On the morning of her 21st birthday, junior Emma Kane celebrated her big milestone with a smaller one: doing a group presentation in BIO 310. The course focused on toxicology, or how substances such as lead or diesel exhaust or pesticides can harm the human body. For their talk, her group focused on the physiological effects on the lungs of inhaling smoke from burning animal dung.
“It was the ideal way to spend the morning,” she said. “I mean, I love school. The fact that it was toxicology class probably made it even better.”
The group discussed the science, such as what happens to small airway epithelial cells when exposed to dung smoke. They also discussed the broader socioeconomic implications. Biomass fuels are used for home heating and cooking by more than 3 billion people. Indoor air pollution leads to more than 4 million deaths each year, its victims disproportionately female, young, and low-income residents of developing nations. The harm is biological, but the drivers of it are economic and social.
Kane wants to start every day of her future career in some version of conversations like this one — immersed in science as a way of understanding and solving problems. She is a biochemistry and French major and a first-generation college student. Back home in Connecticut, her mother, who emigrated from Ecuador at age 16, is a real estate agent. Her father works in insurance. She doesn’t have uncles, aunts, or cousins who are doctors. With her pursuit of a career in the sciences, Kane is breaking new ground in her family. Her goal is medical school, and she is well on track to get there.
One big reason for Kane’s progress is the professor evaluating her group presentation. Kane wouldn’t be in this class were it not for the care of Shannon Jones, director of biological instruction. It’s true in a short-term sense: Jones gave Kane an override to enroll in the course after all of its 16 slots had filled. It’s also true in a long-term sense: Jones directs programs at Richmond specifically designed to help students like Kane persist in the sciences.
“She does this juggling act,” Kane says of her professor. “Half of it is that she’s this exquisite professor. Everyone loves her and wants to take her classes because she’s such a good teacher. But the other half of her is that she’s just kind, caring, always available, a good resource. I go to her for a lot of big decisions because I really trust her.”
STEM FIELDS — science, technology, engineering, and math — are tough environments for every student. A decade ago, fewer than 40% of students nationwide entering college intending to major in a STEM field graduated with a STEM degree, according to a 2012 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The contributing factors were myriad: uninspiring introductory courses that drove away high-performing students. Lack of support for low-performing students displaying high interest and aptitude for STEM careers.
The challenges were particularly acute for students who are members of groups underrepresented in STEM fields, including first-generation students, students of color, and other students with marginalized identities in the sciences. According to the report, they “cited an unwelcoming atmosphere from faculty in STEM fields as a reason for their departure.” Such students looked around their classes and, seeing few students or professors like themselves, too often got the message or concluded on their own that they wouldn’t cut it or didn’t belong.
A decade ago, the university’s experience mirrored those national trends, according to a 2023 study published by more than two dozen current and former UR faculty and students. From 2010 to 2013, anywhere from 20% to 33% of students in first-year science and math courses were from what the report calls “minoritized backgrounds,” numbers that matched overall university demographics. By graduation, those numbers fell to between 4% and 9% for students graduating with a STEM degree. Most of the students who fell away still graduated from UR but in non-STEM fields.
In 2012, the university launched an ambitious program designed to address factors holding first-year students back in the sciences. The new program — called SMART, or Science, Math, and Research Training — emphasizes real-life relevance and early research opportunities. The goal is “to remove the barriers that impede persistence, retention, and success of underrepresented students in STEM disciplines,” according to the 2023 study.
“I have this lived experience, so I feel this connectedness not just to students of color but also limited-income students. My goal is to make them feel like whatever room they step into, they belong.”
Over two semesters, SMART students attend highly integrated and coordinated classes and labs daily. Instead of a chemistry class here and a biology class there, for example, they learn both in one integrated class co-taught by a biology professor and a chemistry professor. This class and, say, calculus or computer science are coordinated via a broad theme, such as antibiotic resistance or infectious disease. The idea is that by integrating the coursework and connecting it to real issues, students better understand scientific processes, interdisciplinary connections, and how scientific inquiry can be used to make the world a better place.
Two other factors are critical. First, students get into labs right away, a chance to immediately see themselves developing capabilities and skills as researchers. Second, through daily classes and other SMART programming, they build a close-knit sense of community that carries through beyond their first year together.
For some of these students, the research skill-building and sense of community start even earlier through another program Jones directs. It’s called URISE, which stands for University of Richmond Integrated Science Experience. Through it, students come to campus for nearly three weeks during the summer before their first year. They get a mix of science lessons, research experiences, and social outings like river rafting to ease their adjustment to college generally and the sciences in particular.
