Meet Your Staff
Striving for Inclusiveness
By Nathan Kahl
Growing up in a bustling Indianapolis home and the youngest of eight, ASEE Postdoctoral Fellow Stacie LeSure Gregory showed a propensity for engineering at an early age. “My sixth-grade teacher told me I should be an engineer.” Innately curious, with a love of math and science, she was the top student and only female in her high school freshman electronics course.
After graduating from high school, Stacie got a summer’s worth of hands-on training shadowing engineers at Allison Transmission. Then she headed north to Flint, Mich., and GMI Engineering and Management Institute (now Kettering University), drawn by the strong co-op program and the opportunity to work while in school. It was there, however, that she got her first sense of isolation as an African-American woman in a very white, male world.
Needing a change of location, Stacie moved to Atlanta, where she earned a B.Sc. in physics from Spelman College and a master’s in materials science engineering from Georgia Tech. She pursued a Ph.D., but again felt isolated as the only African-American and one of few women in the program, and she stopped short of a degree.
After working in industry for several years, Stacie started an outreach consulting firm to engage underrepresented students in STEM disciplines and help strengthen her grasp of research-based practices and credibility as a STEM specialist. Stacie enrolled at Utah State and earned a Ph.D. in engineering education. While conducting research for a Social Foundations in Education assignment, she happened upon a phenomenon that would become her dissertation topic: stereotype threat. That’s a situation in which people are, or feel themselves to be, at risk of confirming negative stereotypes about their social group. The more she read, the more she recognized her own predicament years earlier when she left her first Ph.D. program.
Stacie believes all educators should be aware of stereotype threat, in that it has been shown to negatively affect everyone – including white males, in some studies. “We should all learn to become more cognizant of our implicit biases and work harder to try to see ourselves in the ‘other.’ A little empathy goes a long way.”
Now part of ASEE’s Education and Career Development Department, Stacie, who enjoys yoga, reading, and volunteering in her spare time, led the high-profile early-November Maker Summit. Participants explored ways the “maker movement” can enhance and increase participation and inclusiveness in engineering and other STEM fields. Now preparing a report on the two-day summit, supported by the National Science Foundation, Stacie notes with delight that conversations begun there are continuing.