Dr. Angela Byars-Winston Named a
Champion of Change:
Promoting STEM Equity
Champion of Change:
Promoting STEM Equity
Dr. Angela Byars-Winston was honored as a
Champion of Change at the White House on Dec. 9
for her work in getting students of color and
women more involved in STEM-related studies
Champion of Change at the White House on Dec. 9
for her work in getting students of color and
women more involved in STEM-related studies
By Jonathan Gramling
Part 1 of 2
Dr. Angela Byars-Winston is probably one of the most unassuming persons who live
in Madison. To see her in the community, she comes across as the doting mother of
two and the husband of former school board member Johnny Winston Jr. Rarely does
she talk about herself as she regularly shows up at community events in support of
others.
While that naturally humble mature may keep Byars-Winston’s work hidden from
view in the Madison area — and even on the UW campus where she is a researcher
at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health — her important work has caught the
eye of some national organizations who nominated her for a Champion of Change
recognition by President Barack Obama’s White House.
Sometime last year, the National Alliance for Partnership in Equity and the National
Girls Collaborative Project nominated Byars-Winston for the prestigious award.
Byars-Winston was unaware.
“It was an e-mail invitation that I actually thought was spam mail,” Byars-Winston
said with a laugh. “It was the week of Thanksgiving — that Monday — I got a very
long e-mail from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. They were
the ones hosting that particular award on women and girls and STEM. The
Part 1 of 2
Dr. Angela Byars-Winston is probably one of the most unassuming persons who live
in Madison. To see her in the community, she comes across as the doting mother of
two and the husband of former school board member Johnny Winston Jr. Rarely does
she talk about herself as she regularly shows up at community events in support of
others.
While that naturally humble mature may keep Byars-Winston’s work hidden from
view in the Madison area — and even on the UW campus where she is a researcher
at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health — her important work has caught the
eye of some national organizations who nominated her for a Champion of Change
recognition by President Barack Obama’s White House.
Sometime last year, the National Alliance for Partnership in Equity and the National
Girls Collaborative Project nominated Byars-Winston for the prestigious award.
Byars-Winston was unaware.
“It was an e-mail invitation that I actually thought was spam mail,” Byars-Winston
said with a laugh. “It was the week of Thanksgiving — that Monday — I got a very
long e-mail from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. They were
the ones hosting that particular award on women and girls and STEM. The
invitation was quite laudatory and speaking about how I had been nominated and subsequently selected to receive this award. And
immediately I called because I was thinking this couldn’t be true. When you get these high-security e-mails, they have a red band on top
and have to click it to go through security. I thought, ‘This is interesting.’ When the person answered the phone, they said, ‘White House,
how can I help you?’ My jaw dropped. I held it together thankfully. I have good home training. She reaffirmed what was in the e-mail, that
they were very excited to honor me and the other 11 people who had been nominated and selected for that week.”
For almost 20 years, Byars-Winston has been quietly becoming a national authority on research that investigates how to increase the
number of women and students of color entering STEM — science, engineering, technology and math — fields. She has attached the
problem from a policy and a programmatic perspective.
“I and others are trying to provide the knowledge base, the evidence, to say ‘Here is where you shoot the arrow,’” Byars-Winston said
about developing policies and programs to promote STEM participation in underserved populations. “If you want to get more
underrepresented groups in science technology, engineering and math — and in my case medicine — there are critical issues that we
have to address. And specifically, my contribution, which is unique in the STEM field, is the cultural context of STEM.
“What is it about being the ‘lonely-only,’ one of the few trailblazers — be it by gender, sexual orientation, racial or ethnic status — that
helps to either facilitate or inhibit people’s passions. They want to go into this field. What is interesting I think based on my — research
here especially at UW and I’ve also been working with two Historically Black Colleges — is the passion is there. The intrinsic interest is
there. The motivations are there. It is what happens once they get to campus, once they get to those classes, once they have these snide
comments from faculty and peers that cause people to have what I call this artificial erosion of their self-efficacy. ‘Maybe I’m not as smart
as I thought I was? Maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was?’ My research has had a particular niche and has made a little contribution
in the larger conversation of how do we broaden participation in STEM. It really addresses the cultural context from a research
perspective. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence. People can come up with observations and anecdotal evidence all day long. But in
terms of real research that shows here is how these dynamics are going to affect people, where and how culture makes a difference, I
think that is an important contribution.”
Another area that Byars-Winston has focused on is creating programs and initiatives to get underrepresented students involved,
developing and sustaining their interest in STEM careers.
“I’ve developed a lot of curricula for the national organizations to help promote gender equity in STEM classrooms,” Byars-Winston said.
“One of those curricula that I co-developed is actually being launched in the Baltimore Community College system next month. All STEM
faculty will be going through this training that I helped develop. I’ve developed programs here at the UW at the College of Engineering to
promote mentoring of racial and ethnic minority freshmen. We know they are there and we want to keep them. So with the 90-100 who
come in, how do we keep them into year two and year three? I developed a program to help retain those students. It’s called the Sloan
Engineering Mentoring Program. It was developed while Libby Badger and the late Steve Clark were there. It was under his leadership in
2007-2008 that it was developed. It actually improved retention from year one to year two by almost 20 percent. Ninety-two percent of the
students who participated in our program were continuing on to year two compared to 70 percent who weren’t in our program, which is
still good. So it was pretty effective.”
In the late 1990s when Byars Winston came to the UW campus, she worked with a group of people to implement the Expand Your Horizons
program at the College of Engineering.
