Faye-Marie Vassel

STEM Education, Equity, and Inclusion Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University

I’ve had a unique, interdisciplinary academic journey, and I think the Faculty First-Look program will shed light on the next steps to reaching my goal.

I’ve always been interested in both STEM and the humanities; my mother was an ob-gyn, and my father was a social worker, so I was immersed in both early on. I initially thought about a career as a diplomat helping to shape foreign policy, but in high school my thinking began to change. Thanks to an afterschool program at the American Museum of Natural History, I was introduced to molecular biology and biophysics, and I discovered how much I loved research. I got hooked!

After earning an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Stony Brook University, where I also studied Russian, I was torn between MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. I ultimately decided upon MIT, and there I focused on a protein, REV7, which plays a part in DNA damage repair and could ultimately lead to innovative ways to combat chemotherapy resistance. When I wasn’t in the lab, I developed an interest in science policy and took education policy and sociology of education and inequality courses at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. During this time, I also had the great fortune of finding community based organizations to volunteer with as a math tutor, and I served as a science and math mentor for high school students attending an MIT-student-led non-profit.

I loved tackling questions in the biological sciences and even started thinking of REV7 as “my protein,” since I had studied it so intensely during my PhD training. However, my interest in gaining a deep understanding of what a research career focused on tackling STEM inequities could look like continued to grow. In turn, after I earned my doctoral degree in 2018, I jumped at the chance to be an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation. Growing up in New York City had allowed me to see the richness in diverse perspectives, but by the end of my PhD it became very clear to me that many individuals from historically underserved groups were still missing from STEM. During my time as a Science and Tech Policy Fellow, I was able to learn about research efforts focused on advancing STEM equity and how grant funding for such critical work had evolved; I realized I was still very much committed to pursuing an academic research career focused on understanding factors shaping persistent inequities in STEM.

I’m currently a STEM Education, Equity, and Inclusion Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, and I’m part of the school’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. While my pathway hasn’t been totally linear, I’m very clear about my ultimate career goals: to conduct research that will help reduce the intersectional inequities still faced by many STEM learners.