Black Excellence Oral History with Vernon Morris, June 27, 2021 (Ms2024-072)

Daniel Smith: Okay. There we go. All right. Hi, my name is Daniel Smith, and today is Sunday, June 27, 2021 at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, and I’m interviewing Dr. Vernon Morris via Zoom today. Dr. Morris, would you be able to start off by stating your full name and your date of birth for the record.  Vernon Morris: Full name is Vernon Robinson Morris and date of birth is January 23, 1963.

Daniel: Also, could you start off by stating the current position that you hold today?

Vernon: The current position, and long title, so get ready, Director of the School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences at the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. That’s 00:01:00one of the colleges within Arizona State University. Formally at Arizona State University, professor of environmental science and chemistry and also a senior sustainability scientist.

Daniel: Awesome, okay. From what I was reading, is a newer position within a few years, or have you held it for a while?

Vernon: Yeah. This is absolutely a new position. I am not yet a full year into this position. I was at Howard University for a good twenty-three, twenty-four years before this as a professor in the department of chemistry, as well as adjunct in civil and environmental engineering and also in atmospheric sciences. I had three appointments; two were more primary -- atmospheric sciences and chemistry -- and then 00:02:00I taught and advised students in environmental engineering.  Daniel: Okay. Awesome, it’s always exciting to be at a new position starting off and jumping into whatever it is new that you have going on. That’s awesome.

Vernon: Yeah. It’s been nice. It’s certainly a challenge coming into a new position during a pandemic. Moving into a new position -- you might hear in the background a freshly minted one-year-old. He arrived on the scene shortly before the actual start of the position. And then a cross-country move. And then in our current context, where there’s a lot more energy and effort into social justice and equity arena. There’s a lot more response; I wouldn’t say I’m putting more energy in, but there’s a lot more response 00:03:00and feedback and progress, at least on the shorter term. It’s been exciting. Big changes. Different environment.  Daniel: Your response on the social justice issues -- or social justice front -- is that from the university itself or just because of the change in the environment, the cross-country move or something like that? Or is it from other colleagues as well?  Vernon: I think it’s a combination of things. Certainly, I think ASU has done some things as an institution -- as an academic institution -- that a lot of other institutions are still talking about doing, in terms of actually investing and empowering faculty to make change, supporting some of the changes in policy, creating programs that will be difference-makers if they’re sustained. Specifically -- and maybe we’ll get more into this -- I co-chaired an 00:04:00initiative to create a presidential postdoctoral scholars program, as well as a residential graduate fellows program. And these are designed to attract and retain -- in a thriving environment -- African American and BIPOC scholars across the board. And we’re talking thirty to fifty scholars per year. The proposal is for a multi-decadal -- at least a multi-decadal -- program because these are intergenerational problems, so you have to have intergenerational investment, and the university actually stepped up. And this is within my first year. So that type of response -- to me, at least -- is new. The efforts to design these types of programs and implement the programs and call attention to the need. That’s been an ongoing thing. I think there’s more receptivity to having 00:05:00the discussion nationwide, but still a lot of feet-dragging, in order to actually act on it. That’s been very positive -- a lot of work -- but very positive in the short-term.  Daniel: Yeah, that’s awesome. Is this specific program specific to Arizona State University, or is it bringing in postdoc scholars from these diverse backgrounds into the university itself? Or is it more funding for multiple universities to bring in this diverse talent to the schools?  Vernon: This is Arizona State University trying to bring in talent nationwide. It’s enhancing the postdoctoral population and the graduate student population by a new fellowship. These are going to be new people; 00:06:00African Americans in graduate programs or in postdoctoral positions, indigenous scholars, Latinx scholars, Asian Pacific Islanders, any of the marginalized groups will benefit from the programming because there’s going to be really a comprehensive look at why this institution, in particular -- but these are nationwide challenges at the graduate level, especially in the sciences -- why programs have not been inclusive. Why are we entering 2021 -- second half of 2021 -- the U.S. population is clearly much more diverse than what’s reflected in our graduate program, faculty, postdocs. Actually, the undergrad population overall at 00:07:00ASU is actually very diverse. But when you start going into specific STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] fields, then you start to see something that looks a lot more like 1950s United States workforce. We’ve got to move away from that. So the initiative is not limited to STEM because there are certainly other challenges outside of STEM. STEM happens to be where I like to focus my efforts, so I tend to focus my attention and responses on that. But I work in a very interdisciplinary environment, which I like a lot. My friends in sociology or in communications or philosophy remind me, hey, it’s not great over here; you talk about how geosciences, how many faculty do you see over here in my department? So, it’s global. There’s a lot we can learn from each other, but a lot of it has to do with policy change. How are we 00:08:00setting up admissions? How are we recruiting? What are the admissions criteria that are used to determine who comes in, and how might they disadvantage students, professionals, and scholars of color? What we’re saying is we’re not just gonna recruit people in order -- it’s a competitive process, so each program has to identify in there, historically, what are the barriers that have kept you from being a more inclusive department? That department that already has -- we have a few departments that are very heterogeneous -- if you’ve already established that, how is the infusion of this new talent going to help the University reach its goals of being inclusive? And one of the things I like about ASU is, in its charter -- which is fairly small 00:09:00-- it emphasizes that we are about who we include, not about who we exclude. This is completely aligned with the charter. It’s just helping the university fulfill its mission because it wasn’t in sciences and in the academy, more generally.  Daniel: Okay. This kind of insight that ASU has in thinking about being inclusive, thinking about bringing in diverse talent, but also retaining them there, was that kind of foresight that they had, and what attracted you to that department -- in that school -- in the first place? Or did you learn about it after you had got there?  Vernon: Well, I saw the charter before I got there. That was something that was definitely attractive. You know coming from Howard University where, ostensibly, the mission of 00:10:00Howard University is an inclusive mission as a Historically Black College and University. Transitioning in my career and going someplace else, I wanted to go to a place that was receptive, not just to that idea, but that was gonna put resources behind that. That my identity as a scholar, which is centered on equity -- I love my science; I’m gonna do my science, but I’m gonna do it in such a way that it’s fully inclusive -- that the place that I go to is gonna be accepting of that and is going to be willing to critically assess. And when I come in and say, well, you’re not doing as well, this is how this should be done, or let’s work on these problems, there’s going to be reception to do that. So, Arizona State’s fulfilled on those. They’ve been very receptive to saying, look, we have this charter; we’re not fulfilling our mission. We have to do things differently. We’re 00:11:00going to do things differently, and we’re going to resource it. And a lot of places are more on the talk end of the spectrum and less on the do end of the spectrum. I do give credit to Arizona State for recognizing that there’s a challenge, mobilizing a lot of faculty from across the entire institution to work together to develop these platforms. Students were involved; there was this huge amount of student voice in the overall programming. Because these two programs that I was in are part of twenty-eight different initiatives across the campus. It’s not that they’re just gonna recruit postdocs and graduate students; they’re changing promotion and tenure policy; they’re looking at systemic barriers in the leadership structure and how people are recognized and learned as leaders. There’s reporting 00:12:00changes that are gonna be made -- data collection changes that are gonna be made -- to really identify where the problems are or barriers. So, it’s a comprehensive look, and it wasn’t in progress when I came. This is a unique summer. George Floyd influenced the year. Ahmaud Arbery. Lots of things were going on this year -- 2021 has been pretty amazing, as well, in terms of unrest and commentary on the United States -- but it was very responsive. You move to a new place, a lot of stuff is happening. If you have personal commitments to equity and social justice, you have to give voice to that. And I think at Arizona State, the administration leadership, President Michael Crow, were responsive to those voices. I 00:13:00came in; we’d started No Time for Silence before I left. I let everyone know through my interview process, I can be loud; I can be disruptive. That is who I am, if I think things are wrong. They fully embraced that. They said, look, you’re committed to make change; we want you involved in the change that you wanna see. That came and hit the ground running. I mean, basically, before the end of July 2020 we’re already saying, what do we want to design to implement in fall two months from now? It has been a little hectic but very productive because things have moved fast. I’m surprised at how fast certain things move at ASU.  Daniel: Yeah. Okay. Two 00:14:00things you’ve mentioned there I wanted to touch on were, when they’re identifying the problems -- you were talking about the problems that keep them from diversifying their faculty, graduate students, et cetera -- what kind of problems were they finding and trying to actually change in their admissions process or applications or et cetera? What were they finding, and what are they doing to fix it?  Vernon: Yeah. That’s a heavy question because this is institution-wide, so, in certain programs -- and it’s focused on graduate programs and graduate fellows and post-docs. Why do we do that? Because that’s the near-end of the spectrum that’s going to influence how the professoriate changes. If you can change the professoriate, you can make the academy more inclusive. Then, 00:15:00the challenges a lot of students face, in terms of gaining access, in terms of being in a combative or toxic environment, those can change because of presence of dedicated professors who are saying, no, we’re not gonna tolerate this, and their presence can help that. I forgot the question now. I was setting up, so that I could get to the question. I forgot the question. It was… Daniel: It was identifying what the problem --

