Gender Equity and Diversity in STEM

CEO

Sonja Jost is an inventor and engineer who co-founded DexLeChem in 2013, a Green Chemistry startup of which she is the CEO. She is member of different advisory/ supervisory boards and high-tech juries, such as the biomedical research institute “Berlin Institute of Health” of Charité, the Helmholtz Association, the “Chemical Invention Factory” of TU Berlin (John-Warner-Center for Startups in Green Chemistry), and the U.S. peer-reviewed journal “Green Chemistry Letters and Reviews”. She has received various awards and recognitions for her work. ZEIT online listed Jost among “25 female inventors who are changing our world”, Capital magazine named her repeatedly on their “40 under 40” entrepreneurs list, and the economic business magazine Business Punk chose her as #1 of their 2018 watch list “100 startups, makers, creatives”. Since 2017, she has been a member of the General Assembly of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce Berlin and jury member of the Accelerator pilot of the European Commission, which decides about startup investments of 0.5 bn € p.a. In 2019, Jost was appointed as ambassador of the initiative “Germany – Land of Ideas” of the German Government and the Federation of German Industries BDI. Jost gives advice to governmental organizations, scientific institutions, NGOs, as well as several political parties in Germany, the U.S., and in the EU. She has co-founded and initiated several campaigns and networks that support the translation process of scientific findings into industry which she also promotes as frequent guest on economic and political panel discussions.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr Sandra Kerbler is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam-Golm, Germany. Originally from Perth Australia, Sandra did a Bachelor of Science with Honours at the University of Western Australia majoring in Botany and Genetics. In 2018, she completed her PhD at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, in which she studied the impact of chilling stress on plant mitochondrial function and in the same year moved to Germany, where she is now a postdoc at the Max Planck. Sandra’s current research focuses on understanding how trehalose 6-phosphate (a sugar similar to human insulin) influences plant growth and development and hopes such knowledge will lead to the development of enhanced crop species in a changing world.

Sandra is also a strong advocate for gender equity in higher education systems. She is part of the Equality and Diversity Working Group of the MPG PostdocNet and in 2016 took part in the inaugural Homeward Bound voyage to Antarctica. Homeward Bound is a global leadership initiative, set against the backdrop of Antarctica, which aims to heighten the influence and impact of women in STEMM in making decisions that shape our planet. In the very first expedition, 76 women from across the globe spent 20 days aboard in ship in Antarctica. Now, more than 400 women have taken part in this leadership initiative, with the aim of 1000 women to have the same experience over the next ten years.

PhD Candidate

Sarah Mäusle studied Molecular Life Science at the University of Lübeck. In 2017 she began working on her PhD in biophysics at the Free University in Berlin, for which she is doing research on the O₂-producing step of photosynthesis using infrared-spectroscopy. In 2019 she co-founded the independent group LGBTQ STEM Berlin, which aims at increasing queer visibility in science. She is passionate about improving queer as well as gender-related issues, especially in science and academia.

Full Professor

Vy Dong was born in Big Spring, Texas and grew up in Anaheim, California. She graduated magna cum laude from UC Irvine where she majored in chemistry and completed an honor’s project with Larry Overman. After graduation, she joined David MacMillan’s group at UC Berkeley, and then moved with his group to Caltech to complete her doctoral studies. Her Ph.D. thesis featured variants of the zwitterionic-Claisen rearrangement and a total synthesis of erythronolide B. As an NIH postdoctoral fellow, Vy pursued training in organometallic and supramolecular chemistry with Robert Bergman and Kenneth Raymond at Berkeley. She began her independent academic career at the University of Toronto, where she was promoted with tenure and named the Adrian Brook Professor. After six years in Canada, Vy returned to the United States to assume a professorship at her alma mater, UC Irvine. Professor Dong’s research team is interested in new reaction methods, enantioselective catalysis, and natural product synthesis. She’s currently an associate editor with Chemical Sciences and the faculty advisor for Iota Sigma Pi, a women in chemistry society.

Senior Researcher

Clemens Striebing is a senior researcher at Fraunhofer CeRRI, where he leads national and international projects on organizational culture and diversity in innovation processes.  He received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in the field of organizational sociology. He has a degree in political science and public law from the Free University of Berlin. Clemens teaches demand-oriented and diversity-sensitive innovation development at TU Berlin.

Associate Professor

Lucy Campbell is an Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. In her research she uses mathematical and computational methods to study waves and other geophysical fluid processes that occur in the atmosphere. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Mathematics of Climate and Weather Forecasting and has served as a Treasurer and Director of the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society. At present she is co-organizing a workshop (Connecting Women in Mathematics Across Canada, Ottawa, 2021) to support the career development of junior women academics in mathematics.