LIMFEF

Profiles of Minority Female Environmental Faculty

This page contains profiles of minority women who are pioneers and leaders as well as some of the most promising young scholars or "rising stars". It will also focus exclusively on contemporary minority female environmental scientists.

MELDI Program Director:

Dorceta E. Taylor

Female Profiles:

Claudia Benitez-Nelson

Clara Irazabal Zurita

Robin Kimmerer

Patty Loew

Xiangyi Lu

Leticia Marquez-Magana

Ratna Sharma-Shivappa

Beverly Wright

Dawn Wright "Deepsea Dawn"

Male Profiles:

Tsing-Chang "Mike" Chen

Man Lung "Desmond" Kwan

Wen Lin (a pseudonym)

MELDI Program Director

Dorceta E. Taylor

(1957-Present)

Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology

University of Michigan

School of Natural Resources and Environment

Center for Afroamerican and African Studies

Program Director, MELDI

"Mentoring is only as good as the protege's ability to recognize good advice and act on it." - Dorceta E. Taylor, 2005.

I became interested in the environment when I was a little girl growing up in rural Jamaica. One of my tasks was to tend the family rose garden and I became fascinated by the flowers and butterflies as well as the countless fruit trees in the yard. I loved going to the garden in the early morning because I could gaze at the nearby waterfall - I particularly liked it when it was obscured by the mist that sometimes blanketed the hillsides. When I was eight, my grammar school teacher opened a magical world to me. One afternoon the teacher led our class through the fields and to the banks of the river on which our small school perched. She handed each of us a new notebook; and as she carefully spelled out the words, "Environmental Studies," each child copied the letters precisely, being careful not to make a mistake. It was 1965. Our teacher told us that this was a new subject that that we would be studying. I was mesmerized!

The second awakening came four years later in 1969 during my first year in high school. I was then a twelve-year-old girl sitting in the front row of a crowded, sparsely-furnished classroom in Kingston waiting anxiously to see how long the substitute teacher would last before he or she would retreat to the staff room in despair. Being the honors students of the first-year high school class, my classmates had already mastered the art of being disruptive without breaking school rules or being punished too severely. Our collective rule-bending was always well organized and choreographed. Our favorite tactic was to begin a world knowledge contest before the teacher arrived in the room. Once begun, it was nigh impossible for a neophyte teacher to turn our attention to other subjects. Boys sat on one side of the room and girls on the other. We lobbed questions regarding obscure facts at each other. A scorekeeper kept order and recorded the score on the chalkboard. The object of the game was to settle a question that had plagued us all year, were boys smarter than girls? As talk of "women's liberation" filtered into our consciousness, the game got more intense. We spent hours in the library after school each day, trying to unearth facts that we would use to stymie the opposition. On this particular day, we were so caught up in the competition that we failed to notice a tall, elegant black man standing at the door. "What is the intraventricular septum?" he asked. There was stunned silence. It took three or four attempts to get some rough approximation of the answer. Sensing a challenge, the focus of the game shifted; it was now the class against the teacher. He fired questions at us and we fired questions at him for an hour. We couldn't stump him. Up to that point in my life, I had never met anyone who was so smart and who had such presence. Most of our teachers wanted no part of the game; they squelched it as soon as they walked in the room. We were intrigued. We stayed through the entire lunch hour to listen to him. He told us he was a professor, and "a learned man." That evening I went home and wrote a note to myself in the only private place in the house. I pulled my bed away from the wall and added one more goal to my list. On the wall I wrote, "Get a Ph.D.; become a professor and a learned woman." "The professor" as our American visitor became known, was in our school for a few more days and then simply vanished. None of us really knew his real name or could figure out why he had visited our school. For me, he stayed long enough to demonstrate that learning was an enjoyable life-long undertaking, and that a career involving the pursuit of knowledge was possible.

At the time I decided to become a professor, the career opportunities for and the aspirations of girls were limited. Despite the fact that I had no idea how I was going to attain my goal, I began pursuing it with intense determination from that age on. I knew that if I studied hard and got good grades, then the likelihood that the rest would fall in place was greatly enhanced.

In the meantime, my fascination with the environment continued - it only grew stronger after I was introduced to biology in high school. I specialized in zoology and botany passing both the University of Cambridge ordinary and advanced levels exams. I also entered a teacher-training college and studied to become a teacher at the same time I pursued my Cambridge advanced level studies. I became a certified high school science teacher in 1977. While teaching, I shared my enthusiasm for the environment with my students. Just before I left Jamaica in 1978, my second-year science class in the girls boarding school in which I taught, won the National Junior Science Exhibition award for the project I did with them studying light and shade tolerance of Pinto bean plants. That same year, one of the students I trained also became the regional Spelling Bee champion.

I completed my undergraduate education in the U.S., specializing in biology and environmental studies. At times I worked full time and also took a full-time course load. I graduated from Northeastern Illinois University with high honors in 1983. However, for graduate school I wanted to work more on the relationship between people and the environment. I was always concerned with poverty and social inequality (especially as it affected people in developing countries), and wanted to incorporate it more fully into my academic pursuits. At the time, I found the discipline of biology did not pay much attention to social issues so I decided to focus less on biology and more on environmental studies and sociology as a means of cultivating my interests.

When I was admitted to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 1983, I was the second black woman admitted to the master's program in the history of the school. I completed a Master of Forest Science degree in 1985 and was admitted into the Ph.D. program that same year. From 1985-1991, I completed a master of arts and a master of philosophy degree as well as dual doctorates. I developed an individualized program of study in which I pursued one Ph.D. in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and another in the Department of Sociology concurrently. I am the first black woman to get a Ph.D. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. (Founded in 1901, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies is the oldest school of its kind in the country.)

In choosing which graduate school to attend, I faced a dilemma - go to one of the schools that offered full fellowships or take out a large student loan to go to school where I felt I would get the best education. I chose the latter - and if faced with the same choice again today, would make the same decision. After completing my first master's degree, I got several national and university-wide fellowships to pursue doctoral and post-doctoral studies. While a doctoral student, I was the recipient of a Patricia Roberts Harris Fellowship, Yale Dissertation Fellowship, Bouchet Dissertation Fellowship, and a National Research Council Ford Dissertation Fellowship. I also received two Mellon fellowships to conduct dissertation field research in the Virgin Islands and to study organization theory.

In 1991 I received a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellowship to conduct research in England. I also lived in Canada for a year. In 1992, I applied for post-doctoral and faculty positions at the same time. I received a Rockefeller-Ford post-doctoral fellowship in Michigan's Poverty and the Underclass program. I was also offered a tenure-track position with a joint appointment in the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS) at the same time. I accepted both positions at Michigan: I spent the first year as a post-doctoral fellow and assumed full-time faculty responsibilities in 1993.

I am currently an Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology at the University of Michigan where I teach courses in environmental history, environmental politics, environmental justice, environment and development, gender and environment, and sociological theory. My research focuses on history of mainstream and environmental justice ideology and activism, social movements and framing, and diversity in the environmental field. I completed two books recently that are currently in review. The first, which focuses on the rise of the urban environmental movement is entitled: Environment, Work and Recreation in American Cities: 1600s-1900s. Disorder, Inequality and Social Change. The second manuscript which analyzes the rise of the conservation movement is entitled: Outward Bound: Manliness, Wealth, Race and the Rise of the Environmental Movement. 1830s-1930s. I am currently working on a third manuscript on minorities and the environment which I hope to complete in the next year that will be entitled: People of Color and the Environment: 1600s-1900s.

I am currently the Program Director for the Minority Environmental Leadership Development Initiative (MELDI - http://www.umich.edu/~meldi). MELDI's initial funding came from the Joyce Foundation. I am currently conducting a national study of minority and white students in university environmental programs to find out about their preparation for the environmental workforce, willingness to work in environmental organizations upon graduation, salary expectations, and whether they consider issues related to equity and diversity in the workplace relevant to their job satisfaction. I am also conducting a parallel study of employees in environmental organizations to find out about their work experiences. A third study is being conducted among environmental organizations to find out about institutional factors relating to recruitment and retention of employees, the institution of mentoring programs, diversity efforts, employee review procedures, and the demographic characteristics of these organizations.

I am also conducting a fourth study that is closely related to those already mentioned. I am working on a National Science Foundation-sponsored project that seeks to examine the status of minority faculty in university environmental departments (see http://www.umich.edu/limfef). I am conducting a survey of minority and white faculty in an attempt to find out about recruitment, retention, promotion and tenure, career development, opportunities to collaborate with colleagues or take on leadership roles, networking, and mentoring. I am also currently organizing a National Summit on Diversity in the Environmental Field. The goal of the summit is to bring together leaders of environmental organizations, government environmental agencies, environmental grantmaking foundations, academics, students, and corporate representatives to discuss the state of diversity in the environmental field and formulate next steps.