Vernon: Sorry.

Daniel: No, you’re fine.

Vernon: Different departments actually have different challenges. It ranges. We’ve collected the data just this spring. We actually now have an opportunity to start analyzing the data 00:16:00because a lot of the programs didn’t ask these questions. What they asked was, why don’t Black faculty wanna stay here; why don’t Black students wanna stay here? Why is it so hard to find Black students? The problem was turned around and said it’s on Black students or brown students or brown faculty. What’s wrong with them that they don’t want to be at this great place? So, part of it was trying to get everyone to reframe and say, what is it about this place that leads to high attrition rates of Black faculty and students; that leads to students not wanting to come on the visits; that leads to you have a pool of students of color, and they’re not selected? What’s happening at ASU that’s causing this versus what’s happening outside of ASU that we can’t do this thing? That was a large part of it. To answer your question, I think it’s 00:17:00things like perception of diversity in the area. Police engagement at ASU has been problematic both from the student perspective and faculty perspective, just engagement with university faculty. Local politics can be sort of agonistic to bringing folks in and sustaining. There’s a critical mass problem. A lot of people don’t want to be the only one. There’s a reputation problem. Some people have come and had a bad experience; they go back out; the academic community among BIPOC scholars tends to be kinda small, and the word travels fast. There’s a number of things, depending on the program. Construction of the admissions committees and how they search, how is the search process, are you just tapping into your personal networks, so the only students who get admitted 00:18:00are somewhere in the lineage of the academic families of the people on the search committees? Moving to Phoenix. Having just done that, then, thinking about a graduate student who’s coming from Howard University or a student coming from Morehouse College -- I went to Morehouse College undergrad -- and wants to leave Atlanta and go to Phoenix. What resources do you need to travel across country, set up, and be ready for graduate school? Well, gotta have little disposable income in your family -- or somewhere -- that’ll help you do that, but a lot of the students are first-generation graduate students; they don’t have that income. It’s easier to go to Georgia Tech or University of Georgia than it is to travel across country to go to Arizona State. But if Arizona State is blind to that 00:19:00and said look, you come just like the rich kids who were coming from these other places, you’re not gonna get people there. Or you get people there, and they’re looking around saying, how do I survive on this stipend in this new place that’s hostile to my presence in the first place? Do I wanna do that? If you’re going to be inclusive, you’ve got to have contexts. The common problem is that I think a lot of faculty are -- two common problems. One, they’re reframing the problem, so that it problematizes Black and BIPOC faculty, students, and scholars, so just that framing is problematic. Second, there’s no context to the policies and programming a lot of times. It’s as if you can be successful because I’m successful in that, and from my perspective, I don’t see any problem with this. Therefore, 00:20:00the problem is outside of this program. Bringing that sensitivity and making equity-focused questions is where we’re identifying where a lot of the problems are. And then, you can say, okay, do we need the GRE [Graduate Record Examinations]? Everyone’s dropping the GRE; that’s like a thirty-year-old problem. Nobody who has looked at any data in the last thirty years believes that the GRE -- could believe, not any scientist, could look at the data critically and say, the GRE is useful in predicting success in graduate school. Nobody. Yet, we do it. Not just here but number of places. So, a lot of programs have dropped the GRE, which is a great first step, but that’s like the easiest thing that you could possibly do. We want to go beyond that to say, okay, 00:21:00where are you recruiting from? Do a network analysis on your recruitment. Look at the students who come in; look at their networks. You have to collect data for some of these things, but you can piece together puzzles and say, okay, are we trending in a way that it’s going to really be inclusive in the future, or are we trending away from that by what we’re doing? And I think that’s where we are in some of the analysis. That’s a heavy question, so I hope I answered some parts of it, but there’s a lot that we’re going to learn as we continue to analyze the data that the programs are starting to generate now because they didn’t generate any data on these things. No one thought that there were any barriers. They thought the problem was the students. The problem is this faculty came, and two years later they’re like, I can’t stand it; I’m leaving. What was that guy’s problem; what was her problem? No data is collected, just reinforced perceptions. So, a large part of what we’re doing is changing perception, 00:22:00changing perspective. And what I like the most about it is that we’re not waiting to gather all of the data before we act. We know there’s a problem. We know that when we look for data in these places, we’re gonna get the information that’s going to give us some nuance program by program. But we know what we need to do. That’s one of the things I liked a lot was they brought a lot of Black faculty together -- there is not a lot of Black faculty on ASU’s campus -- but if you went to Purdue or University of Washington or wherever, and looked for the professors in STEM it’s not gonna be a lot. But if you get them together, allow them to talk as a group, figure out what they want to do, gather information from the undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, put together a platform. You’re going to get something that you can move forward on in some extent. Then, along the way, you continue to gather more and better data 00:23:00to support how you need to re-optimize or improve the initiatives that you develop. That’s what we’re doing.  Daniel: That’s awesome to hear. Thank you for sharing it, first of all. I think you definitely answered the question. It’s a big question, like you said, so there’s not going to be a one size fits all. I think it’s good to share and hear, though, for others who try and start initiatives like this. One of the first things they may hit a barrier on is like, where do we start? What do I do? What’s going on? So, thank you; I think it’s good to hear what someone else is doing.  Vernon: A lot of times we say we can’t act because we don’t have the data. We need to get the data. Okay, so what you’re saying is 00:24:00you’ve recognize that there’s a problem, but you’re not going to do anything, until you’ve perfected a collection process to get more information that’s gonna do what then? Is it functional for a human problem to not do anything until you get the data? It’s like this condominium that collapsed in Miami. Here’s the report, well, we need more data. Okay, so you wait -- trying to gather more data -- the thing collapses and kills, and that’s horrible. That’s a horrible thing and probably not a great analogy. But that’s what I see about to happen, when I see people saying, well, let’s collect more data. Let’s not act yet; let’s collect more data on equity problems. You know that people’s lives -- professional lives -- become casualties, 00:25:00as you don’t change where you know that change needs to be made. And with equity and access, it’s not rocket science what you need to do, if you’ve got these barriers. You can actually figure out how to make small improvements easily, even as you go out and get the additional data that you need. I think a lot of times it’s, okay, either we have the optimal dataset, and we have to just work on gathering data and not make any progress, or we do something that is reactionary and, ultimately, short-lived because it’s reactionary, and you’re not optimizing along the way, so you look for a short-term return on, okay, we’re just gonna recruit fifty graduate students. They all come in. They hate the experience because none of the departments have done anything to change the department for the better. They leave, and you say, well, I told you we shouldn’t have done that. So this is the more thoughtful 00:26:00-- actionable -- way of doing things. I hope people pay attention to this in a variety of reasons. You can gather data. That’s okay. But you don’t gather data at the expense of action. That’s not okay.  Daniel: Okay. I feel we’ll be back to this a little bit later, too, so slightly transitioning now to kind of get a little bit more sense about who you are and kind of how you got to where you are today. Could you talk a little bit about your childhood, where you grew up, if you have any first -- or really striking -- memories from your childhood? We’ll 00:27:00just start there. Where you grew up and any memories you have.

