A Career Detour: Transforming Institutions and Organizations to Support an Inclusive STEMM Ecosystem

As a child starting school during the 1950s, I decided early on that I wanted to do something related to science. The only career that I knew of that involved science was medicine. So, for 3 years in college, I was a premed major. When I shifted in senior year to pursue graduate education, I aspired to become a professor like the wonderful advisor I had at the University of Washington who helped me reshape my science journey. While I did become a faculty member for a short while, most of my career has been spent at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest general science organization in the world, working in science and technology policy and science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medical (STEMM) education to change the face of science. As a Black girl growing up in the segregated South, I could not have imagined doing something like that as a career; I didn’t even know what policy was, the difference it made in our lives, or how to go about shaping it to inform and change the science ecosystem. And yet my science journey put me in the place where I now realize I was destined to be.