According to the American Association of University Women (AAUW), girls and women are often not encouraged in educational opportunities in science and math, which limits their access, training, and careers in these fields as adults. As a result, according to AAUW, women comprise only 28% of the workforce in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). The gender gap is particularly glaring in some of the highest paying and fastest growing fields like computer science and engineering.
For women’s history month, we are highlighting five local women in STEM/STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) occupations and their success stories.
SCIENCE: Kathleen M. Woods Ignatoski, Ph.D, Quality Assurance Specialist, UMOR Animal Care & Use Office
What prompted you to study and work in a STEM/STEAM field? How have you used STEM/STEAM on the job?
When I was in third grade, I was at my aunt and uncle’s house. My cousin, Robert brought me down his microscope and a few premade slides, and I was hooked! (sidebar, my cousin Robert is known as Rob Legato. He has won several Academy Awards for Visual Effects and several Emmys for Visual Effects and Directing).
I use science every day at my job. I was a bench researcher for 25 years, studying cancer that affects 5 different organs, intestinal diseases, the microbiome of the intestine, bipolar disease, autism, and depression. I had been doing research compliance for animal welfare in lab research and lab safety as a side gig and parlayed that into a job where I did it for a whole department at Michigan Medicine.
I currently work as a quality assurance specialist for the Animal Care and Use Office under the University of Michigan’s vice president for research. Currently, I am the only former scientist in the office, so I read and teach some form of science every day. I also mentor a few undergrad students in a project that is creating an app for students, staff, and faculty at the University of Michigan to navigate all of the mental health resources available to them.
Do you feel like you had encouragement and support in your career?
I have had some amazing female mentors along the way and continue to lean on them if need be.
What do you like best about your career?
It is different every day. Some days I am doing lab inspections, some days I am teaching, some days I read about other people’s science and some days I am in scientific lectures.
What advice would you give others?
Follow your passion. Don’t let someone tell you you need to make money or be something else. If you don’t like what you are doing change it! If you want to be something, be it!
Also, I believe that everyone is a scientist. You can learn something new about the world we live in every day. And everyone should learn at least one new thing every day. Even if it is that polar bear’s skin is black or that you can track your kids using your smartphone. Do it! Learn something!
How do you inspire other women?
I try to inspire young girls and women to understand that they CAN do science. It is not hard, and your teacher may not call on you often, but you can do it.
I have run community science outreach programs since the mid-1990s. I have been told at events by girls that they decided to go into science because of one of my earlier presentations. It is the best.
TECHNOLOGY: Cynthia Luz Marcelo, M.S., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Plastic Surgery
What prompted you to study and work in a STEM/STEAM field? How have you used STEM/STEAM on the job?
When I was in high school, I liked science, especially the laboratory components of science, and history. So, when it came time to choose an area of study for college, I chose biology/chemistry.
I applied to master’s programs at several universities in the sciences. It was full tuition and a stipend. After a while in the master’s program, they offered me a slot in their Ph.D. program which I took. I graduated in 1969 and 1973. I did a postdoc at the University of Michigan, and I ended up staying in Michigan. I was at the medical school doing basic research –that’s the part I really liked, the bench work.
The career involved teaching medical students, residents, Ph.D. students and postdocs and some undergraduates. I also wrote and obtained research grants and wrote papers and worked reviewing grants for the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. So, I used my STEM training in my career from the beginning to the end. I retired as a full professor at the University of Michigan.
Do you feel like you had encouragement and support in your career?
In high school, the teachers encouraged us to go forward and go to college. I obviously had support in my college career because I went to a woman’s college and all my women teachers had PhDs. When I began graduate school, I was assigned to a woman scientist who had worked in the area of cancer virology. This was at the University of Buffalo in Buffalo NY. And I ended up working for my Ph.D. in cell physiology. Both my mentors were quite supportive of me and the work that I was doing.
The only trouble I encountered was from the other students who were all men who felt that I was occupying a slot that belonged to a man “who was going to have to support a family” and I was not a good person for using up a slot since I wasn’t going to work outside the home.
What do you like best about your career?
Hands down what I like the best about my career was doing science. I’m a natural laboratory rat. I really enjoyed analyzing data. It wasn’t that I was so brilliant, but I was lucky enough to get into an area of work that I had a talent for.
