilworth combines her
passions for science as a researcher,
mentor, and teacher to those around her.
Growing up
Before she began her research career,
Dilworth grew up in Las Vegas, NV, one
of the most popular tourist destinations
in the world, but, for Dilworth, her home.
Having grown up with two younger sisters,
Dilworth always filled the role of support
and guidance for those around her. Her
maternal grandparents, who were both
schoolteachers, were two of her biggest
inspirations. Their passion for giving back
to, teaching, and helping others is a core
value that rubbed off on Dilworth, and one
that has remained with her through her life.
In middle school, Dilworth attended
a summer camp that tackled the water
problems as a result of the desert
climate. The program integrated science
with everyday problems, and she
credits it for helping fuel her interest in
science at a young age. Altogether, these
experiences have instilled in Dilworth
an understanding of the importance that
guidance and early exposure to science
can have on a person. In addition to such
guidance, Dilworth also has had to find
confidence in herself at various stages in
her life. She believes that this confidence
ultimately paves the way for scientists to
be able to make strides in their careers.
Coming from a school district that
was ranked poorly in the United States,
it was attending the prestigious six-week
Minority Introduction to Engineering
and Science (MITES) program at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
high school that proved to Dilworth that
she could stand up against the brightest
STEM minds around the country. This
experience and resulting confidence
catalyzed her to apply to Harvard. The
community aspect of STEM, like the
one Dilworth experienced at MITES, is
integral towards establishing a productive
environment, but there are still certain
stereotypes that Dilworth believes
plague many STEM environments. “The
stereotype of males in the media is that
of people who are pragmatic and listen
to data, and a lot of times the stereotype
of women in the media is that they're
emotional, driven by feelings, and
irrational,” Dilworth said. From these
stereotypes, she believes that people
may get the misconception that women
aren’t useful and don’t belong as much as
men in science. But, Dilworth explains,
“You really need to think about the fact
that science is not solitary. You don’t
do science alone, and there’s a reason
they call it the scientific community.”
In fact, women who have strength in
interpersonal relationships are crucial
to bolstering communities, and the
scientific community is no exception.
She strongly believes collaboration is
key and being able to communicate with
one another is what opens the door for
exciting breakthroughs and discoveries.
Academic Work
Once Dilworth arrived at Harvard,
she discovered her interest in organic
chemistry, and explored it in many
research labs throughout the country.
During the summer after her first
year, Dilworth worked in an analytical
chemistry lab at the University of
Notre Dame with Matthew Champion
and Michael Elwell, investigating lowcost
solutions for a clinic in Kenya.
One project she worked on was a bikepowered
centrifuge, a machine with
a rapidly rotating container which
typically separates substances. With
her background in analytical chemistry,
Dilworth considered approaching
problems with organic chemistry, which
led her to join a summer program
at the University of California, San
Francisco in Ian Sieple’s research group
the following year. Seiple was Dilworth’s
first direct mentor in organic chemistry,
and her experience in his lab inspired
her to continue to pursue the study of
34 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Chemistry
FOCUS
organic molecules. In the following
years, Dilworth joined Matthew Shair’s
group at Harvard, which focuses on
small molecules and chemical biology
to study human diseases and develop
treatments, and, the summer before
formally beginning her graduate studies
at Yale, Dilworth would work with
Alanna Schepartz, formerly at Yale,
continuing her investigation of organic
molecules in a chemical biology setting.
Dilworth is now a third-year PhD
candidate supervised by Scott Miller in the
Department of Chemistry, and a recipient
of the National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship. Her
research focuses on other uses for the
ribosome outside of protein synthesis, a
project within the multi-institutional NSF
Center for Genetically Encoded Materials.
Proteins are polymers, a molecular
structure consisting of similar units
bonded together. Three types of RNAs
work together to build proteins: messenger
RNA (mRNA), transfer RNA (tRNA),
and ribosomal RNA or ribosomes. The
mRNA is a single stranded molecule that
corresponds to the DNA. It serves as the
code for the protein. The tRNA brings
amino acids, the subunits of proteins,
to the ribosome—the site of synthesis.
Ribosomes have three parts, called the A,
P and E sites. First, a tRNA comes in at the
A-site. Then a peptide bond is catalyzed at
the P-site. Finally, the tRNA is released at
the E site. This process is also known as the
peptide bond formation. The three types
of RNAs work together to form proteins.
Dilworth focuses on ribosomes and
how they catalyze the bond formation
between the amino acids. “The idea
is, if you can bring in another source
of monomers—things that aren't
amino acids—could you then have
the ribosome facilitate other types of
transformations?” Dilworth said. Such a
question begs more considerations: the
types of monomers suitable for tRNA,
potential reactions that can happen
within the ribosomes, if there is space
for these reactions within the ribosome,
or what types of reactions can happen in
biological or aqueous conditions.
Dilworth’s research has far-reaching
applications, from medicine to materials
science. In medicine, Dilworth’s methods
could help catalyze the formation of
www.yalescientific.org
biologically active molecules such as
polyketides, which contain alternating
carbonyl and methylene groups.
Polyketides have proven to be promising
antibiotic candidates, but remain
challenging to synthetize from scratch
using conventional synthetic routes.
Dilworth’s method explores a new way
of producing this class of medicine. Her
research could also impact material
science. If ribosomes can help catalyze
polymer formation within a living cell,
then they would be an environmentally
friendly way of synthesizing materials and
medicine as they use less resources than
traditional methods of polymer formation.
Community
One of Dilworth’s main focuses outside
of research is to spread her love of
science. She works as an avid coordinator
within Yale’s Pathways to Science, a
program for middle and high school
students that supports exploration of
science, technology, engineering, and
math. Additionally, she currently works
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JENNY TAN & RAYYAN DARJI
with Yale OpenLabs to hold Exploring
Science, an online weekly event that
brings in middle school students to listen
to Yale scientists talk about their research
and pathways to science. To date, over
five hundred students in the Greater New
Haven community have tuned in to the
program. “One of the parents sent us a
picture of her daughter, saying how much
she enjoyed the session, and it made my
morning,” Dilworth said.
She was also a former teaching assistant
for CHEM 174: First-Year Organic
Chemistry at Yale, where her famous study
guides have inspired prospective scientists
to pursue careers in research. “I know
what I’m doing is really cool, and it's really
cool to pay it forward,” Dilworth said.
However, as exemplified in Dilworth’s
own experience, not every place is plagued
by those stereotypes. The demographics in
the Miller Lab, in which there are currently
more women graduate students than
men, give her hope. Seeing that reality in
day to day life encourages her and shows
her how there is a place for women to
excel in STEM, unequivocally falsifying
the stereotypes. What’s important now,
Dilworth explained, is “having that balance
becomes a standard and not an anomaly.”
Even after accomplishing so much
already, there is much to come from
Dilworth. She is excited about the future,
her research, and how she can continue
to be a positive impact on others.
Throughout her career, she has stayed true
to recognizing the importance of having
self-confidence, building a collaborative
community, and remembering to help
others, all of which are characteristics
she plans to continue to carry with her
along her scientific journey. ■
A R T B Y A N A S T H A S I A S H I L O V
JENNY TAN is a sophomore in Saybrook majoring in Chemistry. She is from northern Virginia
just outside of Washington D.C. Outside of school, she likes baking and listening to music.
RAYYAN DARJI is a freshman in Grace Hopper from Tallahassee, Florida. Outside of school, he
enjoys watching and playing a variety of sports and trying new ethnic foods.
THE AUTHORS WOULD LIKE TO THANK Diondra for taking the time to talk to us about her
experiences and insights about the STEM community.
