Black Excellence Oral History with Candice Duncan, June 10, 2021 (Ms2024-072)

Daniel Smith: Hello. My name is Daniel Smith, and I’m interviewing Dr. Candice Duncan via Zoom today. Today is Thursday, June 10, 2021, and the time is 11:40 a.m. Dr. Duncan, can you start off by stating your full name and your date of birth for the record?

Candice Duncan: My name is Candice Morrison Duncan, and I was born July 11, 1978.

Daniel: Can you also start by stating the current position you hold at this time?

Candice: Currently, I serve as a lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park, but my position actually, as of August 1, 2021, will be 00:01:00converted to an assistant professor position.

Daniel: Congratulations!  Candice: Thank you!  Daniel: Awesome! I won’t jump there; that’ll skip ahead. That’s exciting. That’s really great news.  Candice: Yes. It’s a lot to talk about, when we get to that point.  Daniel: Awesome. That’s August first. Could you also state your parents’ names and where they and you grew up?

Candice: Okay. My mother’s name is Margaret Morrison, and she grew up in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and my father’s name is Lawrence Morrison, and he grew up in Pinehurst, North Carolina, but in a smaller town within 00:02:00the outskirts of Pinehurst called Taylor Town, North Carolina, but in the Gulf capital of the East Coast. And I grew up in Durham, North Carolina, so they moved. The irony with their name is my mother’s maiden name and her married name are the same. My aunts and uncles on my mother’s side’s last name is Morrison. My uncles on my dad’s side, their last name is Morrison. Obviously, the sisters who are married, their names are different, but I had Morrisons on both sides of my family, but they are not related.  Daniel: Wow. It almost sounds like a plan coming together, Morrison and Morrison, so it all stays in the family.  00:03:00Candice: Yes. My cousins have this running joke, when I do something that they kinda don’t like, they’re like, you’re double Morrison. You’re getting your thought process from both sides. If I’m doing something different, they’re like, that’s from your other Morrison side. I’m double Morrison, doesn’t matter.  Daniel: How many brothers and sisters do you have?

