by Miriam Krause
I feel a mix of celebration, sadness, and defiance as I sit down to write about Pride Month here on the Sustainable Nano blog. Given the current administration’s attacks on people with various marginalized identities, including LGBTQIA+ folks,1,2 it feels more important than ever to celebrate the identities, accomplishments, and histories of resistance among the queer community, especially in science. Queer folks have always been part of STEM, whether “mainstream” institutions accepted their existence or not.3 As Elizabeth Stivison points out in “LGBTQ+ scientists in history,” many scientists have felt the need to hide their identities (when that was possible) in order to succeed in STEM.4 But I am heartened by the joy, defiance, and persistence in the community I see all around me in scientists like Andre Isaacs, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, and Riley Black. (People with marginalized identities shouldn’t have to work so hard to just exist in scientific communities and I hope that by taking up the topic here as a straight-cis-white woman, I can take a tiny burden from my colleagues who usually don’t have a choice about opting in to this work because of who they are.)
As the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology is coming to a close in just a couple of months – and this blog along with it – I can think of no better topic than Pride Month as the focus for one of our final posts. (After 13 years of funding, the CSN was not eligible for another grant renewal, even before the proposed gutting of the National Science Foundation.5) Our tag line of “Nanotechnology, Sustainability, and Life in Science” has always been meant to capture the range of human experience that is part of the endeavor of science. The CSN is not a building or a collection of papers; it is a community of scientists, valuing each other as whole people as we work together on big scientific questions.
Others have already written more than I ever could – and more eloquently – about the experience of being queer in STEM. So perhaps the most helpful thing I can do is to point readers toward a few resources to explore more deeply and find community, or to understand better how to provide support for queer colleagues in STEM.
First, be sure you check out a few other relevant blog posts from members of the CSN:
- Applying to Graduate School: Advice for LGBTQ+ students from the community
- Artivism in Chemistry
- #InfertilityUncovered
Other online reads & references
- 500 Queer Scientists visibility campaign
- oSTEM.org (Their annual conference is Oct 16-18, 2025 in Baltimore, MD.)
- Support for LGBTQ+ chemists must include addressing their basic needs by R. Lee Penn and Argo Farlin
- The TikTok Chemist – profile of Andre Isaacs by Alice Motion
- NASA Pride Flag: The story of the pride flag made from NASA imagery: Bluesky’s most-liked image by David Shiffman (Note that the original link to where this image appeared on the NASA website is now broken – just one example of the erasure being perpetrated by the current administration.)
- The James Webb Space Telescope Needs to Be Renamed by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Sarah Tuttle, Lucianne Walkowicz & Brian Nord in Scientific American
- ‘A towering legacy of goodness’: Ben Barres’s fight for diversity in science By Sarah Kaplan in Standford University’s Neuroscience News
Books
- The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Associate Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire.
- Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist by Dr. Ben Barres, Chair of the Neurobiology Department at Stanford University School of Medicine (see list above for a lovely obituary of Prof. Barres)
- Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between by Joseph Omundson, Professor of microbiology at New York University
- How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler, Staff Writer at Defector
- A Little Queer Natural Historyby Josh L. Davis, Science Writer for the Natural History Museum in London
I know these lists only scratch the surface. Comment below or on BlueSky with your favorite suggestions to add!
REFERENCES
- Ramaswamy, Swapna Venugopal. “LGBTQ+ advocates see Trump’s actions on Pride Month as ‘bullying’.” USA TODAY, 5 June 2025, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/05/trump-administration-pride-month-lgbtq-policies/84027617007/.
- Parshall, Allison. “How Supreme Court Trans Health Care Ruling Will Affect Kids. Scientific American, 18 June 2025, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supreme-court-skrmetti-decision-permits-ban-on-gender-affirming-care-for/.
- Langin, Katie. “NSF still won’t track sexual orientation among scientific workforce, prompting frustration.” Science, 13 January 2023, https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-still-won-t-track-sexual-orientation-among-scientific-workforce-prompting.
- Stivison, Elizabeth. “LGBTQ+ scientists in history.” American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Today, 18 June 2021, https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/people/061821/lgbtq-scientists-through-history.
- Mervis, Jeffrey. “Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions.” Science, 8 May 2025, https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-faces-radical-shake-officials-abolish-its-37-divisions.
- Oloyede, Kemi. Queer, PoC, Creative, STEM. Analytical Chemistry, 2021, 93(21), 7541–7542. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.1c01826.