Displaying items by tag: minorities in science

Outdoor Afro founder Rue Mapp.  Bethanie Hines via Revelator

Black people like nature, too. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at outdoor magazines before Outdoor Afro got started.

This story was originally published by The Revelator. There are Southeastern chapters of Outdoor Afro, including Knoxville.

If time and money weren’t an issue, what would you do?

That’s what Rue Mapp’s mentor asked her as she faced the completion of her college degree and an uncertain job market.

“I’d probably start a website to reconnect Black people to the outdoors,” Mapp replied, a story she recounts in her new book Nature Swagger. Soon after that she launched the blog Outdoor Afro, which began with stories of her own experiences in nature. It was inspired not just by her own love of the outdoors, but of a desire to increase the visibility of Black people enjoying those spaces.

Jim Hill Fellow for Conservation Breelyn Bigbee holds a viewing window with a logperch in Long Swamp Creek while conducting fieldwork in search of bridled darters near Jasper, Georgia. Tennessee Aquarium

Tennessee Aquarium fellowships bring minorities into the science space

CHATTANOOGA — Never let it be said that all summer jobs are created equal.

Squatting on his heels to dangle the flexible hose of an environmental DNA pump into a briskly flowing North Georgia stream, the last few weeks have been anything but ordinary for Spencer Trimpe. With the pump’s droning motor steadily collecting a sample of water to filter out genetic traces of the stream’s inhabitants, he doesn’t bother holding back a smile.

A lanky junior biology major from Thomas More University, Trimpe is one of two students selected as part of the Tennessee Aquarium’s George Benz Aquatic Ecology Fellowship. Instead of manning a cash register or waiting tables this summer, he’s assisting freshwater scientists from the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute with a variety of research projects.