The Contrarian Chemist • Dr. Alice Walker

(Chemistry Postdoc, Stanford University || CA USA)

“I always liked to do the thing people said girls shouldn’t do. My dad used to call me his little contrarian. One time, another kid told me girls didn’t know how to play video games. I became determined to be better at video games than him and everyone else. When I was eight, I helped my dad build our family’s first big computer. I used to stay up all night tuning a little radio I put together from a kit he got me. I think he really wanted to show us that science was an option. That was really important for me, because I struggled a lot, especially in my undergrad. My mother passed away a couple weeks before I started, so I did not get good grades. And even if she hadn’t, I don’t think I would have gotten good grades — I wasn’t particularly good at studying. Even though I liked all the science, I didn’t really know how to apply myself. I was told several times to quit by my university professors. My dad always told me to ignore them, and that I’d figure it out. That helped me a lot.

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It sounds counterintuitive, but the fact I identify so strongly as being a woman is what pushed me towards a field with low numbers of women. It makes me so angry when anyone tells anyone they can’t do something for any reason. There’s no reason, really, that you can’t do whatever you want. I felt like I was on a one-person mission to prove that.”