Elsa Abs
With my colleague Dr. Moira Hough, we wrote an opinion piece sharing our expectations, as early career scientists, for our field of soil ecology. We argue that institutions (academia, journals) should promote inclusive and solution-based soil ecology, and we explain why and how.
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As a new member of the "quality of life at work" group at the Laboratory for Sciences of Climate and Environment (LSCE), I co-created a support group for queer people in the lab. For our first seminar, we invited Davide Faranda, who talked about "Diversity, equity and inclusiveness in scientific research".
At the University of California Irvine, I participated to the creation of the Anti-racism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (ARDEI) council of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Some examples of actions: we made the council official by writing by laws, and getting them voted by the department; we organized the first inclusive seminar series of the department; we developed the first anti-racist field safety training on campus.
As a board member of the Marie Curie Association North America Chapter, I got the opportunity to organize webinars open to the public. Three years in a row, my colleague Dr. Sergio Crespo and myself organized a webinar on the topic "Inclusiveness in Academic: Lessons learned in North America".
In Tucson (Arizona), I founded an organization, AskWOT, to help womxn finishing highschool and college transition to their next step (college or job) and not drop their ambition. To this end, we ran a mentoring program, where we paired each student with a professional womxn of Tucson in their field of interest. We also organized bi-annual networking events and made a series of videos to inspire our community.