Candice: I have one older brother. There was just the two of us.  Daniel: From what people have talked about or told you about your history and about your family--we can start with your mother’s side first--but how far back can you trace them, and do you know any stories, or has anyone told you any stories about your 00:04:00family on your mother’s side?  Candice: On my mother’s side, they were farmers in the South, and she grew up in a small area called Wagram, a big farming community, so they did a lot of tobacco because of the time period. My grandmother was one of eleven or twelve children. They believe that some of her heritage was Cree Indian, or Native American, but they did not have it confirmed. They were essentially farmers--sharecroppers. My mother has six siblings, and her parents 00:05:00died at a very young age. Her mother had strokes and died around the age of forty-nine or so. No, it wasn’t forty-nine; she was a little bit older than that because my uncle was sixteen when she passed, so she may have been in her late forties--early fifties--when she passed, and then my grandfather died shortly thereafter. They never met me, but they moved from the country, and my grandfather built the house that they grew up in in the Southern Pine city limits. Just recently, they reluctantly sold the property--the house that he built--to someone, 00:06:00out of need, out of necessity. Some of the siblings needed the money and the house sitting there and being so old, because he built it in the late 1950s, that it’s just fallen in. But it was a very well-structured house because the new owners didn’t change anything on the outside. They left the structure the same on the outside. My grandfather worked for the city doing maintenance type stuff, and he also did some work with spraying the city for the bugs and stuff when they did that, long time ago. The trucks would ride around and spray. He did that kind of work, and when he could not work, he did tinkering. He was a tinkerer, so he fixed things for people, 00:07:00and they would just give him a little money to fix a clock or a radio or that type of stuff. And my grandmother was a homemaker; she stayed at home.  Daniel: What were your grandmother’s and grandfather’s names?  Candice: [Ella Mae Morrison] and Roosevelt Morrison.  Daniel: These are on your mother’s side?  Candice: On my mother’s side.  Daniel: What about on your father’s side? Any information or stories from grandparents or great-grandparents from there as well?  Candice: On my father’s side, the history goes back much further because, in that small town he grew up, his grandfather Orin Morrison had twelve siblings. I don’t know the exact year--I believe it was in the early 1920s--he 00:08:00purchased the land that they lived on and were sharecropping on, and they divided it amongst the siblings. By the time I came along, my dad’s aunts and uncles owned all the land that they grew up on. I would say maybe thirty acres. It sounds like a lot, but it’s not much. When you divide it amongst seven or eight, they had three-, four-acre plots between them. I spent many summers with his aunts and uncles because all of their homes were on the property. We did a lot of house-bouncing in the summer, so you can go and stay at one person’s 00:09:00house, and you could go across the street and be at someone else’s house. We had family reunions every year. These last two years with COVID-19, we’ve missed, but it would have been year forty-seven and forty-eight of having the reunions consistently. When I was a young girl--maybe nine or ten--there would be easily two hundred and fifty people out there on that one day, but it was a weekend of events. They really did it up. Friday night it was a fish fry. Everybody would be coming into town, and they’d have a fish fry for everyone. Then Saturday was the picnic. They had this huge, massive picnic. They had games for kids because the 00:10:00family had a park on the property with swings and the hanging tires and they had horseshoe, all types of things. We just had like a great, fun day. Then Sunday, everyone went to the local church. My dad’s mother’s name is Cassandra Morrison, but they’d called her Cassie, and my grandfather’s name was Mason Morrison, and he worked in the city. During that time, people of color who were very fair-skinned worked at the country club, and they caddied at the golf course. He and his brothers did a mix of working at the country club and 00:11:00being a groundskeeper for the country clubs in the town of Pinehurst. That’s what he did. My grandmother was a seamstress. She worked at a boutique in town. It was called [inaudible], where she fixed these really nice, fancy dresses for lots of white ladies, because Black people couldn’t afford that stuff. She remained a seamstress all the way up until her eighties. She was still doing stuff. As a kid because they were really poor, she didn’t buy us a lot of Christmas gifts every year, but she would make us things. I had a lot of--when 00:12:00I was a little girl--Barbies. You know, little girls have Barbies. She would make my Barbies clothes. I’d get--for Christmas--a Barbie, two or three Barbie outfits from the leftover fabric from fixing the dresses that had the matching hat, and she’d have the top and the bottom, or it would be a dress. My mom would just go and buy the shoes, and I’d have a one-of-a-kind Barbie doll dress. But I had twenty of them. Twenty outfits. It was really cool. For my dad and his siblings, she would make them ties, and we used to call them [Morrisseens] because they were one-of-a-kind of ties. Some of them would be really great, and some of them would be really weird that you know they would never wear because the fabric color was so strange. So, she didn’t just fix dresses; 00:13:00she also made drapes and tapestries and things. She could do all of that. You’d see some stuff that you clearly knew that was some blanket-looking material, but she would make them ties and things like that. She was very good. She made some beautiful pieces that we had seen over the years as kids. My dad has eight siblings. My grandmother started having children very late. At some point, she did not think that they’d be able to have children because, once they got married, it was six or seven years before my dad’s oldest brother came. Then she had them back to back. She had two sets of twins, but one set lived, and she lost the other set, and so, in total there’s eight. My 00:14:00dad is the second oldest. That’s on my dad side, how I remember things were. As I mentioned, they were very fair-skinned. We know that there was some mixing way long, long time ago, probably pre-1920s. Because the story is that some of my dad’s grandfather’s siblings, once they became adults, left and passed for white and never came back home. I always found that interesting, as their subsequent generations are now contacting some of us. We’re like, we have no idea who you are. Because we knew that there was 00:15:00some siblings of my great-grandfather that left and didn’t come back, but we don’t know who they are. Yeah, that’s some of the things that I learned about them growing up. Like I said, I went every year. We still go back a lot. For the most part, all of the land is still owned by family; it’s not the direct siblings of my grandfather, but it’s their descendants. There are a few pieces that have been lost, unfortunately, due to financial hardships. The family members just didn’t pay the taxes, or they used the land as collateral to put their mother in a nursing home, 00:16:00and when she passed, it went off for auction. But the really strange thing is that the land was all grandfathered in. They literally could give the land to each other and put it on paper as selling it for like a dollar, when you know it’s worth a whole lot more, because you’re a family descendant, and you can prove it. But they didn’t do that. They didn’t come to us and say, hey, just take over the taxes and blah, blah, blah and everything stay in the family. But they’ve kept the majority of it, so that’s what we do.  Daniel: You say you’re still going back to some of those family reunions, family gatherings there. Is that a big piece of your childhood that you’d still remember vividly or are there other things that happen as you’re growing up that you remember that 00:17:00stuck with you as you moved through your own path and through your own career?  Candice: Yes. I was just talking with my father-in-law the other day. What we mentioned was that growing up, I never had to make friends outside of family because when my mother and my father moved to Durham, some of his cousins moved to Durham as well. They maintained that familial relationship. They’re pretty close, so all of my first cousins, we’re all close because some of my dad’s first cousins and one or two siblings had moved to the area as well. I didn’t necessarily have to make friends when I went to school because I spent so much time with family on the weekends. Not so much during the week, but 00:18:00on the weekends. Then because my parents were relatively young, they were driving home. I can remember probably at the four, five, six age range going every other weekend back to their home city. They were not wealthy. They didn’t have any money, really. So they would go back to get help. If my brother and I were out of school, my mom couldn’t just take the day off, so she would take us to her sister’s house. Then she’d come back and get us because there was only an hour-and-a-half drive from Durham to Southern Pines. I didn’t have to really make a lot of friends per se because I spent so much time with family, and I really enjoyed it. For me, now having my own children, it’s really important 00:19:00for them to grow up with their cousins if they can. Because my cousins were like my friends and family on both sides. On my mother’s side, they’re a lot closer than my dad’s siblings because their parents died so young. They had to stick together and figure things out on their own, so they’re still close like that to this day. We grew up close-knit as cousins as well. I just think that’s really important for my children to experience, but it’s a different world now. That’s not always possible when people leave, and I live in Maryland, and all my family’s in North Carolina, so it’s kinda hard to make that happen for them. But they do know their cousins, 00:20:00and I think that’s important, and hang out with them as often as we can. I think that’s really good.  Daniel: I was gonna ask, now that you’re in Maryland, they’re in North Carolina, are any cousins or other family members living closer to where you are now or is it always going back to North Carolina to go see them?  Candice: Yes, it’s always going back to North Carolina to see them. I don’t have any family in Maryland, and my spouse doesn’t either. We picked Maryland as our compromise living location because he’s from New York, and I’m from North Carolina, so the distance is about the same. We can get there in four and a half, five hours, and we can get to Queens 00:21:00in three and a half, four hours. That was our compromise, so we can easily see both our families and not have to fly.  Daniel: Okay. You talked a lot about some of those things you remember, the events you went to growing up and staying really in this close-knit family. Slightly transitioning to going through elementary school, middle school, high school--those years as you’re going through those early schooling phases--what was that period like? Were you developing an interest in a particular field, or were you developing interest in a career path during that time? Did 00:22:00you have teachers or mentors that really propelled you to where you are now or had a meaningful impact to getting you to where you are now? What was that early schooling years like?  Candice: My mom did not go to college, but my dad did go. But at the time, he went to an HBCU [historically Black colleges and universities]. He went to North Carolina Central University, which I would later go to--twenty-something years later--to get a degree in physical therapy. But because he was twenty-seven with two young children, he worked three jobs at the time and was going to school. Once he got one job at UPS [United Parcel Service], he realized he would make more money there than he would in physical therapy, so he dropped out of school and worked there for the next eighteen 00:23:00years. My mom was kinda the person who asked the question, what do you want to be, at a young age. That’s something kinda I’ve adopted with my own children, kinda get that thought process going. I always told her I wanted to be a doctor. By the time I got to maybe fifth or sixth grade, I knew I wanted to be a pediatrician. I was like, I’m going to be a pediatrician. I wanna help kids, and I wanna be a doctor for kids. She kinda took that as--because I didn’t really waver from that over those formative years--she was the type that was gonna say, okay, I’ll help you get to wherever you wanna go. Although that’s what I thought I wanted to do, 00:24:00clearly, I’m not an M.D.  Daniel: I was going to ask what inspired the pediatrician in the earlier years?  Candice: I don’t know. I just think it could have been a little bit of being around my cousins a lot. My brother and I were the oldest of the cousins. During the summers, when I was old enough to babysit, I had younger cousins staying at our house in the summer, and my brother and I would babysit all day, just us. I really enjoyed it. When I got older, like sixteen, I had a younger cousin come, and I was responsible for him for three weeks straight at sixteen. He was probably seven or eight months. I 00:25:00was getting up with him, making bottles, changing diapers, giving baths at sixteen because my mom was like, Candice is home. She can babysit. His parents were trying to get things together, and she was like, she can do it. She can handle it. Bring ‘em on. We’ll help you take care of them, while y’all get things together on your end. I really enjoyed it. Now, I say it was really good birth control, too, because I was like, this is for the birds right here. Yes, I’m good. Up late at night, the baby crying and all this. I was like, yes, let me go get this education. Thank you very much. But just some of those interactions. I wanted to work with kids and help kids and make sure that they were good, so I think that’s where the inspiration came from. But 00:26:00I think as I got older and once I got to college, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do. My freshman year, I was like, no, not doing it. That’s kinda what got me there--thinking that that’s what I wanted to do. The other thing was--school systems were different, when I was coming up. We had kindergarten through five, and then in Durham, we had a sixth grade center. Basically, half the county went to one center that was all just sixth graders, and then it was seven through ninth, so those junior high schools were still happening. But the year I went in as a seventh grader, they changed it to the middle school system. Then, when I became an eighth grader, I went from being the youngest at seven, eight, and nine to the oldest 00:27:00in the school at six, seven, eight, and then they went into the high school system. Around seventh grade, they had a program called MSEN--and it was just an after-school club--Math Science Enrichment Network. The big picture of it was just being introduced to science and math outside of what you were doing in just your regular classes. In that age, you’re just looking at science generally speaking; you’re looking at math just kinda generally. What the teacher for that program would do was focus and apply it to some things that you may want to do when you got to high school. We had some field trips. We’d go to the Museum of Science and Math. We 00:28:00participated in some things with the School of Science and Math, which was a private school in Durham where gifted kids in science or math would go. They applied as high schoolers, live on campus, that kind of thing. We were exposed to some of that that they were doing at the high school level, and I loved it. I really enjoyed it. When they made the club an actual program, I quickly joined the program, when I went into high school. Once I identified that science, medicine--STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] generally speaking--was what I wanted to do, my mom helped me find those paths and avenues, so that I could be exposed to it more. Because her thing was, once I got to college, she didn’t want me to be one of those flaky people who say, I’m undecided for three years or something crazy like that. She was like, that’s a no 00:29:00go. That’s what I did. I stuck with MSEN, and by the time I got to high school--I don’t know what Dr. Cutler’s original title was--he was the coordinator of a program called Saturday Academy that was funded through UNC [University of North Carolina] Chapel Hill. On Saturdays, for almost the whole school year, students who were part of the MSEN at all the different high schools would all get on buses from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., and we would go to Saturday Academy. We would literally go to school on Saturdays. And we loved it because you’re on a college campus; you see all the kids from the other high schools that you never see, 00:30:00and they bussed us there. I would drive to my high school, and then get on the bus to go back across town ‘cause I lived so close to Chapel Hill. What was good about that was, they had four major components of that program. They had the math, they had the science, and then what they also had was a career exploration type. Then they had SAT [a standardized college entrance examination] prep. We would be there from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. You think it’s a long time for high schoolers giving up a Saturday. But say, for example, if I was currently in Algebra I, when I went to Saturday Academy, I was doing Algebra II prep. If I was taking biology in school, I 00:31:00was taking chemistry in Saturday Academy. You would sign up for the prep courses that you could be exposed to for when you’re taking it the next year at your school, so you wouldn’t go in cold. You had an idea of what the subject was, and it helped you excel, essentially, because you already have an idea. Then they had the SAT prep. Back then, it was very uncommon for eighth graders to take the SAT. They usually didn’t offer it until you got to tenth grade or something like that. We were taking the SAT as eighth graders, so we saw where we were. By the time it really counted and the numbers were official, you were good to go. I thought that program was really wonderful, and that stamped me in STEM. I 00:32:00knew that’s what I was going to do forever.  Daniel: That’s amazing. This program ran from eighth grade to only ninth grade, or did it run throughout your entire high school?  