I have received several awards. Most recently, I received the Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Environmental Scholars Program fellowship to be in residence at Yale in Fall 2005. I am currently a member of the Yale School of Forestry's Leadership Council, and Vice-Chair of the Board of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation. In addition, I review proposals for the National Science Foundation and National Research Council. I also review journal articles for a number of leading journals. I recently served on the selection committee for the Morris K. Udall Foundation fellowship program. Because of the nature of my work and the interest in environmental justice, I get numerous requests for speaking engagements. As a mother of young twins, I try to balance life and career by limiting the number of speaking engagements I commit to in a given year. My professional life is an important part of my identity, but family is also very important. It is important to my husband and I to take the time to raise our girls so that they become strong women who can make intelligent choices and balance the various aspects of their lives when they get older.

Nothing in life is easy, and embarking on an environmental career is by no means a walk in the park. In many ways, the easy option for me would have been to continue on the pre-med path and become a doctor or a biomedical researcher. Subjects like biology, botany, zoology came effortlessly to me, but I would have been extremely unhappy with those choices. I took the road less traveled by switching from a purely natural science degree to a blend of social and natural science. This was risky - especially since the switch did not occur till I was in graduate school, and at the time I made the switch, I had little social science background. However, once I decided on the career I wanted and finally figured out all the steps I needed to take to attain it, I was willing to go against conventional wisdom, be ostracized by my peers, take the risk of being the "only one" or the "first one" to achieve my objectives. At first I just "toughed it out," but later I began to realize that many great leaders or thinkers were very unconventional. Simply following the crowd often leaves little for innovation. Over time, I began to view my unconventional path and choices as preparation for something unusual - I don't know yet what that might be.

I absolutely enjoy being a professor and would do nothing else despite the fact that I could earn a lot more money in other jobs. However, money has never driven my career choices - freedom to control my time, thought processes, and area of research, as well as the chance to work with young people have always been far more important to me than money. Furthermore, I cannot imagine myself working in any other field. I discovered early on that I hated the 9-5 routine, being stuck in an office, and having someone watch over me all the time. I work best when I control my time and creativity. Academia is the ultimate place in allowing for that. I work long hours every day of the week. If I were expected to put in that amount time in an office, I would be much less inclined to do so.

I like meeting and working with students, teaching them and watching the "light bulb turn on" in their heads. I mentor many students at the University of Michigan and elsewhere. I like the growth and progress one sees in students as they mature and develop their own careers. This is the most exciting part of my career.

There are ebbs and flows to everyone's career. The periods of normalcy are sometimes interrupted by intense high and lows. One such low point occurred in 1987. I was then a second-year doctoral student attending a professional conference in Washington, D.C. on a hot, humid day in August. Somewhat apprehensively, I walked into a social gathering of people in my field. I met a few professors and students from other universities and was just starting to feel comfortable when an older gentleman walked over to me - I was the only minority person in the room - and said in a loud voice, "What are you doing here? Deliveries are in the rear!" Nothing prepares one for moments like this and all the things you tell yourself you should have said or should have done completely escape you (they usually comeback after the moment has passed). The room went silent. All fifty or so people in the room stared at me. I looked at the man and said, "The same thing everybody else is doing here." I don't quite remember what else I said. I knew I took a sip of my wine and turned back to the person I was conversing with before being interrupted. For the next little while, two competing thoughts raced through my mind - leave the room and conference immediately or stay. Instinct took over, I stayed. It also occurred to me that no one said anything; after an awkward pause lasting a few seconds, everyone went back to their wine, cheese and conversation.

I later learned that the man who confronted me was a "big name" professor in the discipline. Indeed he is quite renowned in the field and has a reputation as a liberal thinker. About an hour after initially confronting me, the man approached me again and quietly said, "I am sorry I said that to you. You were wearing white and I thought you were the server. I just came out of a long meeting, I am tired and I just snapped." No one else in the gathering ever said anything about the event till last year. The young man I was talking to when the incident occurred sent me an email out of the blue raising the issue again. As it turned out, he was a first-year doctoral student studying under the professor and felt powerless to intervene.

In the few seconds I pondered staying or leaving the room, I didn't think of the larger ramifications of the decision. Leaving the room would have meant leaving the discipline (and if I was going to do that I wanted to do it on my own terms). As it turns out, to this day, just about every article or book submitted for publication, research grant submitted for funding, even my review for tenure go through some of the people who were in that room. Though I did not know it at the time, a decision to stay in the room really meant I had to figure out how to have some kind of long-term professional relationship with the people in that room.

I haven't allowed events like this to cloud my view of field or the people in it. Over the years, I have met and worked with many people who have been incredibly gracious and generous with their time. My advisors at Yale, William Burch, Paul DiMaggio, Wendell Bell and Kai Erikson helped me how to think more analytically at the same time they pushed me to produce work of very high standards. They were willing to give advice when I sought it. Throughout my profession, I have always sought advice from people who are more senior and who understand how systems, institutions and networks function. I maintain contact with people who understand the unwritten and informal rules of the game since these are often crucial to one's career. At the University of Michigan, senior colleagues like Paul Mohai and Bobbi Low helped me to understand the intricate ways in which academic departments functioned. On a larger scale, I have maintained contact with a large number of people who I can always count on to give me aperspective that comes from outside the institution in which I work. Mentoring is only as good as the protege's ability to recognize good advice and act on it. To young people considering a career in the environmental field, if you don't have a mentor, get one! Once you do have a mentor, be aware that the protege plays an active role in the mentoring process. That is, the protege sets goals, seeks out good mentors, solicits advice, acts on the advice given, and makes the adjustments necessary to mature, meet their goals and flourish.

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Female Profiles

Claudia Benitez-Nelson

(1972-Present)

Assistant Professor, Marine Science Program, Department of Geolgocial Sciences

University of South Carolina

"There are now good strong networks comprised of successful minority women for people coming into this field.. You don't have to feel like you're the only one." - Claudia Benitez-Nelson, 2006.

Benitez-Nelson is one of five children born to Raoul St. Pierre, a physician, and Nurith, a nurse practitioner. Though the family lived in New York when she was very young, they moved to Seattle when she was six, and Benitez-Nelson says growing up there had an impact on her budding intellectual interests. "Seattle is a very environmentally conscious city," she notes. "I couldn't help but be aware of environmental issues."

Water is also a big part of Seattle's livelihood, and Benitez-Nelson was always attracted to it. She began her college career studying chemistry "because I was good at it;" she then took an introduction to Oceanography course and found that she was good at that too. However, it took the guidance of a mentor to make her realize that she could pursue her scientific interests professionally. "At first, it didn't occur to me that I could study these subjects or have a career in them," she admits. "[But] one day, my professor told me to think about Marine Science as a career. He really got me involved and interested, and sent me to an advisor in the Oceanography Department. That's how it all started."

Benitez-Nelson earned her B.S. in Chemistry and Chemical Oceanography from the University of Washington in 1992, and her Ph.D. in Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution joint program in 1999. Three weeks after receiving her doctorate, Benitez-Nelson took a job as a research faculty member at the University of Hawaii. "I had worked in labs as a research assistant up until then, but that was my first real environmental research job," she says. "I wasn't required to teach or mentor students, I just did research." Benitez-Nelson's research there involved examining how and in what forms phosphorous is utilized by marine organisms for growth. She also looked at how carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere by examining the formation and sinking of carbon containing particles in the ocean.

Benitez-Nelson is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches and continues to do research. She is now in her fourth year at the institution. "I found out the job was available, thought the position looked great and applied for it," she says simply. She is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the school's Marine Science Program, where she plays an additional role: "I'm basically mom to the undergraduates here. I make sure everything is going well." Benitez-Nelson is still interested in phosphorus cycling, and is currently developing new techniques to examine the chemical composition of phosphorus in marine systems. She recently served as the lead investigator of a large interdisciplinary project examining the role of cyclonic eddies (large oceanographic whirlpools) in marine plant and animal production.

Benitez-Nelson's role as both mentor and surrogate mother to her department's undergraduates stems in part from experience with her own mentors, especially her relationships with female professors and other female scientists. "In my field there are few to no minorities, so my mentors have mostly been women I saw who were successful," she explains. "Those women became great academics and research scientists. They were married with kids and could do it all. They weren't perfect, of course, but they were getting it done. I liked them and wanted to be one of them." She was also encouraged by her "outstanding" Ph.D. advisor, Ken Buesseler, and continues to look to her colleagues at the University of South Carolina for mentorship, especially Drs. Billy Moore and Bob Thunell: "Whenever I have questions, I go to them." She notes that her diverse range of mentors share one important characteristic: they are people who take their science seriously, but aren't consumed by it. "They thought it important to communicate science in a way that all people could understand, and they also thought it important to be with family," Benitez-Nelson says. She tries to follow their lead as much as possible, and have, as she puts it, "a life outside work."

Benitez-Nelson is now a mentor to developing scientists herself, a role that she cherishes. "Integrating research with teaching and mentorship has been the highlight of my career so far," she says. She admits mentorship wasn't something that initially attracted her, but through experience she discovered she loved it, and now "I try to do it all the time." She is currently involved in a number of diversity-related mentorship activities, including the South Carolina Alliance for Minority Participation, the Minorities Striving and Pursuing Higher Degrees of Success in Earth System Science initiative (MSPHDs), and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). She also runs a program that takes graduate students into middle schools to do science projects with at-risk kids, and has mentored high school students in her lab. Benitez-Nelson notes that all of the programs she's a part of are mentoring programs because "that's how you get people involved. As a mentor, I can show people that they can go into the environmental science field, they can get a good job, and they might like it. That's how I increase diversity directly."