Vernon: Yeah, lots of memories. Memories come back a lot, when you got little children in the house. But I grew up Air Force brat. I have one brother, two sisters. But always a household that had extra kids in it -- people in it -- whether they be cousins, or my mother would sort of semi-adopt Black students who might come into the area, international exchange students. There was always extra folks in there. I always felt like the house was crowded beyond six. I think we moved about fourteen different places growing up. Lived in Japan for four years; went to kindergarten and 00:28:00first grade in Japan. Lived in the Midwest, lived in the Northwest, lived in the South, lived in the Southwest. Actually, my sister was born in Phoenix, so this is not my first time living in Phoenix, although it was many, many years ago. I think the significance of that for me was that I don’t mind moving a lot. I don’t mind change. I’m really used to change and the uncertainty of, okay, we’re moving to this new place; what’s that gonna be like? I have very little reticence to say, okay, we need to do this next thing; I’ll move to the next place. I was not heavily into science, at least as encouraged in any school 00:29:00that I went to. In fact, the most encouraging teachers I had -- which is strange but I remember them because they were encouraging -- was kindergarten and first grade. After that, most of my engagement with teachers was combative. It was highly combative, to the extent that I didn’t really want to go to college, by the time I was finishing high school. It’s like, I had enough; I don’t want to go into classrooms and fight with people because they look at history a certain way, and I look at history in a different way. I’ve read books that clearly they haven’t read, and I don’t wanna do this. In a military background, there’s a lot of encouragement to do combat sports, so I was doing Judo very early, and wrestling and boxing, so I liked 00:30:00those things, and that was a great outlet for me. I think it helped me with some self-discipline. The closest thing to college that I was thinking about was the Air Force Academy because they had an excellent boxing program. Both my parents were in the Air Force at one time. Although my mother came out and was a teacher and then a principal. That seemed like a good avenue to me because it provided opportunities to travel. I still like to travel. I got to box, was aligned with things that I saw in my household with my father. But, ultimately, two things changed that. One, when I became more serious about it, I just didn’t think that I could go to a place and be told what to do. Your time is dictated by another 00:31:00person who, at that age, I thought was probably not gonna be as smart or smarter than I was. They had positional authority over me that was, as far as I was concerned, illegitimate. I say that, at that time, because it seemed -- when I started asking questions and talking to folks -- like it was high school again, where I’m sitting in a class, and there’s a teacher who clearly doesn’t like me because of my skin. It’s probably amplified because of my being vocal and pushing back. I said, this is gonna be another one of those situations, except I’ve signed on some dotted line saying, my life is actually yours, and you can send me any place; the pluses might be getting outweighed by the minuses, so there was a quandary 00:32:00there. Fortunately, I ended up visiting Atlanta, seeing the Atlanta University Center, and then scrambling at the very last minute to try to get applications in to get into a number of the schools down there, and ended up going to Morehouse. But growing up, tight-knit family. I think that’s another thing. The relationship I had with my brothers and sisters was very central because we kept moving place to place. Not a lot of place attachment for me. My friends came from this city or that city. Most of my friends were from college or after college because I spent more time in a single place after that. So, strong relationship with sisters and brothers. That’s my refuge. That’s where I bounced my questions. My parents are passed now, but following a talk, if I get beat up in some professional 00:33:00or academic environment, I’d talk to my mother, talk to my father, talk to my uncle, talk to my cousins, talk to my brother, talk to my sister. And I got a lot of strength from that. So, when I talk a lot about some of the racism and some of the things that I went through, I got good reinforcement, so I was always ready for the next day. It happened this day, I’m ready for the next day. Talked to my sister, made some jokes. Okay; ready to go again. I think that combination of change always being a part of my life, sort of a combat mentality being a part of my life. My father was a drill sergeant for some time, so words don’t bother me. Sometimes it’s like there’s a filter 00:34:00that I just turn off stuff, and I can’t hear anymore, like, I got stuff to do. Like my background, I’m gonna filter that out. And I got to focus on what I came here to do. And I think all of those things really helped me move through hostile and challenging environments. A lot of systems where there are barriers, but I’m fine with taking a diversion and being in an unknown situation because I’ll deal with it just as I’ve dealt with it throughout my life. I think about memories. A lot of those memories start to align better as you get a little bit older because you say, oh, well, maybe that’s why I reacted in that way because I’m not afraid of conflict. Conflict seemed like it’s part of life. It’s a big change to move from Atlanta to 00:35:00Sicily. And then from Sicily, what’s your next job? Ok, I’m gonna move across to California and, hopefully, apply for this position as a postdoc at University of California. I don’t have it in hand, but I’m gonna move anyway. I can see where someone would be like, that’s really risky; I’m gonna take this first gig. But for me, it was like, yeah, that should work out. That -- I guess, willingness to take a chance -- I now see at a lot of different points in my career. Not necessarily a safe decision, but a decision that was more predicated on, this will take me to this next point. If I do this, that’s a step to where I’m going versus if I do this, what would happen if I fail? It’s always looking ahead versus looking backwards, I guess. 00:36:00Another long answer. Hopefully I answered the question.

Daniel: No. Long, short, please keep them coming. With the tense or fighting situations you had through elementary, middle, high school with different teachers, maybe students, are there any in particular that kind of stand out that you remember vividly and that you could describe in a little bit more detail what happened, why did it happen, what were you thinking at the time? Things like that.