Candice: Yeah, I think I did MSEN in all four years because by the time I was ready to go to college, part of the program’s requirement was that I had to apply and be accepted to four schools. Yeah. Isn’t that crazy, like, you better get in at least four. But it made sense. After all that time they had prepped you, you should have been in a good position to get into at least four schools. So yeah. I 00:33:00went all four years, and at the end, I applied to the four schools and went on to college and everything.  Daniel: Okay. During those Saturdays where you were doing the different activities, was there a particular activity that stood out to you, a particular concept or science experiment or something that you were doing that particularly stuck out to you during the program?  Candice: The one that I remember the most--I should have brought the picture--but I have a picture that they took of me when they were introducing careers to us in one segment. Every week it would be a different professional. One week, it may be pharmacy; another week, it may be radiologists 00:34:00or something. But this one Saturday, they brought in a Black male cardiologist. He put some x-rays up, and I was just completely blown away. I had not seen a Black doctor per se. I knew they existed, but my doctor--my pediatrician--wasn’t Black. He was an old white man. My whole adolescent years, I went to the same doctor. And they captured a picture of him explaining something to me because I had asked a question, and he told me to come up to the board, and he was explaining it to me, and they snapped a picture. It always stuck in my head that there’s nothing you can’t do. They 00:35:00are giving us the opportunity to be exposed to people who our family members may not have been able to expose us to because they didn’t have that reach or exposure themselves. I thought that was really important, and it jumped out because that was kinda how my mom felt about education. She didn’t really care what you did. She just wanted to make sure that you are exposed to as many things, so that you can make an informed decision. With that, I did a lot of things that my cousins and family members never thought we could do. My high school had a Latin program--a Latin class. Foreign language was kinda important to them, so 00:36:00they were like, you need to learn a foreign language. I should have listened to my mom and taken Spanish, not knowing that it would be America’s second language twenty years later. But I took French, but they’re in the romance family, so I’m good, I can figure out the two either way. And they had a Latin class, and I told her, one year, I was like, I’m going to take Latin because all medical terms are root words of Latin, and she was like, go for it. I took Latin for two, three years, I joined the Latin club, did the regional Latin competitions--like at UNC Chapel Hill, they held one in the regional competition there--I wore the toga, we did the whole nine, everything. I loved it. But I think it was all about exposure. So, as long as--whether you want to do STEM or not--you’re 00:37:00exposed and can see what’s out there, I think that’s just as important as picking what you’re going to actually do. That one instance stood out, and it did solidify, okay, I think I’m really going to commit to a biology degree, when I get to undergrad. On my transcript, I even think it said pre-med. Little did I know, that was not what I was gonna do.  Daniel: It’s true, from what I’ve seen and heard as well, that a lot of biology majors start off as pre-med, and then they find environmental science, soil science or something like that. They just branch off; it’s like, I never really wanted to do pre-med. This is where I’m going now. I’ve seen that a lot myself, and it’s quite amazing, honestly.  00:38:00Candice: Yes. I came through undergraduate during that period of…professors had no problem with giving you a drop slip really quick early in the semester. Kids today think cancel culture is canceling folks from whatever they’re trying to show the world, but professors were the first cut-throat cancel culture folks okay. Ask any engineering student. I mean, they were quick to say, oh, you didn’t do well on the first assignment? Well, engineering may not be for you. They were doing that during that period, even for pre-med students, and I went to a kinda liberal arts college; I went to UNC [University of North Carolina] Greensboro. They had a nursing school and a nursing program as well, so all of the nursing students 00:39:00and pre-med students took the classes together. After sophomore year, nursing students would apply, try to get in, and they keep going and go off on a different way. When I tell you, we were dropping like flies because those classes were cutting left and right. I mean, I know it’s bad to call them weed courses, but they really did weed. I think it’s good, and I think it’s bad. I think it’s good because, personally, I don’t want a doctor who made Cs, so that’s fair to say. But on the other side of the spectrum, I know that there were people who probably would have been the best doctors--even with Cs--because of how they learned and what they could understand and the bedside manners and things like that. So, I’m not always one to say, oh, 00:40:00you couldn’t make the cut, so see you later. I look at as, what’s missing? What didn’t they get? What resources did they not have that could have made them successful? Not just automatically, hey, you didn’t make the grade, goodbye. Pick another major; start over. That’s what happened to me, when I got to UNC Greensboro. I’d taken my introductory classes, did well, got on the dean’s list, sophomore year I was like, oh, I can relax a little bit. No, I was so wrong. It ramped up, it doubled, and I was like, yeah, this is not for me. I knew that doctors went to school after undergrad, but when they started telling us the math of what all needed to be done, 00:41:00I was like, four years--twice as hard as what I’m doing right now--then three years after that just to specialize with children? I’m good. I’m thinking, I won’t get to start my career until ten years after this? No, thank you. I’m bowing out gracefully. I appreciate it. But the crazy thing is, the stubborn part of me was, I’m getting a biology degree, though. I won’t be pre-med. When I thought about changing my major, I had no idea what to change it to. No idea because I had done STEM all the way up, and I had taken the math and the calculus and the trigonometry and all this, and I’m like, but what am I going to do switching to African American studies? What am I supposed to do with all this stuff that I did in my high school? 00:42:00I was like, I’m not throwing that away. I’m just going to tough it through this biology degree, cry the whole way, make whatever grades I’m going to make, and get the piece of paper, and that’s what I did. It was very grueling for me because I was very sheltered. I grew up in a really religious household; my mother was very religious. She did not allow any foolishness whatsoever; she was very strict. I didn’t date until sixteen. I didn’t go to house parties. I could not go to the basketball games during the week unless it was on Thursday night because it was almost the end of the week, so I couldn’t go to the Tuesday night basketball game. She did not listen to secular music, 00:43:00so I was very limited to what I could listen to on the radio. I was the kid that when ”Martin” came out and then “Living Color,” had no clue what those jokes were about, when they came back to school on Friday, and everybody’s cracking the jokes, and I’m just sitting there like, okay, ha, ha, ha. I missed it. She did not allow it. She just didn’t allow me to watch that. So, I grew up watching “The Cosby Show,” ”A Different World,” stuff like that. She was very strict in what she allowed us to do. So, when I got to college, I had fun; I stayed out; 00:44:00I mean, my curfew was ten o’clock in high school. I was like, how do you give somebody your car and make the curfew at ten o’clock? That’s just wrong. I got to college; I had fun;  I had a lot of fun, but I also knew I needed to graduate because my parents were paying for it out of pocket. They had saved up, so that I could go. But it was grueling for me because I was not sure what I wanted to do, and it took me those extra years to kinda figure it out. I just didn’t like it. I’m doing this degree; I know I don’t want to be a biologist. I’m gonna stay in STEM, but I’m not starting over with chemistry or physics or something else. I graduated in six and half years ‘cause I took a break, and then I went back because I wasn’t sure, and then I took a class here and there to finish the degree. By the time I finished, I was really not sure 00:45:00what I was gonna do at all. But by that time my mother was working at EPA [the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency]. She’d gotten a job at EPA. She was administrative assistant; she had transitioned there from the VA [Veterans’ Administration], and she knew a lady who was putting on an internship program. She asked her--her name is Doris Maxwell--can my daughter interview for the internship? She has a biology degree; she may be a good fit. When I interviewed with Miss Maxwell, she asked me, what do you want to do? I literally sat in her office and said, I have no clue. She said, well, how do you feel about chemistry? I was like, well, I did TA [serve as teaching assistant] a couple of organic labs. That’s the ironic thing about this. I 00:46:00didn’t like the classes, but I loved the labs. I was one of those students. I was like, can I just get some pictures and videos that go with this text stuff, and I can go do the lab? I TA’d labs for general chemistry and organic chemistry for two years or so. Even in the summers, I did it because I enjoyed it. I said, well, I think I can do some chemistry stuff. I’ve got enough background; I ended up finishing the biology degree with a minor in chemistry because I had taken enough classes. She said, okay, well, I know someone who may be willing to take a student and apply, and we’ll see. They always do the we’ll see; they won’t tell you yes. I waited, and I got the internship, and I got to work in the National 00:47:00Health Effects Environmental Research Lab, NHEERL, with Dr. Steven Nesnow. And it was the best internship I’ve ever had. Ever. Not just because of who he was--who I later found out who he was--but because he had a very diverse group of researchers. That was my first exposure to how different researchers do their work. His lab technician,who was in charge of all his instruments in his lab, was like a white redneck. Great big ol’ white guy. Redneck. I mean, going out to do snuff and smoke and coming back kind of guy. His postdoc was this Indonesian guy who would 00:48:00present, and we could never understand what he said. But we could follow his pictures. And Dr. Nesnow could understand exactly what he said. When I talked with the guy one on one, I would be like, okay, I got it. But when he would present, I had no clue what he was saying. Then he had an Indian associate that worked under him as well. But no women and no other people of color. I was really surprised that he agreed to bring me in to his program and be my mentor for that summer. But I, later on, found out it was because he just loved environmental chemistry. He worked on drinking water disinfection byproducts. He had been 00:49:00one of the founders of that division of EPA from 1970 when it was formed. I was like, I’m working with like the godfather here and had no clue, right? Because he was humble; he did pottery; he made his own pottery and stuff like that. I was like, Candice, you had no clue who you were working under! And I would see people come to him with much respect and not understand where that was coming from because, by the time I started interning with him, he was already in his sixties. So, I had a really great internship, and after that summer was over, I was like, I’m in it. Environmental science, environmental chemistry, that’s what I’m doing forever. I did a presentation under his program, and another researcher in another division at EPA saw my presentation 00:50:00and said, do you want to work as a student contractor? Because at that point, I had a biology degree, but I needed an environmental science degree. I went back to school, and I went to my dad’s school, North Carolina Central University--an HBCU--and I got a second undergraduate [degree] in environmental science. I was like, this is the best thing ever, graduated cum laude, the whole nine. I was like, I’m in it to win it right now. This is what I’m doing. But I didn’t have that before. I didn’t feel that way about the biology degree before. I finished interning and started the program when the other researcher asked me to join her lab as a student contractor. I stayed there five years. I did student contracting 00:51:00one year. I did the second undergrad in about a year and a half. When I finished that, the whole time I was working with Elin Ulrich, she said, you need to get a master’s degree, and I was like, no, I’m good with the school thing. I’ll figure something out. She was like, no, you need to go get a master’s degree because you can do this. I was like, hmm. So, I went ahead and applied, I did the master’s in earth science and concentrated in environmental chemistry at NCCU because they did not have a master’s environmental science program. But the earth science program did. So, that’s where I was able to really hone some of my analytical skills. Instead of just knowing how to 00:52:00work in a lab, I learned how to do research in a lab, rules for research at the regulatory level. Also, that’s where I got the chance to take classes at all the schools in the consortium. My master’s degree was a full ride. My advisor had gotten Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation [LSAMP] Bridge to Doctorate funding for twelve of us. She paid for twelve of us to get our master’s degrees. In that consortium, because NCCU was the only HBCU, I believe, that NSF funded in that consortium for that Bridge to Doctorate, I was able to take classes at Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, 00:53:00that I would not have been exposed to otherwise. I thought that was invaluable because how classes are taught at an HBCU and at PWIs--or predominantly white institutions--is different. It’s very different. I needed that exposure because, little did I know, they were grooming me to get a Ph.D. I was like, I’m good; didn’t I tell you all I was done with the school thing? They were like, no, you’re not done. I got the master’s. I was still working at EPA the whole time. I don’t know how I did that, but I worked it out to where I had a memorandum of understanding between EPA and NCCU, where EPA paid for all my supplies--let me use their instruments--to do my master’s thesis. I 00:54:00kinda combined the two, and everybody agreed. It was beautiful for me because I could work and make money and still have my degree being paid. I just kept that train going. I learned as much as I could; I did as much field work as I could. I was in the method development application branch; that name is now changed. Everything that they could teach me about how to develop analytical methods for compounds, I soaked it up because I knew that was invaluable, and I could use it anywhere in my future, even though I didn’t know where that was going to be at the time. Finishing the master’s, once again, I said, okay, thank you all; life is great; done with the degree. They were like, no, you’re getting a Ph.D. I was like, okay, this is where I draw the line. I tried. 00:55:00I really tried, but they said no. They were like, if you don’t leave here and get that Ph.D. and come back, we’re gonna be highly disappointed. It was a hard decision for me because I had no blueprint. Nobody on either side of my family had advanced degrees. Nobody. I literally was moving blind. My friends--not even my cousins--my cousins have bachelor’s degrees, but nobody had a master’s degree or anything else beyond that. I was very nervous about taking on a Ph.D. with no guidance. But, as I said, my mother raised us very religious, and I--one hundred percent--adhere 00:56:00to my faith and so, I said, okay, if this is what You want me to do--if this is the direction I’m supposed to go in life--then that’s what I’m going to do. I had a friend that was doing a master’s program; we did the LSAMP together. She was chemistry, and I was environmental science, earth science. When I think back on it, it’s hard to believe that I was doing this. On Saturdays, we’d get together, and we made a list of all the schools that had both chemistry and environmental science programs, so we could go together. We were almost thirty doing this. We were in our late twenties--we’re not twelve--but we were nervous. The other piece was that my EPA family said, you have to leave North Carolina. 00:57:00I was like, y’all have lost your mind. Why would I do that? I have Duke right here; I have Carolina here. The next step from that is Ivy League, and that is not me, so why would I leave? They were like, you have to get a different taste of education. You have to experience education in a different setting, at a different place, in a different climate, blah, blah, blah. I said, okay. We looked at all the schools. I looked at all the schools that had environmental science and environmental engineering. My dad had a mechanic’s license. He’s big NASCAR, race car family on his side. He’s had a 1953 Chevy truck that he has modified and upgraded and changed engines 00:58:00and put power steering in. I grew up tinkering with him a lot, so when somebody was like, oh, pass me the torque wrench, I actually know what that is. I was that girl who was always with her dad and did things with her dad under the car and learned how to change a tire, all that kinda stuff. I learned how to play golf, everything. With all of that, I felt I probably could do engineering because, back then, environmental science was kind of new in a way that departments were putting it in a box all of its own. Environmental science was usually kinda coupled with environmental engineering or a whole other discipline. I looked at programs that were environmental 00:59:00science and environmental engineering because I thought I had enough math and science background that I could probably pull off two or three classes of engineering and hang. Two of the classes I’d taken at Duke cross-referenced with chemical engineering. I did okay in those so I was like, I could probably learn the engineering and still do this together all in one instead of separate. But, I’d have to spend a year taking courses. I was just like, I’d have to start at, what is engineering? I was so beyond that. I was like, I can’t do this. I’ve worked in the field for five years. I don’t think I could go back that elementary.