“Expand Your Horizons is an annual middle school girls outreach program that brings 300 girls every first weekend in November to the
UW campus and College of Engineering,” Byars-Winston said. “We expose them to everything they can possibly put in their heads for six
hours relating to STEM. They build go-karts and electronic robotics and they do experiments and calculate using physics principles. How
fast is the ball going to fall? It’s been around for over 30 years and I was a part of that through the 1990s when I first came to the UW in
1998 and stayed with them for ten years until I had my second child. I helped develop a lot of the career development pieces. How do we
take those interests that they have in this one day and convert them into career commitment? It is one thing to expose them to it for a day.
But how do you imbed that so it starts to become internalized? Maybe I can be a robotics engineer? Maybe I can be a food scientist? I
never thought about being a molecular biologist.”
Byars-Winston has also worked with Sherrill Sellers and Alberto Cabrera to implement the Delta project, an online training program
designed to help bench scientists become more aware of how they impact underrepresented students and become more effective in
working with them.
For well more than a decade now, Byars-Winston has been working in the ivory towers as well as in the trenches to increase the number
of underrepresented students in STEM fields. But she is only now really hitting her stride as the research she is conducting and programs
she is implementing with Dr. Molly Carnes begin to make an impact on the UW campus and on a nationwide basis.
Next issue: Research on Historically Black Colleges and helping faculty become better at being successful with underrepresented
students in the STEM fields
immediately I called because I was thinking this couldn’t be true. When you get these high-security e-mails, they have a red band on top
and have to click it to go through security. I thought, ‘This is interesting.’ When the person answered the phone, they said, ‘White House,
how can I help you?’ My jaw dropped. I held it together thankfully. I have good home training. She reaffirmed what was in the e-mail, that
they were very excited to honor me and the other 11 people who had been nominated and selected for that week.”
For almost 20 years, Byars-Winston has been quietly becoming a national authority on research that investigates how to increase the
number of women and students of color entering STEM — science, engineering, technology and math — fields. She has attached the
problem from a policy and a programmatic perspective.
“I and others are trying to provide the knowledge base, the evidence, to say ‘Here is where you shoot the arrow,’” Byars-Winston said
about developing policies and programs to promote STEM participation in underserved populations. “If you want to get more
underrepresented groups in science technology, engineering and math — and in my case medicine — there are critical issues that we
have to address. And specifically, my contribution, which is unique in the STEM field, is the cultural context of STEM.
“What is it about being the ‘lonely-only,’ one of the few trailblazers — be it by gender, sexual orientation, racial or ethnic status — that
helps to either facilitate or inhibit people’s passions. They want to go into this field. What is interesting I think based on my — research
here especially at UW and I’ve also been working with two Historically Black Colleges — is the passion is there. The intrinsic interest is
there. The motivations are there. It is what happens once they get to campus, once they get to those classes, once they have these snide
comments from faculty and peers that cause people to have what I call this artificial erosion of their self-efficacy. ‘Maybe I’m not as smart
as I thought I was? Maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was?’ My research has had a particular niche and has made a little contribution
in the larger conversation of how do we broaden participation in STEM. It really addresses the cultural context from a research
perspective. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence. People can come up with observations and anecdotal evidence all day long. But in
terms of real research that shows here is how these dynamics are going to affect people, where and how culture makes a difference, I
think that is an important contribution.”
Another area that Byars-Winston has focused on is creating programs and initiatives to get underrepresented students involved,
developing and sustaining their interest in STEM careers.
“I’ve developed a lot of curricula for the national organizations to help promote gender equity in STEM classrooms,” Byars-Winston said.
“One of those curricula that I co-developed is actually being launched in the Baltimore Community College system next month. All STEM
faculty will be going through this training that I helped develop. I’ve developed programs here at the UW at the College of Engineering to
promote mentoring of racial and ethnic minority freshmen. We know they are there and we want to keep them. So with the 90-100 who
come in, how do we keep them into year two and year three? I developed a program to help retain those students. It’s called the Sloan
Engineering Mentoring Program. It was developed while Libby Badger and the late Steve Clark were there. It was under his leadership in
2007-2008 that it was developed. It actually improved retention from year one to year two by almost 20 percent. Ninety-two percent of the
students who participated in our program were continuing on to year two compared to 70 percent who weren’t in our program, which is
still good. So it was pretty effective.”
In the late 1990s when Byars Winston came to the UW campus, she worked with a group of people to implement the Expand Your Horizons
program at the College of Engineering.
“Expand Your Horizons is an annual middle school girls outreach program that brings 300 girls every first weekend in November to the
UW campus and College of Engineering,” Byars-Winston said. “We expose them to everything they can possibly put in their heads for six
hours relating to STEM. They build go-karts and electronic robotics and they do experiments and calculate using physics principles. How
fast is the ball going to fall? It’s been around for over 30 years and I was a part of that through the 1990s when I first came to the UW in
1998 and stayed with them for ten years until I had my second child. I helped develop a lot of the career development pieces. How do we
take those interests that they have in this one day and convert them into career commitment? It is one thing to expose them to it for a day.
But how do you imbed that so it starts to become internalized? Maybe I can be a robotics engineer? Maybe I can be a food scientist? I
never thought about being a molecular biologist.”
Byars-Winston has also worked with Sherrill Sellers and Alberto Cabrera to implement the Delta project, an online training program
designed to help bench scientists become more aware of how they impact underrepresented students and become more effective in
working with them.
For well more than a decade now, Byars-Winston has been working in the ivory towers as well as in the trenches to increase the number
of underrepresented students in STEM fields. But she is only now really hitting her stride as the research she is conducting and programs
she is implementing with Dr. Molly Carnes begin to make an impact on the UW campus and on a nationwide basis.
Next issue: Research on Historically Black Colleges and helping faculty become better at being successful with underrepresented
students in the STEM fields