Although Benitez-Nelson describes her career as being "wonderful" overall, there have been a few rough spots. One was the birth of her first child. "After my son was born, I loved being with him," she recalls. "It suddenly put things in perspective in terms of what was important and what wasn't." Benitez-Nelson says that at times, lack of sleep became a problem, and it was difficult to manage the shift in focus between her career and her son. "My career wasn't as important at that point-instead, my son was the highlight of my life," she says. However, she was able to get through that period with the support and encouragement of her mentors and her family, especially her husband and mom. "Life's been pretty good in general," Benitez-Nelson says. "Everyone has hardships, but you get through them."

Benitez-Nelson acknowledges that it can sometimes be difficult working in the scientific field when "[I] look like I do." She notes that she has sometimes been mistaken for a secretary because of her race and gender, and people have at times assumed she'd be more "comfortable" in certain areas of a city solely because that's where "minorities live." She realizes that such mistakes are often made out of ignorance rather than malice; however, educating others can become tiresome after awhile. Fortunately, Benitez-Nelson notes that attitudes like these are slowly improving. "I think it's changing," she says. "There is a lot of progress being made in people's perceptions, and how they think."

Benitez-Nelson is hopeful about engaging more minorities in the environmental field. "Once they consider it, a lot of minorities are excited about it," she notes. "It's getting them to consider environmental science as a career that's problematic." As for minorities pursuing careers in the field, Benitez-Nelson has this advice: "There are now good strong networks comprised of successful minority women for people coming into this field. You don't have to feel like you're the only one."

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Gillian Bowser

Adjunct Professor and Research Scientist

Texas A&M University

"Find something or someone that gives you strength." - Gillian Bowser, 2006.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Gillian Bowser didn't have much exposure to environmental issues or the natural world. However, her New York upbringing did provide her with something that helped her succeed as an African American woman in the environmental field. "New Yorkers are just so darn proud of who they are," Bowser says, laughing. "Living there, you're introduced to so many different things and cultures, that it's easy to see things as challenges rather than barriers."

Bowser attended high school at the LaGuardia School of Music and the Arts in New York City, and started out majoring in medical illustration at Northwestern University in Chicago. She soon realized how much she enjoyed biology, and it ended up as her major. Her career interest in the environment and conservation was also launched in college, when she had a seasonal job at the front desk of the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. She was introduced to the National Park Service (NPS) by friendly park staff, and started as a wildlife biologist at Yellowstone through the NPS in 1980. Bowser continued to work at Yellowstone through the NPS cooperative education program as an undergraduate and beyond; by 1984, she was a full-time employee, doing research on elk, bison, mice, and butterflies. NPS has sponsored Bowser's research ever since, including her master's work in Zoology at the University of Vermont, and her doctoral research in population genetics at Badlands National Park through the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Contrary to her original plans, "I've been an ecologist and wildlife biologist my whole career," Bowser says.

In her current position, Bowser still works for the NPS but is stationed at Texas A&M University. The unique position gives her the flexibility to mentor undergraduate and graduate students, do research projects with professors, give guest lectures, and serve as the NPS liaison to the Gulf Coast Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit. Bowser relishes the opportunities a university setting allows her, especially her ability to mentor students coming up in the field. She calls her mentoring opportunities "the greatest joy of being back at a university," especially when she gets to work with minority students. "The university field at the grad level is very white-there's not much diversity in the student ranks," Bowser laments. "It's important for them to have diverse mentors. It can be a different, strange environment for them, and I like to make sure they feel ok and they know that their challenges are understood." Bowser recognizes the importance of minority mentoring at least in part because of her own experience coming up in the field. Her biggest mentor, spanning her career at NPS, is J.T. Reynolds, the Superintendent of Death Valley National Park. "When I started at NPS, there were no blacks," she says. "He was the first black person I met in a Park Service uniform. He immediately took me under his wing as a mentor, and has been a guiding force for me ever since." Bowser says Robert Stanton, the first black NPS director, was also a tremendous role model. She worked as Stanton's assistant in Washington, D.C., and says that seeing Stanton handle the political pressures that accompany conserving national park lands was tremendously influential. "It was eye-opening to be in D.C., and see the pressures on the parks from all sides," Bowser says. "And it was amazing to watch Mr. Stanton do his job. He is such a gentleman, so committed and so poised. Most people say he was the most incredible director we ever had."

Bowser also credits her major advisor, Bette Loiselle, and post-doc advisor, Jill Baron, for their commitment to diversity in science and continuing friendship. Bowser says that Loiselle "Developed a lab that was so multi-cultural that we all felt welcomed, challenged, and groundbreaking at the same time. Of fourteen people there, only two were Caucasians. The environment was so supportive for me, to have that background, and to know that you can help people foster that strength." Baron ran a similarly multicultural lab that thrived on diversity and support.

Bowser still keeps in touch with all her mentors, and draws on their examples in her own mentoring endeavors. "The people that nurture you throughout your career are just so critical," she notes. Bowser is especially proud of her involvement in a Student Conservation Association internship program that matches students with a mentor and places them in national parks. She is mentoring two female African American students from Prairie A&M University through the program. "Neither of them had ever been in a national park-it was so fun to see them, and the other students, go and get excited about stewardship of our natural resources," Bowser says. "I got them together with my mentor J.T. Reynolds, and they plan to go on to grad school. I hope they go into conservation as a career, but even if they don't, maybe they will take their own kids to a park, and know the kind of possibilities that it offers."

In addition to the mentoring opportunities, Bowser says she remains happy in her field because she can study a subject that she loves and make a visible difference. She considers her greatest scientific achievement to be assisting with taxa surveys of all the national parks, working in partnership with her colleague Keith Langdon at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. "It helped the parks understand the importance of invertebrates, how much things like bugs are the linch-pins of complicated ecological systems," Bowser explains. Even a project that she initially thought of as a career low point eventually had its rewards. "They decided to run a highway construction project through an area where we were trying to protect the desert tortoise in Joshua Tree National Park," she says. "It was very discouraging, and I left while the project was still going on." However, the builders eventually took Bowser's groups' advice and put passages in cubs to protect the tortoises and the low turned into a high. "It was really neat," Bowser says. "Seeing those returns is what is cool about the environmental field. You can take people places and show them what you've accomplished."

Bowser says that for minorities especially, learning to view certain circumstances as challenges rather than barriers is key to success as a minority in the non-diverse environmental field. "The majority has given us images of who we are-images that blacks don't use the natural environment, that there's a cultural history of blacks being intimidated by the natural environment," she says. "As African American women, we're taught to think that things like spiders and snakes are scary. But you can work through that, and realize that these things are not so scary. You can grow and become much stronger." She emphasizes the importance of a supportive network to the process of growing and facing those challenges. "Find something or someone that gives you strength-whether that be church, family, or mentors," she says. "You can also draw strength from being a pioneer. Even though it feels far from the civil rights movement, if you can get one more minority out there, it's an accomplishment. Take advantageof that...use it as a strength."

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Renae Brodie

(1970-Present)

Assistant Professor

University of South Carolina

"I truly can't imagine doing anything else." - Renae Brodie, 2006.

Growing up in South Dakota as the daughter of medical professionals-mother Jane Gidley was a neo-natal intensive care nurse, and father Leon Brodie was a dentist-who excelled at math and science in school, it was assumed that Renae Brodie would become a doctor. But after working in a hospital as an undergraduate pre-med, Brodie found that she "didn't like it [medicine] at all." However, she did like research science. And despite the fact that her only real exposure to water had come during her family's yearly trips to Los Angeles beaches growing up, she was especially interested in marine science. When she found out that she could, indeed, make a living out of that as well, Brodie switched her major from pre-med to marine biology "almost as a default," and has remained in the field ever since.

Brodie graduated from the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1991 with a B.S. in Aquatic Biology, then moved on to the University of Washington for a Ph.D. in Zoology. It was there that she would meet her most important mentor, her graduate advisor Alan Kohn. Despite the fact that Brodie was both the only woman and the only minority in his lab, she didn't feel like she was treated any differently. "I was one of his last students-I came in at the end of his career," she recalls. "He was old school...he had no problem showing displeasure, but he took a lot of time to mentor me and look over my work." Brodie says that minorities can sometimes face lower expectations in academic situations, especially in the sciences, but she didn't feel that was the case in Kohn's lab. "Sometimes it seems like, 'You're the smartest black person we could find," Brodie says. "For me it was nothing like that. I found that really refreshing. I don't remember him ever referring to me as a black person. I was just another person in his lab."

After obtaining her Ph.D., Brodie got a post-doc fellowship at the Smithsonian's Marine Station in Florida, where she conducted research on the development of land-crab gills during the transition from marine to terrestrial environments. During that period, she was offered a tenure-track faculty position with the University of South Carolina's Department of Biological Sciences. She deferred that temporarily to do more research on evolving animal morphology in Panama, but eventually accepted. Today, Brodie is an Assistant Professor of Biology at USC; though she spends most of her time conducting research on eco-physiology and larval biology, she also teaches courses in bio-physical ecology and animal behavior.

