Amid the propaganda surrounding Harvard's first African American woman president, Dr. Claudine Gay, PhD, how much does the public really know about Black and Brown PhDs and the vital work they've been doing since Dr. Edward A. Bouchet earned his PhD in Physics from Yale in 1876; America's first Black PhD in any field. Dr. Georgiana Simpson (University of Chicago, 1921) was the first Black woman to graduate with a PhD.
Our guests on this week's show, SCHOLARS & SCHOLARSHIP, are Dr. Diana Hernandez, PhD and Dr. Sheila Walker, PhD.
Diana Hernandez is Associate Professor of Public Health in the Department of Socio-Medical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health:
"Socio-medical is really about appreciating the social determinants of health. So for me, a lot of what I do is actually study conditions at the margins. My work is also about the climate and how climate change is impacting people's everyday realities, not just in the sense of extreme weather events, but even kind of more sporadically, these power outages that may happen on a localized level, or the need for more temperature control as the environment gets colder and hotter."
Sheila Walker is a cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker focusing on the Global African Diaspora:
"My focus is relentlessly global. I think of people in countries where they don't have easy access to energy. I worked in places in the Sahel in West Africa, where there was not an annual clean water supply, where the water table was so low that people with the technology they had could not dig a well deep enough to get to the freshwater table. So what they need is renewable energy, solar power, for example, or wind. I've worked on projects that had to do with renewable energy, bio-gas or solar power. This is a real wake-up call for me and a whole bunch of other people."