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 35
FOCUS
Medicine
DR. SHARA
A
Doctor
Who
Writes
BY
DHRUV PATEL &
MATTHEW FAN
YURKIEWICZ
Dr. Shara Yurkiewicz (MCDB ’09) is a
woman of many talents. She received
her MD from Harvard Medical
School, completed her residency at Stanford,
has written about science for publications
from the Los Angeles Times to Scientific
American, and is currently a medical director
for the Northern California Home Care
Network at Providence St. Joseph Health.
Before she did any of that, however, she was
a Yalie, walking through Sterling Memorial
Library and attending Improv shows on the
weekends. Despite having a heavy workload,
Yurkiewicz made the most of her time at Yale.
Among the many things she did as an
undergraduate, she was a writer for the Yale
Scientific Magazine. Most of the articles she
wrote featured distinguished alumni and
Yale affiliates. “I really enjoyed my time at
YSM because it allowed me to interview
people who I found compelling and talk
about their stories,” Yurkiewicz said.
Yurkiewicz yearned to do more with
her experience writing for the YSM.
In the hopes of connecting the general
population to science while also helping
others improve their writing, Yurkiewicz
and her friends formed their own writing
publication, the Yale Undergraduate
Magazine. “[This magazine] was about
training writers, having workshops, and
being open and accessible [to everyone],”
she said. “I met people who, like me, didn’t
always have the confidence to do writing,
so the idea was to inspire anyone to write.”
Outside the academic year, Yurkiewicz
continued to pursue her love for writing and
publications through summer internships.
In the summer after her junior year, she
interned at Discover Magazine as a factchecker.
In this role, she became exposed to
the intricacies of scientific writing. “Blogs
were still new back then, and I was able to
do that in addition to writing for the print
magazine,” Yurkiewicz said. “After doing
that, I knew I loved science journalism.”
After graduation, Yurkiewicz started
working for the Los Angeles Times where
she interviewed scientists about their
research. “I got to interview people who
just wanted me to understand their work,”
she said. Despite having experience in
science writing, the learning curve in this
role was still steep. “It was definitely a
different feel because the deadlines were
daily. Letting go of stories was very hard
because I was used to research writing; I
was used to monthlies,” Yurkiewicz said.
Complementary to her interest in
communicating science was another deepseated
interest—Yurkiewicz had wanted
to be a doctor for as long as she could
remember. So, after a stint at the LA Times,
she enrolled at Harvard Medical School. “At
the very heart of medicine, there is you using
your knowledge and compassion to help the
body and spirit of someone else,” Yurkiewicz
said. “My most meaningful moments have
always come out of these raw and emotional
circumstances when I can walk away
knowing that I did something good today.”
At Harvard, Yurkiewicz started a blog called
This May Hurt a Bit. She wanted to document
her personal growth and explorations so
that her future self would not forget how she
36 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Medicine
FOCUS
used to feel. “In a way, I was more cavalier,”
Yurkiewicz said. “When I was younger, I
was unafraid to put my voice out there. ”
She quickly found a home in the science
blogging community, who provided her an
escape from the echo chamber of medicine
and provide a larger lens of medicine to
the outside world. The journalistic streak
cultivated by Yurkiewicz’s experiences from
her undergraduate days still remained—
unlike other physician-writers, she strove to
connect with the general population; in doing
so, her in dispelling the misconceptions of
medicine has impacted many readers.
“I wanted to write for lay people,”
Yurkiewicz said. “I think society has a
perception of medicine, for better or for
worse. I wanted to humanize the profession.
I wanted them to connect to someone who
practices it in a way that could be relatable,
in a way that could be empathetic, in a way
that could start a conversation.”
As a medical student, Yurkiewicz wanted
to share her experiences at the bedside. Two
of her articles, “Post-Operative Check” and
“Asymmetry,” are structured around a onesided
conversation with patients who have
passed away. Not until the end does the
reader realize that the writer’s counterpart in
the dialogue is no longer living.
“I like the slow reveal of things,” she said.
“Both of those were about deaths and both of
those had huge emotional underpinning[s]
for someone who is witnessing this and doesn’t
have much control. I wanted the audience to
feel what I was feeling. I like creating scenes
where someone can really empathize with
the observer. I tried to make it observational
because it was so powerful just to be there.”
At the same time, Yurkiewicz developed a
frustration with the existing medical system.
She did not like the culture and expressed
her feelings in some of the articles she wrote.
“I was cynical. I was burnt out. I had the
same frustrations [as the patients had] with
the system and the way people were moving
through the system, the way the focus was
not always on the patient,” she said.
Writing was more than just a pastime,
however. It was an integral part of her
identity. “I saw myself as a writer who
enjoyed medicine, and medicine gave
me something to write about,” she said.
Yurkiewicz recognized the importance of
living a life of multiple passions rather than
seeing herself only as a doctor. As such,
www.yalescientific.org
she has made a concerted effort to actively
participate in her community.
“Being smart is great, but being kind is
the most important thing and that’s what
drives me,” she said. “The idea of being
more embedded in your community is why
I chose to practice in a community setting
and not in an academic setting.”
Currently, Yurkiewicz is working in
palliative and hospice medicine, a career
that has interested her since reading Ira
Byock’s Dying Well and volunteering as
an undergraduate at the Connecticut
Hospice in Branford, where she was
exposed to a model of care that astounded
her. “[I chose palliative care and hospice]
because it was focusing on symptoms,
focusing on quality of life,” she said. “I
liked it because it was slow medicine
[and] required patience.”
Less than a year out of her
fellowship, she is now a medical
director in the Northern California Home
Care Network. Although what she loves
most is treating patients, she has not
forgotten about some of the frustrations
she developed with the culture of medicine
in medical school; she understands that in
order to change this culture, she needs to
be able to make decisions. “If it’s not you,
it’s going to be someone else. So it might
as well be you,” she said.
As for writing, she hopes to return to it in
the near future, though she does not have a
timeline laid out. Rather than continue with
articles, she wishes to eventually publish a
book, which to her is the best way to make a
lasting impression on a general audience.
Yurkiewicz’s path in medicine shows that
one passion does not have to be sacrificed
for another, that a harmonious overlap
between the two is possible. “Medicine,”
she said, “inspired me to do the writing
that I had always loved to do.” ■
MATTHEW FAN is a first-year in Benjamin Franklin College and a prospective Molecular,
Cellular and Developmental Biology Major. In his free time, he enjoys making music with
the Yale Bands, going for hikes with friends and listening to podcasts.
DHRUV PATEL, a sophomore in Silliman, is a Neuroscience major from New York City. When
he’s not writing for the Yale Scientific, he likes to play basketball and play video games.
THE AUTHORS WOULD LIKE TO THANK Dr. Shara Yurkiewicz for graciously taking
time out of her busy schedule to do an interview. We thoroughly enjoyed learning about
her unique path in medicine.
FURTHER READING
http://www.sharayurkiewicz.com/
ART BY
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
MATTHEW FAN & DHRUV PATEL
RYAN BOSE- ROY
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 37
FEATURE
Animation
LI FE
FEATURE
Bioengineering
I N
M O
DR.
BY
LUCAS LOMAN &
JANET
AGASTYA RANA
IWASA AND
THE ANIMATION LAB
T
I O N
ART BY ELLIE GABRIEL
Open your biology textbook to
any page, and chances are that
you’ll find a diagram embedded
alongside the concept that is being
explained. Textbook authors have long
since realized how useful diagrams can
be to communicate key information and
aid understanding, but few understand
the usefulness of visual aids in biology
as well as Dr. Janet Iwasa does.
A professor at the University of
Utah, Iwasa works at the forefront of
molecular and cellular animation, a
niche of biology that she has pioneered
and devoted her career to. A virtuoso at
communicating cutting-edge research
of other scientists through
a n i m a t i o n s
of her own, Iwasa has expanded the
domain of her widely acclaimed work by
running her own research lab. Working
on projects involving visualizations of
the origin of life, HIV, and recently,
COVID-19, The Animation Lab has
been inundated with requests from
researchers to bring to life their ideas
on the workings of life itself.