Vernon: I got into wrestling because I remember fighting on a playground and fighting with kids older than me, bigger than me. When you move a lot, 00:37:00there’s always bullies, especially in an Air Force environment. You move; you’re the new kid, then someone’s gonna test you. After a while, my brother and I would be like, okay, first day of school, let’s go find the bullies. Let’s go take care of that first, and then we’re gonna deal with school. I remember times just coming into the school and be really vigilant about, okay, who looks like they’re giving everyone else a hard time? Who was supposed to be the tough person? And ended up just going after them. I remember one situation -- it could have been sixth, seventh grade; I’m not sure where it was anymore, but I remember I was sitting alone in a lunchroom. I don’t know how lunchrooms are anymore, but we used to have those little plastic trays that had the little sections in it, and they would plop stuff into the different sections, and you go sit down. I was 00:38:00sitting there alone at the end of a table. I’m sitting there alone just eating, first week of school or so. I’m sitting there, and I see like this group with three dudes kind of looking and kind of had that look of, we’re the tough, cool kids at the school. I make note of it, but I’m just trying to eat and go the next thing. They end up walking over, and one of the guys picks up an orange and squirts the juice in my eye. They’re talking -- I can’t remember conversation explicitly -- but the guy picks up an orange and kind of squirts it at my eye like, what are you gonna do? My reaction was fairly immediate because I grabbed the tray, and I just cracked him over the head with it. He was just backing away from me like I was crazy. I was like, yo, you started this, not 00:39:00me! What I was supposed to do, sit here? I wasn’t big. I’m not a big guy; I’m a fairly small person, but that immediately earned me a reputation. I went to the principal’s office, my mother came to school [saying], what happened? Got things resolved, but I had no problems at that school after that. No one was actually gonna bother me after that. That stands out because looking back, I was like, what was I doing? I think in this day and age, doing something like that could have really gone quickly sideways. Actually, one of the people in that 00:40:00group, I ended up being friends with later because I just didn’t take crap from people, and he, for whatever reason, admired that. Teacher-wise, there were teachers -- especially in math -- that told me I shouldn’t be in the class. You shouldn’t be here. Wouldn’t recognize my hand when I raised it. I’m thinking about a math class -- a calculus class -- [the teacher] would grade me down, just take points off. There’d be minus X on the page, but it’s not associated with any problem. Just to make sure that my grade was lower. That, again, inspired me to really know the material, so that when I came to argue -- which I had no problem doing -- I knew that what I had was right. He had to just say, I took points off your paper. You 00:41:00can say that; that’s fine; more than likely, my mom’s coming to school. You gotta deal with her; that’s gonna be on you. I had a math teacher -- and I don’t want to say his name because it’s irrelevant but definitely in high school -- there was a history teacher who was teaching. There’s a bunch of critical race theory going on now. My mother, in particular -- but parents -- had this library of Black history books, when I was growing up. When I was punished as a child -- I’m not gonna say I was a bad child, but I was mischievous -- they would send me into the library. And there’s all the encyclopedias -- this is when you had encyclopedias and stuff like that -- they’re like, go in there and read. Hopefully, this is not a bad statement on me having to go in there, but I read all that. I’ve actually read all of the encyclopedias. Before I got to high school, I had read all of my encyclopedias. 00:42:00I went in there a few times. I would thumb through all the books, so I had a different perception of U.S. history than my teachers, especially by the time I got to high school. And world history, really. You know, how was Africa situated in world history? Not as the dark continent, but as a place that had technology, a place that had histories. It had kingdoms; it had explorers; it shared information. You go and you hear a history teacher explaining U.S. history, and there was no intellectual presence of African Americans. Black people are negroes at that time. I was just like, this isn’t right. I would be a little vocal in class, and I think -- looking back -- it was disruptive, probably unduly combative 00:43:00-- but from my perspective at that time, I was like, you’re acting like I don’t even exist, like Black people just don’t have brains; they were cattle, now, they’re like descendants of cattle, and they’re slightly better with your description of history. I just found it foul and insulting. I was like, I’m not doing this; I’m not gonna listen; this is wrong, and I’d interject in class to the extent that she put me out of class. A lot. There was not going to be any positive engagement with that professor. I think she was pretty popular, but I was just like, this woman is evil; this place is evil. That just made me like school a lot less. I had this math 00:44:00professor who was just trying to make me look stupid in class, and I have this history professor who doesn’t know what she’s talking about and wants to paint this picture of reality that I think is wrong. At that point in time, I refocused a lot of my energy into the sports -- wrestling, soccer, and boxing. I just said, I got to get through this, and then I’m never coming back to this place. That was in Washington state when I was finishing high school. But those are particularly poor interactions with the history professor, particularly poor interactions with the math professor, even though I actually like math. But I think those types of engagements closed doors for me to be in the science fairs, to be connected to opportunities to do science in extracurricular things 00:45:00without knowing it. I don’t know how that would of changed my trajectory because I ended up in science anyway. In fact, I think when I ran into those types of barriers, it’s like any other challenge. Okay, I’m gonna double down on my effort and really know this stuff. A lot of times earlier -- when we first got to Washington state -- you would register for classes, they would take me out of the classes -- especially the math and science prep courses, AP [advanced placement] courses -- put me into woodshop, auto shop, or into these other vocational tracks. They’re interesting, but, one, my mother wasn’t going to stand for that, so when I’d come back with a changed transcript, she went immediately to the school, and just raised holy hell. Two, 00:46:00in observing that process -- even at that time -- I could see, okay, these people don’t want me to do certain things. They don’t want me to know math. They don’t want me to do physics. And I’d say, why? At the same time, in the government classes, in the history classes, you’re painting this picture that I had a real problem with because there’s no -- like, the only thing I can do is basically work with my hands. That, I think, somewhere laid some seeds that say, I’m gonna do the exact opposite of what you’re telling me I’m capable of. There’s always that I got to prove myself, and I know this happens to a lot of folks my age. You gotta prove yourself. You gotta run faster. You gotta jump high, or you gotta lift more. You gotta do more in 00:47:00the same amount of time to be recognized as semi-human. Those experiences amplified that and probably contributed to the type of work ethic that I’ve had, also my focus on equity and access. That there’s a lot of places -- I think most of America -- where access is limited and perceptions dominate how people are treated. There’s some cases where it was a Black student -- he didn’t have any experiences like this. I think that’s cool. Some of my friends [say], I’ve never had experiences like that, and I am like, that’s great! I know that my experience and your experience are two data points in a huge statistical pool, but I think the statistics probably look a lot more like my experience than yours. I think it bears out when you look at the number of first-generation students of color 00:48:00who are still coming into college, into science. Those are some specifics at the secondary school level. I went to Morehouse College. There’s a lot more encouragement there. Those were the first Black teachers I ever had. The number of Black Ph.D.s was -- I was awestruck; I had no concept that they existed in those concentrations. Then Georgia Tech was sort of a return to my middle school and high school, but I knew it. I mean, I already knew what it was, you know. We talk a lot about microaggressions. There was macroaggressions daily there and the microaggressions. When you’ve got both -- like, if someone’s just not talking to you, you’re like, cool, that’s better than you 00:49:00coming in my face and calling me names or saying, why are you still here or the blackface parades and stuff that they would do at Georgia Tech. It’s good, in a sense, that there’s less of that, and more of the focus is on the microaggressions. It’s horrible that we still are having to deal with microaggressions at the level that they are and what they cloak, you know? They cloak the same policies; the policies haven’t changed since God knows when, but, at least, we’re talking about them, and students are pushing back, and there’s more students pushing back.