Brodie mentors a number of undergraduate students in her lab; in fact, she considers being a good mentor the main focus of her career, and her most significant achievement thus far. "I'm still working on it," she says. However, like her own mentor Alan Kohn, expectations for her mentees are high. "I recruit undergrads every semester, and one or two come with me every research season. [But] I don't have to recruit so much anymore...I can screen and take the best ones. I get the very best people I can in here."

Brodie is also the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER grant, which finances her work to increase minority representation in research science. Her diversity work emphasizes both research and education. In addition to mentoring a number of minority students in her lab, Brodie does science outreach programs in local, predominantly black elementary schools. "We go into a school once a month and do hands-on science work directed by the children's interest, usually a one to two hour lesson centered around a certain topic." Though Brodie admits that list can be somewhat eclectic-one unit was entitled "Dangerous Birds"-and certain topics don't get covered, the idea is to get kids excited about science. "The main point is to interact with the kids, and foster their enthusiasm for science," she says.

Brodie says she remains in the environmental field because of the intellectual freedom and stimulation it provides. "I develop my own approach to research-it's completely self-directed and self-motivated," she says. "As long as I can find someone to fund my ideas, I can do whatever I want. It's intellectually invigorating...I love exchanging ideas with bright colleagues, and I get the opportunity to do a lot of traveling. I truly can't imagine doing anything else." Brodie notes the friendships and professional collaborations she has developed with colleagues as being the highlights of her career. Though it was difficult for her to establish herself each time she moved to a new position, she finds her ongoing relationships with her colleagues, students and mentees to be the most rewarding aspects of working in academia.

"What helped me get through grad school was hooking up with other minority grad students," Brodie says. Though the University of Washington did not have a diverse student population at that time, Brodie sought out other minority women in the sciences and formed a support network. "I found two other minority women in science departments, and the three of us stuck together and encouraged each other to finish," she says. Though she had friends within her own department, Brodie says it was a comfort to have others who understood the minority perspective. "It really helps to have other people who are actually experiencing the same thing and could empathize. It lowered my stress level considerably." Brodie recommends that young minorities pursuing environmental careers do the same: "If there are no minorities in their lab/department, seek out minorities in other science departments and build relationships with them."

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Nilda Burgos

(1963-Present)

Associate Professor of Weed Science

University of Arkansas

"Pick up an area of interest and go with it, and you will do very well." - NNilda Burgos, 2006.

Nilda Burgos, Associate Professor of Weed Science at the University of Arkansas, says that her career as a weed scientist has "everything to do" with her upbringing in a subsistence farming community in the Philippines. "It influenced my career 100%," she says. "I acquired an understanding of how a plant is developing, and interactions between crops and their environment." Burgos says that beyond providing inspiration and basic knowledge about agriculture, her background also instilled a kind of fortitude that helps in her line of work. "Doing research in the field presents different kinds of challenges," she says. "One has to be physically tough and mentally resilient. I got that all from where I grew up. Heat and humidity down in the Mississippi River Delta are not so bad for me."

Burgos earned her B.S. in Agronomy with a Soil Fertility major at the Visayas State College of Agriculture, Philippines. After graduating, she worked on a research project examining the uses of nitrogen-fixing trees as natural soil ameliorants for corn production on hilly land, and continued to work on similar research projects in the Philippines from 1983-1991. During one of those projects, she met a consultant who was a weed science Professor (Dr. Ron Talbert) from the University of Arkansas; realizing her potential for further scientific study, he recruited her for graduate school. She excelled there, earning her Master's degree and later her Ph.D. in Weed Science. After earning her doctorate in 1997, Burgos worked as a researcher for an agro-chemical company. However, a vacant faculty position sprung up at Arkansas, and Burgos soon found herself a faculty and researcher in the same department where she had been a student. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Burgos has now established a solid reputation as a researcher examining questions of weed physiology; weed population diversity in terms of genetics and morphology; and their implications for crop production and agricultural environments.

Burgos credits Dr. Ron Talbert, her advisor while in graduate school and major mentor when she returned to Arkansas as faculty, and two other colleagues, Dr. Dick Oliver and Dr. Jim Barrentine, as "excellent mentors. They guided and supported me and made things a lot easier for me since the beginning," she says. Burgos says she has also benefited greatly from her collaborations with other department faculty in different research specialties; for example, she has teamed with specialists to examine nitrogen uptake in rice and weedy rice, and with rice breeders and weed science extension specialists to examine gene flow in that crop. She also has collaborators outside of the Crop Science department. Currently, she works very closely with a vegetable breeder, Dr. Teddy Morelock, at the Horticulture department and an extension specialist at Oklahoma State University, in finding weed control options for cowpeas and other vegetable crops. "I have been enriched a lot by these collaborations," Burgos says. "I also consider my collaborators my mentors."

Burgos says that mentors have also played a critical role in helping her transition to, and succeed in, an American university setting. Since then, she has advised a number of minority and international students in similar situations, and does her best to help them adjust to what may be an unfamiliar and intimidating environment. Burgos is also actively involved in efforts to promote diversity awareness and Filipino culture, including serving as the secretary of the International Student Organization as a graduate student, and as a former President and regular member of the Northwest Arkansas Filipino-American Association. "The one constant thing I've been involved in has been community service and charity work," she says.

Burgos says she continues to work in the environmental field because "I feel connected to it. I can make the best contributions in this field because I truly understand a lot of the problems that are plaguing this area, and my training has been in this area since the very beginning." Burgos says the more knowledge she gains in her field, the more she enjoys doing research and learning even more. She notes that the field offers a wealth of opportunities, both in terms of research questions and employment, and she encourages minorities to pursue the environmental field if they have the desire to see it through. "Just do your best, be tenacious, and have an open mind," she advises. "It's mind-boggling how much needs to be done in this area. Pick up an area of interest and go with it, and you will do very well. There are lots of opportunities for employment, and innumerable resources you can use to learn."

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Adrienne Cooper

(1962-Present)

Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering

Temple University

"Not working in the environmental field, especially as someone who's in technology, would be irresponsible." - Adrienne Cooper, 2006.

"When I look and see the things that are going on around me every day, it makes it that much clearer to me that the work I do needs to be done, and we need more people doing it," says Adrienne Cooper. Cooper, an Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering at Temple University, says finding Green applications for new technologies is the primary motivation for her work-indeed, she believes it is the only responsible thing for someone with her skills and background. "We still have people dying in this world from lack of access to clean water," she says. "In lots of ways, our environment is getting worse, not better. We still have a group of people-people in power-who refuse to accept that we need to make changes in order to maintain human existence. Not working in the environmental field, especially as someone who's in technology, would be irresponsible.""

The daughter of a university librarian and physics professor, Cooper always knew she was interested in science. However, she didn't start out pursuing an environmental path. She majored in Chemical Engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, where she did some work in water management and wastewater treatment (beginning with the Tennessee Valley Authority's river management division) and also worked with nuclear waste. After graduating, Cooper worked in various jobs for DuPont Chemicals for the next eight years.

At one point during Cooper's career at DuPont, when she was working in a facility that manufactured Freon, a group from Greenpeace showed up to protest. "They hung a huge banner on the water tower that said 'Number One Ozone Depleter,'" Cooper recalls. "It was then that I sort of realized the impact of what I was doing on the environment." Cooper's environmental consciousness grew slowly over the rest of her time at DuPont, to the point where when she was offered a "wonderful opportunity" in the company's CFC's division, "My first thought was, 'You mean a wonderful opportunity to deplete the ozone layer?'" Cooper recalls, laughing. She took the job, but knew that she would soon have to move on and do something else.

Cooper decided to get her PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Florida. Soon after earning her doctorate in 1998, she was hired as faculty at the University of South Carolina, moving on to Temple University in 2003. Her current research focuses on the uses of catalytic processes, with two primary applications: designing biocatalytic processes for Green engineering, and photocatalytic water treatment and remediation.

A variety of people have played a role in shaping Cooper's career choices and interests, each in their own way. "I've had a number of people who have played very specific roles, as opposed to one individual who was my go-to person," she explains. In addition to the help and support of her dissertation advisors (Tom Crisman and Yogi Goswami), Jonathan Earl, an Associate Dean at the University of Florida, "Was there for me all throughout my graduate career and ever after," Cooper says. "His whole family became my substitute family." In terms of finding her way as an African American woman in a predominantly white, male field, Cooper was inspired by a group of women she worked with at DuPont. "This was a group of women who were about as high a flyer as a black woman could be in corporate America at that time," she says. "They helped me clearly identify who I was and where I wanted to go, and how to do the things I wanted to do without compromising."

By inspiring her ability and desire to be a scientist, Cooper says her father was probably her first and most important mentor. "He taught physics, and I would sit in on his classes," she recalls. "He would get up at four in the morning to help me with my algebra until I could figure out what was going on. He had more patience than any one human being should be allowed to have." Cooper says her father would also take every opportunity to point out instances and applications of science in the every day world, something that influenced her as a teacher as well as a scientist. "He was an excellent teacher," Cooper says. "I remember not understanding why he was a teacher-he could have made much more money doing other things. But now I understand."

