Historically, paleontology has been a male-dominated field. Over the past few decades, more and more women have entered the field, but female African-American paleontologists remain a rarity. Lisa White, UCMP’s Assistant Director of Education and Public Programs, is one of these rare women. She spent 22 years as a faculty member at San Francisco State University and held the titles of Professor and Associate Dean when she came to Berkeley in 2012. White was profiled recently in California, UC Berkeley’s alumni magazine.

White has been involved in a variety of programs that introduce minority youth to the Earth sciences, providing them with hands-on experiences both in the lab and in the field to help make the subject engaging and relevant. Two of these programs are “Reaching Out to Communities and Kids with Science in San Francisco” (SF-ROCKS) and “Minority Education Through Traveling and Learning in the Sciences” (METALS).

White gets excited by science and she shares that enthusiasm, both with minorities and the general public as a whole. “We’re trying to reach entire communities that may never be able to access the collections at the museum [UCMP’s collections are closed to the public], but I think they can get excited about what those collections tell us about life in the past.”