When you tell people you work in a cryopreservation lab, it sounds like you’re in a sci-fi movie. But the students who work for Oregon State bioengineering professor Adam Higgins say there’s nothing fictitious about the learning they’ve acquired as part of his broader-impact program.
In December 2013, the Office for Research Development was launchede with the goal of establishing a framework to catalyze the competitiveness of faculty researchers in winning funding for their research. The creation of the office was driven by a task force of visionary faculty recognizing the need for someone to facilitate the development of large-scale proposals, institutionalize our “lessons learned,” position OSU to compete successfully on large-scale opportunities, foresee and create new opportunities for large-scale research, and make interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research an institutional priority.
“It is not lack of talent, but unintentional biases and outmoded institutional structures that are hindering the access and advancement of women.”
— Beyond Bias and Barriers, National Academy of Sciences
Kathleen Bogart doesn’t take communication for granted. Even as a child, she was aware that people responded to her differently. She was born with Moebius Syndrome, a condition that causes facial paralysis and difficulty in moving eyes from side to side. She had to work to make herself understood.
When Margaret Burnett was growing up in the 1960s, being a female with a gift for math led to one likely career: teaching. She didn’t see herself in front of a classroom, but when a neighbor got a job with IBM after majoring in math in college, Burnett saw an opportunity. As an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio, she would rush home to do her computer programming homework. “It was like a new puzzle. I loved it,” she says.
Lisa Gaines’ grandmother made it a priority to educate her girls. “I will educate my daughters before I educate my sons,” Gaines remembers her saying. Gaines’ grandmother lived her entire life in the black community in St. Louis and saw that young men “always found a way of making it through, but women did not.”