I recently read a feature interview in Quanta Magazine of physicist Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the formation of protons and neutrons from their elementary constituents, the quarks and gluons. If you’re unfamiliar with quarks and gluons, their main oddities are that quarks come in groups of three, and gluons can shift between various “color” charges in a way that’s much more complicated than the binary “plus” and “minus” of electricity.
After Dr. Kunnawalkam Elayavalli aptly explains this area of physics, the interview focuses on their personal journey. The professor is a transgender person, and they find many connections between this journey and the subfield of physics in which they specialize. “In the physics world, there are not that many people who are queer or who are trans,” they say. “Representation matters a lot to me, and showing up and being there as an openly trans person, representing my field, my area of study — which is fundamentally nonbinary in its nature — is a very important aspect of my day-to-day work.”
Noting that Dr. Kunnawalkam Elayavalli does their work in Tennessee, a state with highly discriminatory transgender laws, makes their story a deeply empowering one — but it’s also a stark reminder of the barriers that remain as institutes of higher education seek to promote the participation of underrepresented groups in academia and research. Particularly for STEM outreach, studies have shown that the number of women students enrolling in degree programs for such disciplines has decreased over the past few decades (despite making gains in college enrollment and graduation more broadly); additionally, studies examining the efficacy of efforts to promote diversity and inclusion have lacked “holistic” methodologies, rarely addressing sexual orientation and other dimensions of diversity, or shortcomings and unintended consequences of interventions.
I don’t claim to know how to solve the issues of diversity in STEM culture — it involves a complex, challenging set of problems, much like research in nuclear physics. One of these problems, implicitly featured in the Quanta piece, is how representatives of underrepresented groups are relied on to drive intervention and reform despite the fact that they continue to face discrimination. This can introduce more stress for those representatives: as Dr. Kummawalkam Elayavalli says, “Fifty percent of my brain is thinking about this, how can I survive, and in the remaining 50% of the brain, I can think about physics.”
As a result, I think we need people of all backgrounds in academia to continue the work in striving for a more diverse environment of higher learning and research. We can, of course, learn much from members of the community who have faced barriers in their career pursuits. But it will take a concerted effort to dismantle those barriers — especially as the Trump administration has set its sights on reinforcing them by attacking diversity efforts across the country.
This may seem to be a grim situation, but there are reasons for hope. There are many arguments for the benefits of diversity in research and education, and diversity has always been a promise of our country as long as we commit to living up to it. In my mind, it’s crucial to defend against continued and heightened attacks against these ideas on diversity, along with voicing solidarity for the more vulnerable members of our communities both on and off campus.
