johntheblackjew
Banned
she's a one drop...are yall gonna claim her ??
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a 32-year-old theoretical astrophysicist. Her academic home is arguably the nation's most elite physics department, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In one sense, she is among a dying breed. Prescod-Weinstein is a pen-and-paper theorist. "Basically I do calculus all day, on paper," she told HuffPost. "I'm a little bit of a hold-out. There are things I could be doing by computer that I just like to do by hand."
But she is also part of a vanguard, a small but growing number of African-American women with doctorates in physics.
Just 83 Black women have received a Ph.D. in physics-related fields in American history, according to adatabase maintained by physicists Dr. Jami Valentine and Jessica Tucker that was updated last week.
By comparison, the physics programs at MIT and UC Berkeley alone grant nearly as many Ph.D.'s each year. In total, U.S. universities awarded over 1,700 physics Ph.D.'s in 2013. The number of African-American faculty at U.S. physics departments remains similarly low; only two percent are Black, according to a report issued last year by the American Institute of Physics, and half of those faculty members are employed by historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Yet more than a third of all African-American women with physics doctorates earned them in the last 10 years, according to the database. In February, Prescod-Weinstein (citing subsequently-revised figures) posted a celebratory message on Twitter:
"How did I feel when I posted that?" she said during a recent interview. "You know, whenever I think about these numbers—and I guess this makes me some white supremacist stereotype or whatever—I feel angry. I feel really, really angry. When I started as a physics major, I understood that I would be some kind of barrier-breaker, but I didn't really understand what that was going to feel like, or how hard it would be and how upsetting it would be, and how difficult it would be to watch other people go through the same process. So I think I felt angry; I felt like people need to hear this. People need to know this."
Prescod-Weinstein recounts teaching herself calculus and physics when her high school ran out of classes at her level; she grew up reading the New York Times each morning on the school bus, and spent a year carrying around the complete works of William Shakespeare. She identifies as queer/agender, and haswritten about the collapse of her first marriage "under the pressure of many things, including my wife's family's homophobia."
Prescod-Weinstein's parents were both political activists, and she has followed their path. Most of her public social media posts focus on social justice, in the world of science and beyond. She has highlightedthe professional challenges of investing her time in activism:
For my part, as a Black woman, I would ask my white (and male) peers to remember that many of us (though not all) experience our differences as a negative in this environment. Where I see it as a Black cultural tradition to lend a helping hand even as I continue to achieve my own dreams, others see my commitment to [the National Society of Black Physicists] as a signal that I am wasting my time not doing science. Do my friends who play music in their spare time get this same signal? Moreover, many of us who are women or people of color or both are often involved in efforts to change the face of science. When we are challenged about that by our peers, not only are they standing in our way, but they are also failing to recognize that for many of us, this investment in the community is necessary to our survival, much like someone else might say playing music is for theirs.
Read the rest here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/chanda-prescod-weinstein_n_7574020.html
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a 32-year-old theoretical astrophysicist. Her academic home is arguably the nation's most elite physics department, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In one sense, she is among a dying breed. Prescod-Weinstein is a pen-and-paper theorist. "Basically I do calculus all day, on paper," she told HuffPost. "I'm a little bit of a hold-out. There are things I could be doing by computer that I just like to do by hand."
But she is also part of a vanguard, a small but growing number of African-American women with doctorates in physics.
Just 83 Black women have received a Ph.D. in physics-related fields in American history, according to adatabase maintained by physicists Dr. Jami Valentine and Jessica Tucker that was updated last week.
By comparison, the physics programs at MIT and UC Berkeley alone grant nearly as many Ph.D.'s each year. In total, U.S. universities awarded over 1,700 physics Ph.D.'s in 2013. The number of African-American faculty at U.S. physics departments remains similarly low; only two percent are Black, according to a report issued last year by the American Institute of Physics, and half of those faculty members are employed by historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Yet more than a third of all African-American women with physics doctorates earned them in the last 10 years, according to the database. In February, Prescod-Weinstein (citing subsequently-revised figures) posted a celebratory message on Twitter:
"How did I feel when I posted that?" she said during a recent interview. "You know, whenever I think about these numbers—and I guess this makes me some white supremacist stereotype or whatever—I feel angry. I feel really, really angry. When I started as a physics major, I understood that I would be some kind of barrier-breaker, but I didn't really understand what that was going to feel like, or how hard it would be and how upsetting it would be, and how difficult it would be to watch other people go through the same process. So I think I felt angry; I felt like people need to hear this. People need to know this."
Prescod-Weinstein recounts teaching herself calculus and physics when her high school ran out of classes at her level; she grew up reading the New York Times each morning on the school bus, and spent a year carrying around the complete works of William Shakespeare. She identifies as queer/agender, and haswritten about the collapse of her first marriage "under the pressure of many things, including my wife's family's homophobia."
Prescod-Weinstein's parents were both political activists, and she has followed their path. Most of her public social media posts focus on social justice, in the world of science and beyond. She has highlightedthe professional challenges of investing her time in activism:
For my part, as a Black woman, I would ask my white (and male) peers to remember that many of us (though not all) experience our differences as a negative in this environment. Where I see it as a Black cultural tradition to lend a helping hand even as I continue to achieve my own dreams, others see my commitment to [the National Society of Black Physicists] as a signal that I am wasting my time not doing science. Do my friends who play music in their spare time get this same signal? Moreover, many of us who are women or people of color or both are often involved in efforts to change the face of science. When we are challenged about that by our peers, not only are they standing in our way, but they are also failing to recognize that for many of us, this investment in the community is necessary to our survival, much like someone else might say playing music is for theirs.
Read the rest here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/chanda-prescod-weinstein_n_7574020.html
is she gonna build a business and employ black ppl???
good for her
