LSI SciComm Series: Kate Zernike

Rackham Amphitheatre

Audience This is a public event.

The Exceptions: The Past, Present and Future of Women in Science

In 1999 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publicly admitted that it had discriminated against the women on its science faculty. That "extraordinary admission," as the front page of the New York Times described it, set off a reckoning across the country about the lack of women at the highest levels of science.

The MIT story started with the quiet efforts of 16 highly accomplished female scientists, led by Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist who had started her career 30 years earlier believing that science was a pure meritocracy and feminism was an unnecessary relic. Kate Zernike, the author of "The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science" will talk about how Hopkins was emblematic of her generation, and what the next generation of scientists can learn from the experience of the women at MIT.

A book-signing event will take place immediately following the talk, at 11:00 a.m. in the Rackham Amphitheatre.

Speaker

Kate Zernike

National Reporter

The New York Times

Kate Zernike is an author and journalist. She joined The New York Times in 2000 as an education reporter and has since worked on the investigations, national, styles, metro and science desks, and as a reporter in the Washington Bureau, and most recently was the lead reporter covering abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade. She was a member of the team that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series of stories on Al Qaeda before and after the terror attacks of 9/11. Her first book, "Boiling Mad: Behind the Lines in Tea Party America," was published in 2010. Her latest, "The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science" (2023), was named one of the 25 best books of the year by the American Library Association and was a finalist for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. A graduate of the University of Toronto, she began her journalism career at The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., and was a reporter for The Boston Globe before joining The Times.

Hosts

Life Sciences Institute

Institute for Social Research

Wallace House Center for Journalists