Narration (Rae): I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show: a podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. This season, I want to share my story, but I also want to introduce you to other amazing wildlife scientists out there: some of my friends who study hyenas, work with lizards, and even track sharks. The animals we study are great, but who we are as people and how that affects our work is just as interesting. And we’re going to talk all about it. This is Going Wild.
Narration (Rae): I loved being a grad student, you know, being surrounded by other scientists who would nerd out with me about things that I found fascinating. But there are things about academia that I really hate and of course I’m talking about all the different forms of discrimination and microaggressions that I face as a Black female scientist. I mean we had a whole episode about this in our first season.
And of course I’m not the only black scientist experiencing these things. Today we’re going to hear about Jasmin Graham’s experience in academia. One that was so painful, it not only affected her personally, but also affected how she does the science that she loves.
Jasmin G.: I love science. I hate science culture.
Narration (Rae): Jasmin Graham is a shark scientist, and even before she knew what marine science was, she loved and was curious about the ocean and the sea creatures that inhabit it.
Jasmin G.: You know, most kids probably wouldn’t want to sit there for hours and hours and hours with some bait in the water waiting for a fish, but I actually found it really calming.
Narration (Rae): Growing up in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Jasmin spent a lot of her childhood on the water and fishing with her dad.
Jasmin G.: And one day I was really young. I don’t know how old I was, but I was fishing with a Tweety Bird fishing pole.
Narration (Rae): Like the yellow cartoon Tweety Bird.
Jasmin G.: And I felt something pull on my line and I was trying to reel it in, it was very heavy.
And my dad said, “Oh, I think you got hung up on some trees.” And so then he takes the pole from me and he pulls and he pulls and then it pulls back and he’s like, “Oh, just kidding. You do have a fish.”
Narration (Rae): And so after reeling and reeling and reeling some more, Jasmin had caught the largest fish she had ever seen.
Jasmin G.: And I got it on my little Tweety Bird fishing line, which, shout out to whatever company made that, because it did not break under the weight of that ginormous catfish that I brought in.
Narration (Rae): Those early experiences fishing with her dad got Jasmin curious about the ocean and the fish that they encountered. And then when she was a sophomore in high school, she went to a summer camp where she learned about marine science.
Jasmin G.: And so as soon as I learned that you could get a job and get paid to study fish, I thought to myself, well, that sounds awesome. That’s exactly what I want to do.
Narration (Rae): So Jasmin decided to attend the College of Charleston to study marine science. Jasmin was the only Black person in her marine science department. Facing constant microaggressions as a Black student in a super white institution was not easy, but luckily Jasmin’s professors in the marine biology department were super supportive.
Jasmin G.: I was really fortunate to have a lot of people in my corner that were telling me you can do this and here’s how.
Narration (Rae): It was through her mentors that Jasmin discovered the two things that changed the trajectory of her life.
One, her lifelong obsession to study elasmobranchs, which is a group of fish that includes sharks and rays. And two, she was really inspired to follow in her mentor’s footsteps and become a professor herself.
Jasmin G.: So, I really was interested in being a professor so that I could help students, particularly students of color, get into the field of marine science.
Narration (Rae): So, Jasmin decided to apply to grad school in Florida, and she got funding to study smalltooth sawfish, a critically endangered ray species in that area.
Jasmin G.: I find them fascinating because they have weird faces.
Narration (Rae): Okay, so picture a fish that’s flat like a ray but then has a classic shark fin on its back and then has a hedge trimmer for a nose! To me, that already sounds pretty intimidating. But then I found out that some sawfish can get up to 17 feet long! But Jasmin isn’t fazed by any of this and she finds them completely fascinating.
Jasmin G.: I have never been one that liked cookie cutter. I love when people have crazy hair or weird clothes or nails or paint their houses a silly color… I just love uniqueness. I think that it makes life really interesting.
And so I think that whenever I see animals that are really unique, it makes me excited.
You know, we have this thought that there’s this optimum that everything is evolving towards and so that’s why we have things that look similar because that’s the best body plan.
And then you see an animal like a sawfish. They have made it through millions of years of evolution and you’re like, why? Why do you have that head? What’s going on there? And I love that because it’s whimsical.
Narration (Rae): But there’s actually a very good reason why the smalltooth sawfish have these hedge trimmers on their faces: they use their saw-like nose for hunting. They swing their saw around to impale their prey, and then they swim back and swallow it whole. And for a long time, their saws have been an incredibly effective tool for hunting, although not so much today.
Jasmin G.: With the introduction of people and fishing nets and things like that, now it’s become a bit of a liability because they do get very entangled in nets. And often they sustain a lot of damage.
