Minorities in STEM Symposium: Talk

The great people behind Minorities in STEM (their rocur [rotating curation] Twitter account is amazing) held their annual symposium at the Francis Crick Institute! Minorities in STEM is founded by Dr. Alex Lathbridge, Dr. Yolanda Ohene, Hana Ayoob, Dr. Oz Ismail, and Tiv Balendra.

The symposium theme was “Level up your academic toolkit” and I had the honour of being on the “Navigating an academic career” panel chaired by Oz. Also on the panel were Prof. Helen Minnis (University of Glasgow), Prof. Chris Jackson (Imperial College London), and Nikou Damestani, PhD student, Kings College London.

The plenary talk was given by Prof. Nicola Rollock - it was absolutely mindblowing and centred on her research on the 25 Black female professors in the UK- a number that has fluctuated but not risen, and during her investigation she saw signs of racism and bullying in our academic institutions. Black women make up just 0.1% of active professors in the UK compared with the 68% who are white men. The commissioned UCU report is here.