As the 2024 Black History Month comes to a close, DEEPS is celebrating our Black community members and honoring the Black scientists who have made invaluable contributions to our society. DEEPS Communications Assistant Angela Snider highlights three Black women (from the past, the present, and up-and-coming) who have made important contributions to the geosciences.

DEEPS & IBES Professor Meredith Hastings is a co-PI on a new project that will center on a field safety, anti-harassment, and bystander intervention training certificate program. “In scientific work, hostile behaviors such as bullying and harassment create a negative work environment that is more often experienced by people of color and those with disabilities. This is an important reason why the geosciences remain one of the least diverse STEM fields,” said Hastings.

DEEPS Alumna Rocío Paola Caballero-Gill '15 was selected to receive the 2023 AGU Award for Advancing Inclusive Excellence in STEM, which recognizes exemplary efforts made by an individual or team for developing programs, systems, or networks that have led to the advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the Earth and space sciences community.

Non-native English speakers reported having their papers rejected specifically because of writing issues 2.5 times as often as native speakers. Lina Pérez-Angel, a Colombian palaeoclimatologist and DEEPS Voss Postdoctoral Research Associate, says “I have had reviewers that explicitly said that my English puts in doubt the quality of the research, or mostly gave me feedback on my English in a harsh way that made me think it was based on my Latinx/Hispanic-sounding last name.”

Women have always played an essential role in the advancement of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences.

The ADVANCEGeo Leadership Team, including DEEPS Professor Meredith Hastings, recently published their findings from a workplace climate survey from the geosciences. Their research provides some of the first quantitative evidence of the frequency and pervasiveness of a range of discriminatory behaviors in the earth sciences.

This month and every month, DEEPS is celebrating our Black community members and honoring the Black scientists who have made invaluable contributions to our society.

A vital part of future planetary science missions will be the development of more inclusive teams. As NASA’s InSight mission comes to its end on Mars, Professor Ingrid J. Daubar and the team share strategies that have helped them to work toward this goal in a new Nature Astronomy article.

DEEPS Assistant Professor Daniel Ibarra shared his thoughts with the Brown Daily Herald in their recent story about Brown's Southeast Asian Studies Initiative: "It’s a way for the students to push the faculty and the upper administration to think: How can we not just be a local university, but how can we expand our global impact?”

The National Science Foundation ADVANCE Program has funded a $1.2 million collaborative grant to expand on the successful work of the ADVANCEGeo Partnership. Professor Meredith Hastings is one of the principal investigators on the project, which aims to address a range of exclusionary and discriminatory behaviors to better address observed demographic trends in STEM.

The AGU Bridge Program has selected 15 new partner departments for 2021 including DEEPS.

DEEPS professor Meredith Hastings works to promote inclusion of women in Earth sciences.

Meredith Hastings and the team from ESWN are awarded a Presidential Award.