We are proud of the progress we made over the past year on the following initiatives:

1) Portrait of Women Scientists: We built a productive collaboration with the Development and Women & Science offices to commission a portrait of women scientists from Rockefeller's history. Over the past year, we formed a committee of key stakeholders and identified an artist to paint the portrait. In the next year, we hope to see the portrait hanging prominently in the Abby Lounge.

2) WISeR speaker series: Our speaker series aims to discuss and challenge the roles of gender in science. We welcomed Dr. Anne Fausto Sterling to campus last fall, and laid the groundwork to engage more exciting speakers either by inviting them to campus or hosting virtual events in the coming year. If you have suggestions for a speaker you would like to see, let us know!  

3) Friday Breakfasts: We upheld the tradition of hosting breakfasts with Friday Lecture speakers together with PRISM. These breakfasts will be hosted virtually for the foreseeable future, but we look forward to continuing discussions about inclusivity and career development through these events in the coming year. We are also excited to include RiSI in our collaboration to host the Friday Breakfasts.  

4) Personal and Career Development Workshops: We recently hosted a workshop on combatting Imposter Syndrome with licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Lira de la Rosa. This fall we are planning a speaker workshop to help trainees give more effective talks.  

6) Partner with our fellow student advocates to foster a more diverse and inclusive campus: Together with RiSI and SRC reps, we are working with members of the Head of Lab Diversity Working Group and campus administrators to analyze campus climate survey data and rethink faculty hiring processes. Our members also contributed suggestions for diverse seminar speakers to invite to campus. This will be an ongoing effort by the whole campus, and any suggestions for how WISeR can contribute to these efforts are welcome.

Over the next year, we look forward to continuing work on current initiatives and launching some new ones:

Creating opportunities for mentorship: We are planning to launch a Lunch and Learn series of events, specifically geared towards postdocs, where WISeR members have the opportunity for informal discussion with a faculty member to discuss a particular topic oriented around careers in science. Unlike graduate students, postdocs do not have a committee of faculty members to champion their success and provide guidance outside their PI. We hope that with this series we will help facilitate informal mentorship between postdocs and faculty members, and provide an opportunity for helpful discussions around career development.

Making Rockefeller’s campus facilities more inclusive: WISeR has had luck in the past bringing attention to areas on campus that needed to be improved to make Rockefeller more inclusive, particularly for women. This included lobbying for renovating the bathrooms in faculty club to ensure there were equal number of stalls for men and women (which resulted in a new gender neutral bathroom), and overhauling the lactation rooms to provide a cleaner, more inviting space for new mothers. There is more work to be done, and WISeR’s next project is to work to provide sanitary products in Rockefeller bathrooms.

Curating helpful resources: Every few years, WISeR crowd sources information from our community about recommended doctors in the area, specifically focusing on OB/GYN’s to make the annoying process of finding a new doctor when moving to a new community easier for our members. We plan to refresh this OB/GYN guide this year and also have plans to develop more helpful resources for our community. We are currently collaborating with RiSI to develop a Guide to Rockefeller for new students. We plan to expand this guide with information relevant to postdocs. We hope to provide advice on navigating Rockefeller policies surrounding parental leave, child care and adjusting to Rockefeller and New York especially if coming from abroad. We also plan to collect advice on building a career and maintaining balance from successful women in science, and make this information easily accessible on our website.

We welcome your suggestions and feedback on our current and planned initiatives, and encourage you to reach out with any ideas you think would help make Rockefeller a better place for women and all scientists. Drop us a line using our suggestion box.