Category: Women in Research

The Role of Social Science in Shaping Inclusive Leadership

Senior Vice President of Human Services Julie Kochanek discusses how social science informs her leadership at American Institutes for Research (AIR), emphasizing trust, collaboration, and community-building in research.

Julie Kochanek

Senior Vice President, Human Services Division, American Institutes for Research (AIR)

How does your experience in behavioral and social science research inform your approach to leadership?

As a leader, I always return to themes I observed while training to be a researcher: trust, culture, and community. In graduate school, I studied how East African nations used education as a mechanism to build community. I dug deeper into this community theme as part of my Ph.D. studies, focusing on how U.S. schools operate organizationally and how teachers, school leaders, and parents must all interact to better support student learning.

How do you build strong teams to accomplish AIR’s mission?

At AIR, collaboration is key to our success. Project teams at AIR often include staff with different backgrounds, various methodological expertise, unique content knowledge, and/or experience working directly with community leaders. Our work is strengthened by bringing people together. This allows us to fully consider the challenge we’re studying and understand the needs of the communities we serve.

As a leader, I am responsible for creating the conditions to help staff develop meaningful partnerships, recognize everyone’s contributions, and reward meaningful collaboration. We collect and share information on staff interests, skills, and experiences so teams can easily identify those they might recruit to fill a gap. My weekly internal messages to staff often highlight examples of great team building and how our work is strengthened by diverse teams.

What are some of the most important results you have uncovered across your 20+ years in the research sector?

Discussions about education policy often inadvertently leave people and human connection out of the equation. Throughout our work, I am constantly reminded that working collaboratively and building relationships among educators and students is an essential part of setting the right conditions for learning.

I’m impressed, for example, by how educators, researchers, and school leaders have partnered to build stronger support systems for students who are at risk of not graduating from high school. Researchers help school districts collect and interpret data on early warning signs and develop an evidence-based approach to address the challenge and boost graduation rates. As more districts across the country adopt these early warning systems, we’re seeing real results: More young people are able to continue on the path to success.

Another example is how we use research and technical assistance to help teachers strengthen their reading and literacy instruction. There are proven strategies (e.g., the science of reading) to help kids learn to read. Working alongside teachers and giving them the tools they need to adopt evidence-based approaches has been successful. However, this requires hands-on training, coaching, and human connection — a significant investment. We know that making this kind of investment in our nation’s teachers is well worth the reward.

What advice would you give women just beginning their careers in research?

Women are better represented in behavioral and social science research than in other scientific fields, but we still face barriers, including balancing work and family, dealing with bias, and having fewer opportunities for funding and leadership. Addressing these barriers is important because evidence shows that diverse research teams bring more innovative and effective solutions.

Whatever your field, I think it is important to live with integrity. Remember that there is not one right path to follow. Upon completing my post-doctoral position and considering my next move, I worried about making a career-defining wrong turn. This is normal. I definitely made choices that concerned my graduate school advisors, but I don’t regret any of them. I’ve gotten to where I am today by learning from the different contexts in which I’ve worked, taking some risks, and staying true to my values.

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February 27, 2025
Physicist Develops New Cancer-Killing Technology, LANT

Dr. Hadiyah-Nicole Green has developed a novel cancer-killing technology, Laser-Activated NanoTherapy (LANT), that is of high clinical relevance in the field of oncology.

In 2003, Dr. Hadiyah-Nicole Green graduated with a B.S. in Physics from Alabama A&M University with a plan to revolutionize the way consumers receive cable TV and internet. She had diligently prepared herself for her future career in fiber optics and optical communication, and she was excited to finally be on her way. The day after graduation, Dr. Green’s aunt, who had raised her along with her two older brothers, disclosed that she had cancer.

“She told us she had ‘woman’s cancer,’ which usually means cervical or ovarian cancer, and was only given three months to live,” Dr. Green recalled. “She also said she’d rather die than experience the side effects of chemo or radiation treatments.” As Dr. Green nursed her aunt through the ravages of the disease, she remembers thinking, “We have satellites in outer space that can tell whether a dime on the ground is face up or face down, but we can’t treat a tumor just at the site of the tumor? That doesn’t make sense.”

