Cherokee, N.C., is known for one thing: Harrah’s Casino. As a young girl growing up in its shadow, I knew that a career tied to Harrah’s wasn’t in my future. Instead, my interests lay in finance and art. But it wasn’t until I attended Arizona State University that I under-
stood how to combine the two. Now, as an MBA candidate at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, I’m well on my way to realizing my dreams by combining my financial skills with my love of art.

In my first year at McGill University in Montreal, I found a home and community around the long table in the university’s four-story, red stone First Peoples’ House. The house serves as a residence and gathering space for Indigenous students, and by the time I completed my first year of university, the Wednesday soup and bannock lunches were part of my routine. It was a good way to get to know other Indigenous students on campus, and it has helped me to build that Indigenous community. 

When I was young, I remember being awe-inspired by large structures and how things so massive could stay standing. Then on the Navajo Reservation, where I have lots of family, I would see collapsing houses and imperfect roads. That’s when I realized civil engineering could be a way to positively impact my community and the world around me, using my math skills to improve the lives of fellow Natives. 

Native Hawaiian taro farmers inspired me to enter the 2017 AISES Energy Challenge, an energy-specific science fair that encourages high school students to get into STEM. Taro is a prized staple food and the root of Hawaiian culture. These farmers are off the grid because many of their patches are historical or cultural sites. I wanted to learn how byproducts from bacteria in the mud in their fields could provide them with a sustainable source of energy. I won the Grand Prize for designing a microbial fuel cell.

Enlisting her decades-long research skills, Dr. Mary Jo Ondrechen is all in for the fight to understand — and ultimately defeat — the coronavirus. Dr. Ondrechen and her team are researching the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, at her laboratory at Northeastern University in Boston, where she is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology and principal investigator of the Computational Biology Research Group.

These days the lab where Kristina Gonzales-Wartz works is a very busy place. A biomedical scientist with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Gonzales-Wartz has joined the Laboratory of Immunogenetics in Rockville, Md., on an urgent mission to develop monoclonal antibodies against COVID-19. 

Olivia Baptiste has been drawn to science since elementary school. “I loved presenting at the science fairs,” she says. That interest has blossomed into focused studies in biology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. While the field has always been a favorite of hers, the biology course she took in her first year cemented her interest. Now in her third year at UBC, she is preparing for the MCAT and pursuing her goal of becoming a physician someday.

When JohnDavid Lancaster was in fifth grade, his mother was laid off because she didn’t have a college degree. But she unmistakably modeled the value of education when she went back to school full time to earn her degree in nursing while working a full-time job and a part-time job and taking care of Lancaster and his sister. By the time he was in ninth grade, his mom had completed her degree and taught her children a powerful lesson about tenacity. Her experience also showed Lancaster how important a degree would be to get the kind of job he wanted. 

Growing up, Denise LeBeau Bois felt it best to downplay her Native heritage because of reactions she received early in her school life. She also felt judged for being from a divorced family, her mom of Western European ancestry and her father, Cheyenne River Lakota (Sioux). As a result, she had the sense that most people outside her family did not expect her to amount to much. 

As a young boy, JJ Jones III loved building. He spent hours playing with Legos and k’nex and never tired of creating something new and different. What started as a young boy’s passion has become a young man’s goal. Now in his third year at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., Jones, Navajo, is majoring in mechanical engineering and minoring in Native American historical studies with plans to become a mechanical engineer, helping to keep his community — and nation — safe.