Earyn McGee

Challenging the world to #FindThatLizard while advocating for women in STEM

Earyn McGee is a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona who catches lizards and studies their diets. She got involved in wildlife science through the Environmental Biology Scholars program at Howard University, where she attended undergrad. She is active on Twitter, where she coined and runs the hashtag #FindThatLizard, teaching people new facts about her work every week. She’s also an IF/THEN Ambassador through AAAS and works to bring more young women into STEM fields.

This interview was conducted in April 2020 and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I’d love to hear your origin story — how have you gotten to where you are?

“For all of my life, I've always wanted to work with animals. There was never really a time when that wasn't a goal of mine. My parents didn't quite understand why I wanted to work with animals, but they were definitely super supportive. They were like, you know, that's fine, you can work with animals, but you need to pick a job and do that and still support yourself, so you should be a vet. So like many other people, I thought that I was going to be a vet and that's what I was working toward. But then I started undergrad at Howard University and I had the opportunity to work in the lab with George Mittendorf and participate in this program called Environmental Biology Scholars, which was an NSF-funded program at Howard. It pretty much provided me with two years worth of support to do field work for two summers and to work in a lab for two academic years. So through that program and through working with George, I got to go out and do field work and that's when I realized that I wanted a career where I could do field work and research. In order to do that, I knew that I needed to go to grad school, so then I started applying. When I got to the University of Arizona, I began working with Dr. Michael Bogan. He's been really great, as far as giving me the room to explore all my options and interests, which includes science communication, which is not a heavy focus for my degree program.”

What specifically are you studying and what do you love about it?

“My degree is going to be in natural resources, with emphasis in wildlife conservation and management. My dissertation is going to focus on a few different things. I'll be looking at lizards and their diets — I'm interested in if they're eating emerging aquatic insects from stream systems. With the idea that aquatic insects could be an important food source for them, but with drought and stream drying and climate change, the populations of aquatic insects that emerge from these stream systems will be smaller, and then there'll potentially be less food for the lizards to eat. I'm also interested in increasing the representation of Black women in natural resources careers and understanding the barriers. I'll also be doing a project that's aimed at introducing middle school-aged girls to natural resources careers. So it's kind of a mix of my love for field work and lizards and animals while also giving back to my community, through my degree. That's really what I love about what I do is that I can mix all these different pieces of me and my different interests together to create a degree and actual resources that I think will be useful in the future.”

When did you first get involved in science communication, and when did you first feel like a science communicator?

“Relatively soon after I started grad school — my adviser Michael Bogan, he was on Twitter. He was telling me about all the benefits of being on Twitter and Science Twitter and all that. I was really thinking that I was just going to hop on Twitter and start sharing what I did so people could get to know me and hopefully when I finish my degree, I would maybe have some job opportunities. It took a life of its own from there and I just went along with it. I just went with the flow of it and it just ended up being something that I really enjoyed. I was like, oh, this is a different type of career path that I could follow, because I knew that I wanted to continue doing research and working with animals, but I didn't necessarily want to be a professor. I was already looking for other possible career paths, and I was like, I enjoy what I'm doing, and if I could keep doing this, that would be great.”

I wanted to talk a little bit about Twitter. How did #FindThatLizard begin and when did Twitter become a tool for you to promote your work and engage in science communication?

“I was doing field work one day and I needed to recapture a lizard to get some updated body measurements. When I catch them, to know they've already been caught without having to re-catch them, I give them a paint mark on their back. This one, I was chasing it through my field site and I almost lost it. I was facing away from it, but then I turned around and the only reason I saw it was because I saw the number on its back, and I said, there it is! I took a picture of it and I ended up sharing that on my Twitter. People were unable to find it even with the number on it. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting, and then people were saying how they enjoyed trying to find it. I was like, well, maybe this is something that I should keep doing. I was doing it irregularly and then people really started commenting and I started getting a lot of positive feedback, so after a couple of weeks, I decided this is something I'll do regularly. I've just been doing it ever since then. So it was a lot of, getting positive feedback and listening to the suggestions from people who are following me and engaging with my content. And that made it what it is today.”

