Technograph Fall 2018

VOLUME 134: FALL 2018

Women in Engineering

Women in Microbiology

PAGE 8, 9

PAGE 14, 15

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TECHNOSTAFF Technograph editor Molly Zupan Assistant Technograph editor Serina Taluja Editor-in-Chief Abby Paeth Managing editors Gillian Dunlop Rachael Bolek Bercham Kamber Designer editors Cindy Om Toni Pantone Copy chief Alexandra Greulich Assistant copy chief Ella Schindler Writers Yoav Margalit Yifan Gu Zack Fishman Co-publishers Kit Donahue Melissa Pasco Contact (217) 337-8345 technograph@dailyillini.com Technograph 1001 S. Wright Street Champaign, IL 61820 AN ILLINI MEDIA MEDIA PUBLICATION © 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS Arctic sea ice and U.S. tornadoes: an unexpected correlation PAGE 4

A CRISPR approach to gene editing PAGE 5,7

“Women and Ideas in Engineering”: a story of resilience PAGE 8, 9

Graduate student dedicates herself to keeping cryptocurrency under control PAGE 10, 11

University study shows benefits from recycling human wastewater PAGE 12, 13

“Women in Microbiology”: a beautiful collection of scientific journeys PAGE 14, 15

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ZACK FISHMAN | TECHNOGRAPH WRITER is very difficult for meteorologists to predict when a tornado will strike or how devastating an upcoming tornado season will be. A challenge to study up close, twisters often only last for minutes and are too small to be spotted on today’s best climate models. It is not even fully understood why some storms create tornadoes, while others do not.

In the face of this prediction problem, Jeffrey Trapp believes he found a connection with Arctic sea ice that may help future meteorologists better understand the destructive phenomenon.

Trapp, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University, published a paper in “Nature” in early August that suggests fewer tornadoes occur in the United States when there is less sea ice present in the Arctic.

Working alongside professor Kimberly Hoogewind from Purdue University, Trapp used pre-existing data collected from 1990 to 2015 to make monthly comparisons between Arctic sea ice coverage and the frequency of tornado reports in the U.S., where about half of the world’s twisters occur. Through statistical analysis, Trapp found a significant, direct relationship between the two phenomena.

“We found that when the extent of Arctic sea ice is relatively low, we tend to see reduced tornado activity, or fewer days of tornadoes within the U.S.,” Trapp said. “In contrast, during years where the Arctic sea ice is relatively large, we tend to see an above-average number of tornado days.”

Beyond this statistical correlation, Trapp goes a step further and proposes a possible physical explanation: Retreating Arctic ice might make conditions in the U.S. less suitable to form tornadoes.

“Tornadoes really need two things in order to happen,” said Jeffrey Frame, University assistant professor of atmospheric sciences.

“They need instability in the atmosphere — warm, moist air near the ground and fairly cool air aloft — and they need vertical wind shear, which is a change of wind speed or direction with height.”

There is plenty of atmospheric instability during the warm spring and summer, when most tornadoes occur, but vertical wind shear is weak at that time of year. Trapp hypothesizes that melting Arctic ice shrinks the temperature difference between the north and south parts of the country, further weakening vertical wind shear and discouraging tornado formation.

This proposed explanation would also explain why Trapp saw a consistent decrease in tornado activity over the 25-year period he surveyed, despite improvements in reporting.

“With every climate change scenario, you warm the Arctic more than you warm the tropics, so that decreases both the temperature change and the average wind shear,” Frame said. Less wind shear likely means fewer tornadoes, so global warming might reduce the frequency of twisters in the U.S. However intriguing and plausible, Trapp’s study and proposal are preliminary and need

further testing, said Zhuo Wang, University professor of atmospheric sciences who researches predictions of extreme weather.

“The specific physical processes responsible for the link between the Arctic sea ice and tornado activity are not well understood,” Wang said. “In addition, one cannot completely rule out the possibility that the Arctic sea ice and mid-latitude tornado activity are both modulated by a third factor.”

