Rooted Pedagogies: Black Women Activist Teachers Planting Seeds

Planting seeds for the future of food

The health and wellbeing of future generations will depend on humankind's ability to deliver sufficient nutritious food to a world population in excess of 9 billion. Feeding this many people by 2050 will require science-based solutions that address sustainable agricultural productivity and enable healthful dietary patterns in a more globally equitable way. This topic was the focus of a multi-di...

Planting the Seeds of a New Paradigm

Although the word ‘revolution’ should not be used lightly in science, there is no other way to describe the recent explosion in our awareness and understanding of RNAmediated gene silencing pathways. The central player in RNA-mediated gene silencing is a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) that is chopped into tiny RNAs by the enzyme Dicer. The tiny RNAs associate with various silencing effector comple...

Trading Places: From Black Power Activist to "Anti-Negro Negro"

In March of 1988, the faculty of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst unanimously demanded that the University remove one of its most distinguished members, Professor Julius Lester. The official reason given for this unprecedented request was that Lester had become an "anti-Negro-Negro." In making this extraordinary demand, Lester's colleagues were ...

Lamport on Mutual Ex lusion: 27 Years of Planting Seeds

Phoebe S. Leboy, groundbreaking activist for women in STEM.

Phoebe Starfield Leboy, scientist and tireless advocate for women in science and engineering, passed away on June 16, 2012, at the age of 75, after a lengthy battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Professor Leboy was a rare creature when she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine in 1967, one of only a few women among many men. ...