 And now we will hear from Rita Caldwell, another person who has inspired many, and if I may say so, her recent biography provides a great number of the stories that need to be told. So Rita is currently at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University and has just gotten off a plane. Please Rita. Thank you very much for including me, Lydia, in this very distinguished panel. Willie Pearson has given a very elegant summary of the issues and John Slaughter, whom I have long admired and respected. In fact, he was my boss when he was president of the University of Maryland. And so with these two companions in presenting the issues that we need to discuss in detail, I'm very pleased to have this opportunity. I'm going to be perhaps a bit more colloquial in my presentation. Indeed, I did write a book last year, A Lab of One's Own, but it turned out to be essentially a journey through sexism and science. It was essentially meant to be biographical because I have done some rather interesting things and have survived some and overcome some barriers. But as I was telling the story and writing with my co-author Sharon McGrane, we were drawing on so many similar experiences of other women that it ended up really being a history of the difficulties of a woman pursuing a career in science. Personally, my own background is that I grew up in a very small town north of Boston, Beverly Cove, and I always had an interest and a curiosity in science. And growing up right on the seashore, it made it obvious that I would be able to do exploration and spend my summers doing the kinds of experiments and studies that I was pretty lucky to have the opportunity to do. In high school, it was very interesting, but this is an experience I think, unfortunately, girls still have today. When I decided that I would like to do a career in chemistry, I asked the chemistry teacher for a letter of recommendation to university. But of course, his response was women don't do chemistry. Now, it may well be that he knew something that I didn't know, namely that at that time and even to today, the percentage of women as professors of chemistry is very, very low. It's not much. I think it's in the range of the percentage of women engineers, though physicists have improved by working diligently to include more women in physics, but still it's in the range of 17 to 20% of all those in the field. So this was a setback to be told that he wouldn't write a letter of recommendation, but fortunately, there were other teachers who provided the letters. I applied to Radcliffe and was accepted. But then it meant that I would have had to commute because I didn't have the resources to be able to live on campus. And my sister had an artist had married a physicist who was at Purdue University and she recommended that I apply to Purdue, which I did and received a complete scholarship that allowed me to live on campus and to be a full-time student. Now that turned out to be very beneficial because Purdue at the time was one of the top and still is in fact is even more so a top engineering school and a school of science. So this, I think, was probably beneficial because rather than pursuing perhaps would have been women's studies at Radcliffe, I found my niche really at Purdue in science. As it turned out chemistry wasn't that much fun, but biology certainly was. Microbiology is where thanks to an extremely good mentor, teacher, Dorothy Paulson, perhaps the only woman professor in the biosciences at Purdue at the time, the full professor. Now, I've always had an interest in the fields of medicine and so I applied to medical schools naively. I applied to three. I applied to Yale, to Boston University and to Western Reserve and I was accepted at all three and I was prepared to head off to medical school. What happened to me my last semester of my senior year, just as I was going to graduate, very handsome graduate student and we were very, in a very short time decided to get married, which we did just before I graduated. Now, this was at a time when being a woman in science was a problem, but to be a married woman in science was even greater problem. Now, Jack had just come back from serving in the military and I would neither of us wanted him to lose a year of his graduate school so we decided that we would stay at Purdue and that was how I became interested in bacteriology. The medical schools, all three kept me kept me on the roll. They said, fine, if you want a year, you can tell us a year from now if you would like to go to medical school. In retrospect, I think it was quite unusual, but I was very grateful for that. However, we ended up going to the University of Washington where Jack was able to join the physics department. Now, there's a whole series of setbacks that I went through that I described in the book. There are the kinds of experiences that unfortunately we still see happening today, but I was very fortunate in having an outstanding mentor eventually, Dr. John Liston. Dr. Liston was a Scotsman who had been recruited to the University of Washington to establish a PhD program in marine microbiology, which at that time, 20 years ago was simply unknown. It was just, there were probably 10 marine microbiologists in the world at the time, but it turned out to be hugely important. So I've told these stories mainly because I want to emphasize that the skills that provided me to persevere was the ability to not give up. And I think this holds today for