Consequently, Wang suggests running simulations on climate models, where scientists can manually control variables, like sea ice coverage, and test for a direct causation.

“While numerical models have uncertainties and biases and need to be used and interpreted with caution, one limitation of statistical analysis of observational data — as in this study — is that it doesn’t nail down a causal relationship,” Wang said. “Although a significant correlation is found, further study is required to find out whether the Arctic sea ice variability is the driver.”

Trapp agrees that computer model testing is needed to further explore his findings and test whether retreating sea ice really does discourage tornado formation. But even now, his work raises compelling ideas and questions as meteorologists continue to search for answers on extreme weather.

“We’re pretty excited because it gives us a potential explanation for something that has been confusing for us to try to understand,” Trapp said. zbf2@readtechno.com

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YOAV MARGALIT | STAFF WRITER here seems to be a divide between what can be changed in the world and what cannot. For much of science, broadening the horizons of knowledge involves defining and redefining this divide. For genetics, in recent years, the divide has become increasingly blurred.

Enter CRISPR-Cas9, a still-developing process that allows the genetic code of an organism to be changed. Now, after the developments of CRISPR-Cas9 have started to be distributed and researched, researchers at the University have created a new technique, called CRISPR-SKIP. Pablo Perez-Pinera, bioengineering professor at the University, and Jun Song, physics professor, led a team of computational biologists and bioengineers to develop the CRISPR-SKIP technique.

But before getting into how CRISPR-SKIP is new, one first has to know how the original CRISPR is supposed to function.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine

explains that by manipulating the RNA of cells the genome of the cell is deliberately damaged. Then, through the cell’s own mechanism for repairing damaged DNA, a new DNA sequence is put in place of the lost sequence.

This allows DNA to be altered with relative accuracy, as part of the process specifies the DNA to be removed. This means rather than ad hoc gene hacking, specific parts of DNA can be snipped away, leaving room for the intended sequence to take their place.

While there are ethical concerns with the scope and applicability of the technology, it has potentially enormous application in curing human genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, hemophilia and sickle cell anemia.

CRISPR might seem useful in specifying which segments of DNA should be changed and which should remain whole, but this specificity can break down. CRISPR can sometimes lead to portions of the genome that were not specifically targeted to be removed anyway.

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7 This causes parts of DNA that were not originally chosen to be removed as well, which leads to serious problems.

“Several recent reports have identified some potential problems that can arise from cutting DNA, such as losing entire fragments of chromosomes, which is potentially dangerous, since they can cause cancer and other diseases,” Perez-Pinera said. “The mechanism of action of CRISPR-SKIP does not require inducing breaks in genomic DNA, which makes it potentially safer than traditional CRISPR.” What CRISPR-SKIP does, rather than removing the offending piece of DNA, is change a single base in the genome, rendering the offending piece as harmless. When the cell replicates, the portion of the DNA is ‘skipped’ since the piece is now read as not relevant for the purposes of producing RNA. RNA, which allows for the DNA to be read and used, does not read these ‘CRISPR-SKIP’ed portions of the DNA, leading for a much safer, more comprehensive solution than what CRISPR offers.

This can also provide a longer-lasting effect than other genomic ‘skipping’ technologies that attempt to mitigate genetic disease by marking genes as not for reading.

Professors Perez-Pinera and Song explained while the FDA has even

approved some ‘skipping’-based drugs for use in humans, however, these drugs generally do not produce results consistently and permanently, whereas CRISPR-SKIP can potentially result in long-term relief via wholesale genetic change.

“From the very moment that we conceived this idea, we realized the significance and potential of this technology, so the entire team worked exceptionally hard to achieve our common goals,” Perez-Pineda said. “As team leaders, we provided technical advice to our students, helped analyze the data and interpret results, prepared the manuscript as well as offered guidance concerning the overall direction of the project.”

