Asian Americans and STEM Conference 2024

Friday, May 10, 2024
9am-7pm
Greenberg Conference Center
Yale University, New Haven, CT

 **REGISTRATION IS CLOSED**

As both objects of study and agents of discovery, Asian Americans across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have played an important yet often unseen, stereotyped, and misrecognized role in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) in the U.S.  In our present moment, Asian American scientists have become hypervisible in American culture and society as dangerous threats to U.S. national health, security, and economic well-being.  Often portrayed as the successful “model minority” in popular media, Asian and Asian Americans are often invisible in scholarly and popular accounts of the history of race and racism in the U.S.   As a result, the fields of history, history of science, and science and technology studies have generated little scholarship to understand the ways in which American scientific research has been shaped by Asian exclusion and racial formation and in turn has impacted the lives of Asian and Asian American scientists in the U.S. and around the world more broadly.  

The conference brings together scholars from the humanities and STEM fields who are actively engaged in exploring the history of race and racialization in their respective fields.  The conference will address research and pedagogy.  The conference offers an opportunity to explore the ways in which the afterlife of Asian exclusion and postwar struggles over Civil Rights and racial inequality have continued to shape the lived experiences and scholarship of Asian and Asian American scientists and their respective fields.  The conference will also address the scientific research undertaken by Asian Americans in these fields to understand the impact of their respective work as well as examine the ways in which their work has been remembered, obfuscated, or erased in standard histories of scientific discovery and invention. 

This year, we will have three panels focusing on physics, life sciences, and computer science. Each panel will consist of scholars from the STEM fields, humanities, and social sciences. The opening keynote address will be delivered by Dr. Howard Kyongju Koh, former United States Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
 

PROGRAM

8:30am - 9:00am       Registration
9:00am - 9:10am      Welcome and Opening Remarks
9:10am - 10:10am    Keynote Address by Dr. Howard Koh
10:10am - 10:30am  Coffee break
10:30am - 12:00pm   Panel 1: Physics and Science without Borders
12:00pm - 1:30pm       Group Photo and Lunch
1:30pm - 3:00pm         Panel 2: Race and Life Sciences
3:00pm - 3:20pm        Coffee break
3:20pm - 4:50pm        Panel 3: Asian Americans and Computer Science
4:50pm – 5:15pm        Closing remarks
5:15pm – 7:00pm        Reception

 


KEYNOTE SPEECH

Keynote speaker:  Dr. Howard Kyongju Koh

Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health

Faculty Co-Chair of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative 

(Graduate of Yale College and Yale School of Medicine)

See Howard Kyongju Koh's bio here.


SPONSORS

Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS)

Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS)

Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM)

Traphagen Alumni Speakers Series, Yale College Office of Student Affairs.