Daniel: Okay. You touched on two things there that we’re leading into as well. Coming from Washington state and that experience you had with those teachers trying to keep you out of the math, history, and 00:50:00any STEM course, in particular, what first got you into atmospheric science -- atmospheric chemistry -- that is, this is my path now? You mention something called the Atlanta University Center before, so I’ll start there with what kind of moves you from school, no, I need to get out of here as fast as possible to this is the career path that I foresee for myself, going to in the future?

Vernon: Yeah. We visited some friends in North Carolina and Georgia one summer -- probably the summer before my senior year in high 00:51:00school. The Atlanta University Center is the AU Center, so at that time it was Clark College, Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Morris Brown College. I think the Interdenominational Theological Center was there. I’d never seen that density of Black students in college. I’m coming from Washington state -- not Tacoma or Seattle where there might be some -- probably Tacoma more than Seattle -- a cluster of Black people -- but from Spokane, Washington. And this is forty years ago. You were very isolated there as an ethnic person. I was just like, wow, Black people actually 00:52:00like college. They’re all having fun. I could go here. I’d actually applied to Morris Brown because Morris Brown was an African Methodist Episcopal Church. I knew nothing about HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities], and my parents weren’t really highly knowledgeable about HBCUs other than they exist; here’s some prestigious HBCUs. In terms of what they were doing, Morris Brown -- and this is no knock on Morris Brown -- but they’ve had some accreditation problems, and they’re not the highest ranked school there. But Morris Brown was an AME Church, parents were AME, so they were like, man,  you definitely gotta apply to Morris Brown. I put a lot more energy into applying to Morris Brown than to Morehouse. But I said, Morehouse is there, too, and Morris Brown is a little bit further away, so I’m gonna apply to Morehouse and Morris Brown. I applied to both, got a full ride at Morris Brown, not realizing that their ranking was a lot lower, so they’re looking for students much more, and 00:53:00then got a partial scholarship to Morehouse. As more family, friends, and folks commented, you wanna go to Morehouse, you don’t wanna go to Morris Brown. Again, no shade on Morris Brown -- my namesake school -- but I had to get to this other one. I had to end up raising a lot of scholarship money to end up paying for the school but was able to do that. Going in, I didn’t know what I wanted to major in, really. My essay was on being a biology-psychology double-major because I wanted to learn about the brain, both from a physical aspect as well as, sort of, a non-physical aspect. Thousands applicants who say the same thing, so it wasn’t very creative, although, I thought I just wanna do this thing, but really didn’t know. The last biology course I took was, as 00:54:00it turns out, was in high school. Not my thing. It never was going to be my thing more than likely; I just didn’t know. I get to Morehouse, and I’ve got my money bag to pay for my tuition, and, man, getting to Morehouse, my first couple of weeks there were really eye opening. How did I get into atmospheric sciences? I had, basically, by the first couple of weeks I was there, spent all my money trying to keep up with kids who were a lot richer than I was. I didn’t have the money to pay for tuition, wasn’t registered yet, panicking because I was like, you know what, I’m out of here. I’m not gonna be able to pay. They’re gonna put me out of the dorms. I’m trying to run around, hustle up a job, or just hustle up money, even more than a job. As I was running off campus -- because there’s heavy 00:55:00programming for the freshmen at Morehouse, as it should be, because it keeps you out of the streets of Atlanta -- I was heading off campus to try to go figure out how to hustle up money to try to stay in school. And I ended up running into a chemistry professor, Henry McBay, and he slowed me down long enough to say, what’s going on; where are you going? I told him part of my story, hey, I’ve got to get a job because I blew a couple thousand dollars this last couple of weeks. He ended up saying, look, you need a job? I’ll get you a job. Need some books? I’ll take care of your books. I’ll buy your calculator. You’ll be in school; I’ll take care of that. But what do you wanna do? I told him, I don’t know, and he said, major in chemistry. I said, fine. He said, well, you gotta major in math. 00:56:00Great, I like math and really had a great math experience at Morehouse. I’ve been in contact with some of the professors who taught me at Morehouse even recently, so that’s a lifelong relationship there. He said, well, you know, think about it. Chemistry is math, physics, and an extension of the physics to more complex systems, so you really wanna do physics, too. I said, I’ll do physics; no problem. I was so happy to have some light at the end of my tunnel because it was dark on that particular day. I mean, I can almost remember what Henry McBay was wearing. That’s how life or death that day was to me. Of course, it turns out he didn’t wear a whole lot of different clothes, so it’s not that difficult. But that got me into chemistry and math. I ended up dropping the physics major 00:57:00because it would’ve added another year onto my undergrad. I just -- typical undergrad -- I gotta get out of here as fast as possible. Would it have hurt me or not, in retrospect, probably not. Would it have helped a lot? I don’t know. I ended up majoring in chemistry, math, minoring in physics, and the job that I got was with John Hall, who just recently passed. John Hall, Junior, who’s a Harvard-educated chemist. He actually worked for the Nobel laureate William Lipscomb. He brought me into his lab, and that’s where I started doing atmospheric chemistry. That job, that exposure to graduate students who were working in there. I think I was the only undergrad at the time, so I came into a place that had some Black graduate students who are working on experiment and theory. They’re publishing papers. John 00:58:00is traveling the world, giving talks, going to China and staying there for a semester coming back speaking Chinese, and I’m thinking, damn these dudes -- Black people are -- wow! I wanna do something like this. He’s driving this red convertible Ferrari or his motorcycle. I’m like, this dude’s a rock star. And he does science! I was like, okay! All the things that I was like -- I don’t wanna be told what to do every day; I don’t wanna be constrained; I wanna use my brain. I get to use my hands because we built apparatus and stuff. It was just a mind-blowing experience and such a turn-around in such a short period of time from I think I’m not going to be here, so I got to hit the streets to try to figure them out, to I’ve got a job; I could stay in school; make my parents proud. But 00:59:00also there’s like, oh, I might be able to do this thing that I see this guy doing. That fits me, I think. That was it. We worked on a technique called matrix isolation, infrared spectroscopy. Infrared spectroscopy, well known, it’s the probe of structure of molecules. The matrix isolation technique involved you having a very cold finger -- or a window -- on which you flowed gas. The window was so cold that when the gas hit it, it froze. And so, whatever matrix of molecules you had in the gas phase freezes onto this cold finger, and then you can probe the cold finger with different probes; we used infrared spectroscopy. But you’re trapping reaction 01:00:00intermediates because the freezing process is like a couple nanoseconds or something like that. So, if you have something lives as microsecond lifetimes, let’s say, you can trap those species that you’re not gonna see typically, probe their structures, and then infer what the reaction pathways were in fast radical reactions in the gas phase. Then, we can apply that to atmospheric problems. You had this really neat apparatus. It took all day to cool down, and then you could try to run your experiments and synthesize molecules, get them into the gas phase, get them into the flow system, and then do this work. We did infrared absorption and Raman spectroscopy on these matrices. That was exciting. I mean, you’re doing this stuff; you’re working on this experiment -- takes all day to cool -- and you’re in there, tinkering, 01:01:00and finally get some stuff that you can work on. At the same time, we’re doing theoretical calculations, so I learned programming very early. In fact, I’ll double back to my interview for the job. Ended up doing molecular orbital quantum mechanical simulations of the structures that we were observing on the matrix. Then, putting those two things together, to me, was just mind-blowing. It’s exciting. Then, you publish that paper, so we were getting publications out. My name is on publications; you go to conferences, and you’re looking around like, well, I’m publishing just like everybody else here as a team. That’s what hooked me. I was just like, I wanna do this. And it’s not being combative in the classroom, and it’s not being told what you can’t do. You’re just doing this mind-blowing stuff. So, Henry McBay gave me the recommendation to 01:02:00go talk to John Hall. I go and talk to John, and John’s like, I don’t really hire undergraduatess, but Dr. McBay said I should talk to you. What do you got? You know, he’s real gruff, and I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing. He’s like, you know how to program? I said yes. [He asked,] You know Fortran? I was like, I’m taking a course. I wasn’t taking the course; I went back and registered for the course, but I wasn’t taking the course. I wasn’t registered. Fortunately, my father was a systems analyst for the Air Force, so he worked with computers. We had computers at home, so I actually knew how to program, but it was machine language on these really fundamental computers. But I wasn’t afraid of computers. So, when he said, you know how to program, [I was like,] yeah, but probably not what you’re thinking, but I know what I can do. Then 01:03:00he said, Fortran? I was like, yeah, I’m taking a class, and he seemed satisfied with that. He was like, how good are you with your hands? I’m like, I’m good with my hands. I’ve built stuff -- my father and I did -- in our basement. I could construct, did the plumbing, electrical. I’m good with my hands. So, I was confident in saying these things, but, in retrospect, did I know what I was getting into? Absolutely not. I knew nothing. I walk into a chemistry lab for the first time in my life, and I’m like, oh, wow. I mean, I blew up hoods doing synthesis. I was a horrible synthetic chemist. Good physical chemist.