However, scientific progress should not be rushed, and more testing is required before CRISPR-SKIP can see widespread use.

“At this moment, the next steps include identifying appropriate delivery vehicles with which to test this technique in animal models as well as testing its safety and efficacy,” Song said.

As testing continues, this technique represents a new wave of advancements that are potentially world-changing. The advancement of techniques aimed at manipulating and ultimately resolving genetic anomalies continues

to stretch the boundaries of what can and cannot be solved.

With the collaborative effort of researchers at the University, that boundary has just been pushed to a safer, more consistent method for altering genes. yoavm2@readtechno.com

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2015, two female Illinois faculty members began a collaborative project. Three years later, in August, this project was published and stocked on bookshelves.

Laura D. Hahn and Angela S. Wolters co-wrote the book, “Women and Ideas in Engineering: Twelve Stories from Illinois,” to “reflect on the past, tell stories from the present and look forward to the future,” Wolters said.

Hahn is the director of the Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education and Wolters is the director of Women in Engineering. The book was published by the University of Illinois Press.

According to both Hahn and Wolters, the original inspiration behind the publication of the book was a book from 1967 titled, “Men and Ideas in Engineering — Twelve Histories from Illinois,” which highlights 12 narratives of men and their contributions across the 100-year history of engineering at the University.

“I had the book on my shelf, and the title always irked me a little bit,” Hahn said. “We wanted to set the record straight and do a little digging into the contributions of women from the College of Engineering.”

Hahn, Wolters and many others dug deeper than ever.

Collectively, they spent weeks sifting through historical archives, transcripts and records. These efforts couldn’t have been achieved without immense help from Bethany Genn Anderson, the University library’s archival operations and reference specialist, Wolters said.

A majority of the book’s historical content was found in review of records held by the University of Illinois Archives, including Board of Trustees Reports, Illio yearbooks and alumni biographical files.

Many contributors felt now was the ideal time to collect and reflect on the hard work, passion and dedication that was and is vis-

ible among past and present women in the College of Engineering, to show how much progress has been made since 1967.

“Women and Ideas in Engineering: Twelve Stories from Illinois,” tells the story of a vast group of brilliant, strong-willed pioneers who share an astounding dedication to engineering, with perseverance that knows no bounds.

In an excerpt from the book, Jennifer T. Bernhard, the associate dean for research and engineering professor, said, “The title ‘Men and Ideas in Engineering’ might seem exclusionary now, but it was simply a product of its time — near the end of an era, especially in academia, when engineering and engineering research was almost exclusively a pursuit of men.”

Just over 50 years later, “Women and Ideas” was published, aligning with the University’s sesquicentennial celebration and reveal of Illinois’ newest statue: the female engineer. On April 28, 2017, the statue was shown to the public; it’s located on the north portion of the Engineering Quad.

Nine character traits are embellished on the raised surfaces that support the quintessential engineer, distinguishing what makes Illinois’ women in engineering noteworthy. These honorable traits are: confident, passionate, intelligent, courageous, innovative, resilient, pioneering, successful and inspirational.

Each of these traits were exemplified by the women noted in the book, including Mary Louisa Page, Kathryn “Kit” Gordon, Louise M. Woodroofe, Grace Wilson and others.

According to Hahn and Wolters, the initial plan was to follow the setup of “Men and Ideas” by covering 12 specific women; as the project progressed, contributors realized there were far too many remarkable women who deserved to be acknowledged.

This resulted in the composition of 12 themes, to sort each woman into the area of

expertise she was most associated with.

“When we started out, we thought we would be mimicking this book in terms of telling 12 stories from Illinois ... We were worried we wouldn’t even find those 12, but quickly after we started our research, it grew beyond the 12,” Wolters said.

The themes are separated into chapters such as Relentless Innovators, Mentors and Mentoring, and Foundations for the Future.

There are 12 chapters total.

