Wesleyan Advancing Visionary Exploration in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics
One of our missions is to highlight members of the Wesleyan scientific community. They may be faculty, staff, students, alum, or people or organizations in the surrounding community. If you would like to make a nomination, please email Anika (adane@wesleyan.edu) their name, contact info, and brief details about why they are a good candidate so we may reach out.
“I don’t have a typical day’ seems to be the recurring theme for Jen Kleindienst, the director of the Sustainability Office at the Bailey College of Environment. For Kleindienst, a typical day involves meetings with students, community partners, and working on projects to support sustainability and environmental justice initiatives. She and her team guide our…
Stem cells are a special type of cell that have a unique ability to be reprogrammed into nearly any cell in the body. Like the stem cells she now studies, Dr. Alison O’Neil’s career has always been guided by the confidence to reprogram its direction. However, long before she became a stem cell scientist, Dr….
Professor Chang-Davidson arrived at college with a plan: to double major in mechanical engineering and math, a combination which was shaped by interests she had carried throughout high school. During her high school years, she spent long afternoons and evenings working with her robotics team, building and troubleshooting whatever problems arose. In the summers, she…
Dr. Boyce-Jacino explained that the history of astronomy has historically been focused mostly on European and Arabic astronomy, in a sort of great overarching narrative about the discovery of the stars. These narratives often focus on grand discoveries that are primarily driven by men and by the grand institutions that fund them. However, by escaping that narrative and thinking about astronomy not just as an institutional thing but as a science that everyone does, the story becomes a lot more diverse.
“When one out of the ten things actually works, you’re like, oh, wow, this is so cool,” Professor Michelle Chen reflects on what drives her passion for research. “I get to study what I enjoy.” Now at Wesleyan as Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Chen channels this sense of discovery into both her pioneering research in…