Chapter 1: Proving My Worth

Navigating the Complex Interplay of Rigor and Identity in Scientific Disparities Research

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As a scientist of color, it can be a kiss of death to get involved in disparities research. It is easy to get pigeonholed into an area of science that is historically neglected, underfunded, less objective, less rigorous, and not quantifiable. It is a soft science. Prominent physician-scientists do not build careers on soft science. No serious institutional commitment is placed toward solving issues of disparity, not like the effort placed into decoding the human genome or finding a cure for cancer—the serious work of serious scientists. Deans of medical schools do NOT do disparities research.

I never intended to fall into that trap.

I wanted to be taken seriously. As a black woman, scientist, and doctor who loves to wear door knocker earrings, tight skirts, and blonde extensions, I knew I had to be meticulous, disciplined, and above reproach. So I focused on just that.

I double majored in chemical and biological engineering AND biology at MIT. And if that was not enough, I threw in a minor in biomedical engineering. Serious, right?

If that was not enough, my next stop was Harvard Medical School—not the regular program, but the rigorous love-child between MIT and Harvard called Health, Sciences, and Technology (HST).

And If that still wasn’t enough—not serious or good enough—my next stop was to go back to MIT for a PhD and a degree called Medical Engineering and Medical Physics. Sure, that doesn’t even really sound like a real thing. It sounds like I got a degree in math, with a side of more math, a helping of engineering, and finally some medicine sprinkled on top. Serious enough?

My dissertation project involved characterizing projections made by metastatic cancer cells that allow them to “talk” to the endothelium. Endothelial cells are the cells that make up your blood vessels. These projections were cool. We called them nanochannels, and I loved studying them. You can think of them like the little hairs on your arms, but much, much, much smaller. We measured them, counted them, and characterized thousands of these structures. Very tedious, but very serious. No one could say this wasn’t quantitative or concrete, was fluffy or imprecise. It was taken seriously, and by association, so was I—blonde extensions and all.

The nanochannels represented everything I thought I needed to be as a scientist. They were measurable, quantifiable, and completely removed from the messy complications of human bias and social structures. Under the microscope, these cellular projections didn’t care about my race or gender. They simply existed, waiting to be counted and characterized with mathematical precision. This was the kind of science that commanded respect, the kind that opened doors and secured funding, the kind that would make people take me seriously in rooms where I might otherwise be dismissed.

But even as I spent countless hours in the lab, meticulously documenting these microscopic structures, I couldn’t escape a nagging awareness of the larger patterns around me. The lab itself wasn’t immune to the dynamics I was trying to avoid through my research. I saw how ideas were received differently depending on who proposed them. I noticed how some students navigated adviser relationships with ease, while others hit invisible walls. I observed how opportunities—funding, conference panels, mentorship—seemed to flow unevenly.

Still, I told myself: focus on the work. Be excellent. Let the data and credentials speak.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was studying cancer cells’ ability to communicate and invade healthy tissue while remaining willfully blind to how other invasive processes were operating in the very institutions where I worked. But that kind of thinking felt dangerous, too close to the “soft science” territory I was determined to avoid. Better to keep my head down, focus on the data, and let my credentials speak for themselves.

Years later, as I would discover, all those accomplishments—the dual degrees, the prestigious programs, the rigorous methodology—were indeed serious. They opened doors and earned me a seat at tables where few people who looked like me had ever sat. But what I didn’t understand then was that getting through the door is only the beginning. What happens next requires a different kind of preparation, one that no amount of academic achievement can provide.

The nanochannels taught me how to measure the unmeasurable, how to bring scientific rigor to complex biological processes, and how to look for patterns in seemingly chaotic systems. These would prove to be exactly the skills I needed for the work I would eventually embrace, though I couldn’t have imagined it at the time. The methodology I developed studying cancer cell communication would later help me understand how toxic ideas spread through institutional cultures, how bias operates at both conscious and unconscious levels, and how systemic problems require systematic solutions.

But first, I had to learn that sometimes the most serious science of all is the kind that examines the systems we’re embedded in, rather than the ones we can observe from a comfortable distance.