An appendix at the back of the book lists and details the first 11 women graduates of the College of Engineering, from 1867 to 1917, and includes a list of the women graduates from 1918 to 1967.

“Women and Ideas” includes third-person accounts along with first-person autobiographies from current faculty members.

“In addition to us reporting in third person on women in engineering, especially from the past, we also published some first-person commentary from current students, faculty and alumni about their experiences in particular fields or research,” Hahn said.

The male companion book only told stories in third person. This is one of the ways the recent female-based version is different.

A website was also created to accompany and expand the content of the book.

“We didn’t want to restrict these stories to the ones that happen to be in the book,” Hahn said. “So we started a website where we can continue to share these stories. We are still collecting stories, as things evolve.”

To further the impact of the book, a seminar course is being taught on the content by Hahn and Wolters. A number of women highlighted in the text are coming to campus to participate in the discussion and to engage with students who were lucky enough to be able to enroll.

“This book is partially about sharing stories not only to retain and inspire our current female engineering students, but it’s also a way to recruit students to consider studying

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Along with students in the College of Engineering, prospective students can access these stories, from the book or the website, which can be an advantage in the process of choosing a major in the field.

Both Hahn and Wolters expressed their gratitude to the innumerable others who aided in the collective process of telling such a compelling story of the women in Engineering

from Illinois and the opportunity that called them to lead such a momentous project.

“Everyone was positive about this project. It was amazing to be a part of this because everyone’s been behind it. There are so many voices that extended well beyond us and our efforts,” Wolters said. “It isn’t very often that you get a chance to work on a project like this.” mollyz2@readtechno.com

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YIFAN GU | TECHNOGRAPH WRITER here are many facets to Katt Gu. She is both prudent and motivated. She is professional, yet easygoing. She is a firstyear doctorate student in informatics at the University who is cultivating a new field that could influence countless investors and transactions.

Standing in the Legislative Yuan, a legislative institution in Taiwan, Gu, the scholar representative, gave the perspective speech on blockchain legislation. It is summer in Taiwan, and the discussion of blockchain legislation is heating things up.

Gu has completed the University’s Juris Doctor program: a doctorate and the first professional graduate degree in law.

Gu is a legal adviser of blockchain regulation for Taiwan and Malta government, and a researcher at Strategic Coin, which is a U.S.-based crypto market research and analysis company.

Over the past year, blockchain has become a hot topic and has piqued the interest of consumers worldwide. The skyrocketing price of Bitcoin has attracted a wide range of investors.

“Too many people just focus on gaining the money. Few people are dedicated to actually regulating and controlling this domain,” Gu said.

“In every field, legislation always lays behind the actual development. I devote myself to starting it earlier.”

Blockchain is a digital ledger in which transactions made within Bitcoin or another form of cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically.

With experience in projects regarding legislation of biofuel sustainability certification and probabilistic risk assessment, Gu has acquired sophisticated knowledge about legislation in high-tech fields.

“I encountered this field by accident. At first, I had a translating job and did some PR work in China for Blockstream in 2016. Then, I gradually began to know about the blockchain field,” Gu

said.

Gu shared that her work at Blockstream was an incentive and its influence was perpetual. As a Blockstream employee, she devoted herself to studying the fundamental technology of blockchain intensively, especially about SegWit, which is an implemented soft fork change in the transaction format of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

During that year, she followed up and participated in the projects that heightened her interest in taking things further in the blockchain field.

“When I (first) encountered the market of blockchain, every researcher was rigorous and travailed in this field. Such circumstance is attractive, which pushed you to devote yourself,” Gu said. “However, from the end of last year to this year, too many people have focused on using the technology to make a quick buck.

Someone even created some Ponzi scheme to attract amateurs and speculators.”

From Gu’s perspective, the blockchain society has turned out to be a place where

11 most participants are pursuing money. These unfortunate circumstances have stimulated Gu’s ambition and idea to create a legislation, to regulate cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. However, it hasn’t been an easy obstacle to tackle.

