Dr. Valerie Sheares Ashby, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), has been involved in every aspect of research, teaching, and management. She has engaged with many people in academia and helped hundreds of students find their paths.

2022 is a watershed in the life of this trailblazing academic and the top award winner at the Women of Color STEM Conference.

“Being the 26th Women of Color Technologist of the Year is overwhelming,” Ashby said in an interview with Women of Color magazine. “Because the path all those preceding women walked was harder than the one I’m on. They opened the doors so I could have some of these amazing opportunities; no matter what my mentors did, it wouldn’t have made a difference if other women and women of color hadn’t walked through them. I feel humbled that I wouldn’t have been here for people who had been a different kind of first. They were smart, savvy, and had courage.”

Growing up in a small town in North Carolina, Ashby’s fondest memories include road-trip games with her father, high school math and science teacher; her sister, seven years her senior, who majored in biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC); and constant inspiration from their mother, who was an English teacher.

Ashby also recalls the lack of school laboratories and science fairs in Clayton, NC. But one high school teacher made classroom content so engaging that Ashby tuned in even more to math and chemistry. Sadly, Ashby’s firsthand experiences exploring chemical reactions did not go well at UNC.

“I told my friends this was going to be the worst class ever,” Ashby told Women of Color magazine over Zoom this summer. “It felt to me like a cookbook. We were doing experiments that rarely worked. It felt rote, doing the same experiments people had done for years—it would change from red to blue. It did not gel what creative chemistry was."

After a few sessions, Ashby declared labs were “defeating and boring” to her best friend, a chem major struggling with biology. But by 1988, Ashby had graduated from UNC with a degree in chemistry. She first worked as an agricultural and organic chemist at Rhône-Poulenc and then earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at UNC. Her best friend, who had said she would never attend medical school, became a doctor.

“So much for two 18 to 20-year-olds making decisions with little to no information,” Ashby said wryly during the call with Women of Color magazine.

One of the best pieces of advice that Ashby got during her first year at UNC was from a faculty mentor, a chemistry department chair at the time.

“Your lab experience is no reflection on research,” he told a skeptical Ashby. “You should work in the Research Triangle Park in a real lab.”

During her internship, Ashby’s first real lab experience blew her away. The agrochemical company, which was later bought by a chemical corporation that Dow Chemical Company now owns, was making nontoxic fertilizers for large-scale agricultural ventures. Ashby’s role was to take one process from paper to a molecule component in a larger compound.

“I made a compound that nobody else had made before,” Ashby gushed. “I thought, ‘My God, I could do this for the rest of my life.’ It was extraordinary that words I had drawn on paper were in the glassware!”

Ashby not only saw a pathway in organic chemistry, but she became a believer in good mentoring. Some of her longest-lasting mentors include Henry “Hank” Frierson, an educational psychology professor from Michigan State University who spent 33 years on UNC’s faculty and administrative leadership.

Ashby met Frierson as a first-year student through his highly respected activities as the program director to support research for minority undergraduate and graduate students to complete research for their PhDs.

“Hank was the first person who told me to get a Ph.D.,” recalled Ashby. “He prepped us for GREs [Graduate Record Examinations], and I met students from all over the country who had come to do the program.”

As luck would have it, Ashby would run the same Ph.D. pipeline program as a faculty member when she returned to UNC many years later.

“I was in the first cohort,” Ashby recalled. “We celebrated 20 years while I was leading the program,” which steered many students of color into doctoral paths and to become faculty members. “If I have to call out my first mentor, it’s Hank,” she said.

In 1989, Ashby returned to UNC as a research assistant in the laboratory of Prof. Joseph DeSimone and completed her thesis, Synthesis, and Characterization of Thiophene-Based Poly (Arylene Ether Ketones) and Poly (Arylene Ether Sulfones), in 1994.

As a Ph.D. supervisor, DeSimone proved an influential figure. He was an “extraordinary mentor,” Ashby said, the kind she wishes for all her students. Ashby added that mentoring others is a gift, an ability to care about others.

“Joe was the person who told me that I could be a faculty member, “she recalled. “Not just a scientist, but a faculty member. Joe trained me to be a faculty member from day one. He was a newly appointed tenure-track faculty member who took me on that ride and is still my chief scholarly mentor. I met him when I was 23 and he was 25. He’d just had his first grant and was unpacking boxes when I walked into his office for the first time. Ph.D. students are usually reluctant to have new faculty as supervisors, but I knew he was someone who cared.”

