キャリアニュース2021年6月24日～７月3日

In May, as our institution began to open back up and whispers about in-person lab meetings started to float around, I panicked. In the months preceding the pandemic, I had cochlear implants surgically placed to address steadily worsening hearing loss. As I began to retrain my brain to hear—a difficult and tiring process that required me to match the new sounds I was hearing with my previous knowledge of the auditory world—we went into lockdown. Amid the isolation and uncertainty, I discovered a bright spot: Online meetings worked well for me. With everyone speaking into computer microphones, I could hear and focus. What would happen as we returned to “normal”? > “I began to leave seminars feeling invigorated rather than needing a nap.” My hearing loss began when I was in graduate school; no one has been able to determine the cause. At first, I naïvely thought I could overcome it with hard work and dedication. I began to record every one-on-one meeting because even with the most in

Atmospheric science is overwhelmingly white. These Black scientists ignited a change. Everything depended on finding the gigantic dust cloud. Seventeen years ago, a scientific crew set out on the Ron Brown , a gleaming U.S. research ship, in search of a plume of desert dust that had sheared off the Sahara and wafted over the Atlantic Ocean. Sailing from Barbados with day after day of clear sky, the crew was anxious about finding the dust storm. But that wasn't the only thing weighing on Vernon Morris, the atmospheric chemist who'd organized the cruise, the first of its kind run largely by Black and Hispanic scientists. Failure could make life complicated for the atmospheric sciences program Morris had recently co-founded at Howard University. And, he says, “They would have never entrusted the ship to a bunch of Puerto Ricans and Blacks again.” Finally, on the fifth morning, the crew awoke to an eclipse of dust. It settled on railings, instruments, and weather balloons. “We were ju