diversity – Tina Lasisi, M.A.

Estimated reading time: 3 mins (608 words)

February has been a good month.

I got featured on my friend Alexis’ blog for her: ‘Sully Asks A Scientist’ series.

My birthday brought me some major wardrobe upgrades (thanks to my partner’s great taste):

28275527_10216244255001590_1835455567_o — This jacket ❤

And, most importantly, I went to see Black Panther. TWICE. And it may have resulted in me acting a little extra since…

Plenty of people have talked about how amazing this movie is and there’s a lot of great analysis on the story and aesthetics.

But what I want to talk about is the impact it’s had.

The memes, the outfits, the pure joy!

Black Panther has gotten so many of us to dream about a glorious Afrofuturistic world and I think that’s just magical.

I for one, want to see #WakandanSTEM happen.

I want Shuri to be our patron saint.

tumblr_p3om7b8vsm1v9oda2o6_r1_500 — Nothing but respect for MY princess

Next time someone asks me what I’m doing after this PhD, I’m gonna say I’m applying to be a professor at the University of Wakanda.

If I were a professor at U of Wakanda, I would, of course, be teaching Biological Anthropology and about 60% of my curriculum on Human Variation would be African Diversity (instead of the traditional 0%).

Continue reading “#WakandanSTEM: Teaching the evolution of skin color” →

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Estimated reading time: 12 mins (2250 words)

(Edit: Link to an article I wrote with my advisor about African skin pigmentation genetics in Genome Biology)

Last week, a research article was published on skin color variation within Africa.

crawford et al — Last week’s article on African skin color in *Science*

READ IT! It is great, well-written, and has amazing figures! I would actually show you some of those figures if I wasn’t terrified of publishers coming after me for copyright infringement (look, I’m trying to finish a Ph.D., here, so I don’t have time to get sued by journal publishers…).

If you don’t have access to these journals, hit up your nearest scholar and ask them for a copy (you can email me!).

And one of the things I really appreciate in this article is that it’s a study on variation in Africa that actually includes African authors from African institutions.

This research is important. That’s why it was picked up by The New York Times and The Atlantic. These articles are all full of people emphasizing that African diversity is an amazing thing that we need to pay attention to!

Read both of those articles too because they are full of quotes that got me feeling some type of way:

“We knew quite a lot about why people have pale skin if they had European ancestry,” said Nicholas G. Crawford, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the new study. “But there was very little known about why people have dark skin.” – New York Times

Few human traits are more variable, more obvious, and more historically divisive than the color of our skin. And yet, for all its social and scientific importance, we know very little about how our genes influence its pigment. What we do know comes almost entirely from studying people of European descent. – Ed Yong via The Atlantic

And there you have it, in bold, the reason I ended up doing a Ph.D. in biological anthropology. I wanted to know more about human biological variation, and I specifically wanted to focus on African diversity.

Why is so much of the research on human trait variation focused on Europeans?

Continue reading “Surprise! Africans are not all the same! (Or why we need diversity in science)” →

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