The African American Women in Physics (AAWIP) website needs your help.

“As the only African American in the department at the time, I felt very isolated. I wanted to know that there were other Black women who had done this before me,” Dr. Jami Valentine says.

According to AAWIP, Jami was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins when she first thought of launching the AAWIP website.

On the main page of African American Women in Physics are two types of women: The first category is women who are doing physics every day– but may have their degree in materials science, physical chemistry or biophysics. The second category of women includes those who have a Ph.D. in Physics or Astronomy.

We appreciate that the definition of a physicist is broader than the old definition of “only those have physics degrees”, particularly in the current multidisciplinary academic landscape," the website reads. This page includes all of the African American women with PhDs who identify as physicists. In some cases, a person may have a degree in electrical engineering or physical chemistry, but the science that she does is physics. If they participate in the Physics community and identify themselves as physicists—we include them on this page.

So how can you help? Here's what AAWIP recommends:

For more information, please visit African American Women in Physics