Daniel: Did 01:00:00you have engineers as research mentors or faculty mentors, as you were coming up?  Candice: No, of course not! None whatsoever. I just looked at it from the sense of, if I can do these classes and do this math, I can do the fabrication and stuff, too. I’m a pretty good tinkerer, D.I.Y. [“Do it yourself”]er. You’re just teaching me the fundamentals of how to do it. At the time I was like, I can probably do this. But once they said I’d have to take a year worth of engineering courses, I was done. I was like, no, I’m good. Plus, in that one year of courses, because I was not a chemistry major, there were some things that I didn’t 01:01:00get under my belt that I probably should have. I didn’t never have to take physical chemistry; I didn’t take thermodynamics, but I understood it. I had done some of it, and I’d used some of it. I would have had to take all of those, in addition to the environmental science courses and the engineering courses because I really wanted to make sure I had a good grasp of the subject. I wanted to make sure that I was gonna be an expert at it. So, no, I didn’t have any guidance. That’s why I said on Saturdays, we would literally get together; we’d get on our laptops, and we would comb the schools’ pages. We made lists of requirements; what we’d have to do to get in, what their requirement was to get us in, what classes we’d have to take. We sat down 01:02:00and compared our lists. She worked on chemistry, and I worked on environmental science. We’d put them together and say, what schools are we gonna apply to? We applied to Ohio State; I applied to University of Arizona, and that was a long shot because I was like, I don’t wanna go to Arizona, but the program looked really good, so I was like, I think I could do this. We looked at Rice. We did look at Duke, but we knew we couldn’t afford it, but we thought we’d look anyway; we could wish. Then we both looked at A&T--North Carolina Agriculture and Technical State University--because A&T had a really good engineering program, but their environmental science program was only a year and a half old. We applied. She got into Ohio State; I got in with conditions. I had to take the GRE [Graduate Record Examinations] because my score wasn’t that good. I 01:03:00wasn’t good at standardized tests. I’m like, just give me a regular test. Don’t have me under the clock. But I got in, and I think I may have had one or two classes they would want me to take or something like that, but no funding. She had one-year funding, and she’d have to apply later. We both got into A&T. I got into Arizona and didn’t know. I just got a call from my soon-to-be-advisor who said, we have money for all four years or five years and another principal investigator is interested in you, and he’s in environmental chemistry. I was like, jackpot! I’m out 01:04:00of here! Where’s this? Where is Tucson? I, literally, was like, let me Google where Tucson is because I did not know. I said, let me think about this because then all those factors flooded in. I’m gonna be--at the time I think it was--thirteen hundred miles away from family. I didn’t know a soul; I didn’t know anybody. I was really taking a gamble. But talked with my parents, and then I just, I’m gonna do it. I asked my soon-to-be advisor about a visit because I was like, I can’t go in totally blind. He was like, I don’t have funding for a visit; you have to come out on your own. I was like, is this gonna be like HBCUs, where they’re 01:05:00playing with your money sometimes? I was like, I can’t do that this far away from home. I talked my parents into helping me fund because, mind you, I’m still a grad student, so I don’t have much, even though I’m on scholarship. I was like, can you help me get out there, they said, sure. My mom and I go out to visit. I was like, it’s gonna be bleak, but I’ll be all right. I come back, and my essential master’s advisor said, did you go out there and visit the school? I said, yeah. She said, okay; you think you’re gonna go? Because this is a Bridge to Doctorate. So, per the requirements, we were supposed to bridge to a doctorate program. Out of our cohort of twelve, only three bridged. She didn’t know at the time her numbers weren’t gonna be that great. So, 01:06:00she asked all of us, what are you doing next? When she found out I was really considering doing the Ph.D., when I got back from the trip, she gave me the money back for that trip because she was like, I believe in you doing this. So I went. We drove across the country; I joined the soil, water, and environmental science program at the University of Arizona. Then that just kept leading to this trajectory of where I am today.