Daniel: Was all this during your freshman year at Morehouse?  Vernon: Yeah. Freshman, sophomore year. Yeah. I started as a freshman. The last hood I blew up was as a sophomore, and then I was just calculations and physical chemistry. He was like, stay out of the hood. 01:04:00He gave me a chance because I hadn’t taken organic chemistry yet, so I was a little clumsy. I was clumsy in the in the lab freshman year; there’s no doubt. I was less clumsy in the labs sophomore year and was helping out in the chemistry labs to try to learn this stuff, so I’m not embarrassing myself in the research lab. I just didn’t have the patience for synthesis, and it didn’t make any sense. Like the why questions, why do things react the way they react, is a physical chemistry question, and that’s where I got stuck. The how to, you know, follow this recipe, and you’ll get this thing. I like to cook, but I’m ad hoc in the kitchen. I’ll go in, and I’m a little of this and a little of that; you don’t do that in the organic lab. Recipe for disaster is what that is. So, I’m born to be a physical chemist. Stick 01:05:00with the math and the physics and the chemistry. I’m good. Build an instrument, I’m good. But synthesized aspirin -- soap is probably my limit of synthetic acumen. It’s sad, but it’s true.  Daniel: Okay. These experiences you’ve had with your mentors, physical chemistry throughout your -- what years were you at Morehouse?  Vernon: I studied at Morehouse in 1981 to 1985.  Daniel: Okay.  Vernon: The stratospheric ozone hole was the big challenge in atmospheric chemistry. It had been identified. It’s growing; it’s closing. Why is it happening? Turned out to be polar stratospheric clouds and some 01:06:00cycles of chlorine nitrates. That’s what we were doing -- the matrix isolation studies -- were the chlorine nitrates. I ended up extending some of that work to look at polar stratospheric chemistry as a graduate student. Because I ended up going to Georgia Tech; John was a jointly appointed between Morehouse and Georgia Tech, so he started off as my advisor there, and we extended some of the work that we had done on halogen nitrates to inorganic peroxides in the stratosphere. That was my thesis work. My Ph.D. thesis work was actually an extension of some of the work I started as an undergrad.  Daniel: So, you both worked together from Morehouse and at Georgia Tech?  Vernon: Yeah. He left. John left the academy, before I finished. He left after about two years of my graduate 01:07:00school. He went to Ohio State University first, and then he went into motivational speaking. He just went on a different track, and I was in graduate school stranded somewhat. But, fortunately, I had published a number of papers, done a lot of work, so it was more of a matter of finding someone who is willing to help me finish out than start over again. That front-end investment -- where as an undergrad, I had been publishing papers; I knew my way around the lab; I had a really deep understanding of the systems that I was working with -- helped out a lot because when he left, I was able to keep rolling. But yeah, he wasn’t there the whole time. He left; he did motivational speaking for a while, and when he came back, he came back to Ohio State 01:08:00University. He was actually at Ohio State University in the Byrd Center I think it’s called now -- but the polar photochemistry, polar programs office.  Daniel: Okay. Going back to something you mentioned before. Going from Morehouse, an HBCU, to Georgia Tech, which I believe I had read somewhere that you were the first Black student to graduate from their atmospheric science -- or was it physical sciences -- graduate program?

Vernon: It was the School of Geophysical Sciences.  Daniel: Okay.  Vernon: I was the first Black to get a Ph.D. from that program.  Daniel: Okay.

