Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: A force in physics
A cosmologist pursues the nature of dark matter while also confronting racism in science and society.
By Nidhi Subbaraman
It has been a busy year for cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. She won two new grants, hired her first postdoctoral researcher and began co-directing a group that is mapping out the next two decades of research using astrophysical observations to study dark matter. She also finished her first book, started another, wrote a monthly column for New Scientist magazine, published two chapters in books in the field of education research and guided two graduate students through their first publications in their PhD programmes. She did this while entering her second year as a tenure-track professor at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
But that wasn’t all. In early June, she and other scientists organized the Strike for Black Lives, a high-profile online campaign to demand that institutions confront racism in science and anti-Black racism throughout society. The idea grew out of an online chat she was having with Brian Nord, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. At about the same time, Brittany Kamai, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, e-mailed Prescod-Weinstein to tell her about her own plan to call for a shutdown as a way to push for change. The volunteer effort grew, and the two teams coordinated to get the word out.
“I was really tired of business as usual continuing in the physics community,” says Prescod-Weinstein.
The scale of the response was unprecedented, says Raychelle Burks, an analytical chemist at American University in Washington DC who often uses her professional Twitter profile to champion inclusion in science. “It is something I NEVER thought I would see in my lifetime,” she wrote in an e-mail to Nature. It was a moment of reorientation for many white scientists, says Nord. “I saw several colleagues transition to a point where they saw racial justice in STEM as part of their responsibility.”
The movement achieved such attention in part because of the accomplished scientists who signed on, and Prescod-Weinstein is no exception. Her passion for science and mathematics was clear early on. Inspired by A Brief History of Time, the 1991 documentary about Stephen Hawking directed by Errol Morris, Prescod-Weinstein decided at a young age that she wanted a career in physics.
She studied physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and astronomy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, then went on to earn a doctorate at the University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada and a fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, among other appointments. She is now a member of the physics and astronomy department at the University of New Hampshire, making her probably the first Black woman to hold a tenure-track position in theoretical cosmology or particle theory in the United States. She also has an appointment in the women’s and gender studies department there.
As she pursued her work on the physics of the early Universe, eventually studying dark matter and hypothetical particles called axions, she found she was almost always the only Black physicist in any room. So she has often had to fight to justify her place in the field. Guided by her own experiences and a sense of duty to the next generation of physicists, she has continually called out racism and sexism in science. “The consequences of staying silent were not liveable,” she says.
The June call for a strike and shutdown came after the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others, many in interactions with police. Their deaths “are just a few examples of the violence and racism that Black people live with every day — and have for centuries — in the US, Canada, and around the world”, according to a call to action by Particles for Justice, a group of physicists who have previously spoken out about sexism in science. Prescod-Weinstein takes pains to point out that neither she nor anyone else was in charge of Particles for Justice — it was a truly collective effort, a “family”, she says.
“As physicists, we believe an academic strike is urgently needed: to hit pause, to give Black academics a break and to give others an opportunity to reflect on their own complicity in anti-Black racism in academia and their local and global communities,” said Particles for Justice.
The groups also challenged scientific institutions to commit to taking action to make their organizations more inclusive and actively anti-racist, using the social-media hashtags #ShutDownSTEM, #ShutDownAcademia and #StrikeForBlackLives.
By the day of the event, 10 June, major academic groups with, collectively, hundreds of thousands of members had pledged to join the strike. Among them were the American Geophysical Union, the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society. Publishers joined in, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science. (Nature also announced that it would use the day to reflect and craft measures to eliminate anti‑Black racism.)
Prescod-Weinstein’s work spans astrophysics and particle theory. For instance, she is interested in how axions could influence the formation of galaxies and other structures. She’s also beginning to use astrophysical observations to explore what the properties of axions might be and whether the particles could be the Universe’s dark matter, which researchers have been hunting for decades. “My interest in them goes beyond the dark matter question just to the question of do they exist, if they exist, and how do they behave?” she says.
She has already collected a string of accolades in recognition of her work and another will come next year: the American Physical Society is honouring Prescod-Weinstein for her work in cosmology and particle physics and for her efforts to increase inclusivity in physics. And next March will bring the publication of her first book, The Disordered Cosmos, about physics and astronomy, and the issues of access and identity in scientific spaces.
Her work across these different spheres is hardly done. Although many took 10 June to produce statements on how they plan to improve conditions for Black academics, the only statement that matters will be the actions they take. “The revolution did not happen that day, but it is my hope that maybe we planted some seeds for people to radically rethink what is necessary in order to save Black lives,” says Prescod‑Weinstein.
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