Data in the 2023 study help tell the story of the program’s success. At the time of its publication, 131 of the 238 students who had gone through SMART had graduated. The others, like Kane, were still in progress. Of those who graduated, 82% graduated with STEM majors, and 87% gained some kind of academic credential in STEM through an adjacent field, such as majoring or minoring in health care studies. The overall percentage of UR students graduating in STEM fields rose from 12% of the undergraduate class to almost 17%. First-generation and underrepresented students made up more than half of graduating seniors in STEM in 2022.
IF PROFESSOR SHANNON JONES HAD ENROLLED AT Richmond during the last 10 years, she would have been an ideal candidate for the URISE and SMART programs that she now directs. She grew up in Roper, North Carolina, a predominantly Black town of just a few hundred people in the northeastern corner of the state. Even in this little town, she lived “on the edge of the edge,” she said, down a cul de sac alongside much of her extended family. She grew up surrounded by love and support, with a hard-working mother, a grandmother next door, supportive teachers, and a steady passel of cousins and neighbors riding bikes and jumping ditches until the summer sun went down. It was an upbringing rich in everything except money.
She was also surrounded by educated women and hard-working men. Her mom and most of her mom’s sisters went to college at a local, historically Black college and then came back home. Her uncles went from high school into the work force. For most of them, that meant the local paper mill, one of the few well-paying jobs available in the region.
The paper mill shaped local life profoundly, not only because of its steady paychecks but also because of a persistent stench from it that permeated the town. “It was just an awful smell,” Jones said. “You grow up thinking that’s just what air smells like.”
As a child, she often wondered why a lot of her family members had chronic health issues. “One defining moment was when my mom’s sister, whom she was very close to, got sick for almost two years before doctors figured out what was wrong, and she was diagnosed with lupus,” Jones said. “I’d never witnessed someone that sick before. It was scary. At the time, I didn’t know what that was, like how your immune system can attack your body.”
She read what she could, this real-life problem fueling an interest in biology and its connection to environmental factors and broader social issues. By the time she went off to college at Winston-Salem State University, a historically Black institution, or HBCU, she was determined to become a doctor specializing in rheumatology so she could treat patients like her aunt. Her plans changed when a mentor suggested she consider a career in research.
“It really opened my eyes to other opportunities,” she said. “Just because you like science doesn’t mean you have to be a medical doctor. There are other things you could do.” She gravitated to a focus on toxicology. By the time she turned 20, she was seeing her familiar community in new ways as she made connections between things she never connected before. The fetid air from the mill. The untreated well water that turned clothes brown and smelled like rotten eggs. Her family’s persistent health issues. She also perceived broader patterns, like how poor and marginalized communities bore these environmentally driven health burdens disproportionately.
Graduate school brought her another kind of education. Her journey from her small nurturing community in Roper and her close-knit HBCU campus brought her to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her first experience with a large, predominately white institution.
“When I got to grad school, it’s a completely different ballgame,” he said. “I just remember the feeling of being othered, and I don’t want my students [at Richmond] to feel that way. I have this lived experience, so I feel this connectedness not just to students of color, but also limited-income students. My goal is to make them feel like whatever room they step into, they belong.”
She persisted, becoming the first person in her family to earn a doctoral degree. After that, she did a three-year fellowship supported by the National Institutes of Health, taught at a couple of HBCUs, and in 2015 landed at Richmond to direct the SMART and URISE programs. The programs’ structures in many ways replicate what was good about Jones’ educational path while addressing what could have been better.
In her time at Richmond, Jones has been able to branch out beyond her core duties of running SMART and URISE. The spring semester toxicology course, BIO 310, is an example. It is an upper-level course that enrolls mostly seniors. When registration for it opened, its 16 available spots filled quickly. But by the first day of the course, enrollment was at 27. Former SMART and URISE students had gotten word that Jones was teaching an upper-level course, and many didn’t want to miss the chance to take her one more time. They made request after request for enrollment overrides, and again and again, she said yes. It was a full-circle moment for them and for her.
SITTING WITH KANE in that upper-level toxicology class on her birthday were a number of other former SMART and URISE students. There was junior Auden Wilson, a lifelong ballet dancer now planning on medical school. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, the child of artists. “They mostly do filmmaking, almost always documentary,” he said. “My mom can’t even look at blood. My dad is fine with it, but he didn’t go to college.” Wilson also responds to campus emergencies as a member of UREMS, the student-run emergency medical services squad.
With him on the UREMS squad, in the toxicology course, and in SMART two years ago was fellow junior Bezawit Mulatu, a student from Ethiopia who attended an international high school in Johannesburg, South Africa. She double-majors in biology and business administration. Her future plans include a dual MD/JD program because of the connections she sees between health care and international human rights, particularly in areas affected by war. “If I were to work for the UN,” she said, “I can just go anywhere there’s a crisis happening and be there as a citizen, be there as a doctor, but also be someone who knows what’s going on and can see it through the lens of the law.” During the spring, she was named a 2024–25 Newman Civic Fellow, a reflection of her commitment to public service.