For someone who had no intention of being a teacher herself, Cooper has found unexpected satisfaction in mentoring students. While she sometimes finds formal mentoring programs to be "forced," she takes opportunities to mentor in whatever capacity she can. "Given the opportunity, I do it-inside of the field or outside, I don't separate them out," Cooper says. "I've had a number of students, many African American, work with me. I have a McNair scholar right now. In any of those cases, if the students are doing what they want to do, I count it as a success."

Though making the transition to teaching hasn't always been smooth-"my first set of class evaluations were a disaster"-Cooper enjoys the having a positive impact on students' lives, even if she does so unknowingly. She says a highlight so far has been her relationship with a student from South Carolina, who asked her advice about whether or not he should take a job opportunity in Ohio. "I basically told him he would be stupid not to take it-in retrospect, I probably should have been more diplomatic about it," Cooper laughs. "As it turns out, I was the only one who encouraged him to. He did, and it opened up a whole new world for him." Cooper says her most challenging and rewarding mentorship role has been as mother to her young son. "It helps that I'm doing work to make sure he has something to look forward to when he grows up," she says.

While very satisfied with her unanticipated career in the environmental field, Cooper expresses frustration with the environmental apathy she sometimes encounters from students, colleagues, and people in power. She finds such apathy especially distressing when it comes from the African American community, who often suffers the brunt of environmental degradation. "Quite often, as an African American, it's not always clear to those in our community the connection between the environment and our everyday lives," Cooper says. "It really ends up being a very strong connection. I think Hurricane Katrina made it a little more obvious, but it's still hard to get people to see it." A whole host of environmental issues-from cancer and asthma rates to water and air quality-disproportionately impact black and other minority communities, but are often dismissed as being "less important" than other issues. However, Cooper thinks remedying such inequalities requires not only more minority participation in the environmental field, but a greater awareness that environmental issues are directly related to the other problems. "I think that as black people in this country, we tend to think that we have more pressing, immediate needs than the environment," she says. "But in the end, it turns out that many of those issues that we think of as pressing and immediate are tied to the environment. We can't make all those other things go away without considering it as part of the equation."

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Deidre Gibson

(1964-Present)

Assistant Professor of Biology and Marine Science

Hampton University

"The field needs a diverse eye on how to solve some of these problems and issues." - Deidre Gibson, 2006.

Like many minorities in the environmental field, Deidre Gibson didn't come to a career in marine science in a straightforward way. Though she enjoyed boating and crabbing with her family while growing up in New Orleans, she never imagined a career in the research sciences. "[Growing up] I never thought about a career in any kind of environmental science field-I had never seen or been exposed to anything like that," she says.

Gibson first got exposed to marine science while taking undergraduate courses at the University of New Orleans. "I was just searching...trying to have some fun," she remembers. "I took a SCUBA diving class, and that opened my eyes to a lot of different things that I hadn't thought about. I started doing research, and looking at different books." After taking a number of different science classes and doing her own independent research, Gibson made the decision to pursue marine science as a career, and transferred to Shoreline Community College in Seattle. After earning both an Associates Degree in Science and an Applied Associates in Marine Biology and Oceanography, she moved on to the University of Washington, earning her B.S. in Oceanography in 1991.

After earning her undergraduate degree, Gibson worked as a research technician at Louisiana University's Marine Consortium for five years. "I worked as a biological oceanographer, looking at the effects of nutrients from the Mississippi river on the zooplankton community in the Gulf of Mexico," she explains. While she found the work meaningful, she also cites her later years there as the most difficult of her career. Her boss did not encourage her aspirations; in fact, she actively discouraged Gibson from going to graduate school, saying she was "not good enough." Fortunately, Gibson didn't listen: she earned her Ph.D. in Marine Science from the University of Georgia in 2000. While in grad school, she worked as an EPA "stay in school" intern doing water collection and sampling, and also did research at the Skidoway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah. She then went on to do more marine research at two post-doc positions, with Savannah State University and the University of Connecticut-Avery Point.

Gibson began her current position as an assistant research professor at Hampton University in 2002; she became a tenure-track assistant professor in 2004, and now holds a dual position in both the biology and marine science departments. While her primary focus is teaching (mainly zoology and marine science), she also performs research, writes grants, and is involved with a number of mentorship and professional development efforts to bring more minorities into the environmental sciences.

Gibson says the highlight of her career so far has been working with such diversity programs. "There's a big push in marine science now to increase diversity-being involved in these programs has encouraged me to stay in [the field], and be a part of making that difference," she says. She is most proud of her involvement in the Diversity in Research in Environmental and Marine Sciences (DREAMS) project. DREAMS is an ongoing collaboration is between Hampton and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), that aims to expose Hampton marine science students to research opportunities. "While they're taking classes, they're doing small projects on the Hampton campus to get a feel for research and working as a group. That gets them ready for an internship experience at VIMS," Gibson explains. In addition to her involvement with DREAMS, Gibson also participates in the Hall-Bonner program (a fellowship program for minority Ph.D. students), is a mentor in both the MS PHD and Aslow minority programs, and works with the Mid-Atlantic Center of Ocean Science Education Excellence to expose K-12 students to the marine sciences.

Gibson has benefited from the guidance of many mentors throughout her academic career. Jack Serwald, her advisor at Shoreline Community College, saw her scientific potential and encouraged her to take all the science classes she could there. At the University of Washington, Oceanographer Mary Jane Perry inspired and encouraged Gibson, and continues to serve as a mentor today. Gustav Paffenhofer was Gibson's graduate advisor; she notes that not only did he encourage her to pursue her goals and pushed her work ethic. "He was very honest with me...we were very different, and learned a lot from each other about different cultures," she says. Ben Suker, who runs a diversity program aiming to bring minority students to scientific meetings, helped her meet other minority students-and potential mentors-in her field. "Until then, I was the only one I would ever say," Gibson notes. She credits that program with helping to nurture mutual mentorship among African American female scientists, including for her Ashanti Pyrtle, Dionne Hopkins, and "too many others to name."

Gibson takes her own role as a mentor very seriously. She first realized her potential to be one when leading students on tours of the Skidoway facility and talking about research there. "I didn't realize it at the time, but I was kind of a mentor to some of these students," she says. Later, when working with programs designed to attract minority students to scientific meetings, she was surprised by how excited other minority students often were to see "someone like them" going on to grad school. One of those students calls Gibson her mentor to this day; she is now a second-year oceanography student. Currently, as the only black professor in marine science at Hampton, Gibson is a mentor to other students at the historically-black school, a role she considers a major accomplishment in itself: "I would say my most significant achievement is being considered a role model myself."

As for her career, Gibson says, "A lot of good things are starting to happen." She was able to finish her Ph.D. in only four years; that accomplishment was made even more special when she got to show it to her former boss who told her that she would never succeed in graduate school. Currently, Gibson is encouraged by the success she's had providing minority students with access to the research sciences. She counts getting DREAMS funded as a major accomplishment, and is excited that it's allowing a number of African American students to pursue higher education in the sciences. "When I started at Hampton, many students were not thinking of grad school as an option," Gibson says. "Getting DREAMS funded has increased the level of interest in research and doing internships, and eventually going on to grad school." Gibson also enjoys the "small atmosphere" in her program, and the ability it gives her to work directly students.

Gibson notes that as those in the environmental field grow to see diversity as more important, opportunities for minorities in the field will grow as well. "There's a reason why there's a big push [from funding agencies] for minorities to be involved in the field...because we're all affected by the environment," she says. "Sometimes it takes a different point of view, a different culture to see things in a way the mainstream may not think of." She encourages minorities to get involved in the environmental arena: "Part of our responsibility as a community is to be involved in environmental issues. It's not always lucrative, but it can be lucrative because there's a lot of programs and funding that you can access to do different things. The field needs a diverse eye on how to solve some of these issues and problems."

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Yvette Huet-Hudson

(1962-Present)

Professor of Biology

University of North Carolina, Charlotte

"Without people to help you, success can be very difficult." - Yvette Huet-Hudson, 2005.

Yvette Huet-Hudson has always been fascinated by science. One of four children raised in Kansas City by parents Yolanda, a school psychologist, and Raul, a physician, Huet-Hudson remembers both of her parents-her mother especially-being very supportive of her love for science. As a child, Huet-Hudson always had mice, rats and fish at home so that she could discover "how things worked." Later, as a senior in high school, she chose to fulfill her week-long internship requirement at a pharmacology research laboratory. Though short in duration, this experience proved to her that she should follow her dreams of working in the biological sciences.

Huet-Hudson went on to attend the University of Kansas, where she double-majored in Human Biology and Microbiology. Before going on to graduate school, Huet-Hudson worked for a year as both an Intro to Biology prep technician, and a research assistant to a geneticist. She then went on to receive her Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Kansas Medical Center.

Huet-Hudson did two years of post-doctoral research in Monsanto's molecular immunology group. She worked on a variety of projects; the corporation was especially interested in her experience making transgenic animals. Huet-Hudson says her experience at Monsanto was a great one, as it gave her the ability to learn more about immunology in practice.

