The session, which started this monring, is free to the MIT community but open to outsiders, with a a reasonable fee for one or both days ($25 to $80.)
This symposium will engage present students and postdocs, junior and senior faculty, alumni, and friends of MIT, and is woven around the landmark 1996 and 1999 reports of the Faculty Committees on Women in Science and their subsequent impact inside and beyond MIT. The symposium will have plenary sessions of talks by outstanding women faculty. In addition, there will be sessions giving a historical and current assessment of women in science and engineering, including the impact of the 1999 report. Two panel discussions will address effective practices for promoting gender equity and challenges ahead. Actress and MIT alumna Gioia De Cari SM ‘88 will give an evening performance on campus of her play, Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through MIT’s Math Maze. In advance of the symposium, we will prepare a publication updating the Women in Science and Engineering reports. The symposium will close with a reception hosted by MIT’s Society of Women Engineers (SWE), an undergraduate student group.
The 1996 and 1999 reports on women faculty in science brought attention to subtle and pervasive gender discrimination not only in the MIT School of Science, but more widely in academic science. The reports led to an immediate recognition that significant efforts were needed at MIT and elsewhere to correct inequities. Within MIT, this led to introspection by all five schools with reports published in 2002 and to the introduction of many changes to improve the climate for and status of women faculty. The impact extended across the nation as many universities have emulated MIT’s approach. The accomplishments of our women faculty members as well as our institutional recognition of gender bias and implementation of measures to correct it are highlights of MIT’s history during the last several decades.
Also, this evening features a performance of the one woman show Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp Through M.I.T.’s Male Math Maze.
Here’s this afternoon’s agenda.
Celebrating Science and Engineering Breakthroughs I
1:30 pm
Session Chair: Hazel L. Sive, Professor of Biology and Associate Dean, MIT School of Science
■Susan Lindquist, Professor of Biology, MIT: Using Simple Cells to Attack Complex Diseases
■JoAnne Stubbe, Novartis Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Biology, MIT: Radicals: Your Life in Their Hands!
■Sangeeta Bhatia SM ‘93 PhD ’97, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT: It’s a Small World: Tiny Technologies in Medicine
Celebrating Science and Engineering Breakthroughs II
3:30 pm
Session Chair: Cynthia Barnhart, SM ’85 PhD ’88, Ford Professor of Engineering and Associate Dean of Engineering for Academic Affairs, MIT
■Angela Belcher, W.M. Keck Professor of Energy, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Biological Engineering, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT: Engineering Biology to Grow Materials and Devices for Energy and Medicine
■Christine Ortiz, Dean for Graduate Education and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT: Biological Structural Materials; Interdisciplinary Convergence of Engineering, Architecture, and Evolutionary Biology
■Sara Seager, Professor of Physics and Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, MIT: Exoplanets and the Search for Habitable Worlds
■Maria Zuber, E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and Head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, MIT: Searching for Life on Mars