Three months after her aunt died, Dr. Green’s uncle, her late aunt’s husband, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and given up to six months to live. Dr. Green was the primary caregiver for her uncle while he received the conventional treatments of radiation and chemo. Although with treatment, Dr. Green’s help, and God’s grace, her uncle lived 10 years past his original prognosis, Dr. Green saw his body bear the brunt of the treatment’s brutal side effects.

“I watched him wither down to nothing after losing 150 pounds,” Dr. Green said. “He lost all of his hair on his head, his eyebrows, and his eyelashes, and his skin looked like it had been barbequed.” Seeing her aunt and uncle suffer at the hands of cancer and cancer treatments inspired Dr. Green to dedicate her life to developing innovative and more humane ways to attack and destroy cancer. In 2005, she enrolled in the physics Ph.D. program at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB) to develop this inspired cancer treatment using lasers and nanotechnology.

A cure without suffering

Cancer has impacted most of us. While cancer that is detected early has a high cure rate, nearly 10 million people still die from cancer each year worldwide. Even with the best care, any of us — our family, friends, or colleagues — can be subjected to ineffective treatments, harsh side effects, lengthy treatment durations, prohibitive costs, and limited accessibility. Now, there’s a better way!

Dr. Green developed a novel cancer-killing technology, Laser-Activated NanoTherapy (LANT), that is of high clinical relevance in the field of oncology. LANT directly addresses the urgent yet unmet global need for more effective treatment options for millions of people with difficult-to-treat cancers. LANT is designed as a minimally invasive, curative treatment for solid tumors that induces site-specific (not cell type-specific) cellular death and tumor regression precisely at the site of laser activation. The peer-reviewed, preclinical in vivo LANT data showed complete tumor regression with clear tumor margins and healed skin in just 15 days after a single, 10-minute treatment without surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, or observed side effects. Because its mechanism of action is based on physics instead of biology, LANT is a platform therapy designed to have clinical indications for a variety of difficult-to-treat solid tumors, such as brain, pancreatic, breast, prostate, and head and neck cancers.

Dr. Green founded the Ora Lee Smith Cancer Research Foundation, a cancer nonprofit, to keep the technology she developed affordable for all. The Ora Lee Smith Cancer Research Foundation is on a mission to change the way cancer is treated and reduce cancer patient suffering by providing a treatment that is accessible, affordable, and effective. Limited by funding, not technological advancements, the Ora Lee Foundation is ready to move LANT beyond the laboratory and into humans with tax-deductible donations. When you support the Ora Lee Smith Cancer Research Foundation, your donations will help ensure Dr. Green’s research comes to life by helping to fund human clinical trials, taking this tech from the lab to the living.

The future of cancer research

Dr. Green acknowledges that none of us are islands; we all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. As such, she pays it forward by creating opportunities in her research laboratory and nonprofit for women and students in STEM to grow their research and personal skills. She also advises her mentees and trainees on educational, career, and life strategies.

“My advice to young women interested in pursuing research careers would be to excel in your coursework and obtain summer and work-study research experiences to help confirm or narrow your scientific interests,” Dr. Green said. “Put your best into everything that you do, so that when opportunities come, you will be prepared. Everyone has a divine purpose for being on the planet. Channel your joy or pain and the things that make you happy or angry, into your purpose or to help you identify your purpose.”

Dr. Green says, “I turned my pain into passion and used the loss of my loved ones to cancer to develop new ways to fight cancer. I also channeled the skills I built as the president of different organizations in college into my position as the founder of my nonprofit.” If you haven’t found your purpose, Dr. Green recommends supporting something or someone you believe in, and by dedicating time and effort to something bigger than yourself, you will gain experience and skills that may be the investment needed to achieve your own success.

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February 27, 2025
Shifting From Bitter to Sweet: A Woman’s Health Goal

The term “bittersweet” isn’t one typically associated with healthcare, but for many women today, their healthcare journeys are just that.

Irene O. Aninye, Ph.D.

Chief Science Officer, Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR)

A woman walks out of her doctor’s office. She sits down — in the lobby, in her car, on a bench — to process what she just heard. She thinks to herself, “They said I have…”

Insert endometriosis or lupus or psoriatic arthritis or narcolepsy or persistent depressive disorder. This is just a short list of chronic health conditions for which many women experience significant delays in diagnosis, and often much longer delays than men.