How did you make the choice to be so open on Twitter? What are some challenges and benefits of making that choice?

“For me, luckily, I don't get a whole lot of trolls. I feel really blessed about that because I know a lot of people do get trolls. That's definitely a consequence. I know people who are open and who advocate for marginalized identities and they actually have people call into their places of employment or their advisors, and people will complain about them. That is definitely one of the bigger consequences. I personally haven't had anything like that, but I also have an advisor who I can talk to about stuff like that and I know that he has my back. We have had conversations about some of the advocacy work I do on social media and in person, and that understanding between the two of us definitely makes things a lot easier for me. But people don't understand things a lot of the time until you tell them, and so there have to be voices out there. Even if you only touch one or two people, hopefully, you'll have some sort of ripple effect. It's definitely a scary thing because you can get negative feedback and you're putting yourself out there anytime that you're doing any kind of advocacy work as someone from a marginalized background. It's always nerve-wracking to think of how people might react. But it's work that somebody has to do and I do see myself as one of the people who have to do it.”

You do a lot of science outreach work offline, too. Can you talk about those programs?

“For a few years, I served on my department's inclusive excellence committee, which is a committee that each department has that’s aimed at increasing diversity and inclusion within their respective department. I served one academic year as the co-chair of that committee, as well. We opened up dialogue within the department: we had an online forum, we had an in-person forum, we brought a speaker to campus. We also encouraged the leadership to have some diversity and inclusion and implicit biases training, and they did, which was great. When I left the position, we were creating some documents that were basically like a code of ethics for the department. I also have students who I mentor and I will advocate for them however they need me to.”

You’re also one of the IF/THEN Ambassadors for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. What does that program entail?

“It’s aimed at promoting women in STEM so that we're more visible, with the hopes that having visible women in STEM will encourage middle school or younger girls to pursue careers in STEM, because they need the representation. They might feel like oh, that woman is doing this particular job, maybe I can do that job too and then be inspired. We all also get these mini grants, which go toward projects trying to get more middle school girls engaged with STEM and supporting them through their journey. That's where the funding is coming for one of my chapters where I'm going to be exposing middle school girls to different STEM careers. I'm also giving talks and participating in different panels on diversity and inclusion, so it's a really awesome program. The great thing about it is that they have a really wide network. They'll have people who will come to them about an ad campaign featuring videos of women in STEM, and then come to us and ask if it’s something that we’d be interested in. So it's not a super set thing — everybody's experience is going to be a little bit different depending on what opportunities the partners have available.”

Can you talk about why Black representation in wildlife fields is so important?

“For some fields, the implications are really clear. If you look at health care, where you have disparities with the Black community — the Black maternal mortality rate is super high in the United States. It's because doctors are not trained to see Black women as people, they don't see their needs as serious. When it comes to natural resources, we have air, water, land, wildlife, access to wilderness, and all these different things. All these decisions are being made about who has access to what, and when you don't take into account the interests of certain groups, then they are obviously going to have a lack of access in comparison to other groups. When you have representation, when you have people looking out for the interests of all the different groups of people, then you can make sure that access is equitable. That's why representation is important. It's just making sure that everyone is taken care of. You can't really do that when everyone isn't represented because you can't really understand the needs of a community unless you’re part of that community or have some kind of relationship with that community. And right now those relationships just aren’t there, that representation isn’t there.”

What would you go back in time and tell past-you? What advice do you wish you’d been given earlier on, that you might give yourself?

“I’d probably say to not be so hard on myself and that I don't have to be the one to do everything. Those are probably my top two pieces of advice for my past self that I wish I had, just looking for more support and not being so hard on myself.”

What are your hopes or goals for the next few years of your career?

“I have about a year left after this semester’s done and I really want to go into science communication. I’d love to host either a webshow or a TV show about natural history and definitely stay in research and give back to my community. That’s the dream.”