Companies included in the Winds of Change list of the Top 50 Workplaces for Indigenous STEM Professionals meet certain criteria established solely by Winds of Change editorial staff. Selected companies completed surveys designed to demonstrate their overall diversity recruitment efforts and/or were included in at least one published list from two different sources that recognize top firms dedicated to diversity recruiting within the past year.

As opportunities in technology expand, more Native students are pursuing careers in computer science (CS). According to the NSF, Indigenous people, especially those who identify as Native women and two-spirit individuals, are currently underrepresented in the field. To understand what promotes — and what hinders — persistence in undergraduate CS programs, a team from AISES and TERC, a nonprofit focused on promoting equal access to STEM learning opportunities, conducted research.

A new study looks at how giving back helps undergraduates stick with a challenging major

By Christina B. Silva, Dr. Nuria Jaumot-Pascual, Dr. Maria Ong, and Dr. Kathy DeerInWater

Melissa Anderson says her academic work at the University of Manitoba is right in line with her “extreme interest” in engineering and physics. Anderson is Ininew, from the Fox Lake Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, and her path into higher education reflects her consistent passion for STEM studies. 

Luke Schrimsher is using alignment lasers to build an optical X-ray system. “That’s the fun part of the job,” he says. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Schrimsher works as an engineering technical associate in the Nondestructive Evaluation Group at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. 

He may have been raised in the city, but Dr. Clint Carroll has always felt most at home in the woods. From Texas to Arkansas, and Oklahoma to Colorado, Dr. Carroll’s love of the land developed at a young age. Now an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, Dr. Carroll, Cherokee Nation, uses his knowledge of the land to address tribal environmental issues.

For Tyler Rust, the Black Hills region of South Dakota was a natural geology lab. As a boy he camped in the Badlands with his grandfather, studying the astonishing formations and fossils. “From then on I had a persistent yearning to understand myself and my place in the universe,” he says. 

Rust and his mom moved around a lot. When they were living with his mother’s parents, his grandfather taught him Lakota traditions and language. Eventually Rust and his mother moved to Black Hawk, S.D.

Danielle Boyer always has loved “cooking up” robots. So when she started public high school in her hometown of Troy, Mich., after years of homeschooling and volunteering as a science instructor and mentor to younger kids, she immediately joined a FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics team. It didn’t go exactly as Boyer hoped. In fact, it was a very difficult period for her. “I was a girl, and a coder, and the guys made it clear they really didn’t want me there.”