During her graduate studies, Ashby worked as a visiting scientist at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, in the summer of 1992. She also spent the summer of 1993 as a visiting scientist at the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, TN. After graduating with her Ph.D., Ashby considered applying for a National Science Foundation and NATO postdoctoral fellowship.

One Saturday, Ashby recalled, she was in the lab doing research, and DeSimone had to take his young son to a ballgame. So, he asked Ashby to host a meet and greet with Reimund Stadler, a visiting professor from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz’s Institute for Organic Chemistry in Germany. Stadler was an up-and-coming polymer chemist in Germany, Ashby said.

“He was a rockstar, just like my Ph.D. supervisor,” Ashby added. After a two-hour presentation on what the DeSimone Group did and what her specific role was, Stadler invited Ashby to do a postdoc in his lab in Germany.

Academic life was no fairytale. There were moments when Ashby felt people responded to her in a certain way because she was a woman and a woman of color. She wouldn’t say the person’s name during the Zoom interview with Women of Color magazine, but she recalled meeting a leading polymer chemist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The distinguished academic had come to visit DeSimone’s research group. When it was her turn, Ashby stood up to do a presentation, and as she started talking, the MIT icon stopped her in her tracks to say he’d thought Ashby was a French man.

“No,” Ashby replied calmly. “I’m a Black girl from North Carolina.”

At the end of her talk, the MIT don invited her to interview for a faculty position. After returning to the United States from a postdoctoral position at the Universität Mainz in Germany, Ashby joined UNC’s faculty in 2003, later rising to serve as chairperson of the chemistry department (2012–15).

As a leader, one of the changes Ashby recommended was more creative laboratory work for undergraduates. But her motivation was not just her “uninspiring” experience as a first-year student.

Ashby’s third mentor, Holden Thorp, served as provost and chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She credits Thorp with showing her the ropes on the transition from faculty to administrator. As chemistry department chair, Thorp appointed Ashby to her first administrative role.

Later in her career, Ashby met Freeman A. Hrabowski, Ph.D., as UNC sought to replicate the Meyerhoff Scholar program, founded at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1988 under Hrabowski. Many Meyerhoff Scholar program alumni are leading innovative programs offering solutions in scientific and technical fields. For example, Dr. Kizzmekia “Kizzy” Corbett, the immunologist who led efforts to develop the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, has become a household name.

During her first meetings with Hrabowski, Ashby recalls him predicting that she would be a university president. “I thought that was the craziest thing I ever heard,” Ashby said with a smile. “I was a department chair enjoying it and thought, ‘That’s a sweet thing to say.’”

Although Ashby’s mentors saw things in her that she didn’t see in herself and took the time to invest in her career promotion and progress, Ashby confessed that she struggled with self-doubt and lack of confidence in her impact as a successful scholar for years.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve given workshops on impostor syndrome because I had it until I was 40,” she said. “That was a struggle, a pure struggle. To internally not believe you are good enough to be where you are, and people keep promoting you. It gets worse as you achieve more.”

Today, Ashby has made the “mindset shifts” by sharing stories of her struggle through the first year and constant fear of failing. She believes being open has helped make her a better teacher, mentor, and scholar.

“If you struggle and use it to help other people who are struggling in the same way or similarly, that’s your superpower because there’s nothing like authenticity.”

In April 2022, the University System of Maryland (USM) Board of Regents announced the appointment of Dr. Valerie Sheares Ashby as the next president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).

Prior, Ashby served as dean of Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences and began her tenure as UMBC president on Aug. 1. While Ashby would not comment on strategic plans, this is what she had to say:

“We’re going to live in the now. There’s no change of vision needed,” Ashby said. “The question is, what does that look like in the next decade? As an institution of higher education that sits in a world so complex. This university has put a stake in the ground with one of the highest callings, I think, in higher education. It says in the vision that we will redefine excellence in higher education. And they’re going to do it through an inclusive culture, innovative teaching, research across the disciplines, civic engagement, and a focus on social justice and economic prosperity. Who says that and means it? To create a welcoming environment for inquisitive minds from all backgrounds. That is a showstopper to me and why I’m in higher education. For an institution to own that, live in that for 30 years, and achieve what they have in this space of excellence through diversity, there is nothing like it in the country.”

Join us as we celebrate Women of Color STEM Award winners from October 6th to October 8th. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to network and learn from some of the most brilliant minds in STEM.

This conference is the perfect chance to learn from experts in your field and get advice from successful women who have been in your shoes. The Women of Color community is a trusted and supportive network, so you're sure to leave the conference feeling motivated and inspired.