Vernon: They had students who would come in, but this is something that happens in a lot of programs, you gain admittance, and then the faculty of that program says, you’re just not Ph.D. material, 01:09:00so we’re gonna have you finish the master’s and get out. So, there were Black students who had come before me, but none of them finished the Ph.D. Wasn’t many. There may have been two or three, but they were relegated to the master’s. That was more of the microaggression issue. You’re given a hard time in the class; you’re isolated. You’re not connected enough to the other students to realize that the old exams -- and answers and homework -- it’s all there. It’s floating around, but you don’t have access, so you’re trying to grind it out by yourself. Typically, you can do that, but your performance is gonna be slightly less than if someone had the key, obviously. Then, when people look at all the student performances, 01:10:00okay, you’ve got these students who clearly got As, but they’ve been helped because they had what was called the word -- was the sort of lingo there. You got the word? You got the word on this? It’s the keys. But Black students were isolated. A couple of students had families, so they weren’t gonna hang out on campus all day and night trying to build relationships enough to get access to these materials. So, they were doing good enough work, getting Bs and Cs, but then there are other people getting As. When it came to do an assessment, they said, well, Black students are getting Bs; they’re not getting As, so why don’t you get a master’s? You’re not our upper-echelon students. I came, and I was somewhere in the middle. My daughter was born before I started graduate school. I was a single parent in graduate school, but I wasn’t married, so I had time to 01:11:00dedicate to be in the space. Although I wasn’t part of the majority student study groups, I ended up studying with some of the Chinese students and students from Taiwan because that’s who were my office mates, and we were all sort of -- I wouldn’t say chumped off -- but we were all sort of marginalized. The white students didn’t really study with us, so we studied together. It was a little bit challenging because language was a little bit of a barrier. But the good thing is that mathematics is just mathematics. If you start working a problem on the board, it is what it is. Mathematics is the language of physics. You try to understand a physical problem, you can pretty much talk across any language by that chalkboard, you know, working 01:12:00it out on the board. Chemistry a little bit more challenging, and chemistry was what I liked a lot, so I was just better off in chemistry. Most of the students were working in dynamics or atmospheric physics, but I liked physics and math. So, what carried me through was that I was very strong in math and physics. Even seeing the problems the first times, okay, I can try to get this. Then, my study mates, we worked it out. I learned a lot on work ethic from a student who doesn’t know the language and is like, this is do or die for me. I’ve got to be in here. You look over, they’re hunkered down working on stuff, okay, I’m gonna hunker down and work on stuff too. I attribute a lot of my success to my Chinese study mates. One actually just sent me an email. He’s a professor -- chaired professor -- in Hong Kong. Hopefully, 01:13:00we’ll have a chance to get together soon. But yeah, Georgia Tech was not a supportive environment. At Morehouse, our study groups were great. Studied long and hard; we competed to get As, so you really knew your math. The math students really competed. We collaboratively competed. It’s like, you and I are in a class. I wanna get an A; you wanna get an A; we’re both gonna get As, and we’re gonna study together, but I’m going to get the one hundred. Hopefully, you get the ninety-nine, and then I got bragging rights, when we go out and celebrate. But if you get the one hundred, and I get to ninety-nine, fine, we’re gonna mark that down, and next test, I’m gonna get a higher A than you. That was how we competed. It wasn’t, I’m gonna not 01:14:00provide you with the same information, or I’m gonna study by myself, and, hopefully, do better than you. Don McGill was a good math classmate of mine I’m still in contact with. We used to stay up all night. I remember differential equations; we worked every problem in the book. We would go in the exam; we’d sit on opposite ends. I got you on this exam, and we would -- ninety-eight to ninety-seven percent; ninety-nine to one hundred. I mean, that was the level of competition on math. So, when I got to Georgia Tech, and there’ll be some differential equations, that’s nothing to me. I don’t actually need the key. I’ve got that. That helps in my communications with my study mates, but also just to get through an environment where there was information that would help you be successful, but you don’t have access to it. You have to rely on it on your own. But yeah, I was 01:15:00the first for a long time. I was the first [Black] Ph.D. in that program for quite awhile. The second person, I think, was Ray Mooring, and I don’t think he came in -- four, five years after I was out. It was a while. In fact, the first African American to get a Ph.D. in chemistry was a classmate of mine -- that’s Marlon Walker -- and the first African American woman to get a Ph.D. in physics -- I think it was Zena. She was there when I was there, too, so the first in a number of Ph.D. programs -- Blacks -- were there while I was there. It would happen in that same era. The first Ph.D. in chemical engineering was around that time. First Black in mechanical energy was around the time. We all knew each other -- still know each other.  Daniel: And this is still the mid- to late-1980s 01:16:00at Georgia Tech?  Vernon:  Yeah. I graduated 1991, so mid-1980s to early 1990s, the first Black Ph.D.s were coming out of a number of the programs there.  Daniel: So, going through Morehouse and Georgia Tech and doing your research -- doing your science -- what is it about your work in atmospheric chemistry -- atmospheric science -- that you really love, that you find beautiful, that makes you want to continue doing it? And also encourage other people to come into it as well, because, this is beautiful for this reason, I want you to be here as well? Are there any downsides or difficulties with being in this field or doing 01:17:00that science? What are your thoughts on that?  Vernon:  I mean, I think the beauty of geoscience is that it touches all aspects of humanity and life. It’s weather. It’s climate. It’s the air that you breathe. It influences the water that’s available to you. The problems that you work on have very immediate human consequences. For me, in particular, what I’ve always liked -- that’s excited me -- is that I’m studying something that is microscopic -- certainly sub-visible, submicroscopic -- whether it’s the fast radical reactions, the gas-to-particle processes, the chemistry on the surfaces of submicron particles. Those invisible 01:18:00phenomena affect macroscale or global scale phenomena. Just the connection across scales, whether it’s spatial scales or time scales, those are the types of grand challenges you can answer by doing the work that I get to do. Then, it’s connection to other planetary systems, interstellar molecular clouds, or other planetary atmospheres, are all, fundamentally, the same types of processes, and a lot of them are driven by these particle processes I get to study. So, for me, that’s really exciting because I can look at Venus -- there’s a couple of new missions to Venus to really probe that atmosphere -- the particle processes that I’ve been looking at in dust storms and in mega cities are actually applicable to what’s going on there. 01:19:00That ability to translate your science -- translate your understanding to address different types of problems -- to me, that’s exciting. I can’t get enough of it. The implications of human health. We are, right now, looking a lot more at how microbial communities respond to some of the chemistry on the surfaces of the dust where they hitch a ride or are a part of. Then, what are those downstream effects on food security, on cloud processes, on humans? That’s the big, complex problems that you can begin to address by some of the techniques and approaches that we’re using, and that’s fun. I like being in the field. I’ve always liked travel, so the fact that I can design an experiment, go out into the 01:20:00ocean environment or go out into a desert environment, and collect the data, collect the observations that are required, to then come back and understand this set of questions or challenges enough to then put them into models and get predictive capacity that then can influence policy and influence how people respond, that drives me. All that is fun. There’s not enough people thinking comprehensively about these things and, especially, on challenges that have differential effects, when you look at the human populations and where they are, whether it be in developing countries, cities where there’s environmental justice and environmental inequities that are driven by development, that are driven by policy, but they’re sort of situated in physical 01:21:00phenomenon. The way that regional climate and chemistry and environment are changing have these policy domains and influences, but there is some fundamental science there that you need to attach to that to understand. So, the interdisciplinary nature of it. It’s not just within STEM fields and engineering, but it reaches to sociology, social psychology, history, and political science. I enjoy being able to talk across disciplinary lines and silos and do science as a human endeavor versus this personal, sort of esoteric…the classic, wild hair, socially inept caveman doing science in this corner, and 01:22:00it not necessarily having impact on the greater community or even sharing it with the greater community. Those things excite me. I think that bringing in people who’ve had backgrounds like myself. The first generation in graduate school, coming from African American communities or indigenous communities or other communities of color that a different perspective on how the environment and history and development intersect. Bringing those into solution-forming and design of experiments, I think it’s exciting because having done that for quite a bit of time at Howard, and contrasting that with what I see at a lot of the R1s that I’ve been in, and even now, I can see where it shortchanges the science that we do, and it shortchanges the public, 01:23:00in terms of the scientific return that everyone invests in. Everyone pays taxes, goes to the federal government, funds the federal science mission agency. They’re supposed to be protecting life and property and community and culture and climate resilience. Yet, the people who are benefiting the most are not the majority of the population. So, that’s something that also drives me is that as we do this science, which is really fantastic, it’s really important to be inclusive in how we do the science. I probably overthought the question, but those are important things to me.  