She feels fearful. She feels confused. She feels overwhelmed. But, she also feels hope and relief, because today’s visit was different. After multiple trips to urgent care, months-long wait times to see different specialists, countless days that turned into years going to work while feeling unwell, and surmounting out-of-pocket costs for medications that were unable to manage her symptoms, today, she finally received an accurate diagnosis — a name to associate with her experience. Now there is hope for a pathway to improve not only her health but also her quality of life.

The importance of women in research

Many factors contribute to the diagnostic delays women experience, including insufficient research funding and prioritization of women’s health issues; historical exclusion of women from medical research; and societal norms and stigma that hinder access and engagement with the healthcare system. As such, preventive care and interventions that address the unique health needs of women are lacking. It is only since 1993, when public law established a precedent mandating the inclusion of women and minoritized populations in clinical research, that the tide for women’s health research began to systemically shift.

Now, over 30 years later, many still fail to realize how essential women are to every corner of the healthcare ecosystem. Women are needed as investigators toward research discovery just as much as they must lead care delivery as healthcare providers. An often-minimized role for women in research, however, is their engagement as participants in clinical studies. Including women in research allows us to effectively study sex differences and learn more about diseases in both men and women alike.

Without the appropriate and safe inclusion of women in medical research, our medications, interventions, clinical guidelines, and basic understanding of human health are compromised, and we are left with persistent knowledge gaps and disparities in health outcomes between women and men. These disparities exist for disease prevalence, time to diagnosis, treatment efficacy, health span, and quality of life. For women of color, women living in rural communities, women at older ages, and pregnant populations, the unknowns about how to effectively diagnose and provide care are compounded in unacceptable proportions.

We must improve

We must include women in research and study sex differences to truly understand the nuances of health and disease. We must empower women to engage the healthcare system at all levels to ensure their best health. We must work with communities safely and transparently, sharing findings and solutions with those who participated in the research. We must eliminate the barriers women experience accessing quality and innovative care. We must continue to invest widely and often in women’s health research to sustain momentum in our progress.

I’ll leave you with this: A clinical study that passively enrolls women does not necessarily meet the standard of inclusivity. If a woman’s participation is not recognized and sex differences are not appropriately reflected in the data analysis, the scientific and healthcare ecosystem will continue to lag. We all have to commit attention and care to valuably including women in research, for as long as it takes to close the knowledge gaps, eliminate diagnostic delays, and empower patients in their care. We have to prioritize resources to advance women’s health until the health of every person is improved. We do this work for ourselves, and we do this work for the woman walking into the doctor’s office right now.

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February 27, 2025
Dismantling DEI Is a Direct Attack on Women in STEM

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are the center of innovation, fueling advancements that drive economic growth and improve lives. Yet, despite decades of progress, the gender gap in STEM remains a barrier.

Gloria L. Blackwell

CEO, American Association of University Women (AAUW)

Women, particularly women of color, are still underrepresented in these critical fields, and recent efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education threaten to push us back even further. If we are serious about securing America’s place as a global leader in innovation, we should be doubling down on investing in women — not gutting the very programs that support their success.

The data is clear: Diverse companies are 39% more likely to drive better solutions than those that are not. In fields like artificial intelligence, where racial and gender biases have led to flawed algorithms with real-world consequences, the need for a broad range of perspectives is undeniable. Diverse scientific teams are more likely to challenge assumptions, identify blind spots, and develop creative solutions that benefit everyone. Yet, despite these clear advantages, women continue to face systemic barriers that push them out of STEM careers.

