Visiting Faculty Member Studies Diversity at UC San Diego

By Sarah Lifton

Dr. Donna Nelson of the University of Oklahoma provided keynote remarks on the status of hiring of women and underrepresented minorities at the CSW Luncheon, held on June 3rd. If you are interested in seeing some of the data she used to inform her talk, visit her website: http://cheminfo.ou.edu/~djn/djn.html

The following article provides additional insight into how she came into studying the problem of availability vs. hiring of women into faculty positions in STEM fields.

For Donna Nelson, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, it all started seven years ago, with a brief article torn from a magazine. The one-page document, which she taped to her office door, tabulated the number of female faculty in the nation’s top 50 chemistry departments. Intrigued, the undergraduates working with her asked why the survey had not also covered minorities.

It was, she replied, because for minorities, the table would probably read 0, 0, and 0.

“That night when I went home, I started thinking about it and was feeling bad about my response,” she recalls. “I realized that wasn’t the reason not to do a survey of minorities—that was the reason to do it.”

Nelson, an award-winning scientist whose research normally focuses on groups of atoms attached to single-walled carbon nanotubes, went back to the students and said if they were really interested and wanted to collect the data, she would supervise them. The resulting survey, the first-ever comprehensive study of minority faculty in the nation’s top 50 chemistry departments (based on NSF rankings by research funding expenditures), set off a minor earthquake in academia. Soon Nelson was getting requests to survey other disciplines. She and her students have now conducted these surveys three times, the latest released in 2007, examining minority representation in the top 100 departments in 15 disciplines.

Recently, Nelson’s groundbreaking work has led her west to UC San Diego, one of the institutions she surveyed, where she is currently the inaugural Chancellor’s Diversity Scholar—perhaps the first person in the nation to hold such a title. Although she had given many talks at other universities and was familiar with how her survey data was being used at various institutions, she explains, she had never taken a direct part in diversity program implementation. She was looking for a way to gain an insider’s perspective, sitting in as programs were actually being developed, ideally at a high-ranking institution. She contacted UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Ann Fox, who had been a member of her graduate committee when both were at the University of Texas at Austin, and asked if she could visit UCSD to observe and learn. In response, Chancellor Fox created the position.

 “It’s a very unusual position,” Nelson admits. “I’ve only heard of something like this one other time, and it was part of an NSF ADVANCE grant at another institution and lasted only a year. I’d been searching all over trying to find something like this. You have no idea how much I appreciate the opportunity.”

Nelson officially began her tenure as the Chancellor’s Diversity Scholar, a visiting position, in February and will continue through the summer, dividing her time between La Jolla and Norman, Oklahoma, where she is based. Working in the UCSD Chancellor’s office, she takes part in brainstorming sessions, shares her own perspective, and sometimes simply observes quietly, as the proverbial fly on the wall.

“I have a lot of perspective on things that have been done at other universities,” she notes. “Sometimes it’s good to get a completely different perspective from another environment because the more you see things done in different ways, the easier it is to come up with genuinely novel ideas. I can provide that, and people seem very open to new ideas.”

Ultimately, Nelson, who has received an NSF ADVANCE Leadership Award and has been named a SACNAS Distinguished Scientist of the Year, AAAS Fellow, NOW Woman of Courage, Guggenheim Fellow, and Ford Foundation Fellow, among many honors, is hoping to leverage her experience into future grant proposals and articles. In the meantime, however, she is content to watch, learn, and share, hoping that her work will help encourage more minority faculty—the indispensable mentors and role models who will groom the gifted, diverse young scientists that America so urgently needs.