Huet-Hudson went directly from Monsanto to her current position at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She began as an Assistant Professor, and is now a full Professor in the Department of Biology. "I was hired at the beginning of the University's efforts to move its research program forward, at a time when they were interested in hiring new people to do that," Huet-Hudson says. "I was lucky to be part of that process." Huet-Hudson played an instrumental role in making the institution more research-intensive; she helped form the PhD program, and set up the infrastructure so it would be much easier for emerging scholars to conduct research on the Charlotte campus.

Huet-Hudson says she is fortunate to have had many mentors. She names her mother as the first and most important; she was very supportive of Huet-Hudson's passion for science, and always encouraged her daughter to be the best she could be. Huet-Hudson also continues to benefit from the advice of her graduate advisor. In addition, she credits her many mentors at the University and at the Ford Foundation Fellows program for teaching her how to get what she needed from her employers, and easing her down the path to promotion and tenure. Other faculty members in Charlotte have also offered help, advice, and most importantly, acceptance. "No one in my family has ever been a faculty member anywhere, so I didn't know what to expect or what I would need to do after I accepted the position," she recalls. Faculty members in other university departments also helped ease the transition process. "I'm especially grateful to the other female faculty members, who taught me how to navigate being a faculty member and a mother at the same time," Huet-Hudson says.

Throughout her career, Huet-Hudson has mentored other minorities in the field, including high school students, undergraduates, and other faculty members. "I see mentoring as a role that I should and have to do," she says, "because I have benefited so much from my mentors." Huet-Hudson's contributions were recognized in 2004, when she was given the UNC-Charlotte's "Woman of the Year" award for her role in mentoring women. "To be acknowledged is very gratifying because mentoring is so important to me," Huet-Hudson says. She considers receiving this award, as well as becoming a full professor at the University, to be among the highlights of her career.

Huet-Hudson is involved in a number of diversity-related programs on campus. She currently works with the Dean on diversity issues, and as the PhD Coordinator, she works to ensure diversity in the student population. Additionally, Huet-Hudson has worked with the Ford Foundation as a North Carolina liaison for many years, and has helped to mentor fellows there. Huet-Hudson helped secure an NIH grant to bring minority high school students to do summer research at the University, and is also a part of the McNair Scholars program and the Minority Science Education Network on the Charlotte campus.

"Being able to continue to succeed at my career, to work with students, publish, and still juggle my family...those are what I consider to be my most significant achievements," Huet-Hudson says. She stays in the field because she finds the work exciting, and the opportunity to work with students makes her daily life interesting. "My work is a never-ending process. I'm excited by the puzzle, and there are always new questions-even when I find a new piece. I'm really fascinated by that," she says.

To minorities considering a career in the biological sciences, Huet-Hudson provides this advice: "Find mentors that can help you. They can be anywhere; they may even be a bunch of different people. Without people to help you, success can be very difficult."

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Clara Elena Irazabal Zurita

(1963-Present)

Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Design

University of Southern California

"There are a lot of racial and environmental injustices that impact minorities. In order to redress some of these issues, it's very important that more minorities become part of the field." - Clara Irazabal, 2006.

"I've always been fascinated by cities," says Clara Irazabal, explaining her choice of career in urban planning and design. Growing up in Caracas, Venezuela as the daughter of architect parents, Irazabal was fascinated not only by her surrounding urban environment, but by the intense inequalities she saw manifested in it. "Caracas offers many contrasts in terms of environmental injustices, in how the poor and rich live," she explains. "It was something that always caught my attention, and I felt a lot of responsibility to redress it." Irazabal has devoted her career to studies of comparative urbanism in Latin America, the link between social and spatial inequalities, and how minority groups, especially Latina/os, create and utilize public spaces in the U.S.

Following in her parents' footsteps, Irazabal earned her undergraduate in architecture and master's degree in physical planning and urban design from the Central University of Venezuela. As a master's student, she worked as a teaching assistant, and helped develop a comprehensive plan for neighborhoods in metropolitan Caracas to better develop socially, economically, and spatially. After completing her master's degree, she was offered a scholarship to get her Ph.D. in architecture at the University of California-Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Irazabal worked on a number of research projects, and developed a further interest in the association between spatial and social inequalities. "I began to study how it is that some inequalities that we suffer as part of a social group are also expressed spatially, such as access to spatial resources in cities...for example, accessibility to affordable housing, open space, jobs, and the like," she says.

Upon completing her Ph.D. in 2002, Irazabal was offered her current faculty position at the University of Southern California, where she teaches, mentors, does service work, and conducts research. Irazabal's current research efforts focus on two broad subjects: comparative urbanism in Latin American, and how public spaces in Latin American capitals reflect ideas of citizenship and democracy; and "ethnic urbanism" in Southern California, focusing on how Latina/os in Los Angeles create and re-create public spaces. For Irazabal, the ability "to select my own topics for research and study, and the support I have gotten to develop those projects" has been the highlight of her career.

Mentors have played an important role in helping Irazabal define her research interests, and jump-starting her career in academia. Her Ph.D. advisor at Berkeley, Nezar AlSayyad, was an especially important influence. "He really taught me about comparative urbanism internationally and in the Third World," Irazabal says. "Also, through him I was able to start networking with other international colleagues, which expanded my opportunities to conferences and research." Irazabal also continues to rely on the mentorship of USC colleagues, most notably Dowell Myers and Tridib Banerjee, as well as female faculty (Jennifer Wolch, Laura Pulido, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo) who have been both personally and professionally supportive of her.

Irazabal now mentors and supports other minority students "all the time. The opportunity to make a difference through teaching and mentoring, writing papers and doing projects with them, and sending them out to make a difference is a strong motivation to stay in this field." In addition to much of her research and mentoring being minority-focused (most notably on L.A.'s Latina/o community), Irazabal has served on several university-wide diversity initiatives, including the Multi-Faith Committee, and scholarship committees focusing on minority students. However, she believes that perhaps her most important contribution might be bringing her ability to "impact developing knowledge and practices in the field from my own perspective as a minority-an international woman of Hispanic background."

For Irazabal, maintaining a commitment to her work, and doing it with honesty, integrity, and to the utmost of her ability has been her most significant achievement. Although she has faced some difficulty as a woman and as a Latina who speaks "English with an accent", she remains committed to making a difference through her work. "I'm just persevering and doing my best," she says. She encourages other minorities to consider the field as a way of redressing injustices and inequalities that disproportionately affect communities of color: "There's a lot of racial and environmental injustices that affect minorities. In order to redress some of these issues, it's very important that more minorities become part of the field."

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Robin Kimmerer

(1953-Present)

Professor of Botany

State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry

"I was born to be a botanist." - Robin Kimmerer, 2004.

Robin Kimmerer was born in 1953 to Robert and Patricia Wall in rural upstate New York. Growing up, she spent most of her time in the woods and fields. It was in this same naturalistic setting that she started to observe plants and cultivate her appreciation for nature. Her parents were also an important factor in her growth as an environmental scientist. It was very important to her parents to conserve the environment, and to appreciate it in all of its glory. When she was a child, her parents gave her a book written by an ecologist, and soon thereafter, she found out that she could have a career based on the study of plants. It was based on this realization that she began her educational track towards a degree in botany.

Kimmerer attended the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry for her undergraduate studies; she earned a degree in Botany in 1975. She attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, obtaining a master's degree in Botany in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Plant Ecology in 1983. Kimmerer held many positions in various companies while she was a student.

In 1975, Kimmerer began working as a microbiologist in an optical division of Bausch & Lomb. Two years after she started her job, Kimmerer decided that corporate America was not for her, and went to grad school. After graduate school, Kimmerer started a family and worked part-time at Transylvania University in Lexington, KY while raising her children. At Transylvania University, Kimmerer taught field biology and botany. She left Transylvania University to work at Centre College - a liberal arts college in Danville, Kentucky. There, she taught general biology, botany, ecology, field biology, plants and culture, and tropical ecology. She got tenure at Centre College but longed to return to her roots.

Kimmerer returned home to teach at the State University of New York because she felt it was more rewarding to give back to her home state. She was also interested in working with Native Americans, the issues that pertain to this group of minorities and conducting research that was not possible to do at Transylvania University or Centre College. Kimmerer applied for and got a position at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and has been there for the past eleven years. Her success is attributed to many people that made a great impact on her life.

Kimmerer had a several mentors and advisors who helped to guide her. An undergraduate professor Ed Cetchledge, gave her the confidence to persevere even when she did not think she could be a scientist. Mr. Cetchledge was such an important part of her life that they have kept in touch over the years. During graduate school, Kimmerer had advisors and peers who were a great source of support. Specifically, Dr. Orie Loucks took great interest in her work, and counseled her about possible career moves that could be beneficial to her. Because of the help she received, Kimmerer now extends herself to help other minorities in the field.

