The Suter Science Center, for the past two years, has featured a mural of people who are significant in STEM fields and come from backgrounds that are traditionally underrepresented. On Friday, March 27, two people portrayed in this mural came to EMU for a dedication ceremony.
Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, an award-winning environmental researcher, spoke about their work and how it incorporates art and storytelling to explore the natural world from an indigenous perspective. They have used their background to co-found Queer Nature, an organisation that strives to create “deep, slow, and thoughtful engagement with the natural world to build inter-species alliances and an enduring sense of belonging for all” (via queernature.org).
Along with Sinopoulos-Lloyd, ADM (ret.) Rachel Levine joined for the dedication. Dr. Levine was the Assistant Secretary for Health of the United States Department of Health and Human Services under former President Joe Biden. She also served as the Pennsylvania Physician General and Secretary of Health. She has spent a significant portion of her career in academia, studying paediatrics and psychiatry.
Dr. Levine described her work in academic and clinical medicine and public health as “intimately related.” Whether she was working with patients directly, teaching students, doing clinical research, or advising national health policies, she said, “all I was trying to do was help people.” Dr. Levine went on to explain, “Everything I did in my academic medicine career served me in public health. It made me a better public health leader and public health physician.”
During her time as a public health official, she travelled all across the country, from an Arctic island in the Bering Sea to farmland in Florida and many places in between. One of the most impactful details from Dr. Levine’s travels was the impact that climate change was having on indigenous communities. In Alaska, she spoke to natives whose homes were sinking into the ground as the permafrost on which they were built was melting. She also went to Arizona and New Mexico. “We really drove across the entire Navajo Nation to see how the Navajo lived, the impacts of climate change, and the health equity problems that they face,” said Dr. Levine. She said that during these travels, “the common theme was cultural humility and the critical importance of health equity in our nation.”
Dr. Levine’s appointment as Assistant Secretary of Health was significant as she became the first openly transgender person to receive Senate confirmation. Dr. Levine mentioned the importance that being transgender has to her identity, but that it also comes with scrutiny. When asked whether she ever felt like she had to choose between expressing her gender identity and her career, she said, “I had the amazing fortune of being accepted. I had a lot of challenges. I mean, lots of challenges, but I was accepted. I think that I had a privilege. I was white. I was a physician. I was at Penn State, and I think that also contributed, you know, to my being able to be accepted.” Dr. Levine also added that when she transitioned, the social climate in the U.S. was different at the time. She said that people were more accepting of the LGBTQIA+ community, and that today, that is definitely not the world we live in.
In order to deal with the scrutiny that comes along with being a high-profile, openly transgender woman, Dr. Levine leans on her background as a medical professional. She said her medical training taught her the art of compartmentalisation. “If you see a desperately ill child in the emergency department, you’re going to have emotional feelings that come up, but you have to isolate those and put them over there, and then concentrate and be a professional,” said Dr. Levine. She used those skills of compartmentalisation throughout her term as Assistant Secretary to isolate the criticism and focus on her job.
Dr. Levine stressed the importance of members of the LGBTQIA+ community supporting each other: “Those who oppose us would like nothing more than to chop us up into different letters, and then continue their work to make us the other in society. The more we stand together, the better it is, including our allies.” In reference to the mural where she is depicted smiling amongst other underrepresented voices, she said, “They’ve been talking about representation, talking about belonging. Belonging, and staying together, is itself an act of resistance.”
Dr. Rachel Levine will be back at EMU on Oct. 28 to give a Suter Science Seminar.