Daniel: Yeah, that’s amazing! What was your thesis for your master’s program? What did you focus on there?  Candice: I was in the methods development 01:07:00application branch, and our jobs were to update EPA’s compendium methods. I did a lot of analysis with pesticides. All types of pesticides, organocides, fungicides, acaricides, all of them. What I was trying to do was to see if a post-column derivatization method could better quantify and identify a group of pyrethroids--which is permethrin-- for that method, for the compendiums as group of compounds, not a singular compound. TLC--or thin-layer chromatography--was part of that. That was my whole thesis. Can 01:08:00I improve the method and use this approach to see if it works?  Daniel: Okay. Coming from that, did you build off of that going into your Ph.D. program, or was it a completely new project and new idea?  Candice: Yeah, a completely new project, completely new idea. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got out there. That was the crazy thing. Principal investigators tell you, I have funding for this project, but my advisor brought me out because of my analytical skills, not necessarily because I was this stellar student. I had good grades, don’t get me wrong, but I was brought out because I had other skills, in addition to good grades and could complete a program. I worked on four different projects, before I figured out 01:09:00what I wanted my Ph.D. dissertation to be on. Because none of them jumped out at me, such that I was like, I want to spend the next three years eating, sleeping and breathing this. It took me a little while to get into what I ended up doing, which is like phytoremediation. His whole program was remediation, vadose zone remediation, contaminant transport, which I loved. I got to work on a lot of different projects. I did one on concrete. A student from France came over during Thanksgiving, and we did some analysis with contaminants moving through concrete. Then I did some stuff with nitrates and interference and chlorinated contaminants. I did another one 01:10:00with soil gas, TCE soil gas, another chlorinated contaminant. From that, I was able to piece together my dissertation to be on chlorinated contaminants in the vadose and using plants to screen for contamination, and that’s what got my Ph.D. work completed. The phyto-screening work at superfund sites. But it was very different from pesticides. In that project, the focus was the analytical method and optimizing the method. In Arizona, it was looking at the whole process. I learned how the contamination starts such that it needs to be remediated. When 01:11:00an expert--an environmental scientist--comes in and does a site assessment, what all those components are, how that data is created, what does it mean from that perspective. So not so much lab-focused but big picture from time of contamination until you’re in the lab analyzing the samples and what it means. It was a much, much broader view. It took me a long time because of my analytical skills, I got stuck one year on a project that wasn’t my Ph.D. because I was an analyst. I spent probably one year of my Ph.D. analyzing about fifteen hundred samples 01:12:00for TCE [trichoroethene], cross-eyed, the whole nine. But I got it done. I got some papers out of it; I was on some papers with it, in addition to my own Ph.D. work, so that was a good thing. Whereas some students just only published the three or four papers from their Ph.D., I walked away from that degree with probably like eight publications because I had worked on so many other little projects as the analyst. They had to put my name on it because I did all that. I was like, hello, you can’t put me in acknowledgments. Thank you very much. I had to get my advisor to correct the girl from France because she put me in acknowledgments in the draft of the paper. He came in one day, and I--a little bit--went off because I was mad, when I saw the draft. I was like, is she serious? I gave up my Thanksgiving for her, 01:13:00and she put me in acknowledgements. Not cool. But he fixed it, so I was good.