Encouraging our women and girls

According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), women, particularly women of color, leave STEM fields at significantly higher rates than men. In fact, 43% of women leave the STEM workforce after their first child. While the percentage of women in STEM occupations has grown modestly from 15% to 18% over the last decade, men’s participation continues to outpace them. This represents an enormous loss of talent, innovation, and economic opportunity.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) has been on the front lines of this fight for over a century. Our commitment to supporting women in STEM is deeply rooted in our history, from raising $100,000 to buy a gram of radium for Marie Curie’s groundbreaking research — making her the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice — to our present-day efforts funding the next generation of women scientists, engineers, and technologists. Through our Community Action Grants, we support organizations like Self-eSTEM, an Oakland-based nonprofit dedicated to empowering Black, Indigenous, and girls of color through hands-on STEM experiences. These programs are not just feel-good initiatives — they are essential pipelines ensuring that the brightest minds, regardless of gender or race, can contribute to the future of science and technology.

But today, our progress is under attack. Across the country, lawmakers are dismantling DEI programs in higher education, rolling back decades of hard-fought progress for women and marginalized communities. These efforts are not just misguided; they directly impact our nation’s ability to compete in a global economy. When we eliminate DEI initiatives, we don’t just shut doors on individual women — we close off entire avenues of discovery, limit our technological advancements, and stifle economic growth.

Doubling down on women in STEM

This is not the time to retreat; it’s time to fight. We should be doubling down on investments in women in STEM, expanding opportunities for historically excluded groups, and ensuring that STEM fields reflect the full diversity of our nation. Our economy, our national security, and our future depend on it.

AAUW will not stand by as decades of progress are dismantled. We will continue to advocate for policies and programs that support women and underrepresented communities in STEM. We call on policymakers, educators, and industry leaders to do the same. The future of American innovation depends on it.

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February 27, 2025
For Your Next Competitive Advantage: Focus On Women’s Health
Want more women in your organizations? It’s time to start talking about the three M’s: menstruation, menopause, and motherhood.

Meleah Ashford

Writer and Life Coach, Find Solid Ground Coaching

“Today, discussing women’s health remains a taboo because people feel uncomfortable when anyone broaches it,” says Dr. Carolina Amador, the associate director of corporate intelligence at BioMarin, in a recent AWIS Magazine article. “I believe that we should talk about and advocate for women’s health as the first step in creating an equitable workplace.”

The vast majority of women in the workplace have dealt with challenges related to monthly menstruation during their careers. In a 2023 survey, respondents cited their top symptoms as abdominal cramps, irritability, and fatigue. 15% of respondents had a more chronic menstrual condition such as endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or fibroids. Sixty-one percent had worked when they didn’t feel well enough to work. According to Let’s Talk Menopause, 20% of the workforce is in some phase of menopause transition, which comes with its own extensive list of uncomfortable and potentially debilitating symptoms.

Motherhood includes yet another set of considerations. Between 10% and 20% of all known pregnancies end in miscarriage. Sadly, not all companies have policies for infant loss. If they do, they offer a scant 3-5 days off when recovery can take weeks. After successful births or adoptions, mothers are four times more likely than men to have their competence questioned, they are offered fewer opportunities than men, and they earn less than men over their careers.

Implementing effective, inclusive policies

Organizations have a huge opportunity to craft policies that support the three M’s. What does this look like?
- Normalize conversations around these topics
- Allow flexible work hours or remote work for those with menstrual pain, menopausal symptoms, mental health needs, and caregiving responsibilities for children, elders, or dependents with disabilities
- Provide lactation rooms and on-site childcare or stipends to offset caregiving expenses
- Create clear and transparent leave policies for childbirth, adoption, loss of a child, illness of a child, and how to return smoothly to work
- Explicitly extend sick or personal leave for menstruation and menopause challenges
- Initiate employee resource groups focused on the three M’s
Supporting women’s health is not just good for women; other employees would benefit from flexible hours. It is also good for your business. It will help you attract and retain more women. Research from McKinsey & Company shows that companies with more women in leadership have healthier cultures, generate more innovation, and experience better performance.

“We see companies within all facets of the STEM enterprise competing to attract and retain impactful women,” says Meredith Gibson, CEO of the Association of Women in Science, whose Career Center connects recruiters with women in STEM. “Organizations have an opportunity to differentiate themselves by creating policies and offering benefits that support women’s health.”

We need to retain more women in STEM to effectively tackle the world’s complex challenges. I encourage businesses to boldly and proactively address women’s health as an avenue to creating a more inclusive, attractive, and productive enterprise — or run the risk of losing out.
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February 27, 2025