In second grade, Chrystal Starbird started a nature club at her school that ended up lasting years. “People who knew me in elementary school usually remember me as the person who was trying to get everybody to join the nature club and be just as fascinated by the things around us as I was,” says Starbird. Looking back, Starbird says she realizes that she’s always been a scientist. “But if you would have asked me earlier, I [would have said I] wanted to be a poet or a basketball player or a lawyer.”
Now a structural biology postdoc at Yale University, Starbird is a recipient of Cell Press’s and Cell Signaling Technology’s first Rising Black Scientists Award, an essay contest that invited young Black scientists to share their experiences as life sciences researchers. Winning the undergraduate award, Olufolakemi “Fola” Olusanya, a senior at Howard University, wrote an essay titled “Still ...
