Dr. Wendy F. Smythe, Haida, never thought her career would veer into the world of public policy.

Sheila Lopez still vividly recalls the first time she fully shared her life story in front of an audience. A member of the Navajo tribe, Lopez was the first in her family to attend college. While an undergraduate pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at Northern Arizona University, Lopez worked in the school’s multicultural engineering program office.

You have classes, labs, homework, sports, socializing, volunteering — maybe even a job. With all that, there’s not much time for feeling listless and unmotivated, and definitely no time for getting sick. Because high school and college students have to assume more responsibility for their own schedules and personal choices, it’s important to know which of those options are most likely to pay off in a more wide awake, stronger, and healthier you. Here are some you can count on.

Scientific research, based on a Western worldview, is thought of as objective and neutral. Researchers choose protocols they believe to be objective, and funders reward them with grants. However, in my more than 30 years of experience working in higher education, I have listened to researchers talk about choosing protocols that will likely yield the results they are seeking. Is that objectivity?

Though he had no idea of it at the time, Dylan Moriarty started training for his current job at New Mexico–based Sandia National Laboratories when he was a young boy. Moriarty grew up in rural Fort Defiance, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation.

Dr. Otakuye Conroy-Ben’s environmental consciousness was awakened at a very young age. Growing up in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, she could literally taste and smell the impacts people were — or were not — making on the natural world around her.

Yona Wade is not the type of person who waits for things to happen. It’s an impulse he has been cultivating since he was very young. “As a kid, I always was the one who wanted to be in charge and run the show and make whatever I needed to happen actually happen,” he says. “I never had time to wait for others.”

Native Americans engaged in meaningful work that benefits Indigenous people and communities are eligible for the Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship. In partnership with the Henry Luce Foundation, the First Nations Development Institute is awarding its first 10 fellowships in January 2020.

The newly chartered American Indian Academy of Denver (AIAD) and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) successfully held an afterschool computer science event on August 26 at the Denver Indian Center. 

STEM is here. STEM is evolving. STEM is the future. The AISES Leadership Summit is focused on honing strategies to enable science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) professionals and emerging leaders in STEM fields to think proactively about their goals. This annual gathering focuses on the core competencies and capacities of individuals. It stimulates participants to think about their responsibilities and the impact of their work and studies on the global STEM community. It enables participants to stop, think, and plot their incredible life journey, and it supports them as they process the lessons and opportunities they come away with.