Katt Gu’s law professor Xifen Lin, who is a professor of law in KoGuan Law School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said, “Regulation of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is a niche area that no scholar has ever delved deep into.” Lin worked at the University as a visiting scholar from fall 2016 to spring 2017.

In recent years, particular technologies have reached advanced levels, and many wonder if a form of regulation is necessary. There is no intrinsic right or wrong to technology, but it can be used for good and for bad.

Gu is dedicated to using legislation processes to prevent malicious or otherwise unethical behavior.

The purpose of her legislation is to control and limit blockchain technology usage when it is being abused. Gu stressed that the issue is not the technology, but some of the people using it.

“From the perspective of a professional, it is very important that there is some legal standard about Token, ICO and the ‘foundation’ for

token sale,” said Suji Yan, the founder of the Dimension Chain Project. “Different countries view Token currencies in different ways: virtual commodity, security or completely illegal. Also, after the ICO, what is the best way to calculate the ‘revenue’ and audit it?”

The project aims to build a bottom level decentralized data system based on blockchain technology. Suji Yan studied electrical and computer engineering at the University from 2014 to 2017.

According to Yan, one of the largest barriers for legal researchers is that many of them have little or no experience in this domain, especially because the crypto industry is moving so quickly. The field is in dire need of some sophisticated players with strong backgrounds in engineering, investment and law.

Gu has worked on several papers independently on whether Bitcoin should be regulated as stock, or a commodity of currency in China, and how to establish a stabilized governance system with the crypto community to facilitate consensus. She is currently working on creating a code, called Kleio, that tracks the legislative history of every country on cryptocurrency and blockchain.

The complexity of issues twisted within the blockchain domain makes regulation appear

PHOTO COURTESY OF KATT GU

Katt Gu, first-year doctorate student in informatics, is a legal adviser of blockchain regulation for the Taiwan and Malta government. She is currently working to create a code that will track the legislative history of every country using cryptocurrency and blockchain.

onerous or even unapproachable. Gu has worked tirelessly and proven her devotion to the field of blockchain technologies, and she’s not stopping anytime soon.

Through writing legislative code, Gu makes efforts to maintain a fair cryptocurrency market by spreading blockchain knowledge and understanding worldwide. yifangu3@readtechno.com

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SERINA TALUJA | ASSISTANT TECHNOGRAPH EDITOR ater and food are two necessities that human life is directly dependent on. Humans can survive roughly five days without food and only three days without water. As essential as they are, a striking number of people struggle to access both of these resources on a daily basis, especially in developing nations.

To make matters worse, this number is growing, and according to a recently published paper on food security in “Science,” this number is going to continue to grow for at least another 40 years.

The paper explains that to tackle this problem, society needs to look for solutions that are sustainable as well as economically and environmentally reasonable.

John Trimmer, graduate student in Engineering, saw this issue play out firsthand during his time in the Peace Corps in Uganda. Trimmer’s experience there motivated him. Upon starting his graduate studies at the University, he joined Dr. Jeremy Guest’s lab.

Guest is an assistant professor in the civil and environmental Engineering at the University. According to the department’s official website, Guest’s research “focuses on the development of technologies for sustainable water and sanitation, with a focus on resource recovery from bodily excreta in technologically advanced and developing communities.”

The Guest lab’s primary focus is on developing sustainable infrastructure for countries that are in dire need of improvement. In this work, they integrate a variety of fields, such as biofuels, urban water systems and even agricultural systems.

This collaboration led Guest and Trimmer to publish a paper on wastewater being used for agricultural purposes. In August it landed a spot in “Nature Sustainability.” The paper promotes potential solutions to the problems addressed previously in the “Science” article: growing more food to feed an expanding population in a way that is environmentally and economically friendly.

The publication discusses and analyzes how human wastewater is useful for agricultural purposes. Both the water and nutrients, such as nitrogen and potassium, can be reused for crop fertilizer production.

