Leslie Hopkinson was raised on math and science.

Her parents—a math teacher and an engineer—inspired her to pursue a career in science. She also liked being outdoors and wanted to preserve it for everyone else.

She journeyed into ecological engineering with the help of her adviser and teaching mentors, all three women, and participated at her graduate institution’s seminars and networking experiences for young female scientists funded by a National Science Foundation grant called ADVANCE that is designed to support female faculty.

Now Hopkinson, as an assistant professor at West Virginia University, is faced with climbing the faculty career ladder while building her research team and lab. Once again she is receiving assistance from the women around her.

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She is one of eight women who are receiving $15,000 grants through WVU’s $3.2 million National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant. The funds, part of the WVU ADVANCE Sponsorship Program, will allow them to receive mentoring from faculty members outside their department and to explore their science in new ways.

The overall grant is designed to create a network of support and resources for female faculty in science, technology, engineering and math careers.

“By ensuring that women scientists consider academia as a viable and attractive career option, we are contributing to a more diverse science and engineering workforce,” said Melissa Latimer, director of the WVU ADVANCE Center. “These role models also help to inspire the next generation of female faculty and researchers.”

These professors’ interests are far-reaching.

Hopkinson is exploring how to restore riverbanks to allow plant and animal life to thrive. Karen Culcasi wants to figure out the identity issues that Palestinians living long-term in Jordan are facing. Jessica Deshler wants to see how better to teach college calculus with gender in mind. Yuxin Liu is developing a microvessel model combining biology and engineering to allow the investigation of human tissue, which could contribute to cancer research.

Jennifer Weidhaas is using bacteria to clean up pollution. Jennifer Ripley Stueckle is curious to see if fish in the Potomac River are showing both male and female sex cells because of pollution. Shikha Sharma will track carbon dioxide in the Appalachian Mountains. Robin Hissam is researching biological polymers.

All eight women got into their fields in different ways.

For Jennifer Ripley Stueckle, a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Biology, it was an eighth grade trip to Wallops Island in Virginia that convinced her that aquatic life would be in her future.

“Over the week, we visited intertidal, marsh, eelgrass beds and estuarine environments, and I was amazed to see all the different fishes, crabs and invertebrates dart between my legs,” Stueckle said. “From that point on, I focused my education on marine science.”

Some, like Hopkinson, had female scientist and engineering role models guiding them to the place they are now.

Yuxin Liu grew up watching her parents, both electrical engineering professors, teach and research at universities in China. Seeing her mother work as a faculty member showed her a direct path to research, and she didn’t see the difficulties women face in engineering.

But the statistics tell another story.

According to the Society of Women Engineers, women made up 17 percent of freshman engineering majors earlier in the last decade, and fewer than 20 percent of those in science, engineering, technology and math careers were women. The National Science Foundation reports that women with science and engineering doctorates made up 30 percent of full-time faculty in 2006.

“I think as women faculty in the engineering department, we really need to do something to change that,” Liu said.

Why women in science?

When it comes to the question of why support women in science, for some the answer is obvious: it’s the science that should be supported no matter who is practicing it.

But diversity, some note, allows new ideas to flourish.

Jennifer Weidhaas, who researches and teaches in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering said that, “Everyone approaches problems differently.”

“Having a diverse faculty in terms of gender and race provides the multiple lines of thought and disparate approaches that are needed to solve complex problems in science and engineering.”

Jessica Deshler researches undergraduate mathematics education, a field in which she stands out.

“Successful women and minorities in science and academia can have the greatest influence over others right now who might not be sure if this is the career choice for them,” Deshler said.

“Showing others by our own example is a great way to demonstrate what we’re all capable of doing. I hope that female and minority students see me as an example of the non-traditional—a female Hispanic mathematician, and that that might influence even one student to pursue a career choice that he or she might not have otherwise.”

Feeling encouraged was certainly the route that led Karen Culcasi to pursue a career in geography.

With the ADVANCE sponsorship, she will be meeting and questioning Palestinian refugees in Jordan about how their displacement after the formation of Israel in 1948 affects their identity. She’ll also be bringing students with her to learn about refugees and other cultures, and she’ll be strengthening a bond with Yarmouk University in Jordan that is leading to an exchange program between the Jordanian university and WVU.

The grant is allowing her to both learn more about the refugee experience, an area she hasn’t delved into before, and to increase her understanding of the Arab world, an area that’s fascinated her since high school.

She could pull off the project on her own, but there’s something reassuring about the mentoring aspect.

“I would attempt this on my own but having her assistance is encouraging,” she said of her project mentor Alison Mountz of Syracuse University. “It gives me a lot more confidence that I will be successful in doing this research.”

Shikha Sharma, an assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geography, said the mentorship she will receive from Rosemary Capo, an associate professor of geology and planetary science at the University of Pittsburgh, could turn into something more.

“I have had very limited networking and mentorship opportunities in the U.S. as my entire schooling was in India,” she said. “This is a great opportunity for me to get a good mentor who has a successful academic career. Since our research interests and fields of specialization greatly complement each other, I foresee a potential for long-term research collaboration.”

From 2012 to 2015, 10 women a year will be selected to receive the WVU ADVANCE sponsorships.

To read detailed biographies of the women in science, technology, engineering and math fields at WVU, go to http://wisewomen.wvu.edu/

-WVU-

By Diana Mazzella
University Relations/News

CONTACT: Melissa Latimer, WVU ADVANCE Center
304-293-0278, Melissa.Latimer@mail.wvu.edu

Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.