Being a scientist is hard. Being a young scientist is harder. Academic institutions squeeze cheap labor out of graduate students and postdocs who are busy competing for publications and increasingly limited faculty jobs, sucking joy from once-enthusiastic trainees.
While people generally think of scientists as smart and competent, they’re rarely viewed as warm or caring. If you ask kids to tell you what a scientist looks like, many will describe a geeky, emotionally inept white man in a lab coat.
Kaela Singleton, a neuroscientist by training, has racked up an enviable number of publications, fellowships, and awards in the field. She is also undeniably cool and unapologetically empathetic — for every accolade she’s earned, she’s shown students and mentees how to do the same. Her predominantly white graduate school, however, was not a welcoming space for a Black, queer scientist like herself.
Unfortunately, her experience is not uncommon. Being a Black scientist is really hard. Black students earn fewer than 10 percent of all doctorates across all science and math disciplines. In practice, this means it’s very normal to be the only Black neuroscience student in a given course — and possibly the only Black or brown person in their graduating class — making daily experiences of racism a near-inevitable job hazard.
Then, in July 2020, science writer Christian Cooper was birdwatching in Central Park when a white woman falsely claimed that he was assaulting her. At the same time, people were organizing protests across the US in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. In response, Black birdwatchers flocked to Twitter for #BlackBirdersWeek, an initiative celebrating Black scientists and nature enthusiasts pursuing what they love in naturalist and academic spaces that have historically marginalized people of color.
#BlackBirdersWeek inspired #BlackInAstro, a similar online movement celebrating Black scientists studying the cosmos, in the midst of a news cycle focused on police brutality, death, and unrest. Scrolling through a Twitter feed full of joyful Black nerds, neuroscientists Singleton and Angeline Dukes were “deeply jealous,” Singleton remembers. A few Zoom meetings later, #BlackInNeuro was born, a grassroots effort empowering hundreds of neuroscientists across over 60 countries to push for diversity, accountability, and justice in a historically white academic space.
“I don’t think any of us thought it would be as popular as it was,” said Singleton. But Black in Neuro, now a registered nonprofit organization, continued to grow: Today, its community directory lists over 1,400 Black neuroscientists across all career stages. Beyond existing as a database of underrepresented scientists, Black in Neuro hosts regular workshops, seminars, and social events centered on research, wellness, and professional development.
After co-founding the organization, Singleton became the president of Black in Neuro in 2023, where she has worked to resist and rebuild systems that try to strip the joy out of scientific discovery. Today, she works as a director of grants management at the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, which funds accelerated research to prevent, slow, or reverse the disease. While she has taken a step back from academia, Singleton continues to mentor young scientists and nurture the supportive academic communities she knows they deserve.
“The coolest thing about being president of Black in Neuro is that I get to be a leader of leaders,” Singleton told me. “On my worst day, someone is ready to step up. But on my best day, it feels like how I imagine Justice League feels, where everybody has their strengths, and we build off one another.”
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your relationship with science like, growing up?
I wasn’t a science kid, not even a little bit. I was really into books, some pretty depressing music, and telling stories. The only thing that I was ever really excited about in school was one neuroanatomy class I had in seventh grade. When I decided to go to college for neuroscience, all of my teachers were like, “What are you talking about? You don’t even like biology.”
Agnes Scott is where I did my undergrad — it’s a private all-women’s liberal arts college. Naively, when I got there, I was like, “I’ll do neuroscience.” Agnes Scott is technically a minority-serving institution, and it was easy for me to think this was doable.
When I went to Georgetown [for graduate school], it was the first time I had ever been around people who didn’t have open conversations about racism and sexism, or lead by example in that way. To go from such a free-flowing exchange of ideas, to a place where everybody was really invested in objectivity and science and empiricism, and less about nurturing the growth of you as an individual, as a person — it was a hard left.
I hear old-school academics say that science is supposed to be apolitical and objective, or somehow exist outside of culture. I imagine you have thoughts about that.
There’s a PDF on the internet about the characteristics of white supremacy, and how they show up in the workplace. Things like objectivity, making things impersonal, and encouraging people to be devoid of their personhood at work all strip us of our creativity, our empathy, and our humanity — which, as I’ve gone through my career, are the bits of myself that I have tried to hold onto the most.