“We apply nutrients to crops in a field, and usually those nutrients come from fertilizers we make commercially,” Trimmer said. “Right now, it’s a one-way flow of nutrients, from our food, to us and then to our wastewater. Our line of thinking was, ‘can we make this process more circular and more sustainable?’”

To answer this question, Guest and Trimmer began investigating how realistic it would be to transport wastewater between treatment facilities and agricultural establishments.

They examined nutrient travel distances in 56 cities around the world. These distances would be indicators of how far nutrients would need to travel from facilities to get to where they would be useful, and of how much energy the whole process would require.

“Usually where a treatment plant is depends on the topography of the surrounding area,” Trimmer said.

Guest and Trimmer used a variety of on-

line databases to gather information about the locations of various treatment facilities relative to large urban areas, as well as the most agriculturally prominent areas of all the countries where the 56 cities were located.

“I was surprised that there was a very wide range of data, from distances in the single digits all the way to hundreds of kilometers,” Trimmer said.

Researchers looked further at how crop alternatives, still fitting to the food culture of each city, could impact the efficiency of a nutrient recycling system. Some of the more nutrient-rich crop alternatives they examined had the potential to reduce the nutrient travel distances by a significant amount, which could make the whole system more promising as an alternative to man-made fertilizers.

“We looked (at) what crops would be optimal for making the nutrient travel distances as short as possible, which are often the crops that need the most nutrients,” Trimmer said.

Guest and Trimmer took it a step further and analyzed how realistic this system would be economically for those same cities. Different wastewater treatment options and nutrient travel distances would impact how much energy and cost would be associated with this type of system in a variety of countries, and for some, this option is more viable than for others.

“The most appropriate strategies for resource recovery — and whether recovery should be pursued at all — will depend on the circumstances in a given location.

It’ll depend on the stakeholders, nutrient markets, the characteristics of the existing

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treatment infrastructure, availability of local agriculture or fertilizer distribution strategies, among other considerations,” Guest said.

Guest and Trimmer discovered that in countries where large, densely populated urban areas were closer to high-production agricultural regions, nutrient travel distances tended to be shorter, making the concept more affordable and sustainable. In more spread out countries, however, such as the U.S., a system such as this would be less beneficial to agriculture.

“We focused on applying nutrients to agriculture, but you could apply them to other things as well, such as forests. This might be more efficient for urban areas farther from agriculture, such as Boston,” Trimmer said.

The research doesn’t stop after this project for the field of sustainable engineering. In fact, Trimmer noted that the entire field is just starting to gain some serious momentum.

“There has been a lot of research on this subject over the last few years, and I think more and more people are interested in transforming the idea of wastewater into something useful,” Trimmer said.

Going forward, Guest’s lab is going to continue to refine this potential system for nutrient-based recycling.

“Now, we’re working on more contextual issues, like how different forms of recovered nutrients impact the plants and soil in that area,” Trimmer said.

This includes finding specific ways nutrients should be extracted from wastewater so that they’re most useful to plants, and finding the ecological impact this type of reintroduction of nutrients would have on ecosystems surrounding agricultural areas.

The work is far from over, but there is a bright future ahead of it, with the possibility to help feed our ever-growing population by enhancing agricultural production.

“We will continue building on this work to identify technologies and locations where the greatest benefits could be observed, and engaging with all relevant stakeholders to develop strategies to work toward closing nutrient loops between people and our food supplies,” Guest said. taluja2@readtechno.com

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SERINA TALUJA | ASSISTANT TECHNOGRAPH EDITOR

omen in STEM-related fields have faced various forms and degrees of discrimination since the beginning of coed universities. In many cases, women have been told they simply aren’t good at math by nature, or that only men should want to go out and collect microbe samples from the dirt, or that they can’t be mothers and professionals in their fields.

Thankfully, we now live in a world where these types of deceptions are being recognized and rectified more frequently.