Janet Iwasa describes her work
as simply another method to probe
biology. “Some people use microscopes;
I use animation software,” Iwasa said.
Her modest statement doesn’t quite
capture the gripping power of her work;
not only are her animations much more
visually alluring than your standard
biological schematic, but they
have been designed to
communicate nuanced and intricate
theoretical models effectively and
intuitively to experts in academia.
“The way you learn about molecular
biology is that it’s complex, there’s all
this stuff going on, and it’s dynamic,”
Iwasa explained. “But then the way
people visualize it is really kind of
disappointing.” Her animations, on the
other hand, encapsulate a sentiment
worth many more than just a thousand
words. “A lot of it is just about capturing
that kind of excitement that wouldn’t
necessarily come out using scientific
jargon or figures with arrows and
circles,” Iwasa remarked.
Her specialization in a niche discipline
was the result of an extraordinary
academic journey—becoming a cellular
animator is hardly a career on high
schoolers’ radar; indeed, not even in
Iwasa’s case. Her first foray into the
domain that is now her life’s work came
well into her graduate schooling,
while chugging along
the railroad from
college to graduate
38 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Animation
FEATURE
school to post-doctoral work to
professorship.
“A lot of people go through a bit of
a slump in [graduate] school where
things just aren’t going well, and your
research isn’t going well, and you look
around and you [think] ‘What am I
doing here?’” Iwasa said. Fortunately,
her rejuvenation came in the form of
a chance encounter. The lab next door
studied kinesin, a protein responsible
for movement within the cell, and they
hired an animator to model the protein
based on their research. After seeing the
animation they produced, Iwasa became
engrossed by the potential of animation
in research. With support from her lab,
she began taking strides into the field of
animation and computer science, and
by the time she completed her PhD, her
mind was set on the unconventional
path of biological animation.
Barring the sheer complexity of her 3D
animations, Iwasa’s journey to cement
herself as an established leader in the
niche of cellular animation was not
without roadblocks. In graduate school,
she realized that she had finally stumbled
upon her intellectual passion, but she
also realized that she had no footsteps
to follow—no mentor to look up to. “The
hardest part was trying to carve a bit of
a niche within academia and research,
doing something that’s really not
considered typical,” Iwasa said.
In taking a risk to alter her career path
into one rife with uncertainty, she was
met with doubt and disapproval from
friends and colleagues who did not share
her confidence. Her temperament sealed
the deal—something that she terms her
“blinder mentality.” Iwasa added, “I’ve
definitely encountered a lot of [negative]
attitudes in science, especially being
outside of the norm.” Rather than being
daunted by the doubt from those who
did not support her, she instead chose to
listen to the encouragement from those
who did. “You just pivot, and pick and
choose what advice you listen to
and incorporate into your plans.”
Her staunch belief in the
untapped potential of cellular
animation was not without
justification. Working as a
biological animator among
the research faculty at the
University of Utah,
project requests
started coming
from all angles.
She was helping
s c i e n t i s t s
portray their
work, and they
came to appreciate
the significance
of hers. “When
we create an
animation, it can
be the first time a
researcher who’s
been studying a
process for decades
has actually seen
it come to life,” Iwasa
said. Noting one instance in
particular: “He was nearly
in tears. ‘This is exactly how I
envisioned it,’ he said. ‘I was never able to
show people what this really looks like.’”
Eventually, Iwasa realized that she alone
would not be able to meet the demand for
projects, and so set about creating The
Animation Lab. With her lab, Iwasa also
had another objective in mind. “The idea
of having a community, even if I had to
build it myself, sounded pretty good,”
Iwasa said. She is giving her postdoctoral
fellows training opportunities that she
did not have herself, and many of them
are interested in forming groups of their
own at other institutions, sowing the
seed for a future tight-knit network of
biological animators.
Iwasa is highly optimistic about
the future of animation in biological
research, citing significant growth
in the field over the last decade. Her
goals for animation are clear and
compelling. “More researchers need to
be able to create visualizations easily—
the democratization of animation and
illustration,” Iwasa said. In particular, she
is excited by the prospect of collaborating
to populate a virtual cell, accurately and
comprehensively portraying the highly
complex and fundamental unit of life with
various models of its constituent parts.
With hardly any others to look up to
in crafting her academic journey, Janet
Iwasa has since carved out a discipline
in the rapidly growing field of biological
animation. She is an embodiment of
persevering through an untraditional
career path; as she says, “The career of
your dreams is not necessarily in the
most obvious place.” ■
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 39
FEATURE
Neuroaesthetics
ADDING THE "A"
TO "STEAM"
SCIENCES AND THE ARTS
WITH SUSAN MAGSAMEN
BY KELLY CHEN & HANNAH HUANG
ART BY ANMEI LITTLE
For someone who has spent her career studying neuroaesthetics—
how brain sciences interface with the arts—Susan Magsamen
has a surprising secret: she’s not a very good artist herself. “Like,
not good at all,” she laughs. “Not a good writer, not a good drawer,
not a good dancer, can’t sing at all. I will literally turn on Siri and sing
as loud as I can, and I just hear my husband close the door upstairs.”
Magsamen doesn’t do it for the praise—she simply does it for herself
and the pleasure she derives from it. And she’s devoted her life’s work
to helping others realize how art can impact human potential.
Magsamen’s interest in the field started early. At age nine, she saw
her twin sister immobilized and confined at home for a year and a
half after a serious accident resulted in a compound fracture in her
leg. An art class that her sister was able to take from home helped her
come to terms with her feelings, get over the trauma of the accident,
and ultimately saved her life, Magsamen believes.
Now, as the founder and Executive Director of the International
Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab), part of the Brain Science Institute at
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Magsamen and her
team are focused on scientifically validating how art affects our
minds, bodies, and behavior, as well as how that knowledge can
be used in interventions at the personal, family, and community
level. Her team is conducting a number of research projects that
explore not only how the arts can improve health and well-being,
but also consider the importance of personal preference when using
art and aesthetic experiences as an intervention. For example, in
collaboration with Kennedy Krieger Institute, IAM Lab is building
a multisensory care room to aid
children waking up from coma,
customized with a child’s
favorite colors, scents,
sounds and textures.
Although there
is a growing body
of research on
neuroaesthetics,
efforts in this
emerging field
have largely
operated in
isolation. One of
Magsamen’s major goals is to “really coalesce all of the different
disciplines and practitioners and researchers around the world
who are already doing this work.” To do this, Magsamen’s team
has created a scientific method to study the arts called Impact
Thinking, a framework that can be consistently applied across
the field to standardize research practices and scale the most
promising, evidence-based interventions rapidly.
Magsamen is not only a passionate problem-solver and researcher,
but also an established entrepreneur and children’s book author.
Despite how different these fields may seem, Magsamen has “never
felt uncomfortable shifting between [these spaces].”
“The through lines to all of my work have really been three
things,” she said. “One is this idea around self-expression and
finding, sharing, and celebrating voice.” The other is “collaborations
and working with really amazing people.” The third is trying to
understand why something is happening, a curiosity that drives
her investigations into the underlying science of the arts.
Not all collaborations have been ideal, though. “Where I think
there have been barriers has been coming up against traditional
types of belief systems about what something should look like as
opposed to what something could be. In the venture [capital] world,
I came head up against gatekeepers—primarily older, white males
who were really just sexist,” she said. “I think that’s changing, but
it’s really true, and I think to not name it is wrong.” Her advice:
persevere through and hold your ground.
To all women in STEAM, Magsamen also emphasizes the
importance of taking care of your mind and your body, as well as
truly listening to yourself. “I do my best work when I sleep,” she
laughs. She chooses not to make important decisions or answer
questions late at night. “I needed to process and know what I thought
before I was responding to what people wanted me to respond to.”
