For years Taviare Hawkins avoided giving talks about being a Black woman in physics. “I didn’t want to be pigeonholed,” she says; she wanted to be known for her science. Eventually, though, through a zigzagging path that included good mentors, personal initiative, and several jobs, she came to see the importance of serving as a visible role model.
Hawkins majored in physics at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1992. She wasn’t sure she wanted to stay in the field. “I knew I was an experimentalist,” she says, “and I did not want to spend my life in the basement with a bunch of smelly dudes.”
After a three-year break, Hawkins started work on a PhD in physics at Syracuse University. She credits her return to physics to Vincent Rodgers, a string theorist at Iowa. “He saw something in me and kept doubling back,” Hawkins says. “Women, people of color, we want to feel a part of things. For whatever reasons, physics sucks at that,” she says.
Along the way to earning her PhD in 2009 for research on human–computer interfacing, Hawkins picked up master’s degrees in physics and computer science. She also taught at other institutions. She then did a postdoc with Jenny Ross—who became another important mentor—at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which opened the door to biophysics and convinced her to stay in research. From 2012 until early 2021, she was on the physics faculty at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. She led a research team that characterized microtubule rigidity, and for the last two years she chaired the department.
Then in January, in the midst of the pandemic, Hawkins embraced a new challenge, becoming division chair of math and science at St Catherine University, a Catholic liberal arts school for women in St Paul, Minnesota. “The provost is an African American woman. The dean is an African American woman. And then there is me,” she says. “Such an opportunity—those cards wouldn’t align again. That made it a done deal for me.”
PT: Why did you go into physics?
HAWKINS: From my earliest books on comets, I was always interested in math and science. In school—on the South Side of Chicago—I was in the aerospace club. I came to physics through astronomy. I picked the University of Iowa because I knew they were strong in astronomy; James Van Allen was still there.
PT: Did you feel comfortable at the University of Iowa?
HAWKINS: Yes. I did experimental work, and for two summers I did REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates, an NSF program] in plasma physics. The one thing that was off-putting was that there were no other people of color in my major. It was just me when I started.
In my junior year, a Black professor joined the department—Vincent Rodgers. His office was near the elevator, and I would see him in the hallway. He would say, “You must be a physics major. Stop by and talk.”
Before I left Iowa, I told Vincent that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do physics. When I got up in the morning, I wanted to feel like what I did was making a difference in people’s lives.
PT: What did you do after you graduated?
HAWKINS: I moved to New York City for the summer, and I stayed for three years. I worked as a real estate asset manager.
PT: How did you get into that?
HAWKINS: I got bored sitting at home waiting for my buddies to get off work, so I got a temp job. My boss, the son of the company’s owner, was a physics major. We talked shop, and he knew that I was good at problem solving. At the end of the summer, when I was ready to leave, he wanted me to stay. He said, “You attack problems like a physicist. You are analytical, and I don’t have to hold your hand.” I stayed.
PT: Did you like the work?
HAWKINS: I did, I enjoyed it. But you have to evict people and get properties out of arrears. I felt uncomfortable with that part of the job.
PT: What did you do next?
HAWKINS: I had gone to Europe on vacation and was about to go to Jamaica on vacation when my phone rang. It was Vincent. I had not heard from him in three years. Immediately after I said hello, he said, “Are you ready to stop playing around and take yourself back to physics?” He said he had found a project for me and that I should go check out the work a certain professor in Syracuse was doing on human–computer interfacing.
I did, and I loved it. Unbeknownst to me, they had my stats and I was already accepted. All I had to do was say yes.
PT: How was graduate school?
HAWKINS: The research I did in grad school involved an interdisciplinary team of engineers, programmers, medical doctors, and industrial designers working to develop interface devices. My contribution was to design human–computer interface software. Basically, what I did was take whatever gestures a person could make and translate them to simple language. One of the people in the group was quadriplegic. He wore glasses, and we outfitted his glasses with sensors to capture some of his gestures. I would take those gestures and use an algorithm to map them to phrases.
Even though I had a team of people I worked with, I was the only student working on my specific project and with my academic adviser. The algorithm was proprietary, so I couldn’t talk to people about it. It became isolating. I was spinning my wheels.
PT: So you left to teach?
HAWKINS: I applied for a tenure-track position at Xavier University of Louisiana. By that time I was ABD—all but dissertation. I got the job, and my husband and I moved to New Orleans in 2002. We were there for three years. When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, we moved back to Syracuse so I could finish my PhD.
But my adviser was stringing me along. “You need to do this,” or “do that.” The carrot was always moving. I learned so much in that process about having a sense of myself and being able to speak up. I trained two junior students and helped them finish their degrees—a master’s in physics and a PhD in computer science—but I still wasn’t done.
