PhD Journal Of A Ghanaian Woman in StemFive Days in Louisville
Earlier this month, I was at the FASEB conference on Protein Folding in the Cell. These meetings are small with a few hundred people in one hotel. There’s no crowd to disappear into. You eat breakfast next to someone, watch them ask a question two hours later, then end up beside them again at dinner. By the second day I’d stopped introducing myself and started picking up conversations where we’d left them.
I noticed the other thing on the first morning. I couldn’t find anyone who looked like me. A few hundred people and as far as I could tell, I was the only Black woman there. I counted more than once, the way you do when you’re hoping to be wrong.
I gave a talk and presented a poster. A talk goes one direction. A poster keeps starting over. Someone walks up, you give the short version, and either they nod and move on or they stay, and the next forty minutes disappear in a discussion about your work. The highlights for me were all the suggestions I got. You spend months on the work and get fifteen minutes to show it, and what you carry home is one question that makes you see your own data differently and explore beyond what you initially hypothesized.
I loved being at this conference. It was great to be in a group of like-minded scientists studying similar biological systems and seeing the advancement in the field. At the same time, I was aware that no one else in that room knew what it felt like to be the only black woman. Both things just sat there together, motivating me to keep doing science.
#Biochemistry #Conferencepresentations #FASEb #Graduateschool #LoisBansah #Proteinfolding #Proteostasis #STEM #Womeninstem
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