Narration (Rae): The smalltooth sawfish are actually critically endangered, which means they face a very high risk of becoming extinct in the wild. And so Jasmin focused her graduate studies on saving them.
Jasmin G.: And in order to do that, we have to know where they’re spending a lot of time so that we can find some potential protected areas that we can make that would protect the sawfish.
Narration (Rae): To find the areas sawfish inhabit, Jasmin and her team needed to track their movements, which meant they needed to catch them, tag them and release them back into the water.
They use what’s called an acoustic transmitter for the tracking, which is about the size of a AAA battery, but what they do with the transmitter is pretty wild, at least to me.
Jasmin G.: We actually insert them internally. So we do a quick surgery with a little incision that’s maybe about two inches long. We slide the transmitter in, and then we suture them back up just like you would get stitches. Then we’re able to track the movements of that animal for 10 years, which is really awesome.
Narration (Rae): And when a tagged fish passes by these receivers that are placed all along the coast, the receivers pick up the signal from the transmitter and record its location.
For the most part, these tagging expeditions are pretty routine, but being out in the open ocean means that sometimes even one little hiccup can turn a routine expedition into a potentially risky situation.
Like this one day when Jasmin and her advisor were trying to catch sawfish in the Florida bay, they were out on a boat on a super windy day.
Jasmin G.: It kind of becomes a sort of washing machine. The waves kind of whooshing around, there’s a little bit of whirlpool, there’s a lot of current in that spot.
Narration (Rae): And that day, Jasmin was the one driving the boat.
Jasmin G.: And it was actually my first time driving the boat while we were setting and hauling gear in deep water, and so this was a new experience for me and I was sort of leveling up in my boat driving, so to speak.
Narration (Rae): They weren’t out in the water for long before they caught something on the line. When they pulled it up, it turned out to be a lemon shark.
Jasmin G.: Lemon sharks in general like to bite things, like they’ll bite the side of the boat, they’ll bite the tools that you’re trying to use to get the hook out of their mouth and all of that stuff.
Narration (Rae): And as they were trying to get the shark free, it started to tense up and its head slipped out of her advisor’s hand.
Jasmin G.: It turned and it bit the hydraulic steering line and it had this fluid just spewing everywhere. It couldn’t have tasted good. So I don’t know why it didn’t immediately let go, but it just really clamped down on this steering line.
I said something like, “Ah, there’s fluid leaking. I hope that’s not important.”
Narration (Rae): Eventually they were able to pry the steering line out of the shark’s mouth.
Jasmin G.: And so we, uh, put it back in the water, it swims off on its merry way feeling I’m sure very proud of itself for ruining our day.
Narration (Rae): And that wasn’t an exaggeration. I mean, at this point, Jasmin and her team were in the middle of the ocean with one engine down.
Jasmin G.: We got some duct tape because that’s the solution to everything, even when you’re a scientist, and then as soon as I start steering, it starts leaking through the duct tape, like, oh goodness. So then, my advisor at the time, he looks at me and he says, “Well, just try not to steer.”
Narration (Rae): Every time Jasmin moved the steering wheel, she was making the problem worse. So she had to figure out how to get them all safely back to shore with only one working engine.
Jasmin G.: I was very stressed. I did not want to be driving that boat, for sure. There’s just all of these worst case scenarios running through my mind.
Narration (Rae): If Jasmin couldn’t find a way to steer the boat back, they’d be stuck out there in the middle of the ocean and they’d have to call the coast guard or she could end up doing something even worse.
Jasmin G.: The last thing that we need right now is for me to capsize the boat, that’s not good.
So it took a lot of patience and then trying to ride the waves and the current as much as possible instead of using the steering wheel.
And we made it through, we got all the gear in, we made it back to our field station and my advisor turned and gave me a high five. And he said, “If you can drive in that, you can drive in anything.” And so I feel like I’m prepared for most things now.
Narration (Rae): Most things, but not everything. Because there were a few things grad school threw at Jasmin that she could not have prepared for more of that after the break.
MIDROLL (15:00)
Narration (Rae): Jasmin fell in love with studying sharks and rays in college and now she was in grad school on track to become a professor and fulfill her dream of introducing more students of color to the field of shark science. But there were a lot of things about grad school that Jasmin didn’t expect and she was really struggling.
Jasmin G.: My first day of grad school I didn’t even go to class the first day because I had a panic attack in the parking lot. And I called my mom and she was like, “Well, just don’t go to class today. Just go home.” So I went home.
Narration (Rae): And yeah, grad school’s hard for everybody, but it was especially hard for Jasmin.