Until the last days before I retired, I was still doing some laboratory work. I also very much enjoyed teaching and training people to do research. I have trained a lot of women in part because I knew that a lot of the male mentors felt they were wasting their time training women. Besides fundamental cell research, I grow cells from people’s tissue and expand them and use them to make replacement tissues, mostly skin. I am part of several patents, and we have developed in vitro cell systems and manufactured tissue composites used in significant injuries for a replacement.
What advice would you give others?
A scientific career manifests itself in many ways. You can teach, or you can do extensive laboratory work as a senior lab technician, or you can go the academic professorial route which also involves teaching college and graduate students and medical students and residents and a lot of writing because you must write publications and must publish your results. You also must help run conferences and give many talks.
My advice is to find an area that you like to work in that makes you happy and try to make sure that that area is one in which you have an ability to undertake.
How do you inspire other women?
I really tried to train other women. I tried to be a good role model for them. Also, through my work on study sections grant reviews, et cetera. I made sure that women were treated fairly. I always tried to be in the room when discussions and decisions were being made about how things were run in general but also if women were being considered for slots.
ENGINEERING: Haley Dalzell, Engineer at General Motors
What prompted you to study and work in a STEM/STEAM field? How have you used STEM/STEAM on the job?
My desire to study and work in STEM started with just a small seed in elementary school, when I learned about FIRST Lego Robotics competitions and told my mom I wanted to join a team!
However, there weren’t many teams at the time, and it was hard to find a team that had room for more students. I finally was able to join one in middle school and I loved it! I was shy and hesitant to continue with the FIRST robotics team in high school, but I ultimately decided to after being encouraged by the president of the team, who was a mentor of my middle school team.
On the high school team, Engineers from GM taught me how to design and machine parts for the robot, and decided I wanted to pursue mechanical engineering in college. My university required taking two intro engineering courses, and I ended up enjoying the electrical & computer engineering intro course so much that I switched majors.
After graduating, I took a job as an embedded software engineer in the automated driving team at General Motors, and have been working there since. I use the knowledge from my engineering degree every day when writing software, performing testing, defining requirements, and defining system architecture for new products.
Do you feel like you had encouragement and support in your career?
From the beginning, my mom was very supportive of my interest in STEM and participation in robotics clubs, and encouraged me to pursue it in college. However, in the clubs, I sometimes felt behind my peers – many of the boys on the team had already learned some programming. I felt like I was slowing the team down if I asked them to teach me, so I stuck to tasks that had more parent/mentor guidance and encouragement such as the research project or fabrication. That early lack of support in some areas definitely made me hesitant to pursue programming in college, and I had to take extra courses to catch up.
In my career at GM, I feel that I was strongly supported in my career by my leadership and coworkers from the beginning. When I joined GM, my team was overloaded by a large project, and I was able to dive in and contribute quickly. There was ample room in the team to grow and take on more leadership and responsibility as time went on, and my leadership encouraged me to do so. I never felt the need to “fight” to have my contributions recognized. I know that is not the experience of most people in their careers in general, let alone for women in STEM, so I am very grateful for that.
What do you like best about your career?
When I first started at GM, my favorite part of my job was taking a vehicle out for testing, and getting to see my code in action on a physical product. The first project I worked on was Super Cruise, which is a semi-autonomous version of cruise control that steers itself on the freeway. It was very challenging but rewarding to work in a fast-paced environment on a popular new technology. These days, I spend less time coding and testing in the vehicle since I’ve moved to a systems architecture role. However, in that role, I get to work on architecting new products with many teams across GM, in offices around the world, which has been rewarding in its own way.
What advice would you give others?
The strongest advice I can give is don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone to pursue something you’re interested in. Don’t let the fact that others appear to be ahead of you prevent you from trying, and asking for advice on how to get started. It does take work to catch up, but most people like to help others and will go out of their way to support you if you ask.
How do you inspire other women?
Just like my robotics team mentors did for me, I now mentor a local high school robotics team, teaching students how to program the robot and wire the electrical system. I also briefly mentored the middle school all-girls robotics team, many of whom are on the high school team now.
I’ve tried to passively encourage them simply by being present and sharing my career path, to show that if they want to, they can do it too. I also let them know that if they ever want college or career advice, or need help because they are not feeling supported by someone on the team, they can come to me or any woman mentor on the team and we’d be happy to help.
ARTS (and MATH AND SCIENCE): Connie Rizzolo Brown, Architect and Owner of Rizzolo Brown Studio
What prompted you to study and work in a STEM/STEAM field? How have you used STEM/STEAM on the job?