students, blacks, Latinos, women, all of those of us in the unrepresented groups, women are more so, but still not at a parody. And I think it's important to emphasize that in the studies that I was able to be involved in at the National Academy of Science, I chaired a committee on women in science, engineering, and medicine, and we produced a report, sexual harassment of women, climate, culture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine. Fortunately, it appeared at the very peak of the me to movement. And it was fortuitous because it was a heavily documented three year study that provided the data that underpinned the demands and the criticisms being made during the height of the me to movement. And that report has turned out to be the third most read or downloaded report in the history of the National Academy of Sciences. It was followed up by another report, which I did share, I co-chaired it. And this was a report promising practices for addressing under representation of women in science, engineering, and medicine, opening doors. And it provides extremely good wisdom, based recommendations for the kinds of changes that are needed. But fundamentally, women don't need to change. Society needs to be changed. And I think that statement holds as well for underrepresented groups in science, engineering, and medicine. Let me now turn to some of the recommendations that I think we should discuss. First of all, I think it's critical as a basis of what I have just described in a colloquial way to have supporters, family, friends, mentors, mentors, and we can discuss this. I think Willie and John and I, and supportive colleagues. In other words, I would say we need to, each of us needs to build a posse, a circle to within which we can go to discuss, to share, and to strategize. Now, let me address a couple of recommendations that I feel very strongly about. First of all, I feel very strongly about the NSF program of EPSCORE. But I do feel that this is a program that needs to be redefined as a very powerful economic driver for our country. It is not a program to help the underrepresented. It's a program for the underrepresented to help our nation become stronger in science, engineering, mathematics, medicine. And I think that similarly the advanced program, which has been 20 years now highly successful as has EPSCORE, that as the changes occur in the coming year with Congress, hopefully, investing heavily and wisely in enhanced science research and education, that EPSCORE in advance will come under the new funding for basic research, but also for the funding coming in for transformational research. In other words, the research that takes the findings of basic science and engineering and applies it to a variety of societal benefits in forming companies, et cetera. And I think it would be very powerful for the EPSCORE and the advanced programs to be deeply involved in the transformational as well as the fundamental curiosity-driven research programs. And then I would like to see resuscitated a program that I started as director of NSF called the GK12 program, graduate K12 program. And this, I think, speaks directly to the points raised, especially by Willie and by John. And that is to allow graduate students to be paid well as graduate students to do their research, but instead of being assistants in the laboratory at the university to be part of a program headed by a scientist or engineer in a university and by a teacher in a K12 school. And that the graduate students would participate in doing their teaching as a TA in the K12 system. And this is an opportunity for children in the first and second and third grades to see that engineers do things besides drive trains, to see that there are students who are African-American, who are girls, who are able then the children are able to see that they too could be a scientist, an engineer, or doctor, or a lawyer, or whatever. So I think my time is running out, but there are two other points I would like to make. And that is I do believe strongly that we need to weave the social, behavioral, and economic sciences into and in parallel with the fundamental natural sciences. We are in an era of interdisciplinary science, and that means that we can no longer leave out the behavioral component, particularly as the computational sciences go into artificial intelligence and machine learning. These are, we're learning all too painfully, must have guidance from the behavioral and the social, psychological, and economic sciences. And then I'll just close by saying that there is a magic in more than the token one. It is, we must be, we must move beyond tokenism because to really empower change, you need to have more than one. You need to have an equity, at least in any case, if you're going to put together a search committee for a job, a position as a faculty member, whatever. It's not enough to have one woman, or one African-American, or one Latino. There needs to be an equal blend. And then you will find that you are able to recruit and retain the very best of society. Because after all, if you're a general, and you're going to fight a battle, you sure don't want half the army. You want the whole army with you. So with that, I'll say thank you for including me in this very important workshop. And I look forward to the discussion. Thank you so much. I would say that we have one comment in the question and answer period from Gloria Trujillo, who wishes to thank you for GK 12. It changed my life, she says.