Professor Sheila Browne, shown here (at far right) with a few of the students she's mentored, went to the White House this week to receive a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. Photo courtesy of Michael Zide.
On September 10, professor of chemistry Sheila Browne received a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring at the White House from President Clinton. The annual program, administered on behalf of the White House by the National Science Foundation (NSF), identifies outstanding mentoring efforts and programs designed to enhance the participation of groups underrepresented in science, mathematics, and engineering. In addition to the ceremony, Browne is participating as a panelist in a two-day symposium attended by the secretary of education and the director of the National Science Foundation. Accompanying the award is a mentoring grant for $10,000.
As part of Browne's nomination for the award, students from Native Spirit and Sistahs in Science, two campus organizations for which Browne has served as a faculty adviser, wrote letters speaking to her unrelenting work for and support of minority students at Mount Holyoke. With a membership last spring of fifty students, Sistahs wrote that the "establishment of this group was totally inspired by our direct contact with Professor Browne." Department Chair Mary Campbell's letter to the NSF included a five-page list of Browne's eighty-three current and past research student assistants; 40 percent were identifiable as women of color.
Other MHC accomplishments of Browne's include her efforts to create more mentors, knowing that she alone could not increase the numbers of scientists of color. Recognizing the challenges these students face in the science classroom and the need for proactive advising, she organized faculty development workshops for the science departments, which Dean of the College Beverly Daniel Tatum and Dean of Religious Life Andrea Ayvazian helped lead. Browne also persuaded the College to extend these workshops to faculty in the humanities and social sciences.
Beyond the eighty-three students Browne personally has mentored as research students and the fifty students participating in the Sistahs group, Browne's work off campus and regionally is equally impressive. Since 1992, Browne has been, according to the Dr. Moody, vice president of the New England Board of Higher Education, "an extraordinarily effective mentor" in the group's Science and Engineering Academic Support Network. The network has 128 mentors from New England, and Moody named Browne as the outstanding mentor of underrepresented minority students, past and present.
For the network, Browne annually keeps in touch with two dozen mentees, helping them secure internships and postdoctoral positions, and linking them to other students and professionals throughout the country--the same activities that she has tirelessly done for her MHC undergraduates. She also has served as a keynote speaker at the network's meetings and has spoken in smaller groups for it as a plenary-session panelist and workshop leader. In 1996, Browne became a mentor-at-large for the group's minority doctoral scholars program, coaching forty-five scholars preparing to enter the professoriate.
Described by students as "funny, committed, awesome, supportive, enthusiastic, and animated," Browne has been known to calm jittery nerves during labs with music. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Browne's generosity with others and her verve perhaps lie in her own struggle to know firsthand what it's like to go to college on scholarship and to be a minority, as she was one of only two women and the only one of Native American heritage in her entering Ph.D. class of 140 at the University of California at Berkeley.
![[Index]](../index3.gif){kind=small}