Sisters Transforming Stem

Accomplished women of color provide powerful insight into transformative leadership strategies and network building.

This powerful essay collection shares the voices of thirteen women of color in academic leadership in STEM fields, who explore the history of transformative collaboration and reflect on their leadership strategies. The contributors--specializing in a multitude of engineering disciplines including aerospace, biomedical, civil, computer, industrial, and mechanical--leverage their individual strengths, such as bilingualism, resilience, resistance, and family knowledge, in order to develop collaborative networks to support and mentor upcoming faculty, researchers, administrators, and industry leaders. In an era of hostility toward diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, the lessons from these trailblazers are vital for academic leaders, especially in engineering, but also in any field whose leaders desire to learn about research methods and multidisciplinary education. Through narratives drawing from their personal and professional experiences, these scholars provide practical insight into growing leadership skills, fighting patriarchal and discriminatory constraints, and transforming the fields of engineering and computer science for the next generation of scholars.