By Chris Warren
Every year AISES recognizes outstanding individual achievement through the Professional Awards Program. Winners are selected by a committee of distinguished leaders from organizations that partner with AISES. When that group convenes to devote their time and expertise to weighing the Professional Awards nominations, every member has a difficult task. Because nominations, which are invariably both impressive and inspiring, arrive from across our membership, selecting the five winners is never easy. The winner of the Professional of the Year award is selected based on overall leadership and technical achievement, and the remaining four awards are made based on achievements in specific categories. New this year is the Indigenous Excellence award, which acknowledges individuals who have done substantial work to advance programs and opportunities for Indigenous students and professionals in STEM education and careers. Here are the winners.
Haida of the Eagle moiety and of the Sdast’ aas (Fish egg) house
➼ Dr. Wendy F. Smythe, Haida, never thought her career would veer into the world of public policy. After growing up in the rural community of Hydaburg on Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island, she earned a dual PhD in estuary and oceans systems and environmental science and engineering from Oregon Health and Sciences University in 2015. A passionate advocate of STEM education in Native communities, Dr. Smythe founded the Geoscience Education Program in Hydaburg. It’s an initiative that has helped boost the number of college-bound students from about 19 percent when the program started 12 years ago to about 65 percent of high school graduates opting to enter college or trade school to pursue STEM degrees.
A two-year post-doctoral NSF (National Science Foundation) AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Technology and Policy Fellowship at the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action at Michigan State University showed her the power of policy. “My postdoctoral mentor told me, ‘the work you do in your tribal community is policy,’” recalls Dr. Smythe, this year’s winner of the Professional of the Year award. “I told her it was just me doing work at home as a scientist.”
But Dr. Smythe has come to understand the significant impact — both good and bad — that policy can have on paving the way for more Native students in STEM fields. As an NSF AAAS Fellow for the past two years, Dr. Smythe has worked hard with program officers on making informed decisions when it comes to funding proposals focused on Native American/Alaska Native communities. “Money is policy. If you don’t direct money to ethically and culturally aligned projects, we do damage and disservice to the community,” she says. “Millions are given to Native education, and when there is no change there is an assumption that Native people don’t care about education. But the reality is that it hasn’t been done in a culturally and ethically responsible way.”
DR. SMYTHE HAS COME TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANT IMPACT — BOTH GOOD AND BAD — THAT POLICY CAN HAVE ON PAVING THE WAY FOR MORE NATIVE STUDENTS IN STEM FIELDS.
To help change that dynamic, Dr. Smythe created a professional development workshop for NSF program officers that focuses on tribal sovereignty, governance, best practices, and ethics for evaluating science and education research projects. She also has served as a reviewer of proposals submitted to NSF’s Geoscience Education division for the past several years. While improved education of program officers about the appropriate way to evaluate proposals from Native communities helps, ultimately the aim should be increased diversity among the program officers themselves. “I think the first step is to increase the number of program officers who are Native. I was the only Native that I know of in the foundation addressing these issues, and with me leaving, my concern is who will continue the work,” says Dr. Smythe, who went on to become an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth with a joint appointment in American Indian Studies and Environmental Science, the first scientist to join both departments.
One key ingredient to improved policy and funding of Native education programs is clarity on the intersection between traditional ecological knowledge and STEM disciplines. “Our way of knowing is different, as we look at STEM as a single and interrelated sphere, whereas in academia that knowledge gets compartmentalized as separate unrelated concepts,” she says.
All these efforts involve necessary but challenging structural changes. And Dr. Smythe has plenty of experience tackling big challenges. Despite her impressive academic achievements, Dr. Smythe insists she was a late bloomer. That all began to change in a seventh-grade science class, when her teacher made the topics and experiments fun. Even more important, Dr. Smythe’s fisherman grandfather — who took over the role as a father figure when Smythe lost her own dad when she was just 11 — preached about the importance of education. When he passed away, he left money for Dr. Smythe to take a microbiology class. “I wanted to do well because he had given me the gift of education,” she says. “The spark was lit.” Ever since, Dr. Smythe has been doing her best to light that same spark for as many Native students as possible.
Navajo
➼ Though he had no idea of it at the time, Dylan Moriarty started training for his current job at New Mexico–based Sandia National Laboratories when he was a young boy. Moriarty grew up in rural Fort Defiance, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation.
“The one resource we have plenty of is dirt,” says Moriarty, this year’s winner of the Most Promising Engineer or Scientist award. “When it would rain, I would go down to the wash and make dams and play around with the natural systems. I would also play with Legos, and though I didn’t know it at the time, what I really liked was solving problems.”
A lot has happened in the years since Moriarty was playing in the dirt, including his obtaining a BS in civil engineering from the University of Arizona and an MS in energy resources engineering from Stanford University. But at some level, Moriarty is still using the skills he unknowingly began building as a kid. Today, as a geoscience engineer at one of the nation’s premier research laboratories, Moriarty works on the challenge of infrastructure resilience — think of water networks or traffic — using spatial statistics. “I take my knowledge of Earth systems and infrastructure systems and apply statistics to gain an understanding and solve challenges,” he says.
Moriarty says that people’s eyes generally glaze over when they hear that explanation, which is why he has a handy way to illustrate what he does. Think about the weather forecasts we’ve all seen that feature heat maps showing the high and low temperatures in different states. “That data is collected from weather stations, but there aren’t data collection stations everywhere,” he explains. “Spatial statistics help you understand what’s going on in between those stations.”
Much of Moriarty’s work at Sandia these days is geared toward promoting the resilience of the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), the world’s largest emergency supply of crude oil. Stored in huge salt dome caverns at four sites in Louisiana and Texas, the SPR is designed to store up to 713.5 million barrels of crude oil.
One of Moriarty’s jobs is to ensure the safety of these facilities by monitoring ground deformations on the surface of the land, also known as subsidence. “These are giant caverns that go down as much as a mile deep,” says Moriarty. “We can’t see what’s going on in the caverns, but one way to tell and get an indicator of cavern stability is by looking at subsidence and how it is changing, and then applying spatial statistics.”
The work is like solving complex puzzles, which is what Moriarty likes about it. There are other projects at Sandia that he enjoys, including helping with research to aid the Indian Energy Program, which investigates energy possibilities on Native land, energy sovereignty, renewables, and responsible development. “A lot of Native nations realize the energy potential on their lands, and they are sovereign nations with control over those resources,” he says. “Native nations haven’t had the best experience dealing with outside companies, and this is an effort to get people from the tribes who know the issues to work on this so they aren’t taken advantage of.”
TODAY, AS A GEOSCIENCE ENGINEER AT ONE OF THE NATION’S PREMIER RESEARCH LABORATORIES, MORIARTY WORKS ON THE CHALLENGE OF INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE USING SPATIAL STATISTICS.
Though his job responsibilities are extensive, Moriarty carves out a significant amount of time to mentor and encourage Native students. Since he joined Sandia in 2014, Moriarty has been involved with the American Indian Outreach Committee, which is devoted to recruiting — and retaining — Indigenous scientists in the Sandia workforce. He also has been engaged with the Dream Catchers Science Program, which introduces Native students in middle and high school to STEM.
Moriarty understands that these interactions are meant to motivate the students. But he is the one who usually comes away energized. “I’m blown away by the potential, excitement, and creativity of these young Indigenous scientists. That, combined with the disparity between the number of Native students there are and the number of scientists, motivates me,” he says. “Between excitement at their passion for engineering and this frustrating gap, I dedicated myself to helping as best I can.”