Daniel: You finish your master’s in 200-  Candice: 2008.  Daniel: Okay. Then how long were you in your Ph.D. program?  Candice: I graduated in 2014.  Daniel: So six years. Eight publications, six years, that’s amazing.

Candice: Something like that. It may have been around eight. I don’t remember because some of my master’s work was published during that time too. I did work at the university, too. I had three jobs. I forgot about that. I did some environmental justice work on a project 01:14:00at NCCU, in addition to working at EPA, in addition to getting my master’s at EPA. I did all of those all at the same time.  Daniel: Wow.  Candice: That’s right. I would go to EPA from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and then I’d go to NCCU from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. In between, I would take my classes. And because Duke has terrible parking, when I had my classes at Duke, my dad would actually come and pick me up and drop me off and come back and get me. It’s crazy. I did the whole lot, now that I think about it. But I didn’t have anything else to do. At that period of time--I was on the mindset--school is my job. This is my job. Somebody else is paying for it; I am milking this cow all the way. Any program, she 01:15:00said, do this, and you do this. Yep, done. I was very laser-focused. A couple of papers from that NCCU work was published, while I was getting my Ph.D. One was a book chapter that I had done with Elin Ulrich, characterizing probably about eleven hundred pesticide compounds and looking at the chirality that was part of that project. I was still doing that at Arizona when I graduated. That’s what collectively ended up being about eight papers from the time I left until I graduated.  Daniel: Going through your programs--undergrad 01:16:00and grad school, both for your master’s and Ph.D.--you mentioned there are classes taught at the HBCUs and classes taught at PWIs and the difference between them. So could you speak a little bit more about what that difference was to you and what the different feel was between HBCU class teachings and PWI class teachings.  Candice: I think for a long time, it has been very hush hush as to the formula of success at HBCUs, and just in the past few years has it been talked about more. I think that’s good. Not so it can be duplicated because I don’t think you can ever be really, truly duplicated. But that an 01:17:00understanding could be had. It’s mainly, in a figurative sense, they won’t let you fail. They won’t let you fail. If you have come from a challenging background financially, economically, and you get to that school where you hock the car, and your parents got all these loans to get you in that dorm room and registered, they’re going to help you get to the finish line, as long as you’re doing the work. I think that’s something that PWIs don’t have the true formula for. I felt, going through the schools I went to, that I was a unique identifier and a social security member with a dollar amount attached to it. I 01:18:00never felt that I got the support that I really needed to really be successful until I switched. I went from UNC Greensboro to North Carolina Central University, and when I got there, that’s when I realized that they see you working hard and hustling. They will do everything they can to get you to the next stage that you are trying to achieve. It has to be from your initiation. But as long as they see that, they will keep pushing you; they will keep making the doors open all the way up until whenever. There’s no stopping point. I think that’s the difference as well. You go to a PWI; you start as a freshman; you leave as a senior; they keep up with you as alumni. Just keep telling us what you’re doing professionally 01:19:00and come back and give us a talk. I’ve had mentors and advisors still contact me and say, where are you at now? Hey, I know about this program, or, hey, what about this, or, what are you doing? Writing letters still. Just being mentors and me trying to figure out what type of work I want to do. I didn’t get that--I didn’t think--from the PWI. The other piece is how they teach as well. I think sometimes HBCUs teach the fundamentals, but it’s sometimes from a level of experience versus y 01:20:00equals mx plus b; this is what y means; this is what x means. Well, let’s think of an example at a HBCU. This is what the example is, and let’s liken it to this. I think it was more of how the knowledge was transferred--was a little bit different. I’m not saying how PWIs do it is wrong, but I think you can capture more students and engage them more and foster a better learning environment, when you relax some of the restrictions on how you disseminate the information. Sometimes that’s hard to do when you’re talking about thermodynamics. But if you’re in physics 01:21:00and you can liken--because I used to tutor a lot during those years I was an undergrad--I tried to liken--for the younger grades--it to things that they’re familiar with. I could talk to them about, say, for example, angles with roller coasters or shapes. I could talk to them about acceleration and physics concepts with basketball. You can take things that they’re familiar with and apply these fundamental concepts. I didn’t always get that at PWIs, and I think, sometimes, it made it a little bit hard to really learn the information. But I think today that’s what they’re realizing, and I think it’s a little late because 01:22:00now HBCUs are like, well, we’re getting the money now. We’re not aspiring to stand next to you. We’re aspiring to do our own thing, and I think that’s good. But that formula--I felt--was what was missing, what was different. I took the class at Duke--and only a few people I shared this with--I went the entire semester as the only female and the only Black student in that water chemistry class. Nobody spoke to me the whole semester. Not one time, not to study group, not how’s it going. I initiated two or three conversations, got a cold shoulder, and I shut down the whole rest 01:23:00of the semester. I dropped off, picked up, dropped off, picked up. I realized that they were having study groups because our homework was butt-kicking. I mean, she’d assign it on Thursday; I’d start Thursday night, be up until three o’clock Friday morning, do it Friday night. I would literally be up until two and three o’clock in the morning because I didn’t have the engineering background, so I had to learn it, so that I could figure out what the problems were asking me, so I knew how to apply what I had learned in class, and I had no help. I was very frustrated and was like, I’m gonna flunk this class, I’m so gonna flunk this class, and then I’m going to get kicked out of my program. But I realized that I had to figure how to maneuver that. I said, okay, if they won’t talk to me, I’m going to bypass them. I went directly to the professor because she didn’t 01:24:00have a TA, and I would go in her office. I’d stand outside her door for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes until she was done, and I’d go in and ask my questions every week because I was just lost. I just didn’t know what I needed to know. About the fifth or sixth time I did that, she said, Candice, you need to relax. You’re doing fine. You don’t have the engineering base that these other students do, so don’t panic if your grade isn’t on par with the rest of the class. You don’t have that background that they do, so don’t worry about it. I was like, okay, and she’s like, you’re doing the right thing; you keep coming to me. I was like, okay, cool. I was good to go. But it’s those types of interactions I’ve encountered--not the exact same--in a lot of my classes, especially when 01:25:00they were environmental science classes or some of the math classes. There were small groups that don’t want to share what they have. You’d never get that at HBCUs; they shared everything. They don’t want you walking around lost. If you are the person that wasn’t pulling your weight, they would box you out. But if you are on the same plane as everybody else, you didn’t have that happen. So, I think that changed how I looked at education, how I perceived education, and, even now, how I teach.  Daniel: Thank you for sharing that. It’s always nice to hear those experiences people have going between the two types of institutions. 01:26:00And still reflecting back on that experience, I know you mentioned that one with the water chemistry class--that one professor--but were there other professors that served as mentors and helped propel you to stay in this field, know that you’re doing your work in a positive way, and kept you moving forward?  Candice: To be honest, no. I was very self-motivating at that time. To this day, still very headstrong and intentionally had tunnel-vision beelining to that Ph.D. I wasn’t gonna let anyone or anything get in my 01:27:00way of completing it, once I decided I was gonna start. But what I have found was that, because environmental science is white male-dominated, I found, as they call them today, allies, I guess you could say, or professors who saw what I was doing and were like, she’s on the right track. We’re gonna support her, but not publicly. If that makes sense. I did have a few professors in the Ph.D. program, including my current mentor, who was my advisor then, he still mentors me today because I told him he had to--I didn’t give him an option--were working on my behalf from the beginning, but it was behind the scenes, that 01:28:00was not overtly seen by all of their colleagues. Funding that I didn’t even know about until I got to Arizona--for it being a minority-serving institution--he had gotten Sloan fellowship money. I had a whole scholarship for all five years; I stretched it five years. It was a lump sum--I stretched over that time period--that I didn’t know about it until I had already started. I got to campus; he said, I know about some other funding that I’m working with. Here, fill this form out. And then two days later, I get a letter in the mail for like $40,000, and I’m like, are you serious? Did you just drop that like it was, sign right here and you’re good? But I had a few of those things happen, when I first got to Arizona, and 01:29:00I think that’s really important, having those types of people in those places, even if you don’t see them or know what they’re doing, but they’re working on your behalf, and I think that was really important. My Ph.D. advisor wasn’t always clear in his support, verbally, but he always showed it, and that meant a lot to me. Not only was he a great researcher and advisor, he was fair and still is, I think, to this day. Sometimes, I’d get a little frustrated because he wasn’t as aggressive like, can you shut that student down they’re over there acting crazy, are you just going to let them get crazy over there? But it wasn’t my lab, so I’m not in charge. But 01:30:00other than him and maybe one or two others at the University of Arizona, he was my only mentor. He was the only person that I went to for advice and navigating because there wasn’t anybody else at the time. I didn’t have any affiliations with other universities. I would talk to my old advisors at North Carolina Central here and there, but it was just him. I was very, very fortunate that I picked the right advisor and program.  Daniel: What was his name again?  Candice: Dr. Mark Brusseau.

Daniel: Mark Brusseau.  Candice: He’s still there now. I’m still doing research with him to this day. We just talked about working on a vapor intrusion paper.