Jasmin G.: I didn’t know what grad school was going to be like because I kind of went into it blind because no one in my family had done something like that before.
And the people’s descriptions of it were from people who were white.
They were like, yeah, it’s hard, the classes are hard and, you don’t make a lot of money. So I was like, yeah, I mean, I can handle academically rigorous. And I can handle living on not a lot of money.
Narration (Rae): But what Jasmin had to endure that those white grad students she had spoken to didn’t warn her about, was the toxic culture that dominated academia.
Jasmin G.: It’s set up to be so cutthroat and competitive and it gives a lot of power to not that many people. So that’s really unfortunate because the powerless people are often students.
Narration (Rae): The competition and lack of power is something that a lot of grad students deal with, but it’s often worse for women and especially women of color.
And I think back to that moment that I had in grad school, meeting my professor for the first time and he was already expecting me to be lazy. I mean, I’ve had countless other experiences like this throughout my career, with colleagues talking down to me and questioning my competency, and some of these things might be blatantly offensive, but they could also be very subtle.
Jasmin told me about a small incident that really captures the subtlety of these aggressions.
So, every week there was this departmental seminar where different scientists come in and present their research.
Jasmin G.: And it happened every Friday at 4:00 PM, it was always in the same place every time, in the big, main auditorium in our building.
Narration (Rae): And one day it was Jasmin’s turn to give her talk.
Jasmin G.: And it was a very exciting thing because that’s like the first time that I got to present a seminar like that. Yeah, I feel like a scientist now. I’m about to go talk for 45 minutes about my scientific research to all of these other scientists and it’s going to be really fun. It’s going to be really exciting. And I worked really hard for this.
Narration (Rae): And then Jasmin got an email telling her that she would need to move her talk somewhere else because a professor had booked the auditorium for the date that she was supposed to give her talk.
Jasmin G.: And I was like, uhh, what?
Narration (Rae): But actually, it turned out that the professor had booked the atrium outside of the auditorium for her event.
Jasmin G.: And so in my mind, that seems very cut and dry, but that is not how it worked. She claimed that she couldn’t move her thing because she had already printed flyers.
I ended up having to go into a much smaller room and my advisor actually took a picture of the room when I presented. And it was standing room only. It was packed. And then he went downstairs to where she was having her thing and took a picture and she had 10 people in there.
And I was like, so you kicked me out of the largest room for 10 people and you made me go into this small room. Like you’re basic, I don’t like you.
Narration (Rae): I mean, yeah, that was such a basic move, but it’s more than that, right? I mean, there’s no way for Jasmin to prove that all this happened to her because she’s the only Black grad student in her department, so it’s easier to just laugh it off sometimes.
But this kind of microaggression is actually really painful because it seems so petty to even bring it up and thus it becomes invisible.
Jasmin G.: I just wanted someone to be like, “You’re more important than some flyers,” and I couldn’t even get that. It’s like the bare minimum. Someone saying, “Yeah, you’re wrong. You booked the wrong place. You don’t get to boot the student out of this place in their big moment,” because nobody wants to tell any tenured professor that they’re wrong.
Narration (Rae): And maybe this room mix-up doesn’t seem like a big deal, but of course it’s not just this one professor or just this one incident. Something undeniably awful happened to Jasmin in her final year of grad school.
Jasmin G.: So I like to say that science has created a lot of monsters.
Narration (Rae): So remember those acoustic transmitters that Jasmin tagged are sawfish with? A lot of marine scientists have those receivers in the ocean and sometimes the receivers pick up transmissions from animals that they didn’t tag.
When that happens, they can upload that location data to an online database, which is a great way for sharing information. But one thing is clear: that data belongs to the scientist who tags the animal.
Jasmin G.: That’s what it’s designed for. It’s designed collaboration. Collaboration involves equal involvement with both parties and everyone agreeing to what is being written. But that’s not what happened.
Narration (Rae): So at one point during her study, another researcher picked up Jasmin’s sawfish tags on his receiver and he wanted to publish a paper using the data from those tags. Jasmin and her advisor didn’t think this was a good idea. I mean, after all, Jasmin was planning to use it in her own study and she actually had way more data than just the ones he picked up on his receivers.
Jasmin G.: I don’t know what happened, but he decided to do it anyway.
Narration (Rae): So the researcher drafted a paper using Jasmin’s data, but he only a fraction of the sawfish data.
Jasmin G.: “Oh, I had 200 detections on my receivers obviously this is an important place for sawfish.” But 200 compared to 200,000 is nothing.
Jasmin G.: If you say that they are recovered and they are not, that means they lose their protections.
Narration (Rae): So Jasmin and her advisor responded to the draft of the paper.