There was also a senior, Kharma Hall from Atlanta. She grew up interested in the sciences but didn’t have any family or mentors in her extended network with careers in the sciences. Like Jones in her younger years, Hall constructed a vision of her future self in which she was inevitably a doctor. Growing up, she told family and friends and everyone around her that she was headed to medical school after college.
One of SMART’s goals is to widen students’ sense of career paths in the sciences. In Hall’s case, she began to see a wider array of options than she ever knew existed. This realization introduced questions for her. Was the medical school path really what she wanted? She worried, in particular, about work-life balance and about whether she would even enjoy working as a doctor. But the thing she worried about most was disappointing other people. Everyone important to her knew she was going to medical school, she said. “That’s what I had talked about for a good portion of my life.”
At the time she began asking herself these questions, she was also developing a close relationship with Jones. It began in the summer of 2020, when Hall participated in URISE during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public venues were generally shut. Vaccines were not yet available. URISE students could not come to campus for community-building or skill development.
Instead, Jones did her best to bring the URISE experience to Hall and the rest of the cohort. One day, they did a virtual escape room. A staff member went into a real one and, via Zoom, showed Hall and the other students around the room, having them guide an escape plan. Another day, Hall opened a package from Richmond. Jones had sent each student a piece of lab equipment called a pipette so they could complete a lesson together over Zoom.
“Once we got to campus, I remember meeting her and the rest of my class for the first time. That was not only one of my first science classes, but also one of the only classes with that many people of color,” said Hall, who is Black. “That was one thing I was worried about coming to UR, not fitting in or finding my community on campus, but literally all of my best friends on campus are from SMART or URISE.” She would lean on this community as she contemplated her future.
"She does this juggling act. ... Half of it is that she’s this exquisite professor. Everyone loves her and wants to take her classes because she’s such a good teacher. But the other half of her is that she’s just kind, caring, always available, a good resource. I go to her for a lot of big decisions because I really trust her.”
At the time she began asking herself these questions, she was also developing a close relationship with Jones. It began in the summer of 2020, when Hall participated in URISE during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public venues were generally shut. Vaccines were not yet available. URISE students could not come to campus for community-building or skill development.
Instead, Jones did her best to bring the URISE experience to Hall and the rest of the cohort. One day, they did a virtual escape room. A staff member went into a real one and, via Zoom, showed Hall and the other students around the room, having them guide an escape plan. Another day, Hall opened a package from Richmond. Jones had sent each student a piece of lab equipment called a pipette so they could complete a lesson together over Zoom.
“Once we got to campus, I remember meeting her and the rest of my class for the first time. That was not only one of my first science classes, but also one of the only classes with that many people of color,” said Hall, who is Black. “That was one thing I was worried about coming to UR, not fitting in or finding my community on campus, but literally all of my best friends on campus are from SMART or URISE.” She would lean on this community as she contemplated her future.
THE TERM “IMPOSTER SYNDROME” often hovers around the edges of conversations with SMART and URISE students. The questions come the moment they hit campus. Do I really belong here? How do I compare with the students I see around me? These questions can injure like toxicants by prompting the mind to respond with self-doubt. “When you come into UR, where everyone is a really high-achieving student, you can get hit really hard in a challenging class and, without support, feel like you don’t belong,” said chemistry professor Michael Norris, who co-teaches a SMART course with Jones.
Kane, the student who celebrated her 21st birthday in class, felt that pressure. “When I came to Richmond, I was so nervous,” she said. “I’d never heard much about research. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to do science.” With that initial push from Jones and SMART, she has since spent three summers doing lab research, once at Richmond under biology professor Laura Runyen-Janecky and twice at Yale University.
Even when students have confidence in their abilities, they might not understand the pathways that will get them to their goals. Higher ed professionals sometimes refer to this as the “hidden curriculum,” the knowledge and skills necessary for navigating higher education. Kane said that when she arrived on campus, she didn’t know what office hours were. Auden, the son of artists, entered Richmond without any knowledge about the steps for pursuing his childhood dream of becoming a surgeon.
“When I came, I was like, ‘What are you supposed to do as an undergraduate to get into medical school?’” he said. He knew he was supposed to “do research” but had no idea what that meant in practical terms. “I thought it was going to be this whole process. I thought maybe you have to join freshman labs and then eventually move up into a higher-intensity lab. I don’t know. I was thinking it was this whole complicated process.”
