Women Scientists From The United States

"Too often girls and minorities get discouraged early in high school from pursuing a career in the atmospheric sciences"

"You must love chemistry; you must be committed; and you must prove yourself over and over."

"I do hope they recognize that I care deeply about Trinity and trying to make it a stronger institution, that fundamentally I want to leave the place better than it was when I came. It isn’t about me; it is about a better Trinity and my hopes for higher education being better and stronger for the country."

"I work and work and still it seems I have nothing done."

"Science fairs “serve as a natural breeding ground for budding scientists” and “as a continual source of female and minority science-minded students."

"I can admit now, in retrospect, that when you’re a Black female and you’re the only one in a particular situation, when something happens, you don’t know whether to view it through a lens of racism or not. You can’t tell because there aren’t other people who look like you. You don’t know if what is happening to you is because of your race or not."

"My mother was executive director of the Los Angeles Girl Scout Council. She was a leader, she knew how to interact with people, and she believed deeply in higher education. She would wake me up every morning and say, ‘You can be anything you want to be.’ If you grow up with that kind of confidence, it has a profound influence on the rest of your life."

"If I was talking to someone I mentor, I would say to make sure that you’re comfortable in your own skin. I don’t care what job you have. You need to know who you are, and then you look for a place that wants who you are. Then you go and do the best you can, being who you are authentically. And I think that’ll work."

"I have heard other women and people of color say that we feel like we have to work harder to prove that we know what we’re talking about. I got to where I am because I worked harder, I dug deeper, and I learned how to bring more people into the conversation and to see my point of view."

"I poured these feelings which have been stewing slowly for years into the regimen of restraint I needed to lose ten pounds in 7 weeks. Even this I feared wouldn’t be enough for me to be a viable competitor, but it was all I could reasonably do."

"I grudgingly accepted my unspoken duty to my mom to do this thing that continues to be a significant part of my life for better or worse. She unpacked and furnished my house while I concentrated on adjusting to working remotely for my job I kept from Boston. I employed what felt like grueling levels of self-discipline to prepare for the pageant. After all, I had moved here to pursue business opportunities in pageantry, and wouldn’t the title of Miss Colorado USA be a great foot in the door?"

"No matter how many times I go through it, I can’t help but feel its intensity which then mellows into ambivalence, leaving me in a stupor of more emotions than I can count."

"Although it was my first time at this pageant, I grew up competing in various pageants in Colorado up until I left for college at 15. I had competed twice in Miss Massachusetts USA with disappointing results."

"The discipline naturally spilled over into my work and I had a productive start to my entirely separate and equally significant remote work journey. My boyfriend was with me for it all and offered his observations and insights about all the newness in our lives."

"I want viewers to see a glimpse into the experiences of our elders, and then, perhaps, we can extend more grace and care for a group of people surviving a world that changed around them."

"Yes, there weren’t any African American women studying aerospace/mechanical like me. There weren’t any at my university, which was a historically Black college. I could have said that I felt out of sorts but because I played sports most of my life and I played with boys, I didn’t really feel so out of place."

"I graduated with high honors and passed the exams for all of New York's Technical High Schools but instead of attending those schools, I moved to Cambridge, Mass., to live with my grandparents and attended high school at the Cambridge School of Weston."

"I was used to kind of being the only girl a lot. I probably did better than most in terms of the cultural shock and not having other women around, but I had to deal with some prejudice as people doubted my capabilities. So, there are always challenges and I don’t think it just being about the color of your skin or your gender."

"That really got me excited about graduate school and I was attracted to the lab of Dan Hammer, who was interested in understanding how white blood cells — especially neutrophils, which take up pathogens — interact during the body’s inflammation response. I spent my graduate school days trying to understand how to create particles, artificial cells, that could mimic this behavior."

"My academic career now combines all this to try and understand the expression patterns of these cell surface receptors in cardiovascular disease."

"I was resistant to the notion of mentors for a long time, and part of that was probably me being defensive in the sense that people don’t randomly come up to folks like me and nominate us. For a long time, I didn’t get opportunities to interact with mentors in the way you might traditionally describe, but I did have interesting experiences."

"People just sometimes see what they want. They put their own filters on and choose to like or dislike you based on whatever they think. What I did was just worked really hard and proved them wrong."

"You have to know it’s your calling because it’s not easy in this area particularly when most of the people around you don’t look like you. You will run into hostility. There will be people who think you should not be there, and I had my share of experiences like that."

"I became interested in noise problems while attending a workshop at NSF. People from various companies discussed issues with deploying speech technology over VOIP and dealing with everyday noise."