For example, Kimmerer has helped sponsor the Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB) project, which pairs students of color with faculty members in the enviro-bio sciences while they work together to research environmental biology. Kimmerer is also a part of the United States Department of Agriculture's Higher Education Multicultural Scholars Program. The purpose of this program is to provide students with real-world experiences that involve complex problem-solving. Kimmerer is also a mentor to students on the SUNY campus - a campus on which there are few female and minority environmental faculty. She enjoys the community in which she can mentor native and non-native students. Kimmerer is also involved in the American Indian Science & Engineering Society (AISES), and works with the Onondaga nation's school doing community outreach. Kimmerer also uses traditional knowledge and science collectively for ecological restoration in research. Lastly, Kimmerer fosters diversity in the field by showing how multiculturalism makes a significant difference in the way that science is carried out. This is particularly true in the field of ecological restoration. Kimmerer enjoys her job and duties, and has experienced many highlights in her career.

In 2003, Kimmerer published her first book entitled, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. In the book, she was able to offer several insights into herself, including her experiences as a plant ecologist and her understanding of traditional knowledge. She feels the combination of indigenous and scientific perspectives gave an "authentic voice" to her work. Kimmerer will also be credited with starting a program at the university - one dedicated to the study of traditional ecological knowledge. She currently strives to further the aims of that unit. It is important to her to be accepted in the science community, but she would also like to be known for bringing a unique perspective to the understanding of plant ecology. Although Kimmerer has had many achievements that she is proud of, times have not always been easy.

A low point of Kimmerer's career is the sense of isolation she has felt throughout her career. The feeling of isolation she experienced is not always in the forefront, but it is there nonetheless. She also says that although it is necessary to be a part of "the group" by following the traditional path set by others in her field, she struggles to do her work her own way. Despite these ups and downs, Kimmerer loves her job.

Kimmerer loves to create a community of people interested in strengthening the environmental field. Most importantly, she gets lots of support and recognition from her students; this makes a huge difference, and puts a value on her work. Her most significant achievement was raising two daughters as a single parent while pursuing a career. Her achievements and status within the environmental field make her a great person to turn to for words of wisdom.

Kimmerer speaks to minorities who are considering a career in the environmental field with many words of wisdom. First, she says they should learn about how the system works in order to have credentials, and to bring all of themselves selves to the process of becoming the best in the field. She continues to say that science suffers from narrow vision because it is a self-perpetuating domain riddled with roadblocks. Consequently, students should bring their own unique perspective with them, because it is much needed.

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Patty Loew

(1952-Present)

Associate Professor of Life Sciences Communication

University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Having an environmental vision is absolutely consistent with who I am as a Native person." - Patty Loew, 2006.

Patty Loew is committed to her career as an environmental journalist and teacher in large part because it is consistent with her tribal philosophy. A member of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Ojibwe, Loew was raised to make decisions with a mind towards the effects her decisions will have on the next seven generations. "It's part of who I am as a Native American. I'm 'planting oaks instead of pine.' It's about sacrificing short-term gain for long-term fulfillment," she says. "Focusing on the seventh generation encourages long term vision. We need to consider the environment in our decision making."

Loew grew up in Milwaukee, a city that helped to develop her environmental consciousness in two ways. As a stronghold of socialism, Milwaukee was a place where socialism's traditions were evident all around her. "A basic tenet of the socialist movement was the struggle for shorter work days and weeks, and for more recreational areas so that workers would have places to enjoy their time off," she explains. "Milwaukee has the most square feet of parkland of any city its size in the country." Loew worked for the city's Recreation Department for years while going to school, and spent much of her time in these areas. However, Milwaukee was also a city with very blighted areas, and Loew, who was raised in a housing project, decided early on that she did not want to live in a city like that. Green space had made a big impact.

Loew received her bachelor's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin- LaCrosse, and would later receive her master's degree and Ph.D. from UW-Madison in Mass Communications. However, she was far from a traditional student-Loew had a career in television for 25 years before she began teaching at UW.

Loew began her career as a reporter and anchor for a TV station in LaCrosse. A year later she took a similar job in Madison, a city that has had a visionary recycling program since the 1960s. In the 1980s, the community was looking toward county-wide recycling programs and ways to encourage plastic recycling-well before other communities around the nation. Loew began to focus her reporting on local environmental issues, and soon made a documentary on a town south of Madison that was coordinating a massive recycling effort of every conceivable material. Her focus soon grew from recycling to failing toxic waste sites and landfills in the area. As soon as environmental reporting was recognized as a field, Loew joined the Society of Environmental Journalists, and her career in environmental journalism took off from there.

When Loew returned to UW for her master's and Ph.D., she broadened her reporting focus to reflect her personal interests as a member of an Indian nation, expanding her coverage to include topics such as tribal hunting, fishing, and gathering rights. "It seemed like my professional, academic and personal lives just harmonically converged on this topic," Loew reflects. "It's been what I've done in all facets of my life." Loew currently teaches a course on Native American Environmental Issues and the Media, and another on Digital Documentary Production.

Loew was hired by the Department of Life Sciences Communication in 1999 to teach two classes each year; she soon earned tenure, and is now an associate professor. The UW Extension office bought out the other half of her contract so that she could continue to host programs on Wisconsin Public Television and produce documentaries. Her weekly news and public affairs program, In Wisconsin, has environmental information as its primary focus.

Loew did not have the benefit of mentors in environmental reporting when she began her journalism career in the mid 70s. She remembers, "There really wasn't anyone doing that kind of thing; it just sort of evolved as community awareness grew about environmental issues-as did my own awareness." Most of what Loew learned came from reading as much as she could and from seeking out publications; she often turned to her colleagues in the Native American Journalism Association for support as well. Loew got a lot of inspiration from people she considered to be very good reporters, even if they were not specifically environmental. Richard LaCourse, Mark Trahant, and Dave Iverson are just a few of the journalists she refers to as mentors in the field. In terms of her academic career, Loew has benefited from the mentoring of colleagues such as Jacquie Hitchon, Larry Meiller, Shiela Reaves and Ada Deer, all of whom took interest in her and helped her along the path to gaining tenure.

Loew tries to mentor other minorities in the field at every opportunity. She is a past board member of the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), an 800-person organization that has always placed special emphasis on high school and college students. Young, Native journalists who will work in mainstream and tribal press have always been a very important focus of NAJA; the organization runs student programs at their annual conventions, and members have taught a high school journalism class in Madison. WHA-TV, the television station where Loew works, hires interns. Loew is also a member of various professional organizations that matches minority students with mentors in their communities. The courses that she teaches put her in contact with Native students; in addition, she is also affiliated with the Native American Studies program, through which she works with independent and directed studies programs that deal with environmental issues.

In addition to her mentoring activities, Loew is involved in a number of diversity programs. She served on the program committee for Unity 99, a collaboration of national Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American journalism associations. The coalition holds a joint conference every five years, and reaches out to other under-represented groups like LGBTQ and disability rights journalists. Among the other diversity programs Loew is involved in are the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences' Equity and Diversity Committee, and the Steering Committee for the UW system's Institute on Race and Ethnicity.

Teaching has been the highlight of Loew's career. "I didn't know how much I'd appreciate it until I started," she says. "To see my students find success is so satisfying-it's wonderful." Loew's contributions were honored recently when she received honorary doctorates from Northland and Edgewood Colleges, in recognition for her work in the community with regard to awareness of treaty rights and environmental issues. However, Loew's overall highlight is still teaching, and being able to see the next generation of environmental journalists find its voice.

In terms of her most significant achievement, Loew hopes that the best is yet to come. She believes her most successful achievement is having raised two children with strong environmental ethics. "To a lesser extent," Loew says, "the material I've written dealing with environmentalism as it relates to Ojibwe treaty rights was a significant achievement, but I think that the way I raise my kids is the best way to contribute to the next generation."

Loew says she is more comfortable providing advice for Native Americans interested in the environmental field than for minority groups as a whole, because their issues are so different from those in other communities. "For me, having an environmental vision is absolutely consistent with who I am as a Native person," she explains. "We were the original stewards of the land. Initially we hunted, fished and gathered, and had a subsistence lifestyle. Our relationship to the land is symbiotic; if you look at the histories of native people on this continent-the agreements, treaties and laws passed-our own stories tell us of our relationship and responsibility to the land. Native people have tried to protect the landscape over time."

"To a Native journalist coming up," she continues, "I'd say keep at the center of what you do. Let that principle of land stewardship guide you as you undertake a career in the environmental field, whether you are working for an NGO, as a journalist covering agencies responsible for pollution, or as an advocate working within a governmental agency. Understand that we have this responsibility to our ancestors, who conducted themselves like this, to the next generation, and to generations seven times removed."

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Xiangyi Lu

(1962-Present)

Research Associate Professor, Environmental Health Sciences

University of Alabama-Birmingham, School of Public Health

"It is a very exciting time right now with all of the tools that are available...you can do so much more now than before." - Xiangyi Lu, 2006.

As a child growing up in rural China, Xiangyi Lu lived in a community where homes were made of mud and straw, and there was no running water. Lu and the children in her neighborhood had no access to television, and she remembers having plenty of free time to play, but few organized educational activities. However, the hardships she experienced as a young person turned out to be important life lessons. "I got used to difficulties and now I'm not intimidated by them," Lu explains. "I appreciate opportunities when they come by, and I take the opportunity to do the work that I am doing very seriously."