He learned in URISE that it could be as simple as emailing a professor to ask, “Hey, can I work in your lab?” He sent a message to chemistry professor Julie Pollock after she spoke to his URISE class, and he’s been working in her lab ever since.
“There are so many things you have to be aware of as a pre-med student that weren’t talked about by anybody in my family or my high school,” he said. “I don’t even know if anybody from my high school was going to study medicine.”
The question can nag: Why does everyone seem to know how things work except me? With it comes a self-defeating corollary: Maybe I don’t belong here. One of the chief benefits of SMART and URISE is that they help students work through these issues. At the same time, they promote a sense of community. These bonds can carry students through long after the first year as they progress together through the upper levels of the curriculum.
That retention piece is critical, says Colleen Carpenter-Swanson, a departmental colleague of Jones. Together, they sit on the Science Belonging Committee, a faculty-student effort to promote a culture of belonging throughout the Gottwald Center for the Sciences.
“I feel like there have been really improved recruitment efforts, but I’ve seen a lot of shortcomings in retention,” she said, speaking of higher education generally. “I think this is where URISE and SMART are so intentional. How do we create that sense of belonging? It does an amazing job, and the students have each other. They want to be in the program, so how do we keep them connected?”
Jones, she said, establishes a foundation for that to happen all four years. “The students that I’ve gotten in my research who went through URISE and SMART all say the same thing: ‘It felt like family when we were there.’ And that’s the atmosphere I want in my classroom. For students who historically might not feel that support, it’s especially important for them.”
“Sometimes we talk about class; sometimes we talk about other things. She encouraged me to not only think about what other people want, but what’s best for me.”
THIS FEELING OF SUPPORT CAN BE CRITICAL for students making big decisions about their futures. With the help of Jones, Hall came to terms with her doubts about whether medical school was right for her and got the courage to make what she called “a big switch.” It happened mostly over a series of meals. After Hall’s first year, she and Jones began having weekly lunches together in Jones’ office. They did it every Thursday for the next three years until Hall graduated — professor and student, mentor and protégé, making sense of Hall’s options and the wider world together.
“Sometimes we talk about class; sometimes we talk about other things,” Hall said. “She encouraged me to not only think about what other people want, but what’s best for me. She basically helped me put aside the fear that I will be disappointing other people. She’s been a great support system and has really been there for me in all of my times of need, whether it’s been school-related or not. I’m just very grateful to have met her.” As her senior year closed out, Hall was working in a clinical research lab and applying for anesthesia tech and medical assistant positions — “pretty much anything that will give me clinical experience,” she said. She no longer sees a career as a doctor in her future, but she will stick with medicine. During the summer, she will take the GRE and apply to master’s programs in anesthesiology, a field that fascinates her and a professional path that she believes offers the balance she seeks.
ONE REASON THAT JONES’ STUDENTS TRUST HER AND her advice is that they recognize her deep empathy for them. She has usually experienced some version of what they’re experiencing. “They have many of the same feelings I’ve felt,” Jones said. “Early on, when I meet them in URISE, they’re like, ‘What am I getting myself into?’ I will tell them, ‘I know exactly what you feel like.’ I can see myself in them, for sure.”
But she also hopes it works the other way. She wants them to see themselves in her. That’s why she is very open with them about her background. She tells them about growing up in a small town in North Carolina and seeing her family members get sick, about how she felt in grad school, and about how her career path has wound this way and that.
One of the words she uses to describe herself professionally is storyteller. It’s apparent in her toxicology class. Tuesdays are hard science days with slides of lung tissues or nerve endings and always an array of chemical symbols. Thursdays are for stories. She might give students a case study about a migrant farmworker arriving at an emergency room. They might read news reports about a neighborhood with unusually high rates of cancer. The point is to help the students learn to use science to problem-solve. It connects the scientific details to real life, a pedagogical approach that research shows promotes student engagement and self-efficacy.
The most moving story she tells is the one she embodies. It comes out as she skillfully leads class every session, warmly banters with students before and after class, and quietly chats with them in her office. I am making my path in the sciences and addressing issues I care about, her example says, and you can do this, too.
A wall in her office speaks to her success. Just above her desk is a giant board covered with personal photos and messages. Many of them are notes from former students. They might have gone off to graduate school or medical school. They might be completing a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship, working in industry, or doing a post-baccalaureate fellowship with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The notes all express some version of thank you. They’re right in front of her every morning when she walks into her office in the Gottwald Center, puts down her things, and starts her laptop. They’re there when she has lunch with a student and when she closes her office door at the end of the day.
They’re her daily motivation for building the life she envisions for herself and for helping her students build lives in the sciences that they envision for themselves, no matter their background.