When Victoria Nofchissey spotted a flyer for a program called Engaging Indigenous Women in Nuclear Physics, she thought, “That’s me!” She was a sophomore at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Growing up without water or electricity on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, she says, “I didn’t imagine I had the possibility of being a physicist.”
A few months later, in the summer of 2023, she was at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Indigenous women in STEM “are the minority of minorities,” says Cesar Da Silva. (According to data from the Department of Education, Indigenous women earned 0.2% of bachelor’s degrees in the physical sciences in 2021. See the interactive tool at https://ww2.aip.org/statistics/physics-engineering-degrees-earned.) He and fellow Los Alamos physicist Astrid Morreale proposed the program in 2021 in response to a call by the Department of Energy to increase participation by groups historically underrepresented in science. Their proposal to mentor such...