In a society where art programs and experiences are often
underfunded or viewed as frivolous, Magsamen’s work may teach
us how important it is to incorporate art in our lives. “The arts
and aesthetic experiences make us healthier and more human
and connect us to ourselves,” she says. “We have become such a
transactional culture, and sometimes we’re not as transformational
and as fully alive as we can and should be.” Art doesn’t have to be
produced by a prodigy to have value—it can do its greatest good
when enjoyed by everyone, regardless of skill level. ■
40 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
FEATURE
ERIKA CHECK HAYDEN
Journalism
PAVING THE WAY FOR MORE
INCLUSIVE SCIENCE STORYTELLING
BY ALEX DONG &
ANGELICA LORENZO
For someone like Erika Check Hayden, a career in science
journalism was the perfect match. The daughter of two scientists,
her early passion for science bloomed as she immersed herself
in different labs, internships, and educational experiences. However,
her calling to science journalism was not clear until her undergraduate
career as a biology major at Stanford University.
As a writer for The Stanford Daily, Check Hayden fell in love with
gathering information and presenting it in a digestible, compelling,
and accurate narrative. Combining her newfound interest in reporting
with her curiosity for science, she set her focus on science journalism.
This path offered her the possibility to engage with multiple scientific
fields, such as genetics, infectious diseases, and biomedical
innovations—without having to focus on just one.
After graduating, Check Hayden served as a
reporter for Nature for fifteen years, during which
she wrote her award-winning coverage of the
2014 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. Initially,
Check Hayden covered the story from San
Francisco, before choosing to report from
the heart of the outbreak in Africa. There, she
quickly discovered that the reality of Ebola was
far different from its portrayal in American
media. She recognized how these American
stories were centered in Western involvement,
often failing to highlight the tremendous efforts
of African healthcare workers and scientists. On one
occasion, Check Hayden recalled meeting three courageous
women working tirelessly as nurses at an Ebola clinic, despite having
survived the disease themselves. The Western misconception that the
African response was incompetent catalyzed Check Hayden’s mission
to depict frontline workers in an honest, undistorted light.
As COVID-19 has disrupted our world, reliable scientific
communication has proven to be of paramount importance. “You
can see clearly that the spread of misinformation is hampering
the response to this disease, and it’s why the U.S. is leading the
developed world in terms of cases,” Check Hayden said. In response
to such issues, her Science Communication Master’s Program at
the University of California Santa Cruz
deliberately works on combating
the spread of misinformation by
training students to develop the
skills to tell engaging, authentic
stories. This is the lifeblood
of science journalism—to
be accurate and factual is
necessary, and to be engaging
is to attract and keep the
attention of readers.
ART BY ANMEI LITTLE
First introduced as a program lecturer, Check Hayden quickly
realized how unique the program was. “[The program] specializes
in taking people who have science backgrounds and giving them the
tools to make an impact through journalism and communication
careers,” she explained. The curriculum is designed for students
to partake in part-time internships alongside their coursework,
receive training in social media, and develop close relationships
with mentors and professional media outlets.
Seeking to amplify the voices of writers that have too long been
ignored and excluded, Check Hayden embraced her new role as the
program’s director in 2017. “It became more important for
me to try to use my position to help make coverage
in science journalism more inclusive, to empower
young journalists to tell the stories that they
think need to be told about science and
society,” she said. In addition to practical
training, the program also prepares its
students, the majority of whom identify as
women and non-binary people, to take on
leadership positions in a field still largely
dominated by men. According to The
Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2019
report produced by the Women’s Media
Center, women received just thirty-seven
percent of byline and other credits in television,
online, print, and wire news in 2017.
Reflecting on her own experience as a young reporter
in a field with a prevalent “boys’ club atmosphere,” Check Hayden
understood the importance of representation and mentorship. She
drew support from inspiring women editors at Nature like Helen
Pearson, Alexandra Witze, and Lauren Morello, who advocated for
her work and helped her navigate the field. She also cites her parents
as a major source of support. “Instead of trying to push me towards a
more conventional or practical career, they actively supported me in
continuing with my writing and finding a way to use it,” she said.
When thinking of the future of science journalism, she is
energized by skilled young journalists ethically addressing modern
issues like COVID-19 and telling stories inclusively, which helps
readers better connect with science. “If we can expand our thinking
about what makes for good stories, how to tell these stories, and
who deserves being covered, then we’re going to make a bigger
impact with our journalism.” ■
Women’s Media Center. (2019). The Status of Women in the U.S.
Media 2019 (Rep.) Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://
tools.womensmediacenter.com/page/-/WMCStatusofWomenin
USMedia2019.pdf
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 41
FEATURE
Astrophysics
ACADEMIA WITHIN AN
A CONVERSATION WITH
KATIE MACK
BY BRIANNA FERNANDEZ
ART BY ELLIE GABRIEL
Looking up at a clear night sky and
pondering the significance of each
individual speck of light forces one
to question one’s place in the vast and everexpanding
universe. Though daunting and
terrifying at first, there is a strange relief
in knowing that even our oldest ancestors
have also asked, “How does it all work?
What does it all mean?”
Katie Mack, an assistant professor at
North Carolina State University, theorizes
about the same kinds of questions that
keep the rest of us up at night—only now,
she is closer to finding the answers. As
a theoretical cosmologist, Mack studies
everything from the beginning of the
universe to the end, researching what it
is made of and how it works. Among the
many questions in this field to be answered,
Mack’s research focuses on the connections
between cosmology and particle physics,
which leads to a plethora of questions
regarding the early universe, when particle
physics was different. Lately, her work has
focused on the ever-elusive topic of dark
matter, which is composed of particles that
don’t interact with light and may account for
unexplained stellar motions, and vacuum
decay, the theoretical and violent potential
fate of the universe. Particle physics can also
help uncover the fate of the cosmos, which
Mack explores in her new book, The End of
Everything (Astrophysically Speaking).
Astrophysics Goes Viral
Katie Mack is a busy person. But
when she’s not teaching classes,
conducting research, or writing
her book, she spends time on
her vastly popular Twitter
account, @AstroKatie, where
she engages her passion for
science communication.
With over 375,000 followers,
Mack has a considerable
audience to which she
imparts her knowledge
of astrophysics and her
opinions on topics that
matter to her. “At first I
was just talking to other
physicists,” Mack explained,
“but then I found out that it
could also be a really good
way to talk to nonphysicists.
And
there's kind
of a challenge and a skill to translating a
complicated topic to a general audience.”
To her, tweets are “a kind of literary form.”
Mack has always enjoyed writing, and
she first got into science communication
through science journalism in college.
Now, rather than writing for magazines
like she did in graduate school, she
uses her skills to write witty books and
viral tweets. This allows more people
to access her science, and it has the
added benefit of a platform, giving her a
celebrity experience within the astronomy
community. Her platform has granted
her access to a community of talented
people with which she wouldn’t have
been connected otherwise. “I have a lot
of friends who are super, super clever
people who have written amazing books
or produced amazing art or written
amazing music,” she said.
However, being in the spotlight has its
drawbacks. While her popularity redeems
free advertisements for her book and
invitations to conferences, it also means
that privacy is harder to come by. “It's
complicated to register to vote if you don't
want your address in the public record on
the Internet,” she explained, revealing an
unexpected facet to her fame.
Life in Academia
Before Mack was a popular science
communicator and theoretical cosmologist,
she was an undergraduate physics major
pursuing her passion at California Institute
of Technology. From there, her infatuation
took her around the world with stops
at Princeton, Cambridge (in the UK),
www.yalescientific.org
Astrophysics
FEATURE
ENDING UNIVERSE
Melbourne, and finally Raleigh, North
Carolina. Over the course of her academic
journey, she has “been more than 360
degrees” around the globe. Mack cites this
lifestyle as one of the biggest challenges
in academia, stressing that each time she
moved, she was starting over.