Daniel: Nice. A 01:31:00 few 01:32:00more questions that I’m thinking about as you were talking. Now, you’re a lecturer at University of Maryland, College Park, coming out of your Ph.D. program. When you talk about your science--soil chemistry, environmental chemistry, phytoremediation--what is the beauty or the amazement you see in this field? Whether it’s about your own work or just to the field in general. What inspires you to continue on doing this type of research?  Candice: The beauty that I see in it is that environmental science is such a broad term, and it’s so interdisciplinary. As I was matriculating through programs, I would see the research as very siloed. I’ve never felt that environmental science was siloed like that because my experience wasn’t siloed. I did everything from environmental justice, water samples, soil samples, air samples. I looked at aldehydes and air in an environmental justice community, Superfund site. In 01:33:00ten years or so. I did not see environmental science as being so one-dimensional as it sometimes was shown. You had to be in environmental chemistry or environmental physics or soil science or environmental soil science. I just didn’t believe that, and I didn’t experience it. I felt that I wanted to make sure that if a student had a glimpse of interest, that they got the full picture and that any part of it you could take and learn something from, and make it interesting to you. For example, when I left Arizona, I took a research hiatus. I had a second child. I 01:34:00was not in my field for two years. Some people think that’s career suicide, but I’m a big family person, as I said in the very beginning. Nothing comes before that. I needed a mental break--by that time I had my daughter-- so I took a break, and I took some time to reflect on what exactly it was that I wanted to do. I thought I was gonna go back and work at EPA, but during that period, I thought anything, research-wise, that comes to me, I will consider it, whether it’s in my direct wheelhouse or not. If I can apply it in a way that interests me, then I can make it interest someone else.  So, the New York African Burial Ground Project came 01:35:00up. Dr. Fatimah Jackson--who’s anthropology, UMD College Park emeritus--was at Howard University. I went to University of Arizona with her daughter, Latifah. I met her there, and we stayed in contact. So when I moved to Maryland, she’s like, what, you’re in Maryland? Let’s do something. I was like, research? Okay, let’s do it. I hadn’t read a paper, article. I was in Pampers and baby books mode. I had to drag my brain 180 to get back into science research. But she had this project she told me that Dr. Jackson was working on, and she wanted to know if a soil chemistry component could be applied to it. They sent me the information. I took a look at it, and I was like, this is a stretch. I don’t know. Could I pull this off? After 01:36:00I thought about it and did some thinking, I said, yeah, we can make this work, and it started. I did not even have the job at UMD yet. I was working pro bono. I didn’t get paid for any of it. I just did some of the preliminary stuff, and she invited me to do a symposium talk on what we had done during that period at Howard because she’s now at Howard. I went and did that talk. Come to find out, her husband, Bob Jackson, was the chair of the food and nutritional science in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. He saw my talk. He was like, my colleague in the environmental science and technology 01:37:00department needs a soil chemist; you need to go talk to him. I’m gonna set it up and make it happen. That’s how I got the job at UMD teaching the soil chemistry class. It was a bit of a shock, so you caught the real rough versions of the class because they literally gave me a month to put it together. I’m pulling stuff from what Dr. James did--Bruce James did--and my experience with John Chorover’s soil and water chemistry class that I took at University of Arizona. I was like, I’m gonna pull all the pieces together, and I’m gonna make something shape because I have a job now. And that’s what I did. That soil chemistry project came about before I got to UMD. But I knew that it was gonna be something good; I just didn’t know it would be as great as it was. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. But once I got going, and 01:38:00things started to fall in line, and I had a really good student from Howard that worked on it, Carter, then it was smooth sailing.

Daniel: His full name was Carter Clinton?  Candice: Yes.  Daniel: Okay. Carter Clinton. Like I said, off-screen before, very interesting project. Were any of the results you found towards the completion of that project surprising, interesting? If you could just give a few more details just for the record about that project and what it entailed as well.  Candice: I can give you the short version. The New York African Burial Ground Project is owned by National Park Services housed in New York. They loaned the collection 01:39:00of bones and soils to Howard University for research purposes--that’s how Carter got access to the soil samples. The history was that, in 1991, the State of New York was building a new federal building, and when they started excavating and digging, they found the site. They immediately stopped, anthropologists and researchers went in, collected those samples, and put them in cloth bags in 1991, and they sat in those cloth bags until Carter started that project. You have some soil chemistry background now, you can imagine anything volatile, gone. Anything else that was maybe 01:40:00in a saturation or liquid state absorbed into this copper material, and so what we’re left with is the soil and the cloth material. I come in on the project, I say, everything needs to be moved to glass amber bottles, please. Thank you. They did that, but these samples are from descendants from a burial ground that was given to freed Africans by the Dutch during that time period--the late 1600s to early 1800s--and this was a location where they were allowed to bury their loved ones. It was a terrible location because, at the time, New York City was swampy, and it was also a dumping site 01:41:00for a kiln that was nearby. So, the idea was that, if DNA is gone from these samples because these were the burial soils of interred individuals, what can it tell us? In the course of Carter doing his project, I had to learn a lot, too. My background is organics, not inorganics. I did a steep learning curve on what metals can tell us about individuals, and that’s how we got to the concept of the ratios of certain metals giving you indicators of diet. That just being a small picture of information about them from an anthropological perspective, but I wanted to take that out of the narrative because I knew that Dr. Jackson 01:42:00and Carter could easily tell that story as biologists and anthropologists. I wanted us to tell the story from a soil chemistry-only perspective, and that’s what we did in the paper. We tried to say, with these concentrations of arsenic or lead or strontium--we did calcium, iron; we actually identified fifteen metals, but we could only quantify those five that were presented--what can this tell us about what they were eating? We know from other research that the ratios can tell you if it’s a highly vegetable diet, or if they did have some small amounts of protein or nuts. That’s what we were trying to tell, some sort of story about who they were as individuals, and then he was going to continue and look at microbial 01:43:00DNA, what kind of microbes were present and that telling a story about what they may have been exposed to that may have caused their death. Was it like typhoid or yellow fever or something like that? That was another component, and the third component was the geospatial analysis, which he didn’t quite get to finish because, from a soil’s perspective, at these different depths, different minerals could have been in higher concentration and more highly present. What does that mean? Could that have interfered with the results that we got based on these different depths? The next step was to do chemical analysis on those same samples. What we did was noninvasive with the portable X-ray fluorescence analyzer, so we basically took a 01:44:00picture of the soil and was able to quantify concentrations, but now, we needed to do a chemical analysis to verify that. That’s the next step, and then we can keep telling a story. We can keep giving information about what happened to these people so long ago. I thought it was a really cool project, so I was like, we need to keep working on this one. This is really good. It’s like reading a novel. Flipping pages.  Daniel: I was gonna say that as well. Reading the paper and learning about history from a soil chemistry perspective, again, was fascinating.  Candice: It hasn’t really been done. There are two journals that combine--think it was called Archaeometry, and there was another 01:45:00journal that combined archaeology and chemistry or archaeology and biology, and I was like, this paper is too good. It does not fit in this. He didn’t even have that many references in that paper because there wasn’t much that didn’t focus on just the bones. That’s a whole subject, in and of itself, looking at the bones, but we weren’t looking at bones, we were just looking at the soil. That’s it. I thought it was really cool; this is something wonderful. We can do this; we can get some people to give us some money to do it, too.

Daniel: Yes. That’s the best part.  Candice: Right.  Daniel: You alluded to this in the beginning of our talk 01:46:00saying you started off as a lecturer at University of Maryland, but starting August first, you’re changing into assistant professorship role. Coming down on that tenure-track path, is this the path you’ve always wanted to go down, or, at least, been seeing for some time now? Was this the ideal course you were foreseeing, when you first started at University of Maryland, and where do you hope it’ll go from here?

