Summer 2025 is the fifth birthday of Wesleyan’s Inclusion in STEM initiative, now known as WesWAVES, or Wesleyan Advancing Visionary Exploration in STEAM. At five years old, WesWAVES is a multi-directional information bridge, connecting minds all over campus: channeling faculty expertise and life experience to the student body, enabling students to share advice across disciplines, making key knowledge about research careers easily available, and serving as a hub for Wesleyan’s commitment to a dynamic and inclusive research environment.
It all started with a Sharepoint file. In the summer of 2020, following the Black Lives Matter protests, a group of Wesleyan researchers realized how little they knew about the many kinds of barriers which can come between budding researchers and a life in science. How many students had faced exclusion in learning environments before they even stepped in the lab? The group wanted to act on what they had learned, so they did what they knew best: research. Ishita Mukerji, then-director of the College of Integrative Sciences, teamed up with then-Vice-President of Equity and Inclusion Alison Williams ’81 to compile all the information they could about how faculty can intentionally create inclusive, innovative environments for their students. The resulting toolkit of tips and skills was shared widely—it united people across fields with a common vision, setting the blueprint for WesWAVES’ mission. Alongside the toolkit was the Wesleyan Commitment, a guiding manifesto of core values for research and learning at Wesleyan.
The two compilations became a living document, then a website that expanded over the years. In addition to compiling resources for faculty, the WesWAVES website collects information for students about research careers—the ins and outs of grant and scholarship applications; how to choose a lab or mentor; how to forge healthy collaborations—so that crucial details about the research life, often shared by word of mouth and easy to miss, can be available to everyone. The WesWAVES profile project, started by Sophie Wazlowski ’22 and continued by a team of student journalists, is an archive of interviews with professors across disciplines about their research journeys. The journalists also report on student-to-student advice, inclusion-related events on campus, and science history at Wesleyan. Finally, WesWAVES is expanding into in-person events with its speaker series, through which students get to meet and hear from people from all kinds of scientific backgrounds, from science communication to psychedelic research. “I want to get rid of all the barriers to information,” said Anika Dane, who now leads the growing WesWAVES initiative. “Accessibility is everything.”
Our goal: connect people, ideas, and resources. As our fifth year anniversary approaches during a time when scientific research is facing significant challenges, it is more important than ever to return to our Wesleyan Commitment as a reminder that protecting and furthering science is a collective effort. In the spirit of collectivity, we are revising our Commitment and hoping to get as many signatures as possible from faculty and students—symbols that we are all in this together. Watch for our announcements in Fall semester!
WesWAVES began as a collaboration between faculty. In the future, however, we want to emphasize the student audience, moving beyond the website into real-life gatherings and creating spaces where students can talk to each other about their visionary explorations: their hopes, fears, obstacles, and questions. We want to lean into interdisciplinary connections across the arts, humanities, and sciences as areas which all face similar challenges and hold potential for contributing to the same urgent big-picture questions, from intellectual freedom to climate change. Most of all, we want to hear from you: tell us what you need, so that we can structure WesWAVES’ future to serve Wesleyan best.
Ready to close this tab and reenter the world of science? Here are a few things you can do to take advantage of WesWAVES’ resources:
- Check out our website—interviews, resources, data, and more.
- Access the original Sharepoint with additional resources. We are in the process of updating all our resources for both sites in anticipation of the new commitment’s release in Fall.
- Follow us on Instagram for updates.
- Contact us with event or program suggestions, ideas, or questions.