An early career characterized by
uncertainty and competition necessitates
flexibility and savings, which feeds into
the exclusionary culture of academia.
“I think the idea that you should move
every few years to do the postdoc thing is
built around the idea that your wife will
come with you and care for your children
while you’re at work,” Mack explained,
underscoring how academia is historically
male-dominated and not structured for
family-oriented people of any gender. The
constant moves pose great difficulties for
those trying to start families and foster
relationships. To this Mack added, “That
can be hard, and that can be hard on women
more often than men as well, on average,
because it's more likely that women are
dating other academics and trying to
maintain relationships.” As times continue
to change, more academics have called
for a restructuring of the field. Though
it is unclear what reforms will be made,
the archaic and unrealistic assumptions
woven through academia cannot stand for
much longer, especially as the community
continues to diversify, Mack said.
Mack is sure to stress that academia is
not all that bad. “It’s a really great job in
a lot of ways; I get to follow my curiosity,
I get to work on really interesting things,
I get to think for a living, and talk to a
lot of brilliant people, and that's all really
great. I really like that, and I get to travel
for free all over the world,” she said.
Amid the restrictive culture of academia
and the complications that come with a
viral online presence, speculating about
things as large as the origin and end of the
universe gives Mack a sense of catharsis. In
her new book, Mack invites us to consider
the potential fates of the universe, ranging
from depressing and agonizing heat
death to the violent catastrophe of the
Big Crunch. Many of us know at least
something about the beginning of the
universe; CBS’s The Big Bang Theory is
even named after it. However, there isn’t
much popular literature about its end.
“It was definitely a topic that I thought
needed to be written about. There's just
not a lot of public understanding of the
end of the universe or the future of the
universe, in general,” Mack said.
While educational, her book also
demonstrates a sharp wit, creating many
laugh-out-loud moments even about
our ultimate demise. Some endings
are grim, such as the reversal of the
expansion of the universe detailed in the
Big Crunch. Vacuum decay
could incinerate us at
any moment. But you
don’t think about being
personally ripped in half
by the universe while
reading about it. Instead,
you enjoy reading about
ultimate destruction like one
enjoys watching demolition derbies.
“It's nice to think about the end of the
universe because it's so separate from
the stress of daily life,” she said, “and
it's a totally different
scale of things so
it can be a nice
escape.” ■
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 43
FEATURE
Business
THINKING SPACE
BY BRITT
BISTIS
NEW INNOVATIONS IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH
Biotech and biomedical business skyrockets, literally,
as Andrea Yip, CEO and founder of Luna Design and
Innovation, launches commercial research experiments into
space. Luna is advancing human health and well-being by making
space a commercially viable research platform for biotech and
pharma companies. Luna is the global biotech partner for Blue
Origin’s New Shepard rocket.
Yip’s academic background is in the field of public health. After
receiving her BSc in Biology from the University of Calgary and
her MPH in Health Promotion from the University of Toronto,
she became immersed in helping those around her. Creating new
products and services in mental health and women’s sexual health, she
developed a strong passion for connecting individuals with medical
resources. This commitment is still at the heart of Luna, which seeks
to explore a new platform for medical research. “I still consider myself
as working in healthcare,” she explained, “just in space.”
Behind Luna’s meteoric success is Yip’s dedication to her
concept…and a lot of hard work. Yip had an impressive resumé
in public health and a successful job at Johnson & Johnson in
New York City doing product design, and then, she quit. As she
researched and sought new business opportunities, her mind
wandered into space. “I’ve always been fascinated by space, [and]
I credit my great-grandmother for sparking my interest. She didn’t
speak English but loved to watch visually stimulating TV shows,
her favorites being the World Wrestling Federation and Star Trek.”
The latter completely fascinated Yip: “I loved how they explored
space and pushed scientific boundaries.”
She then began to think about what it would be like to experience
space from the perspective of the everyday citizen, someone like
most of us who have never studied astrophysics or worked for NASA.
She organized her thoughts on a visually concise diagram called
a Journey Map, detailing what a trip to space would be like for a
commercial astronaut or “a space tourist.” Then she sent her creation
to companies, and Virgin Galactic responded with a contract offer.
Yip became CEO of Luna and launched herself into the
business of space exploration. However, creating a start-up
isn’t nearly as hard
as trying to grow its
business, in an arena
where only two percent
of start-up funding goes
to woman entrepreneurs.
“I’m often the only woman
and person of color in the room.
Sometimes, I really stand out when I go
to conferences,” Yip laughed. “Running a startup that focuses on
an emerging market in the space industry is exciting and forces
me to enter uncharted territory. What has been invaluable to
me as an entrepreneur is having diverse mentors and sponsors
who I can turn to for support.” She added, “I’ve learned how
important it is to reach out to other business leaders and
CEOs, particularly other women, who can relate to my own
experiences and help open doors to new opportunities.”
Yip finally saw her vision and hard work become reality by
orchestrating the first Blue Origin space flight competition in
Canada, which allowed over six hundred high school students to
design experiments online to be conducted in space’s microgravity
environment. One selected experiment will be launched into space
on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket with the help of Luna.
“The commercial space industry is transforming the way we
think about space. It’s changing the way people like you or I can
access space today,” Yip says. “Scientists are exploring how to
leverage space as a research platform, and how the microgravity
environment can advance medical research in areas like oncology
or bone and muscle loss.” What excites Yip the most about space
is that it is a potentially untapped resource that is becoming more
tangible for more people. “I don’t have a traditional aerospace
background. I’ve embraced the fact that I have a biology, design,
and public health background and that I can be here, today, and be
one of the few women and people of color who is a space CEO. I’m
excited about what that means for access to space tomorrow and
how we can advance healthcare in space and on Earth.” ■
ART BY ELLIE GABRIEL
44 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Business
FEATURE
“OKZOOMER” PLATFORM CONNECTS
ISOLATED COLLEGE STUDENTS
ILEANA VALDEZ’S CREATION PROMOTES SOCIAL
INTERACTION ACROSS BARRIERS BY CLAY THAMES
Ileana Valdez is inventive, inspired, and intelligent, and over
the quarantine period, she used these traits along with her
education to make a positive difference in the world. After
receiving news that the Spring 2020 semester had been cancelled,
Ileana did what most students did; she hopped online. There, she
was greeted by other students around the country who were all
mutually dissatisfied with how their spring semester ended. Many
students were expressing these feelings of discontent and sadness
on a Facebook meme page entitled, “Zoom Memes for Self-
Quaranteens,” and upon seeing this, Ileana began formulating an
idea. As a rising senior with many friends in the graduating Class
of 2020, Ileana felt that these seniors and other students had been
robbed of many friendships and potential romances.
A computer science major, she turned to her friend Patrycja
Gorska and created a form that students could fill out if they were
interested in finding a new friend while enduring quarantine. Ileana
said, “We got four thousand signups overnight,” which showed
the massive number of students expressing interest in making
new social interactions over the virtual meeting platform Zoom.
Neither anticipated this sort of overwhelming response, but upon
seeing that many students needed and wanted help creating new
friendships, Ileana set out to give these same students a medium
on which to satiate their desire for social interaction. Ileana and
Patrycja found the most important thing for a product to succeed
without even realizing it: a need for consumers.
For most people, the fun would have ended with the virality
of their Google form, which was intended to be a joke. Instead,
Ileana saw her opportunity and seized it. The problem: how to
create an interface that matches students based on their interests
and personality rather than their physical appearance so as to
facilitate friendships and potentially even flames of disembodied
romance. The solution: using knowledge
gained in the classroom to create
a platform that could provide
students with a glimmer of hope
in the
large shadow of despair cast by COVID-19. From class, Ileana
was familiar with coding and in one night, with the help of
her brother Jorge Valdez and Patrycja, created a website called
“OkZoomer.” Ileana said, “We created a clunky HTML website in
one night, and even though it had its bugs, it still worked.” This
website now has more than twenty thousand users, a testament to
her hard work and incredible matching algorithm.