Not only does Illinois have strict policies in place that prevent and punish gender discrimination of any kind, but the world around us is also becoming more accepting

of all people in STEM fields. Women are no longer seen solely as the homemakers or caretakers, but the strong, intelligent and professional people that many are.

In a world where views surrounding the women in STEM-related fields are beginning to change, literature is following suit. More textbooks are including female scientists and engineers and crediting them where it is due, and women are publishing their experiences.

It is through this sharing of experiences that the book, “Women in Microbiology,” was born.

In May 2018, “Women in Microbiology” was published by the American Society for Microbiologists Press. It was written by a collection of authors, and it was put together and edited by Dr. Rachel Whitaker of the University and by Dr. Hazel Barton of Akon University in Ohio.

This book is a collection of stories from women in the field of microbiology, written by women and men who found the individuals featured in the stories particularly inspiring.

“We started by asking real women in science: Who inspires you? And when they got back to us, we would ask if they wanted to write about her for the book. And although this book is not a representative overview of women in microbiology, it provides just

a few examples of some inspirational women in the field,” Whitaker said.

Each chapter is a new story, taking place at different time periods, across the U.S. and across the world. The women featured have astounding scientific discoveries associated with them, but the book pushes a focus on the women as individuals who face personal pressures as well.

“We wanted to focus on who they were that made them inspiring,” Whitaker said.

“The science these women did was obviously inspiring, but we wanted the book to be accessible for an audience outside of science fields.”

This book is certainly one written for the masses. And while the title implies it was a book written about women, for women, anyone can read these stories of triumph.

“I learned that it really is true that everyone has a story. Everyone was so inspirational, and the important thing for me (to realize was that) they didn’t just bring ideas to the table, but passion,” Barton said.

The authors published “Women in Microbiology” for a vast audience to inspire, motivate and share the achievements made and struggles encountered by women in STEM. “These stories really help show, and I hope people feel that: You don’t have to be the best and the smartest to be inspiring, or to be successful,” Barton said. “You don’t have to be the top of your class who went to the best university and got the best job to be an inspiration to the world.”

Almost all the women in the book faced some sort of hardship through discrimination upon entering their field of choice, whether that was being the only female staff member of a physics department, nearly being shamed out of school for being pregnant, or getting “playfully” pinched in the elevator by male colleagues.

Some of these acts may sound outdated, as if there’s no way they could continue in today’s world, but many of them still exist for women in the workplace.

“All my advisers coming up were men,

15 so it was interesting when I was invited to write this book because I had never run into any glass ceilings or misogyny or anything. My gender had never been an issue for people in my field,” Barton said. “But when I started talking to the women around me and reading the literature about women from the past, I was shocked.”

In STEM-related fields at the University, more women have recently been given opportunities to lead lectures, write books or sit on corporate or trustee boards.

Rebecca Wipfler is an undergraduate in Dr. Whitaker’s lab at the University, and a prime example of an inspirational woman in science and someone who gets to move forward freely in a world where women are less discouraged in STEM related fields than they were in the past.

“I have never personally felt discriminated based on my sex or gender in science, both in any laboratory I’ve been a part of or in any science class,” Wipfler said.

Based on ongoing movements and

issues, a long road remains to ensure every woman can say as confidently as Wipfler that she has never dealt with gender-motivated disrespect or discrimination.

“I think the glass ceiling isn’t gone, it’s just gotten a little higher. But with the progress we’ve been making, eventually we’ll break through it,” Barton said.

“Women in Microbiology” was released at an ideal time, to remind and push those in STEM fields and elsewhere to treat and respect everyone equally, regardless of gender.

Both as an advocation for women and an inspirational piece to all, this book is sure to influence readers and leave them with a sense of hope.

“The people featured in this book really show you what a lasting impact you can leave, not only in your field with your work, but on the world with your passion,” Whitaker said.

taluja2@readtechno.com

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Beckman Institute 405 N. Mathews, Urbana

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