I hope when people meet me, they feel that I am warm and that I am soft, and that I actually don’t care if they take me seriously. I hope that they can sense a sincerity about the idea that my whimsy, my forethought, and my kindness have been battle-tested, because at every turn in this career, people have tried to tell me that I need to be more serious — that I need to be less caring in the name of objectivity. But you can’t talk about curing diseases and helping the climate if you’re not talking about things that are actively going on in our lives.
Academia asks for so much of your resources, in exchange for being at the forefront of discovery. But when you’re living in a neoliberal capitalist society, what does that really do for you? I think about, in 2020, Black students showing up to learn virtually after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I think about Palestinians and Arab students showing up to work every day, while a genocide is unfolding.
We’re all supposed to be devoid of humanity, and it has real consequences.
In an interview with Nature, you said that you attribute many of your successes and professional doubts to the stereotype of Black resilience. How has that trope shaped your career, for better or for worse?
I think my least favorite thing in life is to be called “resilient,” because it means that people only see me through the lens of difficulty. They love the idea that I am resilient, but they don’t actually care about any of the things that made me resilient.
When we talk about resilience, no one is discussing what it costs you. I experienced a lot of racism in grad school that I just internalized — that energy goes somewhere, and it’s taken years for me to unpack that, and to deal with the internalized shame. I also think the idea of resilience stems from Jim Crow-era thinking about Black people — like, you’re one of the “good ones.” It again strips you of your personhood.
There are ways that resilience has shaped me for the better. It pushed me to do things I did not think I was capable of doing, and that’s something. But there’s a fine line between that, and putting someone in a traumatic situation to get them to do something. Older people are sometimes like, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” but not in a fun Kelly Clarkson way.
In the summer of 2020, it felt like every university scrambled to implement DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives. Many of those initiatives lost steam once the moment passed, but Black in Neuro has continued growing for years now. How did you keep it going?
A big portion of it is building community. A bigger portion is being a safe, inviting place for younger Black people in neuroscience.
Another big thing that works in our favor is that neuroscience, as a field, is incredibly interdisciplinary — we’re able to touch more corners of the Earth and more places on the internet. There’s an innate collaborativeness to everything that we do.
The years of my presidency have been about doing behind-the-scenes work to build structures and processes for us, so we can be long-lasting: finances, building project management tools, and providing structure to something we want to be amorphous and creative.
This is a huge question, but what changes do academic institutions need to make to truly welcome and nurture early-career scientists, especially Black scientists?
So often, universities prioritize recruitment and representation, but not any sort of power, sustainability, resources, or accountability. Money would be nice.
Beronda Montgomery has a great book called Lessons From Plants. She’s a microbiologist, and she talks about the idea that all collections of people are ecosystems. You have to nurture them. And when plants fail, you have to ask yourself, “What is it about the environment that is not right for this plant?”
Unfortunately, it is often grad students, postdocs, and early-career professors who are trying to make those changes, but they can only bump up against resistance so much before they’re just like, “it’s fine.”
It’s the environment, but more specifically, it’s the way that we measure success and impact. So much of earning diversity fellowships is about numbers.
So often in graduate school, it’s publish or perish. In part, I went to grad school because I’m a yapper and a thinker — I like to think about things, I like to talk things through, and I like to build stories. There’s a humility that comes from learning that I think we’re losing. People just want to scoop one another.
If you create an environment where the metric isn’t “Did you publish your paper first?”, but “What are the questions you’re asking? Who does this question benefit?”, you can do so much more with that. I feel like that is a concrete thing we can change. I would change the metrics that we use to define success in academia.
You say that you live by Toni Morrison quote, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” How have those words guided you?
I always share applications and resources with people. I always want to be around to talk to people. So much of being in homogenous, predominantly white spaces [as a person of color] is not feeling validated in your experience.
I dreamed of being the person I needed when I was younger — someone who was kind and soft, and had agency and joy in their life.
My Nana would say that empowerment is about commodity, capitalism, power, and metrics, but there is a power in stillness. There’s power in softness, there’s power in storytelling, and in sitting back and taking time to figure out who you are.
SZA tweeted something that I think about every day, about this idea that people teach you how to fight for your dreams, but they don’t teach you what to do once you’ve fulfilled your dream. Once you’ve done the thing you said you were going to do, what do you do next? To me, empowering people is about giving them the building blocks to be better, and to empower them to sit with and revel in their greatness.