“We are planning on launching an iOS version of the website in a
few weeks,” Valdez said. As amazing as her work with her startup has
been, she still cannot escape some patronization from her classmates.
Ileana feels that, in a particularly male-dominated field, her male
peers often tend to overexplain and treat her as if she is incapable of
accomplishing the task at hand. This could not be further from the
truth. Creation of a matching algorithm is “kind of complex,” in the
words of humble Valdez, and for an undergraduate to accomplish
such an astounding feat within the span of one night is truly a
remarkable feat. Valdez, however, is not worried about profit from
ad revenue or selling her site to other companies that might make
capital off her invention. She is instead a bubbly, compassionate, and
wildly intelligent woman whose passion for serving and making
others smile led her to create a site specifically for college students to
feel the same love she exudes, even from behind a computer screen.
Her goal was never to make profit, but to use her skills to bring
about positive change in a particularly trying time for everyone.
She told me a poignant anecdote about a student who told her he
had experienced difficulty making friends and especially romantic
connections due to his appearance. She said, “This one boy messaged
me and told me how grateful he was for the ‘OkZoomer’ platform
because he could never get dates in person. His story made my heart
melt.” “OkZoomer” provided a space for this student to be himself
and be confident in creating connections that will last far longer than
a quarantine period. Ileana has made an indelible positive impact on
the world, but this will not stop her from aspiring to achieve and
accomplish so much more as a leader and innovator in her field. ■
ART BY ELLIE GABRIEL
www.yalescientific.org
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 45
SPECIAL
Intersectionality
INTRODUCING SHEA AT YALE
Intersecting layers of marginalization mean that BIPOC women—and Black women
in particular—face unique experiences of discrimination in STEM. To highlight these
experiences, we have partnered with STEM and Health Equity Advocates at Yale (SHEA)
for the following pieces. Organized by alumni of Professor Carolyn Roberts’s Sickness and
Health in African-American History class and a group of students that authored an open letter
to pre-medical students, SHEA is an undergraduate organization at Yale that advocates for
racial justice in STEM. SHEA’s goals include demanding anti-racist curricula, uplifting underrepresented
STEM students, and supporting events and publications that seek to dismantle
systemic racism in STEM at Yale. For more information, visit http://bit.ly/SHEA_yale.
WHAT IS
MEANT FOR US?
BY
LELEDA
BERAKI
To be a woman in STEM” is a phrase we hear so often that it almost becomes white noise. We glance at the surface of
this concept and claim to understand the layers inside. To be a woman in STEM, to be overlooked while constantly
being watched, to be held to lower standards while expected to work harder, to be a spectacle while cast into the
shadows, to feel alone while numbers and pamphlets claim you are many. And to be a woman of color in STEM?
The quick glance around the classroom as you
ask yourself, “Am I the only one here?” The
incessant feeling that all eyes are drilling into
the back of your head, waiting for you to mess
up. The care with which you speak, dress, and
act, hoping to avoid the preconceived notions
you already think they hold. It’s drowning.
Drowning in expectations you set, drowning
in expectations others set, and drowning in the
complexities of your own psychology.
As women of color aspire to reach their
goals, they are met with textbooks that
praise the work of men while leaving out the
history of women, are taught by professors
speaking from pedestals of privilege, and
are constantly reminded that this field was
never meant for them. When trying to
visualize their future, they scramble to find
people who look like them, as others simply
flip a page and see their mirror image among
the words. Representation is many times
overlooked but can be the sole reason for
retention. It’s almost a never-ending cycle,
striving to create that representation while
needing to see it yourself. How does one
cope with that? How do we as women of color
balance our desire to be validated with our
aspirations to create validation for others?
Many fields, but especially our own,
regurgitate their value of diversity. Although
this was meant to create spaces of inclusivity,
it perpetuates the imposter’s syndrome already
boiling within us. We ask ourselves, did we get
here with our own merit or because there are
not many of us? We internalize the constant,
“Oh you got in because…” and the, “Why don’t
you do…,” then suddenly their words become
the voices in our heads. Although the thought
lingers, the answer is simple. We embarked on
a path never meant for our steps; we watched
our peers stride past us with ease. Nevertheless,
even as thorns scratched our legs, as vines
wrapped our feet, we still caught up. There is
no doubt that this spot was earned. No. This
spot was deserved.
It seems to me, more than the institutional
barriers, being in STEM is battling the push
and pull within our minds. While the most
important thing in class is passing the organic
chemistry exam, as soon as we step outside the
door, it shifts. Our minds are saturated with the
women of color everywhere whose lives are
taken with no remorse, whose worth has been
determined by someone else. We turn a corner,
open a newspaper, check our phone, and there
it is: the young girls of color who go missing,
who are stolen, who are forgotten…
A door is simply too weak to separate the
lives we live in society from the focus we
have in school.
Telling ourselves that we have come so far
doesn’t make this experience any easier. Being
a woman of color in STEM is a privilege and
a curse. Had we taken a different step as we
walked this path, perhaps we would be the ones
missing, stolen, or forgotten. Yet, even as we
embark on this journey, the threat remains. We
are not immune to the many ways society tears
us down simply because we wear a lab coat.
The path that I claimed was never meant for us,
has been walked on hundreds of times before by
women who look just like us. The eyes drilling
into your head? Those are your own. Women of
color face an immense amount of obstacles, but
we hold the true power to overcome them. ■
All quotes in this piece were provided by women
of color pursuing STEM at Yale College.
46 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Public Health
SPECIAL
IMAGE COURTESY OF MCDOW
Kendra McDow, a physician and
CDC medical epidemiologist,
is leading the charge for racial
justice in public health.
THE
OCKING
BOAT
How Dr. Kendra McDow Imbues
Public Health with Racial Justice
BY ATHENA STENOR
IMAGE COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
As an undergraduate, McDow worked with
Common Ground, an anti-racist organization, to
help New Orleans rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.
As I pored over LinkedIn, Twitter,
and various healthcare websites
in preparation for my interview
with Dr. Kendra McDow, a clear portrait
of the formidable female data scientist and
epidemiologist took shape in my mind.
Her resume is impressive. She holds an
undergraduate degree in biology and
religion from Swarthmore, a Masters in
Public Health (MPH) from Columbia, and
an MD from Mount Sinai. She currently
serves as a medical epidemiologist at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), where she has spent the past
few months promoting telehealth in the
COVID-19 pandemic. As I understand
firsthand the sacrifices Black women
must make in order to succeed in male-
dominated STEM fields, my invented Dr.
Kendra McDow was an amalgamation of
all the top-notch Black career women I had
encountered in the media—irreproachable
and a bit austere à la Annalise Keating of
How to Get Away with Murder or Olivia
Pope of Scandal. . Yet, on the late summer
morning of our interview, McDow’s sunny
voice sliced through the hazy monotony of
quarantine. She barely introduced herself.
The moment our phone lines connected,
McDow dissolved the stuffy formality of
www.yalescientific.org
interview etiquette and conversed with
me in the approachable, conspiratorial
manner of an aunt or beloved neighbor.
Despite the years she spent training with
the National Center for Health Statistics
as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS)
fellow, McDow doesn’t think of herself as a
data scientist. Most of her formal education
prepared her to be a pediatrician, and she often
finds herself missing the routine of seeing
patients and bonding with children and their
families. McDow’s pursuit of data science has
little to do with any particular love for numbers
and everything to do with the socio-political
influence of data in the technological age. Her
truest passion is, and has always been, affecting
material social change. Data science provides a
way for her to do so. “To sway public opinion, to
sway the opinion of [policy makers], you have
to be able to collect data, you have to be able
to analyze data… and you have to be able to
translate it into a message that is cohesive, into
a message that multiple audiences understand
and can take action based off of,” McDow said.