Architecture heavily integrates art, math & sciences. That’s why I love it—using math and science to create beautiful human-centered buildings
I followed what I was interested in, it was the choice to pursue a career that combined both technical and artistic skills. Being able to combine creativity and problem-solving through both art and science is exciting to me. As an architect, we develop three-dimensional space in our heads and test them on paper and computer. There is a lot of back-and-forth manipulating structure and form to get the appearance and pleasure I want in the building. We also run sun studies, consider how to naturally heat and cool the building as well protect it from and reuse the site water.
Do you feel like you had encouragement and support in your career?
This is a tough one. I had a number of people who fully supported my abilities and career goals. There were also those who were resistant to a woman being the leader of the design and structure—they tended to see women as helpers to another’s vision. Thankfully that has been part of the past rather than any recent experiences.
What do you like best about your career?
This is easy—architecture is about identifying and solving problems. It’s a big set of goals (often at odds with each other) to solve for and you go back and forth between the goals: the layout, the 3D form, physics, the exterior, the form, the interiors, beauty, and finding a solution that works on all levels. I have an array of tools—paper, pen, computer modeling, physical model making, and my head to refine (and refine and refine…)
What advice would you give others?
I assume you mean women specifically? In architecture school, we were always taught to look at precedent and when I looked at precedent it occurred to me there may have been better solutions. We can learn a lot from history but it is also about understanding the mindset of the decision-makers involved in the preferred solution.
My first project in arch school was a room in a nursing home. It became apparent that the rooms were historically designed for how easy it was to clean for the janitor rather than for someone whose entire life may revolve around a bed or a chair. It taught me a lot about looking for the “why’s” behind things-finding out what problem was being solved and for whom. I am often a 3-year-old child asking why (or at least wondering silently 🙂 Be open to turning things upside and see if a different approach opens up new possibilities
How do you inspire other women?
Inspire is a big word-yikes! Hopefully, I inspire them to follow that feeling in their gut when they know they are on the right track. I encourage to be their own teachers as well as learn from others. Look at things with curiosity, and don’t be afraid to ask questions OR provide answers. Seek answers, don’t expect someone to spoon-feed you. Know where you want to grow and go for it!
MATHEMATICS: Anastasia K. Yocum, Ph.D. Director of Data Science. Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Program, University of Michigan Medicine
What prompted you to study and work in a STEM/STEAM field? How have you used STEM/STEAM on the job?
I like to continually learn about the natural world and our interactions as humans with the natural world. Always enjoyed chemistry, the science of change, so that was my first direction. But being a mother, I withdrew from laboratory work and focused on analyzing biological and chemical data at the interface of medicine and environment. Daily, I’m always using math for statistics, and scripting to manage data to turn that data into knowledge to help people.
Do you feel like you had encouragement and support in your career?
Yeah I did early on, growing up with uncle DuPont in the backyard. Won several awards as a “women in chemistry/ pharmacology” over the course of my formal educational years. I felt that those in power realized there was a gender gap that needed to be corrected. Unfortunately, as I became more senior, the need to balance family forced my career to take a slower/lower trajectory than initially planned. But that was my choice.
What do you like best about your career?
I work with smart, creative people intent on solving problems, big or small. That’s fun. Respectful collaboration is expected even with critiques and I’m afforded the luxury to continually learn.
What advice would you give others?
Surround yourself with people that not only support your growth but make it so you want to be better. Not better than anyone else, but yourself better today than yesterday. Remove the negativity and naysayers from your environment or you change your environment.
How do you inspire other women?
Don’t really know. I teach Potions for Wines as a part of WESO which is a fun introduction to chemistry. There are young women that join the team which I hope to inspire. Other than that, I suspect just by my presence sitting at the STEM table, outsiders may feel comforted to know that there is a woman and mother helping solve problems with STEM.
Full Disclosure:
In addition to being a freelance journalist, Donna Marie Iadipaolo has primarily worked in the STEM/STEAM field as a math teacher since 1993. What prompted Iadipaolo to work in the STEM/STEAM field is that she always excelled in math/science early in her education and studied at the University of Michigan School of Engineering for 4 years. Her father was an electrical engineer at GM for 35 years and her mother was an accountant. Iadipaolo then switched to education to earn three teaching certificates in mathematics, social science, and English. Also subsequently earned three graduate degrees: a Master of Arts within the Communication Arts field, a Master of Science in Mathematics Teaching and Learning, and an Education Specialist degree in Curriculum and Instruction/Educational Technology. Iadipaolo’s research and teaching have continued to cover Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics for over 30 years.
