HOW IDENTITY INFORMED AND IMPACTED MY CAREER AS AN ACADEMIC GEOSCIENTIST

I was meant to be a wife or a doctor, engineer or lawyer, but not a geoscientist. As the daughter of immigrants and a Latino, it was always assumed I would ‘marry well’. And, if I had the aptitude to get an advanced degree, then it would be to ensure a ‘legitimate’ professional career. I was well into my fifties before my family stopped pointing out that all the geologists in documentaries were older white men with dirty jeans and scruffy beards. Two geology degrees (A.B., Bryn Mawr College; Ph.D., Virginia Tech) and a serendipitous opportunity to join the faculty at the University of California, Riverside launched my career in the geosciences. As a woman in STEM, I have encountered barriers and subtle to not so subtle discrimination. But an academic career at R1 institutions has also presented many opportunities. A life partner and geoscientist who enables me has translated to travel to field sites across six continents and the opportunity to see the world from a perspective that few others have. An academic career has allowed me to pursue new areas of research and to develop niches at the nexus of subdisciplines. I began in diagenesis addressing subsurface fluid-rock interaction, then applied my stratigraphic, petrographic, and geochemical expertise to reconstruction of past marine and terrestrial conditions, including seawater compositions and atmospheric pCO₂, and have spent the past 20 years reconstructing deep-time Earth systems through the integration of field, geochronologic, geochemical and climate and ecosystem modeling studies. And an academic career has allowed me to ‘play’ with a diversity of people and to mentor many young geoscientists.

I am of the generation that was born into the second wave of feminism — focused on gaining gender and cultural equality. Consequently, my career path has been linear — a path that provided structure but was risk adverse and in which work-life balance was not an entitlement. Younger geoscientists are likely to have a more non-linear path with a much broader spectrum of available career opportunities and non-traditional ‘practices’. The geosciences are the hub to the solutions of many of society’s grand challenges and the skills developed by professional geoscientists are critical to addressing and solving these issues.