Setting Sail
Although she didn’t always see herself at
the CDC, McDow had long known that she
would never be quite satisfied by the typical
duties of a physician, constrained by a laser-
focus on individual patients. She went into her
medical training conscious of the fact that she
eventually wanted to improve health at the
population level and to rectify the systemic
injustices perpetrated against the African-
American community. As an undergraduate
student, McDow had spent time in New
Orleans rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina
as a member of Common Ground, an
anti-racism organization. She witnessed
how Common Ground’s efforts to address
structural inequality were still able to help
survivors in a personal way.
In time, her curiosity about the
intersection of healthcare and social
justice inspired her to get a MPH degree
between her third and fourth year of
medical school, if only to have a broader
knowledge base to draw on during patient
interactions. When confronted with racial
health disparities, having a public health
background allowed her to understand
that historical trauma manifests itself
in the very beings of marginalized
people, both today and tomorrow. “We
are learning that chronic stress, the
weathering that occurs, causes epigenetic
changes and may result in generational
inheritance of disease," McDow said.
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 47
SPECIAL
Public Health
“So, this is not just having an impact at
one person’s level, but it’s also affecting
generations. It’s affecting generations.”
The sentiment could just as easily be
applied to McDow’s own family history. She
was born and raised in Washington, D.C.,
but both sides of her family are originally
from South Carolina. Her mother and
paternal grandparents were all part of the
Great Migration, joining thousands of other
Black Americans in escaping segregation and
terrorism in the South. They left in search
of a setting where they could realize their
potential, where their worth would be judged
on merit rather than on a part of their identity
over which they had no control. D.C. was far
from a utopia, but it provided at least some
relief from oppressive Jim Crow laws in the
South. Her family’s willingness to uproot
for better opportunities would never be
forgotten. “It’s something that’s always stayed
with us, and that we have drawn strength
from,” McDow remarked.
So, McDow’s parents pushed her to excel in
her education, knowing that her credentials
would grant her access to the influence
necessary to help her community. She grew up
keenly aware of her history and her obligation
to improve the lives of others, and this personal
stake in social justice drove her later career
choices. The same historic subjugation that has
left its ghostly fingerprints in Black Americans’
DNA generated one of its most devoted
assailants. One could say McDow’s hunger for
righteousness was baked into her very being.
Doing so, however, would disregard the
work that McDow has done to unlearn
her own unconscious biases. When she
attended medical school in the early
2000s, she and the other medical students
were trained to diagnose patients based
on pattern recognition—a sanitized term
for stereotypes. In an exam, when given
a patient vignette that began with “young
African-American...” the medical students
could safely assume that the fictional patient
had sickle cell disease and know that they’d
be marked correct. Several years later, when
Central American patients tested positive
for the sickle cell trait at the community
health center where she worked, McDow
was puzzled. She told herself that they must
have had some Black ancestry. Eventually,
one of her mentors, a Guyanese doctor
who graduated from Howard University’s
College of Medicine in the 1950s, explained
to her that sickle cell disease was a genetic
mutation, not something caused by one’s
race or ethnicity. That conversation forced
McDow to separate the socially constructed
theory of race from the biological reality
of genetics, a fine distinction that she still
struggles to grasp fully. “It’s still difficult for
me to conceptualize that. It’s an unlearning;
it’s an unlearning that has to take place,” she
admitted. Despite her prior activism and
personal experiences, she was not immune
to the harmful mythos of race.
Shifting Course
McDow’s shortcomings only strengthened
her resolve to dismantle racial disparities
in healthcare. As a medical resident, she
questioned the leading theory that African-
“[Race] isn’t a
priority because
no one’s thinking
about it. And the
people who would
think about it are
not at the table.”
Americans’ poor health outcomes were caused
by soul food diets. Later, as a pediatrician, she
personally called school nurses, psychologists,
and guidance counselors to make sure that
ill children had the proper accommodations
because she knew that strong academic
performance leads to better economic status,
which then leads to better health as an adult.
Eventually, McDow became frustrated by
the limits of her reach as a lone physician. “I
felt like my hands were tied… I wanted to be
able to say that this child needs to connect to
[this specialist], but, for some reason, I can’t
even get them an appointment,” McDow said.
“Why is that? Why are the resources so lacking
that my patients cannot be connected to the
services they need, not because of any fault of
their own, but because the economic resources
are not there in the community because of
structural inequality, because of racism?”
The more time McDow spent as a
pediatrician, the more obvious it became
that medicine was too siloed for her
ambitions. As a public health professional,
she could work directly with the board of
education. She could focus exclusively on a
given community’s historical relationship
with government and healthcare systems
and develop far-reaching interventions to
address the modern repercussions of those
relationships. So, after a decade, McDow
applied to the EIS, leaving medicine behind
to enter public health. “I wanted to know how
I could join the community of people who are
thinking like that,” McDow said.
Rough Seas
In public health, McDow found a
community that, like her, was still grappling
with the mythos of race. For all its analysis
about the intersections of history and
collective wellness, public health still has many
blind spots with regards to race. Although
public health professionals have supported
emerging research detailing the origin and
mechanism of healthcare disparity, there is
a difference between extensively describing a
problem and fixing it. That, McDow believes,
is the current frontier of race and public
health: we understand how racism, not race,
acts as a social determinant of health, but
we are paralyzed by inexperience. “The issue
now is with the science that we have, with
the evidence that we have, how do we craft
interventions based on this?” McDow said.
“How do we evaluate those interventions?”
The challenge is partly caused by the lack
of diversity at the upper echelons of health
institutions. Black scientists, physicians,
and public health professionals are
underrepresented in leadership positions. As
a result, McDow opined, efforts to alleviate
the burden of disease on marginalized
communities have been reactionary instead
of proactive. “[Race] isn’t a priority because
no one’s thinking about it. And the people
who would think about it are not at the
table,” McDow elaborated. If our society
ever wants to be free of the multi-headed
beast of white supremacy, we must begin by
investigating who has access to the platforms
that could ameliorate racial inequality in the
first place. And then we must ask ourselves
the question that shifted the course of
Kendra McDow’s life: Why is that? ■
48 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
Biomedical Engineering
SPECIAL
IMAGE COURTESY OF PIXABAY
SCIENTIST
IMAGE COURTESY OF KORIE GRAYSON
Dr. Korie Grayson in her lab with a
microscope examining a cell culture.
How Korie Grayson balances
her STEM research with her
interests outside of STEM
BY GONNA NWAKUDU
When COVID-19 caused
businesses across the United
States to shut down, many
young people found themselves trapped
at home with an abundance of free time.
Many found solace in TikTok trends like
the #WipeItDownChallenge, which involves
wiping a mirror and switching between
two disparate appearances. For Dr. Korie
Grayson, a postdoctoral research fellow in
chemical engineering at the University of
Michigan, the trend was a way for her to
celebrate the completion of her PhD. “I was
a little bummed out and upset that I wasn’t
able to walk in person because of COVID,”
Grayson said. “I was like… this #WipeItDown
challenge looks kind of cool. I think it would
be a cool idea if I just showed myself getting
into my gown and [doing] certain swipes and
wipes.” In her version of the TikTok trend,
Grayson alternates between an AstroWorld
www.yalescientific.org
shirt and her red and black graduation regalia.
The video went viral, gaining likes and shares
from celebrities and aspiring scientists alike.
While it is not the only thing Grayson will
be known for, it encapsulates the engineer’s
dedication to fun and activism in her career.