In 2008 I left for Mount Holyoke College. I went for two years on an initiative they were part of to diversify faculty at liberal arts colleges. One of the conditions was that you had to finish your PhD within a year. I used that to lean on my adviser, and I got my degree at the end of 2009.
I went to Mount Holyoke specifically because I felt insecure in my abilities as a physicist. I knew I was good at teaching—but was that all I was good at? I wanted to figure out: Could I bring in grant money? Could I mentor students? Could I train students in research?
PT: How did you figure out that you wanted to do research?
HAWKINS: One reason I picked Mount Holyoke was because it was close to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Jenny Ross was, and I wanted to work with her. She is a physicist but didn’t have any physicists in her lab. From my experience on the tenure track at Xavier, I knew better what I’d need to be successful. I knew she was young and hungry—she is 10 years younger than me—and not yet tenured. I told her, “I need to learn to write papers. I need to learn how to run a lab. I need to work on a project that I could take with me to my next job. And I am going to need to be supported by you throughout the rest of my career.” She said, “Yep, I can do that.” And I said, “Yep, I can work for you.”
PT: It sounds like you took a lot of initiative.
HAWKINS: I realized that you have to invest in yourself, especially if you want others to invest in you.
PT: Did you go from your postdoc with Ross to the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse?
HAWKINS: Yes. Within eight years, I went from assistant to associate to full professor and served as chair of the physics department.
PT: Tell us about your research.
HAWKINS: I measure the persistence length of cellular filaments. I picked microtubules because I worked on them when I was at the Ross lab. They are easy to make and polymerize. We really can’t start to approximate the cell if we don’t understand its structural integrity. Microtubules are the largest filaments. How rigid do they need to be to support a cell when, for instance, it’s crawling? Or when a cell undergoes mitosis? We know that filaments can tune their rigidity; how bendy do they need to be in various conditions?
Those are really good problems for undergraduates to work on. They get a bit of biochemistry. They learn how to polymerize microtubules. They learn how to use a microscope. And they learn some image processing.
PT: So you moved into biophysics?
HAWKINS: I am a physicist who works on biological problems. And biophysics as a community is actively welcoming. That makes it easy to come into the field. There are a lot of women and Black and brown people at meetings. I found a place that I felt comfortable. (See also “Why does biophysics attract a disproportionate number of women?” Physics Today online, 7 June 2021.)
PT: What persuaded you to talk to people about being a Black woman in physics?
HAWKINS: Within a year of my showing up at La Crosse, we went from having zero to four people of color in the physics department. The students see people who look like them and think, “I could do this.” That was rewarding in itself. But part of my armor was that I didn’t want to give those kinds of talks.
Then as part of citywide Martin Luther King celebrations in 2019, Duchess Harris, whose grandmother had been one of the early Black women at NASA, was speaking. She had written a book at the middle-school level, Hidden Heroes. The organizers needed someone to introduce the speaker, and they invited me—they said, you are a Black woman, and you are the closest thing we have to NASA here. I had an African American student, Adrienne Hester, who was just about to finish up her bachelor’s degree, and I agreed to participate in the event if they would showcase her.
From the questions the middle schoolers asked—there were about 1000 in the auditorium—I realized that they saw me as a scientist, just like any other scientist.
The next day when I went to pick up my daughter from school, I ran into two African American girls in the hallway. And one of them said, “Can I give you a hug?” I didn’t know her, and it didn’t dawn on me that she had been in the audience. The girl said that from the talk the day before, “now I know I am going to do science too.”
I realized that not giving those talks, and not allowing kids to see themselves as people who may go into science or become teachers, was not bringing my whole self to work. I still take every opportunity to talk about my science too.
PT: What are your plans at St Catherine’s? And what do you see as the challenges?
HAWKINS: St Kate’s is a good incubator for women in STEM. We have a physics department but not a major, and I’d like to explore offering a full-fledged major.
I think the challenge for me is convincing people that we need to change the institution to serve the population we have now. St Kate’s used to attract middle- to upper-class women. Now it’s 52% BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color], something like 44% Pell-eligible, and 23% first generation. If the students are Pell-eligible—that means their family income is less than $50 000, and often it’s much lower—it’s different. We need to meet students where they are and get them to see that they can get where they need to be.
PT: What does that mean in practice?
HAWKINS: For example, I want physics degrees to be open to students who start off at the algebra level—or even lower. I don’t want their opportunities to be limited because they didn’t have access to better education earlier. At La Crosse, I’ve sent several students who started off in algebra-based physics on to graduate school in physics or biophysics. So this whole thought that you need to come equipped to start in calculus is crazy. It excludes people.
PT: What are your plans for the future?
HAWKINS: For now, St Kate’s is a whole new challenge for me. I’m enjoying the work and learning a lot. And it’s different because I don’t always get to drive things as fast as I get to drive myself in research.
I think younger people are where hope lies. They are demanding political and societal change. And the kids I am training now, they are different. They will speak truth to power.
