At the University of Minnesota's Women in STEMM Summit, Raven Baxter keynotes on being unapologetically you

Raven Baxter gave the keynote address at the University of Minnesota's 2021 Women in STEMM Summit on April 30, 2021. Her talk, "Unapologetically You in STEMM," ran as a Zoom webinar for the university community.

She drew on her own path as a scientist and educator. Her subject was how to be unapologetically yourself in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine, and the wider effects of doing so. A fireside chat with audience questions followed.

The summit met online, more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. That spring, a National Academies consensus report found that pandemic disruptions "endangered the engagement, experience, and retention of women in academic STEMM." On April 1, a Pew Research Center analysis found that women held most health-related STEM jobs. They remained underrepresented in the physical sciences, computing and engineering, and degree trends suggested those gaps would not close soon.

The Medical School's Center for Women in Medicine and Science (CWIMS) hosted the summit. A committee drawn from Women in STEMM groups across the university planned it. CWIMS supports leadership and professional development toward gender equity, diversity and inclusion. Its work covers faculty recruitment and retention, mentoring networks and fair pay and leadership opportunities. It also carries out research on gender equity and women's health.

The University of Minnesota was founded in 1851 near Saint Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River. It is the state's only land-grant university. It is also one of five U.S. universities with engineering, medical, law, veterinary medicine and agricultural schools on one campus. Its Medical School was founded in 1888.

Baxter, a molecular biologist, worked in drug discovery before turning to science education. She was then a doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo, where her research focused on science communication.

The center's mission and programs are preserved in an archived copy of its website.