In high school, Lu excelled at math and physics, and was poised to take up an engineering career. However, by chance she came across a book about chromosomes in living cells, and found the subject fascinating. She decided to pursue cell biology instead, and from there progressed to medicine and finally, to the environmental health sciences. Lu received her BS from Wuhan University in China, and continued on to get her Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmacology from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She then went on to Harvard Medical School for her post-doctoral work, where she was trained in genetics. After four years, Lu received her first independent investigator position at the University of Kansas, where she remained until she accepted her present position in 2000.

Lu currently conducts her research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she is a Research Associate Professor in Environmental Health Sciences. Lu's research revolves around a protein found in cilia that causes polycystic kidney disease, and is presently studying cilia's sensitivity to different environmental factors. Many of those factors can affect the motility and function of cilia, and may result in increased susceptibility to hypertension, cardiovascular disease, asthma and even obesity.

Lu credits her Ph.D. and post-doctoral mentors for providing her with the expertise to pursue her chosen areas of study. Dr. Charles Rubin at Albert Einstein is the Chair of the Molecular Pharmacology department; he gave Lu the basic knowledge of the field that allowed her to branch out in different directions, and formulate new questions for further investigation. At Harvard, Dr. Norbert Perrimon, known for his pioneering work in developing genomic tools, helped put Lu on the track to studying gene/environment interactions.

Lu laments her lack of opportunities to work with and mentor students. She has worked with two master's students, both of whom have since graduated and published independently. She cites the opportunities she has had as amongst the highlights of her career. "Seeing students who come into the classroom naïve, and later become more independent and learn to think more on their own, is very fulfilling," Lu says. "Also, finding new things in research, the progression and evolution of research, and getting exciting results are highlights as well." Lu is about to move to Wayne State University in Detroit, and hopes that her new school will bring her into contact with more students.

Although Lu expresses some concern about the lack of adequate administrative support for her research at the university, she is quite satisfied with her career as a researcher. She remains in this position because there are so many questions yet to be answered, and more tools than ever to work with. "It is a very exciting time right now with all of the tools that are available...you can do so much more now than before," she says. Thus far, Lu's most significant achievement in her field has been helping to discover a new role of a protein in cilia that contributes to kidney disease in humans. She continues to make advances in that trajectory by studying the sperm flagellum, the largest motile cilium, in fruit flies.

For minorities considering a career in the environmental field, Lu has this advice: "You must be persistent. Follow your interests, and if you find something that intrigues you, then that is what you should be doing."

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Leticia Marquez-Magana, Ph.D.

(1963 - Present)

Associate Professor of Biology

San Francisco State University

"It's a real achievement...I craft my position in such a way that it meets my commitment to my community and to my science." - Leticia Marquez-Magana, 2004.

Leticia Marquez-Magana was born on August 15, 1963 as the first of four children. She was raised in Sacramento, California by her parents Lupe Marquez, a former factory worker and housekeeper, and Jesus Marquez, a former construction worker. Growing up in Sacramento, Marquez-Magana felt a strong sense that Mexican citizens were second-class. She has been dedicated to changing that mentality.

Marquez-Magana attended Stanford University where she received her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Biological Sciences in 1986. She went on to receive her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California-Berkeley in 1991. She became interested in a career in the environmental field as a graduate student at UC Berkeley where she worked in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Chamberlin. Members of his laboratory studied the genetics of a soil bacterium, Bacillus subtilis.

Marquez-Magana's first job was at San Francisco State University where she remains a Biology professor and scientist. More specifically, she is a microbial geneticist, studying the genes responsible for particular behaviors in several bacteria that reside in the soil. She divides her time between research, teaching and doing educational outreach service. Currently, Marquez-Magana is a tenured professor at San Francisco State where she has been teaching for eleven years. She is the first Latina to be tenured and promoted to full professor in the College of Science and Engineering at San Francisco State and she says, "It's a real achievement...I craft my position in such a way that it meets my commitment to my community and to my science." Marquez-Magana also has a commitment to empowering minority students to pursue research careers.

Despite Marquez-Magana's success, she says that she has never had a typical mentor. She believes that the best mentoring happens when a team of individuals work together to promote an individual's work. In fact, several individuals have provided Marquez-Magana moral and professional support. Michael Chamberlin, professor of Biochemistry at UC-Berkeley, taught her to be precise in her scientific thinking and effective in her scientific communication. Rhoda Cales, owner of Weekend in Español, a Spanish emersion program for adults, taught Marquez-Magana teaching techniques. She learned that teaching is more than sitting in class and giving presentations; it is also engaging students.

Marquez-Magana showed her dedication to becoming an effective teacher by attending workshops focused on teacher training. She aspired to be a Latina scientist committed to both her job and her family. Unfortunately, that type of mentor was not available to her, so she became that person. Marquez-Magana's lack of a typical mentor makes her fully aware of the importance of being mentored. Through her endeavors, she makes certain that others can have what she did not. As a graduate student, she started Scientists of Color, a graduate student organization aimed at creating minority social support and a professional network on campus. At Stanford, Marquez-Magana was involved with the Stanford Multicultural Scientists that helped to create a summer research program for underrepresented minorities. She served as a mentor for these undergraduate students and also assisted in their training.

Marquez-Magana mentors undergraduate students from all over the country. She also mentors new and younger faculty at San Francisco State. She acknowledges that in the beginning, there is so much for them to learn and know; it can be overwhelming at times. She let's them know that she is there to help them. As for the recognition that she receives for this work, Marquez-Magana says that the appreciation of her students is enough. Her mentees often thank her and she finds their gratitude to be rewarding. Marquez-Magana advises minorities considering a career in the environmental field to find mentors that can make them feel that they belong in the science field. These mentors should promote their best interests and encourage networking. She believes that mentors should be able to demystify the whole process of going forward into the environmental sector and give students ideas and options regarding their next steps. Marquez-Magana says that while many scientists recognize the need for diversity in nature, they are reluctant to promote racial diversity in science research. She feels that diversity in science research and work brings creative thinking, new views and solutions to problems.

When asked what had been the greatest obstacle that she had encountered in her biological studies, she replied that it was the fact that the professors neither looked like her, nor did they sound like her, and in turn, she felt that she could not communicate with them. Later, when she decided to become a professor, she knew that it would allow her the opportunity to be a person with whom students of color could connect.

Marquez-Magana cites the highlight of her career as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mentor Award that she received in 2001 for her outreach efforts as a graduate student at UC Berkeley and as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford. She finds her most significant achievement to be the work that she did on the role of Sigma-D in controlling motility functions in Bacillus subtilis. She was responsible for much of this work and it demonstrates the role and regulation of this factor in controlling the bacterium's ability to move in its soil environment. Undoubtedly Marquez-Magana's fortitude and dedication have enabled her to achieve success in her profession. She is a committed mother, scientist, professor, and mentor; these roles have served to make her a great source of inspiration as well.

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Lee Ann Martinez

(1957-Present)

Associate Professor

Colorado State Pueblo

"[We have] problems with environmental justice, under representation of minorities in the movement, and yet we're the ones who experience the most problems with environmental degradation." - Lee Ann Martinez, 2004.

Lee Ann Martinez was born in 1957 in Lake Arrowhead in Southern California. She is the second of five children born to Daniel Martinez, a Spanish teacher and Barbara Martinez, a children's librarian. Growing up in Lake Arrowhead California, a rural mountain community, Martinez spent a great deal of time outdoors. She also spent time with her grandmother who lived near the beach. When visiting with her grandmother, Martinez would often do a lot of camping as well. She says that her early experiences with nature greatly influenced her decision to pursue a career in the environmental field. After high school, Martinez attended the University of California at Santa Barbara where she majored in Aquatic Biology. The summer before she graduated, she had a student internship with the Brookhaven National Laboratory. As an intern, Martinez did research on the acidification of lakes in the Adirondack Mountains. She graduated in 1979 with a bachelor's degree and secured another student internship as a backcountry ranger at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. There, Martinez assisted in prescribed burning, fire fighting and science research with a focus on fire ecology. It proved to be a great opportunity for Martinez as she was able to combine her love for the outdoors with fieldwork.

Martinez went on to obtain a master's degree at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1982. While pursuing her master's, Martinez was also appointed as a teaching assistant. Martinez went to Cornell University to study for her doctorate. She received her Ph.D. in ecology in 1987. While at Cornell, she had more teaching assistantships in introductory biology and aquatic insects courses. Martinez describes her advancement in her career as incremental because each experience opened another door for her. The work she did on the acid lakes project at Brookhaven was her introduction into field research and gave her the background to be hired as a ranger. By graduate school, she had had three summers of field research that helped her get into graduate school. Martinez is currently an Associate Professor of Biology at Colorado State University - Pueblo. In 2003, Martinez, on temporary leave from Colorado State University, worked for the National Science Foundation as a Program Officer for the Division of Undergraduate Education.

Martinez's professional advancement was due, in part, to the support of people who have helped her with her academic endeavors. When Martinez was an undergraduate, she did an independent research project on the effects of acid on algae and her advisor, John Melack, helped her with experimental designs and thinking through data collection techniques. During her graduate studies, Martinez's master's advisor, Mary Silver, taught her how to give polished presentations at science conferences and gave her numerous te