Happy Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month!
I am on the Steering Committee for AAPI in Geosciences, and together we are organizing events and mixers throughout the month of May, highlighting AAPI leaders in Earth science, and speaking about allyship.
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Geosciences (AAPIiG) is a grassroots, member-driven organization founded in 2020 by colleagues Christine Y. Chen, Kim V. Lau, and Daniel E. Ibarra, during a time highlighting racial violence towards both the Asian-American and Black communities. The aim of AAPIiG is to build a community that supports AAPIs within geosciences.
I was fortunate to join Christine's, Kim's, and Dan's efforts early on alongside other members of the Steering Committee, and brand AAPIiG with their logo and help with organizing. Last December at the 2021 AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans, LA, I finally met some of my fellow Steering Committee and members of AAPIiG at our Town Hall event!
As part of fulfilling our organization's mission, this is the second year we are organizing events to celebrate AANHPI Heritage Month this May. AAPI-identifying geoscientists and allies of the community are welcome to our public events this month. And AAPI geoscientists are welcome to our mixer events as well, and encouraged to sign up for free to be a member at aapigeosci.org.
Drawing Representation
For the two panels, I volunteered to illustrate portraits of the panelists to include in our AAPIiG social media channels, on top of designing all of the graphics to advertise the events. With all of the recent discourse about lack of AAPI in leadership positions and the gap in representation in the geosciences in general, I felt it was important to showcase our role models who have passed their doctoral degrees and not only inspire with their research but also who take the time to discuss directly with students about their careers and race and diversity. I didn't want to only showcase them through their photos, I also wanted to honor them with portraits.
The first panel featured three AAPI geoscientists at their mid-careers who discuss allyship as AAPI geoscientists. The second panel featured geoscientists of color who are international scholars, to join AAPIiG in discussion about the challenges faced by international scholars as they live and work in the U.S. For each panelist, I asked for a quote about their experience as an AAPI geoscientist or to share some advice to the younger generation of students. I put the portraits together with their quotes, and worked with another Steering Committee member to start posting across Twitter and Instagram (thanks, Erika!). I hope others found the resulting social media as inspiring as I did. As a high school or college student (and even as a graduate student), I would love to see faces of leaders who look like me come across my feed.
The panels took place in May 2022. The descriptions of the two public events are below.
APA Heritage Month Panel: Allyship as AAPI geoscientists
Open to all (including non-AAPI individuals), live captioning will be available
Friday, May 20th, 1:00-2:30 p.m. PDT / 4:00-5:30 p.m. EDT
Panelists: Dr. Kanani K.M. Lee (Associate Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley & Staff Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab), Dr. George I. Matsumoto (Senior Education & Research Specialist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute), and Dr. Kartik Sheth (CEO/Founder Empowered Earth Alliance)
In this panel, we bring previous speakers for the Virtual ECR Lunch series to highlight a specific part of their experience as AAPI geoscientists: being allies for other marginalized groups, in addition to fellow AAPIs, within the geosciences.
APA Heritage Month Panel: International Scholars in Geosciences
Open to all (including non-AAPI individuals), live captioning will be available
Friday, May 27th, 11:00-12:30 p.m. PDT / 2:00-3:30 p.m. EDT
Panelists: Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe (Professor, Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, UC Merced), Dr. Alejandra Sanchez-Rios (Postdoctoral Scholar, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego), and Dr. Yige Zhang (Assistant Professor, Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University)
Conversations and scholarship about race and structural inequity in United States academic science typically focus on U.S.-born students and scholars, for whom there is more longitudinal data collected. Immigrant scholars have distinct career narratives from U.S.-born students and scholars of color, while representing a substantial proportion of non-white geoscientists working in the U.S. This panel aims to spotlight these experiences by bringing together three earth scientists who have had transnational careers. We hope attendees will come away with insight into how international scholar experiences interplay with efforts to diversity STEM.