Jasmin G.: “The conclusions that you’re drawing are incorrect because you don’t have the full story.”
Narration (Rae): Jasmin and her advisor ended up involving more higher-ups, hoping to receive some kind of support, but despite her concerns, she continued to feel pressured to share her data and finally decided it wasn’t worth her energy fighting it anymore. She relented and her data was used and the paper was published.
Jasmin G.: I had people send it to me and they said this has been published. And I was like, okay, cool. And I purposely did not read it that day because I didn’t think that it would be a good choice for my mental health.
Narration (Rae): For Jasmin, that was the final straw. So she decided that she was done with academia.
Jasmin G.: That’s just how academia is.
What I’ve learned is if you don’t have a penis or a Ph.D., you don’t matter. And that’s some bologna.
Narration (Rae): I find this so devastating. Jasmin had this dream for years to be a professor so she could mentor other scientists in this field she loves so much. And ultimately, she decided it isn’t worth it.
And I don’t blame her. It’s really hard to endure a system that’s so toxic.
Because experiencing these macro and microaggressions is bad enough, but what’s even more disconcerting is this feeling of I know this is happening to me because I’m Black and because I’m a woman, but there’s no way for me to prove it!
Jasmin G.: It’s so easy for people to gaslight people because people can say, “Oh, they would have done that if it was a white student,” because there is not a white male version of me with exactly everything the same that I can be like, that person got treated differently from me. And that’s why these departments can hide racist and sexist people within their departments, because they can always say, “Well, we don’t know that they said that because they’re racist” or “We don’t know that they did that because you’re a woman,” and I’m like, well, when you’re on the receiving end, you know. You feel it. You can feel that somebody is discriminating against you.
Narration (Rae): So Jasmin defended her thesis, got her degree and left academia. She mourned that her dream of becoming a professor wasn’t going to happen. But she still wanted to make marine science more inclusive, and she realized she could still do that… just from outside the system.
Jasmin G.: I like to call myself a rogue scientist.
Narration (Rae): And the best part of being a rogue scientist is the complete freedom. Today, Jasmin still does research, just on her own terms and only with the people and organizations that give her the support she needs.
Jasmin G.: A lot of people are afraid to speak out because they’re afraid of being blackballed. I’m not afraid of that because I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. So I don’t care how long I exist in science. I don’t care how many papers I publish. I don’t care about any of that stuff. What I care about is learning about sharks, helping to protect sharks and taking down the system.
If that means that I gotta kamikaze and run full speed into a situation that other people wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole, so be it.
Narration (Rae): And in that spirit, in 2020 Jasmin, along with three other Black female shark scientists joined forces and co-founded a non-profit organization called Minorities in Shark Sciences, MISS for short.
Jasmin G.: We wanted to create a safe place to support people because all I wanted was for somebody to say what they have done is not okay. And I couldn’t even get that.
Narration (Rae): Today, MISS supports over 400 early career people of color in shark sciences. They offer everything from mentorship and funding opportunities to hands-on field experiences doing shark research.
On top of that, MISS also provides a supportive community.
Jasmin G.: And that’s why, like we wanted to create MISS to really create a collective voice because the power is in the isolation. Maybe you can silence and ignore one person, but you can’t silence and ignore 400.
Narration (Rae): So even though she’s not teaching marine science as a professor in a university, Jasmin is still playing the role of a mentor to members of the MISS community. She’s kind of like the mama bear or, you know, mama shark.
Jasmin G.: So I always want to be that person to say, “No, what is happening to you is not okay. And nothing you have done has given this person permission to treat you that way.”
Narration (Rae): When MISS members run into issues at their home institutions, Jasmin jumps right in. She’ll persistently send emails to these institutions and not let it drop. And you know what? People in these circles are starting to notice.
Jasmin G.: And that is why people are afraid. People are like, “Oh no. Mama bear Jasmin is coming after me” because I will not stop.
I think that this system is broken. It’s built on a foundation of sexism and racism, and it’s built for people that have a lot of power and the powerless will never get a voice that way. It needs to be rebuilt.
Narration (Rae): And this is what I’m trying to do, too. I haven’t exactly left academia, but whether it’s from the inside or from the outside, the goal is the same. I’m working to change this field — to dismantle and decolonize science and the academic institutions it’s tied to.
And you know what? Here’s the good news…
Jasmin G.: I think there are a lot of people that want to change it. Just the people that don’t want it to change are very loud and very powerful. But I think if we just you know, move them aside, then we can make some real progress happen.
CREDITS
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Episode guest: Jasmin Graham
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant – Host and Writer
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