Candice: To answer the first part, was it where I thought I would end up being, when I started at Maryland? No. I 01:47:00was planning to go back and work for the government and finish my years there. I actually was contracted to only work until they hired a soil chemist, so there was really no intention for my position to extend beyond one or two years because they were gonna get a soil chemist, and they have now. I didn’t necessarily see it, but as I’ve said throughout the interview, I get to a stopping place and something else says, you’re not done. You’re going to go and do this, and it’s never me. That’s the irony. It’s never me saying, this is your next move. To me, that’s my faith telling me where I’m supposed to be. I didn’t 01:48:00talk much about it, but I tutored second, third, all the way up to sixth graders, all of my undergraduate years and master’s years, and I loved it. I loved it, and I did it for many years for free because I just enjoyed it that much. I always felt like I would be in a position where I was helping the next generation reach their goals, but I did not know what that’d look like. I thought it would be working some program within a federal agency to help students learn about the careers or something like that maybe, in addition to being a scientist or a researcher. But I did not see me being an assistant professor. I thought it was quite overwhelming, even when the conversation started, because 01:49:00the old school way of thinking is very strong in our department. Women can’t have a whole family and young children and still be successful; it’s just too much. I’d heard some of that rhetoric, and I was thinking, well, do I want to work at that level? Can I work at that level? You ask yourself these questions, but at the end of the day, I am tasked with sharing my talents. That’s what I was taught in my faith. I’m tasked with sharing my talents, and if my talent is education and teaching, and this is where I’ve moved over these last fifteen years, then, clearly, this is where I’m supposed to be. That’s how I looked at it. Once the opportunity 01:50:00was mentioned, I did some more thinking about it and said, I so could kill this. I could really do this. Just like I had with the master’s degree, just like I had with the Ph.D. It’s the same mindset. You set the goal, and you pursue it until you reach it. Once the conversation was had, I talked with our chair, and he was like, I want you to do this, and I was like, let me think about it maybe. And he was like, no, you can do this, and I was like, yes. Then I got to thinking about the whole purpose that you’re doing this interview. There are no African American faculty in the department, and it’s 2021, and that really bothered me. But then the other piece of me is, in the course of my education, I was a lot of firsts, 01:51:00and I didn’t always like it. It’s not always being the first to do it because now you’re the blueprint, and the pressure is always really high. The stakes are always so high because you have to succeed. It can be a bit overwhelming and deflating, as it relates to how fun it could actually be, when all that’s off the table. You’re just doing the work. You’re just enjoying the research. You’re just working with students. You’re meeting some really cool people, that kind of thing. I thought on it, and I went ahead and said, okay. Well, God, if this is what You want me to do, then this is what I’ll do. Once I went ahead and agreed to it, then the concern was how they were gonna make it happen because we had a soil chemist coming, and I was part of that search process and 01:52:00knew he was coming. Then I’m like, what are we doing with me, again? Do I need to find a job? I actually had gone and found a job at EPA. Got an offer, the whole nine, was like, what are we doing? They were like, no, no, no what are you doing? I’m like, wait, what are y’all doing? It was one of those situations. Once we got past it, they really committed because I’m one of those, if you say you’re going to do it, you have to come through. There’s no, oops. We didn’t get to. No, this is my livelihood. Once that was confirmed, I went ahead and tried to get things in place, tried to get more publications, tried to get more funding because I was in a lecturer position. I was really outside of what the parameters were of my job, but my contract said I could do it, so I’d done some 01:53:00of that.  By the time UMD was blessed to have a Black male president who decided to put $40 million toward an initiative to increase diversity amongst tenure and tenure-track, he opened the door, and we ran right through it. Literally one of the first applicants. I got some good support from faculty, and I learned some more about our faculty. Once again, sometimes people who are not of color don’t want their peers to see them working on their behalf of people of color, and to me, that’s fundamentally a problem. If you want someone to succeed, it does not matter what color they are. If you are working in diversity, equity, inclusion and respect, and you are not of color, but it is in your heart to do it, you can be nominated for an award to do it. You’re doing the work! 01:54:00You deserve your accolades! It doesn’t matter what color you are, but I think sometimes they don’t want their peers to see them working, helping. That’s crap to me! Because, just like all the literature has been saying since the early 2000s, excluding people of color from science conversations means you’re excluding the innovators. You’re excluding perspectives. You’re excluding experiences. I mean, come on. Does that make sense, if you’re trying to be innovative? If you’re trying to move the field forward? You’re trying to get on the international map? How can you get on the international map, and you’re excluding whole groups of people? That just doesn’t make sense to me. Fortunately, there were some people who were willing to do some of that work with me. We 01:55:00got the application in, out of eighteen, I believe, that applied, only seven were funded in this first cohort, and I was one of the seven. Thank you. I appreciate it. You won’t regret it. I promise you. That’s how I looked at it. I still hear the rhetoric, oh, the stakes are high. You’re the first, and you’re the this, and you’re the that. I had to drown out the noise because, at the end of the day, I don’t think me being the first is what’s most important. I think what’s most important is the mindset change of those who are in the field--seeing the value of me being in the room and those coming after me being in the room or being allowed to be in the room. Not that I’m the first in the room. I couldn’t care less, to be quite honest. I 01:56:00rather they don’t even put that on as part of the conversation. But the fact that there are senior faculty and personnel who now see the value of someone who doesn’t look like them in conversations about science. That’s kinda where it is now. I’ve been given a great opportunity, and as I said, I’m taking it, and I’m bursting the door down. That’s the plan at least. I’ll welcome anyone else who wants to bust the door down! Bring it on. Come on; we can do it. It’s 2021. I mean, what are we waiting for here?  Daniel: Well, again, I heard about UMD’s new president because he was the Dean of the College for Engineering, when I was there. I heard about that, but I did not hear about 01:57:00the funding he put out for diversifying the faculty which is--

Candice: Putting his money where his mouth is.

Daniel: Yes. That is spectacular.  Candice: They just hired another dean in engineering from Georgia Tech? One of the Georgia schools.  Daniel: I do remember Georgia Tech. We can look at that.  Candice: He’s not playing, and this is serious! This is for real, and it’s not just engineering; it’s not just STEM. It’s across the board. I was really happy and surprised that that was one of the first things he’s done. He came in during COVID-19, but in a year--fifteen months, sixteen months--done. Already got the first cohort in. I 01:58:00think that’s wonderful.  Daniel: We’re coming towards the end. Time flies!

Candice: I know I was talking a lot, but it is fine.

Daniel: This is perfect, and the last question I’ll ask is, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave with either students or other faculty or whoever may be watching or reading this in the future? Is there something else you wanted to share and leave in this discussion for those who may be watching later?  Candice: I mentioned it to you, and I was supposed to send you the articles about some of those recordings that they did of former slaves. I forgot to send it to you, when you first mentioned it, but I’m really happy that the principal investigators of this project see 01:59:00the value in this knowledge-sharing because, a lot of times, we don’t know other people’s stories. We just see where they are at that point in time, and what I’d like someone twenty or thirty years from now to get is that any individual who has broken some sort of barriers or surpassed what was expected of them did not do it unscathed. It takes a lot of mental fortitude to push back and push past naysayers or people who don’t think you’re capable of doing something or don’t think you have the skill set or don’t think your background is strong enough 02:00:00or any of those obstacles. But you have to remember, if it’s in your heart and in your spirit that it’s what you’re supposed to be doing, go for it and drown the noise. Because the greats never took the easy path. Michael Jackson didn’t take the easy path. He worked like crazy, from five all the way up to be in the greatest. In any discipline, in any genre, in any topic, the greats never had the easy path. I think that if you want to make an impact and put a stamp on your legacy, then keep that in mind. Just keep pressing because you always have the rewards. Growing up in the south, my mom 02:01:00would say to me all the time, only what you do for Christ will last. She meant that in the sense that anything that I do in honor to Him or for Him is going to better me and my generation and my legacy and my children. Personally, that’s how I move, and that’s whether it’s professionally as well. So, all the decisions that you make, you may be nervous about, keep that in mind. If you’re doing it for a good cause, for a good reason, and you see the outcome will be the betterment of others or people generally, do it. Take the leap; go for it. I think that’s what everyone should aspire to do.  Daniel: Awesome. That was something I needed to hear for myself. Thank you 02:02:00for sharing that and sharing everything you shared today. Obviously, we could talk for five hours going through what has happened, things you’re doing or hope to do, suspect to do. But I really do appreciate your enthusiasm for being here and talking about your experiences--good and the bad--and just sharing that with others who may need it, at a time when they’re not sure where they wanna go. Thank you, one hundred percent. And that ends the interview portion of this oral history project, which is, again, documenting Black excellence in the STEM field, and showing that looks different, 02:03:00depending on who you talk to you because everyone’s science, everyone’s lived experiences, are different.