SPIN Forward: Where She Belongs in STEM

Why I Became a SPIN Board Member — and Why I'm Asking for Your Support

I'm the one speaking in this photo.

That's DOE Secretary Bodman across from me. We're at Jefferson Lab — one of the country's premier nuclear physics research facilities. And if you scan the rest of the room, you'll see what I saw that day: suits, as far as the eye could go. Mostly men. Mostly white. A room that had looked more or less the same for decades.

I was proud to be there. I want to say that clearly. I had worked hard to get to that table, and I knew it.

But pride and belonging are not the same thing. And I had spent so many years by that point learning to perform the latter while quietly negotiating the former.

You learn the rhythms of rooms like that one. You learn when to speak and how — not too fast, not too much, not in a way that makes anyone uncomfortable with your certainty. You learn to translate yourself. To sand down the edges. To walk in having already decided which parts of who you are will stay outside the door. You learn to be grateful. You learn to make yourself easy to overlook when it's strategic, and impossible to ignore when you finally get your moment.

I learned all of it. And it worked — by most measures, it worked remarkably well.

But here's what I couldn't unknow, even on the best days in the best rooms: I had learned to belong. I had never simply been told I belonged. There's a difference. And it lives in your body in a way that's hard to name until someone finally names it for you.

No one who looked like me had shown me this path. No one had said — early, plainly, before I'd had to half-convince myself — you are a scientist. You are a physicist. This is yours too. I found my way without that. I built mentors out of books and stubbornness and a few extraordinary people who saw something in me and said so. I was fortunate. I was also exhausted in ways I didn't fully understand until much later.

I am a physicist. A science policy fellow. A disabled woman in STEM who has spent more years than I care to count being the only one in the room — the only woman, the only person who moved through the world the way I do. For a long time I told myself that was just the terrain. That every path has its tax, and this was mine. I paid it and kept moving. That's what you do. That's what you learn.

It took me a long time to get angry about it. And then it took me longer to figure out what to do with the anger that was actually useful.

This is what I've figured out: the most powerful thing I can do with everything I've been given — the education, the access, the rooms, the hard-won seat — is make sure the next generation doesn't have to do it the way I did.

That's why I joined the board of SPIN Forward.

SPIN — the STEM Paths Innovation Network — runs free Saturday programming in King County for middle and high school girls, trans youth, and gender-nonconforming young people of color. Students are paired one-on-one with female-identifying STEM mentors of color. They receive participation stipends so that the program is genuinely accessible, not just technically free. They get real support for high school planning — the kind of guidance that families with insider knowledge take for granted and that first-generation students are often left to piece together alone. And they complete a Capstone project where they don't just learn science — they use it. They identify real problems, develop real solutions, and stand up and present their work to the world.

SPIN doesn't teach students to tolerate STEM spaces. It teaches them to own them.

I think about the girl I was at 12. Curious about everything. Already in love with how the universe worked. Already beginning to sense, in ways I couldn't yet articulate, that the universe of science wasn't entirely sure it was in love back. What would it have meant to have a mentor then — not at 22, not in graduate school, not after I'd already built a whole internal architecture for surviving rooms I wasn't sure wanted me — but then? Before the doubt calcified? Before the performance became habit?

I can't answer that for myself anymore. But SPIN is answering it for thousands of students right now. Every Saturday. For free.

That last part matters enormously and it is entirely dependent on community support. SPIN does not charge the families it serves. It does not means-test belonging. It does not ask students to prove they've already overcome enough before it will invest in them. That model — radical, generous, and right — only holds if people who believe in it show up for it financially.

I am asking you to show up.

I'm fundraising for SPIN because this work is the most direct line I know between the rooms I've been lucky enough to enter and the students who deserve to walk into those rooms without spending a decade first learning how to survive them.