Dr. Jedidah Isler
More about Dr. Jedidah Isler
Dr. Jedidah Isler maintains her own website and biography on her website, but a few highlights from her career include: She is an assistant professor of Astrophysics at Dartmouth college. She was the first African American woman to earn a astrophysics degree from Yale. She went on to further participate in the Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-Ph.D. Bridge program, and later went on to finish her Ph.D. at Yale. She studies blazars, which are a type of super black hole.
A prominent speaker, Dr. Jedidah Isler is the moderator and original creator of a monthly Google hangout series called "Vanguard STEM," a webcast that focuses on issues of women of color in STEM. The goals of the webcast is to bring together emerging and established women in STEM together. #vanguardSTEM Her non-profit, the SeRCH Foundation is related to her work with Vanguard STEM.
TED and Informational Talks by Dr. Jedidah Isler
Books about Opportunities for People of Color in STEM
Making Black Scientists
Americans have access to some of the best science education in the world, but too often black students are excluded from these opportunities. This essential book by leading voices in the field of education reform offers an inspiring vision of how America's universities can guide a new generation of African Americans to success in science. Educators, research scientists, and college administrators have all called for a new commitment to diversity in the sciences, but most universities struggle to truly support black students in these fields. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are different, though. There is a lot we can learn from these exemplary schools. Educators on these campuses have a keen sense of their students' backgrounds and circumstances, familiarity that helps their science departments avoid the high rates of attrition that plague departments elsewhere. The most effective science programs at HBCUs emphasize teaching when considering whom to hire and promote, encourage students to collaborate rather than compete, and offer more opportunities for black students to find role models among both professors and peers.Interrogating Whiteness and Relinquishing Power
Interrogating Whiteness and Relinquishing Power: White Faculty's Commitment to Racial Consciousness in STEM Classrooms is a collection of narratives that will transform the teaching of any faculty member who teaches in the STEM system. The book links issues of inclusion to teacher excellence at all grade levels by illuminating the critical influence that racial consciousness has on the behaviors of White faculty in the classroom. It functions as an analytical tool, scaffolding exemplary examples to inspire readers to engage in the complex and difficult work of assessing their own racial consciousness and teacher effectiveness. White pre-service teachers in STEM education rarely see the importance of the link between race and the teaching and learning of mathematics, in part because the White faculty who are teaching these subjects rarely engage in the study of racial projects in STEM. From this perspective, the authors of this book contend that the classroom is a racialized environment that, if not addressed, can reproduce racial structures and hierarchies in cyclical ways.