West Virginia's STEM Speaker Series brings Dr. Raven Baxter to Marshall University

Dr. Raven Baxter gave the keynote for West Virginia's STEM Speaker Series on Monday, April 11, 2022, at Marshall University in Huntington. Her talk, "From College Dropout to PhD: Finding Resilience in your STEM Journey," began at 7 p.m. in the Don Morris Room of the Memorial Student Center.

The series' announcement said she "had a unique path towards her PhD, including dropping out of college." At 16, while looking for an education that suited her, she found a genetics course and her future career, the announcement said.

The talk came after two years of falling college enrollment. In January 2022, the National Student Clearinghouse reported that undergraduate enrollment fell 3.1% from fall 2020 to fall 2021. In West Virginia, 48.2% of 2020 high school graduates went on to higher education that fall, the state's lowest rate since 2000.

The talk also took up the representation of women in STEM, the announcement said. It noted that "most people think of white men when they're asked to conjure up an image of a scientist, making inclusivity and representation more important than ever." Women held half of U.S. STEM jobs but 15% of engineering jobs and 25% of computer jobs, the Pew Research Center reported in April 2021. The science community, the announcement said, can show students from all backgrounds "that they can be whatever they want to be, and do so unapologetically."

Later that year, at a lecture at Princeton University, Baxter recalled a university talk in West Virginia. At the question session, a little girl "came up to the microphone, a podium, and her mother actually had to hold her up so that she could reach." The girl told her, "I didn't know that you could be a scientist and wear a pink dress and I want to wear a pink dress and be a scientist too."

"Normalizing diversity and how we present ourselves is so important. You just never know what resonates," Baxter told the Princeton audience. "I didn't think anything of putting on that pink dress that day other than I'm just getting dressed."

The STEM Speaker Series began in 2014 to communicate science, technology, engineering and math research "to all West Virginians." It is run by the science and research division of the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission. The division directs the National Science Foundation's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) in the state. West Virginia was one of the first seven states chosen for the program, in 1979.

Baxter's keynote was supported by NSF award OIA-1458952, which funded a five-year, $20 million research project on water resources and astrophysics. The series still runs, bringing the public scientists it "may not otherwise have the opportunity to meet."

Baxter, a molecular biologist known online as Dr. Raven the Science Maven, worked in drug discovery before moving into science education. Her Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, conferred that February, focused on science communication research.

The host's announcement of the keynote remains on the division's website.