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Schiebinger says farewell

Directing the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research has been a remarkable pleasure for me. Working with all of you—supporters, scholars, and students—to create knowledge that promotes equality for women and men at Stanford, nationally, and internationally has been wonderful. Life will never really be the same again.

I thank each one of you for all that you have done for the Institute. Our work together has taken the Institute to a new level. The Faculty Fellowship Program has brought together gender researchers from all across Stanford and the world—we’ve had researchers from Japan, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan, and South Africa, to name a few. And the topics of research ranged across the globe. We created knowledge and made significant change with our Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know, Housework, and Women in Technology studies. Our OpEd and Gender News initiatives are positioning the Institute as a thought leader by giving voice nationally to the treasure troves of research on women and gender produced at Stanford. Our Graduate Dissertation Fellowship (GDF) program continues to produce leaders for tomorrow. One of our GDFs was recently appointed a professor at Harvard University and another will be directing the Clayman Institute—we wish Shelley all good things!

What’s next for me? Most immediately, I am going on sabbatical at the Stanford Humanities Center to continue the project on Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, and Engineering, launched during my directorship at the Institute. The project has morphed from two conferences and a volume into a global project. “Gendered Innovations” employs gender as a resource to develop state-of-the-art gender methods for basic and applied research aimed at stimulating gender-responsible science and technology—and by doing so enhancing the lives of both men and women globally. We hope to launch our very cool website in 2011.

In addition, I am working with the United Nations to prepare an international meeting in Paris in September on Gender, Science, and Technology—a topic tabled after 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and now, at long last, revived. I am also involved in several European Union projects devoted to gender, technology, and innovation. I will be presenting at a conference in Brussels in October and then lecturing in Munich, Berlin, and Vienna. With support from the National Science Foundation, I have also completed research for a book on human experimentation in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World that looks at how Caribbean plantation slaves were used in early drug development and testing. I hope now to have time to finish that manuscript.

The Institute will always be in my heart. I have learned so much! Thank you for this wonderful opportunity! Let’s stay in touch.