Grayson’s PhD research involved targeted
drug delivery approaches to treat late-stage
prostate cancer. Inspired by her grandfather’s
passing from prostate cancer and her own
predisposition to colorectal cancer, Grayson
spent her PhD program analyzing whether
nanoparticle drugs decorated with TRAIL,
a protein that can induce cell death, could
target and penetrate primary prostate
tumors using leukocytes, immune cells
that are already in the body. “[TRAIL is]
specific to cancer cells but spares normal
cells,” she said. “We would use it to decorate
the particle. And so… [using E-selectin, a
cell surface molecule] it would latch onto
leukocytes in the blood and then target and
bombard cancer cells [to kill them].” She
subsequently examined the interactions
between her TRAIL-based nanoparticle
drug and other more common therapies for
metastatic cancer in 2D and 3D cultures.
She found that common clinical treatments
sensitized the tumors enough for TRAIL to
effectively kill prostate cancer cells.
During her postdoctoral position, she
hopes to extend her research to colorectal
cancer and COVID-19. Acute respiratory
distress syndrome (ARDS) is a deadly
condition that can affect COVID-19
patients. ARDS is often caused by
leukocytes like neutrophils infiltrating the
lungs. “If we can preferentially target a
certain leukocyte so they don’t do this…
then maybe we can spare people … at that
stage,” Grayson said. Grayson’s research
will focus on evaluating novel nano- and
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 49
SPECIAL
Biomedical Engineering
microparticles for therapy in neutrophilic,
acute inflammatory diseases and cancer.
Outside of engineering, Grayson’s interests
include participating in Carnival, a monthslong
annual Trinidadian custom that reaches
its peak the Monday and Tuesday before
Ash Wednesday. While she herself is not
Trinidadian, participating in the costuming
and parties has allowed her to completely
immerse herself in the cultural significance of
the event as well as regain ownership of her
appearance. “From an outsider looking in, it
looks really raunchy and debauchery, but [it
is] just a freedom of expression and sexual
liberation while celebrating the traditions and
culture of Trinidad and Tobago,” Grayson
said. Grayson carries this mindset to all
aspects of her life as a tattooed Black woman
in STEM, pushing back against the notion that
scientists must look a certain way in order to
be seen as professional. “We’re multifaceted.
We don’t necessarily fit the stereotype of just
being buttoned up, geeky, nerdy,” Grayson
said. “We also can wear bathing suits; we also
can go have fun; we might drink a little; we
have tattoos; we have piercings.”
Grayson stresses the importance of
visibility when it comes to pursuing a career
in STEM. “One of the main reasons why
women don’t remain in STEM, especially
women of color, is because we don’t have that
representation, and we don’t see it,” she said.
This is evident in the statistics: according
to a 2015 survey by the National Science
Foundation, Black women make up less than
ten percent of the STEM workforce and less
than four percent of STEM-related doctorate
programs. Additionally, sexism continues
to be a barrier of entry for aspiring female
scientists, as proven by a recent controversial
manuscript in the Journal of Vascular
Surgery that declared wearing bikinis to `be
“unprofessional behavior” for scientists. By
pushing back against the article’s policing of
what female scientists should and should not
wear, Grayson combats this misogyny.
Ultimately, Grayson aspires to not only
succeed in her research but also to show Black
women that success in STEM is possible for
people who look like them. “My purpose here
is greater than me,” Grayson said. “It’s about
growing and inspiring and helping other
people get to where I’m at and beyond.” ■
To learn more about Dr. Korie Grayson, check
out her Twitter/Instagram page at @teamkorie
and her website at koriegrayson.com.
50 Yale Scientific Magazine November 2020 www.yalescientific.org
What still needs to
be done to improve
GENDER
EQUITY
INCLUSION
IN STEM?
A Message from our
Editorial Board
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www.yalescientific.org
This September marks the fiftieth year
of coeducation in Yale College and the one
hundred and fiftieth year of female students
at Yale University. In 1869, Alice and Susan
Silliman were the first females to enroll and
joined the Yale School of Fine Arts. In 1885,
Alice Rufie Blake Jordan was the first female
to enroll at Yale Law School; she applied using
her initials and was assumed to be male. In
1894, Yale awarded its first PhD degrees to
women. In 1905, Florence Bingham Kinne
became a professor of pathology and the
first female instructor at Yale. It took another
sixty-four years before Yale admitted female
undergraduate students.
Despite these major steps forward,
progress towards equal representation at
Yale was slow. In 1977, five percent of female
faculty members were tenured, compared
to the fifty percent of male faculty. Males
made up the majority of the first-year class
until 1995. All residential colleges were
named after white men until 2017, when
Calhoun College was renamed to Grace
Hopper and Pauli Murray College was built.
Even today, women represent 57.6% of Yale
College undergraduates but only 38.6%
of STEM undergraduates. Women from
underrepresented backgrounds represent
16.6% of undergraduates but only 9.16% of
STEM undergraduates (p. 27). This issue
features the stories of women in STEM
who broke down these barriers and became
leaders in their fields.
Keeping true to our usual coverage, we
still feature cutting-edge advances made
by women researchers at Yale (see Features
section), as well as profiles of a few notable
women leaders in STEM (see Focus section)
whose individual journeys to success have
been nothing short of amazing. Equally
notable are women innovating in new STEM
fields and non-traditional roles. In stepping
outside of the norm, these women face the
dual challenges of being a woman in STEM
and forging their path without the guidance
of forerunners. Janet Iwasa took a significant
leap by branching out into biological
visualizations (pp. 38–39); women like Mariel
Pettee (p. 5) and Susan Magsamen (p. 40) are
pushing the boundaries of science into the
arts. And women like Shara Yurkiewicz (p.
36) and Erika Check Hayden (p. 41) are using
their expertise and voices to communicate
science—journalism is itself another maledominated
field, with its own set of challenges.
That they have all succeeded and left their
unique impact on the field is a testament to
Future
SPECIAL
their grit and courage in stepping where few
women have trodden before.
Although we started out with the intention
of featuring the achievements of standout
women in science, we were also inspired
by the collective ways they made science
accessible to other women in the field.
Akiko Iwasaki comments on restructuring
meetings to include more women and
offering support to those who must also take
care of their children at home (pp. 16–18).
Clare Flannery’s all-female medical research
team has fostered a culture of inclusion and
solidarity for their female patients (pp. 19–
21). As the only female faculty member in
the physics department, Meg Urry pushed
for more female representation—today,
there are five more with tenure (pp. 31–33).
Aside from being successful scientists, these
women are also fierce advocates for a more
inclusive academic culture, mentors to
younger women in STEM, and above all, role
models to current and future scientists.
The road ahead to true equality remains
long. Astrophysicist Katie Mack calls
attention to a culture of academia—that
requires constant geographic relocation
and thus creates instability—that is not
conducive to women with families (pp. 42–
43). The numbers reflect this “leaky pipeline”
phenomenon: while women receive half of
STEM undergraduate degrees, their numbers
decrease throughout each level of graduate
education such that they comprise only a
quarter of the STEM workforce (p. 27).
The numbers also tell another story:
underrepresented minority women, bearing
intersecting layers of marginalization, feel
these barriers more profoundly. Leleda Beraki
’24 highlights the unique weights Black women
pursuing STEM bear: isolation, imposter
syndrome, and the weight of stereotypes, all
while contending with the psychological toll of
seeing Black women face violence beyond the
classroom (p. 46). “Why is that?” asks Kendra
McDow, a Black physician and epidemiologist
at the CDC who has dedicated her life to
fighting racial injustice in medicine and public
health. To move forward, McDow urges, we
have to first critically evaluate the historical
and ongoing forces that shape current racial
disparities (pp. 47–48).
Women have come a long way in the fields
of STEM, but there is still more work to be
done and more progress to be made. As the
community of women in STEM continues to
grow, we hope we can inspire one another to
continue learning, working, and innovating. ■
November 2020 Yale Scientific Magazine 51
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