"We’re going to keep innovating and seeing how we can fill a void that’s out there involving speech and sound.” — Carol Espy-Wilson, founder and CTO of OmniSpeech"

"Because of my training at MIT where we focused on understanding what’s unique about speech and understanding how it is produced. I could use my knowledge to deal with removing noise to help improve voice communications."

"You must have confidence in yourself, and for me my spiritual grounding was very important, knowing that God loves me as much as he loves anybody else and that He’ll fight battles I can’t. I’m not in a room to fight. I just believe in myself, and I believe in Him. Some of the groups I was a part of at MIT never had a woman or an African American before."

"The things I do on a day-to-day basis change over the course of the life cycle of a mission. Early on, you’re involved in the requirements and rules the design has to follow so you can meet your mission goals. So you work with people at all the different levels to develop the requirements and make sure all those rules are written properly. Then systems engineers are involved with verifying those requirements and developing tests and sitting in on the tests."

"Many engineers treat speech like it’s any other signal when it is not. As a professor, I had a couple of Ph.D. students who did dissertations in this area, and I had a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard for a year where I could put all of it together into a solution."

"You know one of the things I can say is that to get a doctorate — I have my doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT– you have to be willing to work hard and also have to be passionate about what you’re doing."

"The first time I remember being fascinated by space was when I read about how the solar system formed. The fact that it was formed from a giant cloud of gas and dust spewed out by supernovas and it all came together under gravity and made the Sun and all the planets – I thought it was bananas that scientists could figure all that out based on what they can see today. I remember thinking, “That’s really cool that we can know that about space.”"

"Usually, anticipation is a slow burn, but when you’re on stage in heels, under the bright lights, smiling nervously ahead waiting for the emcee to say your name, the anticipation burns hot and fast."

"That singular experience is why you are able to have this conversation with me today. The level of confidence that she had in making that proclamation that I could be an engineer was enough to carry me through. I went from that horribly failed exam to getting an A in the class."

"There’s an interesting journey to my research. The class that I was struggling with at the undergraduate level was fluid flow. That is one of the core courses in chemical engineering, and I remember leaving it going, “God, thank you and good riddance.”"

"It’s a little bit embarrassing, but real in the sense that there was no deliberate move towards engineering. In fact, growing up in Nigeria, engineering was often a profession reserved for men and women were steered toward careers in healthcare and medicine."

"I first realized I had an aptitude for Math and Science during my high school years at Marine Park JHS, where I was the only Black student enrolled in the Special Progress program. In my senior year of JHS, I won second place in the Science Fair and scored in the 90s on all my Regents and citywide exams."

"I think science is like tofu"

"The first one is a favorite is because when I was young, I got to see man go to the Moon."

"We each have a solemn duty to make positive contributions to the world. Well, my reasons for becoming an engineer were initially frivolous, but they eventually moved into something more meaningful. I want to have a positive impact on the world."

"We're going to a place that's super cool and is a juicy, juicy science target"

"I share this story to emphasize the critical importance for us to be socially conscious and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in our solutions."

"It's in a place that is really hard to study because Jupiter, my favorite planet, has a massive radiation field around it. Europa is orbiting inside that radiation field, so there are some pretty significant technical challenges with even conceiving a mission that can study a moon there."

"I do not stand here on my own two feet alone. None of us got here by our individual merit alone, whether it be teacher, friends, family, mentors, or role models, we each have one or multiple people to whom we are grateful for making this moment possible."

"Like, how you get there, how you deal with the radiation, how you power a spacecraft so far from the Sun. This talk will give people a peek into some of the interesting things that have happened along the way and hopefully plant a little seed of excitement that they can nurture over the next five years to get ready for all the science data that this mission is planning to send back."

"Whatever seasonings you put in it, it will just sop it right up. So, if you season it with racism, it will become racist. It’s incumbent upon me as a scientist to choose my marinade differently … to season it with multiplicity, season it with different thoughts, season it with change."

"A Michigan Engineer is one who does not just provide scientific and technological leadership, but is also one who is intellectually curious, socially conscious, creates collaborative solutions to societal problems, and promotes an inclusive and innovative community of service for the common good."

"I think in the long run, this focus on less complexity will drive the cost down for generative AI and make it more available for a broader global audience because at this time, it takes a significant amount of money to build a really large gen AI project."

"At this time, most of my technology work involves consulting with others at a very high level. For example, the specifics of issues associated with cybersecurity, blockchain technology, and a little bit of AI."

"My background is in computer hardware. But over the years, I have transitioned from hardware design to software design. But someone who's an expert in both or understands both is a more valued person. I keep my tentacles, if you will, in both hardware and software."

"Know what you were born to do. Know your purpose. Know your destiny..."