{"id":187082,"date":"2022-06-20T07:30:19","date_gmt":"2022-06-20T11:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=187082"},"modified":"2023-06-27T12:58:44","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T16:58:44","slug":"by-us-for-us-first-queer-science-conference-creates-connections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2022\/06\/by-us-for-us-first-queer-science-conference-creates-connections\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBy Us, For Us\u201d: First Queer Science Conference Creates Connections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forty-three high school students and 13 members of the UConn community came together to celebrate science \u2013 and themselves \u2013 in the first Queer Science Conference<\/a>, held Saturday, June 11, in Storrs.<\/p>\n

The one-day, volunteer-driven event connected the students with faculty, staff, and graduate and undergraduate students at UConn who work in STEM disciplines, with the goal of supporting Connecticut youth while offering state-of-the-art laboratory experiences and opportunities for hands-on science demonstrations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to show LGBTQIA+ teenagers that there are people who are like them in all fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, because we don’t get a lot of representation in those fields,\u201d says Anna Marie LaChance \u201917 (ENG) \u201920 GCCI \u201922 Ph.D., who organized the inaugural event with support from the School of Engineering\u2019s Vergnano Institute for Inclusion; the nonprofit organization Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, or oSTEM<\/a>; and UConn\u2019s Rainbow Center<\/a>.<\/p>\n

LaChance modeled UConn\u2019s conference on the Queer Science program at the University of Minnesota<\/a>,\u00a0 which she learned about at an oSTEM conference in 2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cI met the \u2018Leslie Knope\u2019 of this project, Dr. Julie Johnston, and she told me all about Queer Science, and I was like, UConn needs this \u2013 UConn absolutely needs this,\u201d she says. \u201cAs soon as I got back from that conference, I started planning in my head, talking to Julie, literally DMing on Twitter, and I started working with the School of Engineering to pull off Queer Science at UConn.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Group photo of those who attended the Queer Science Conference. (Photo courtesy of Anna Marie LaChance)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LaChance began recruiting fellow volunteers from a variety of disciplines, but plans for the in-person event were sidetracked by the onset of the global pandemic in March 2020. In 2021, having completed her doctorate in chemical engineering and then working with the Vergnano Institute, LaChance was able to return to planning for the conference with renewed focus on crafting an event that emphasized both professionalism and networking.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy number one priority was pulling off some version of Queer Science at UConn,\u201d she says. \u201cI wanted to emphasize people in STEM who had LGBTQ identities themselves. I wanted this to be \u2018by us for us,\u2019 in a way, so that students, when they show up to the event, could be surrounded by people who are like them in terms of gender and sexuality. That was really important to me from the get go, only queer people working on this event.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just in time for Pride Month, the event was entirely free for participants, who were all high school students ranging in age from 14 to 18.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe tried to structure it so that we would do a bunch of tours of different lab spaces and other UConn resources in the morning,\u201d LaChance explains, \u201cand then, in the afternoon, sit down, do some science, and get some hands-on experience with real-life science and instruments that real grad students and real faculty use.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the course of the day, the students toured UConn\u2019s Rainbow Center; learned about plants and insects in the UConn Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Greenhouse<\/a>; and visited the world-class Microbial Analysis, Resources, and Services (MARS)<\/a> Laboratory.<\/p>\n

\"Group
(Photo courtesy of Anna Marie LaChance)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They caught bugs with Abigail Hayes (they\/she), an EEB post-doctoral researcher and entomologist. They learned about water density with doctoral student and ecosystem toxicologist Anika Agrawal (she\/they) from the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, using temperature and salinity to separate a water sample in the colors of the bisexual pride flag. They plotted LGBTQIA+ history on a tree core with Master\u2019s student Jillian Dyer (they\/them) and learned how to analyze gas composition from soil samples with research technician Nicolette Nelson (she\/her).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got people from the biomedical engineering department, people from natural resources and the environment, and people from psychological sciences,\u201d says LaChance. \u201cAll of these resulted in really great presentations. All the presenters, the volunteers themselves, not only talked about the science, but also their journey into queerness, their LGBT identities, and how that folded into their STEM identities and affected how they navigate STEM fields.\u201d<\/p>\n

The conference made for a day full of connection, and also emotion, for both the volunteers and the participants, who praised the science as well as the inclusive environment the organizers created.<\/p>\n

\u201cThroughout the day, people came up to me and were like, \u2018I’m crying because I got my first binder,\u2019\u201d says LaChance of the Rainbow Center visit, where students were able to select donated items from the center\u2019s gender-affirming closet. \u201cOne student told me, \u2018I have never been this open about my gender or sexuality before in my life.\u2019 And that was beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

With help from the Vergnano Institute for Inclusion, LaChance has already secured funding for next year\u2019s conference, officially making this year\u2019s event the first annual UConn Queer Science Conference.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a day of joy, of connection, of networking,\u201d she says. \u201cand everyone came away from the event with more friends, more community, and more knowledge about STEM subjects, including knowledge about why they should come to UConn.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forty-three high school students and 13 members of the UConn community came together to celebrate science \u2013 and themselves \u2013 in the first Queer Science Conference<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":187084,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1866,1715,1875,2235,2225,2306,2234],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2168],"class_list":["post-187082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engr","category-community-impact","category-grad-school","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-storrs","category-uconn-voices","category-university-life"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-22 08:45:52","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187082"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187112,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187082\/revisions\/187112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/187084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187082"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=187082"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=187082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}