Daniel: Is that kind of mindset of being inclusive, bringing 01:24:00in diverse information, diverse talent, et cetera -- I’ve read and know that you’ve worked on a number of international research projects as well. One, in particular, is the aerosols project. That idea of bringing in diverse background -- diverse information -- when you’re doing your research, here talking about bringing in Black and brown people for it as well. Is that something you commit to and strive for even in international research settings as well? And if so, how does that process come up for you?  Vernon:  Yeah, definitely try and do that as much as possible. So the AEROSE campaign -- Aerosols and Ocean Science Expeditions is the rollout of the acronym -- is 01:25:00a international campaign in that we are in international waters some of the time; we’re in the remote tropical Atlantic a lot of the time. And the phenomenon that we’re studying is international in scope. We’re looking at dust storms that originate in Sub-Saharan Africa, how they propagate over the Atlantic Ocean and influence climate and chemistry in the tropical and subtropical Atlantic, and what are those implications as they process, as that material moves from one hemisphere to the next? So, from a United States perspective, we’re interested in what is the impact of these things as it comes into our airspace? But whatever effects it has on us, it’s gotta be having effects upstream. In 01:26:00fact, a large part of the motivation for doing this study the way we’re doing it, is to measure the upstream effects. As you measure those upstream effects, hey, there should be African scientists who live near the source regions who should be engaged in this process. That project came up because we were -- number of motivations. One, a good colleague, Roy Armstrong -- down at University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez -- is a physical oceanographer. And he’s looking at ocean color, but the dusts and coral reef health and coral ecosystem, or coastal ecosystem health in Puerto Rico. As a dust comes over, his ability to extract information from satellite sensors is greatly inhibited. As we’re talking, he’s like, oh, could 01:27:00you take out that noise, so that I can do this work? I’m like, yeah, but I’m actually interested in the noise as a scientific, so this is a perfect relationship that we got here. So, the first cruises were just around Puerto Rico during dust storms to try to figure out, okay, let’s characterize the dust, so that we can then do this work right here regionally. As I continued to do that, one, we saw that the dust was actually not static. It’s evolving chemically and physically, and later on, we realized it’s evolving even microbially. We looked at what was being done, and most experiments were just focused on this U.S.-interests or U.S.-centric thing, where we’re just going to measure where there’s U.S. territories, and we’ll just characterize everything here. That’s fine if it doesn’t change, and it’s fine if that change isn’t going to affect anything 01:28:00that might have applicative effects or other effects in the atmosphere. We got one atmosphere. So, you need to understand what’s happening in the source region to really be able to predict what’s happening at any point downstream. When we looked, there was just nobody doing any of that. There’s a few studies of people doing things in African nations -- in Cape Verde, in the Canary Islands, maybe in Senegal. But it was always extractive science; the group would go there, set up, collect the measurements, and then leave, and there’s no local scientists engaged significantly. There was no information that was left to be available to the public or policymakers. Student training was virtually nothing; no students were being trained. To me, again, it’s one of those things where I said, why would the scientific community go about 01:29:00its science that way? Like, I’m going to come into your house, cook some stuff up, and then take it all with me when I leave. That’s the same. So we said, one, there’s a scientific justification for doing these broader, larger scale experiments, but we’re not gonna do them and then just take all the data and say, okay, this is only for U.S. interests. We’ve got to engage. I’m in your territorial waters collecting these; send some students and some scientists to come in, and if you’ve got some other designs or things that you want to do, let’s get those done as well. And you have access to this data set and to the chance of co-publishing, et cetera. We just built out that mentality, that if we go set up in Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Ethiopia, or Sudan, we’re gonna engage scientists as fully as possible. Ultimately, we were still 01:30:00sort of bringing in our project more, and not really saying, well, what’s your intellectual input on the design of this? More recently, we’re starting from scratch saying, let’s all get together and talk as scientists; it’s going to be an international group of scientists, students, policymakers, et cetera, and we’ll design the questions and design the experiments as a group. We’ll get the best science out of it, and it will be fully inclusive, and it’ll have the greatest human impact on the end. An example of that actually is a workshop we just concluded a couple of weeks ago on air quality in African megacities. Again, this is not disconnected to the AEROSE campaign; AEROSE is more focused on dust, but we realized the coastal regions harbor about -- globally -- eighty percent of our population or over. So, this dust 01:31:00comes across the African coastline, majority of your population is impacted by this dust. But it’s also trash burning, biomass burning, mining, and industrial pollutants. So, you’ve got this miasma of stuff in these mega cities -- that, a lot of times, are set up along the coast, but sometimes they’re inland -- that is also influencing air quality, not just locally and regionally, but, potentially, globally. So, the African megacities project is looking at, okay, you’ve got a really unique confluence of particles. They outflow and influence regional, global chemistry, but there’s this local problem that we’re not paying attention to because we’re still framing it from my perspective as a U.S. scientist or a European scientist. What gets to me, that’s what I’m going to design the 01:32:00whole thing around. We sort of flipped that to say, okay, well, here’s where a lot of this is originating. What’s happening there? What can we learn from what we know about mid-latitude chemistry, climate, and urbanization, and what is there left to know in these regions that are really developing rapidly that are unique? They’re in the tropics, by and large, or the subtropics. They have very different aerosol mixtures and lifetimes. Very different human behaviors. The vegetation is different, so the feedback between the biosphere and the human-focused sphere are very different, and the lithosphere, the dust content. I think that’s been the evolution of how I see inclusivity, in that, even the projects that we’re doing in cities in the United States should 01:33:00involve citizens in the communities that are most affected by the environmental challenges. What are you seeing? What have you seen? What’s happening in terms of health in your neighborhoods? And can we design the questions, the scientists, and the science, so that we get the information that we need that is the most helpful and is the most humane? That has to be inclusive, and it has to be equity-centered science versus -- you know, it’s fine to say I want to know how fast ozone reacts with hydrochloric acid, and I’m just gonna get the best rate constant possible. There’s extreme value in that because we have to have that well enough to do any sort of predictive measurements. But as we start to expand out from that, you might ask, was that the reaction I should be studying? Because is that the reaction that 01:34:00is actually leading to health problems in urban communities? What are the questions that we should be asking? The science can be good anywhere you do it, but how you ask the question and which questions you ask can change a lot, depending on who you’re including, and how you’re defining the problem. This actually goes back to what we first started off with. Why don’t Black professors want to stay here? What’s wrong with them? You’re defining a problem in a certain way, and your solutions are gonna be predicated on how you define that problem. You define that problem that way because your perspective was limited by who was in the room asking the question. The white professors who said, everything is fine, so the problem must be out there. The same thing happens in environmental and geoscience questions. What’s the actual challenge? Then, 01:35:00we get enough people in the room to identify the real holistic challenges, and then start developing solutions and approaches based on it. But we’ve done that internationally as well. We always have international folks on the team who are going to be impacted either regionally or very locally, as well as opening up opportunity for collaborators in our international networks.  Daniel: Sometimes when you are setting up and starting out a campaign -- this could be for the U.S. as well -- in a different community, either nationally or internationally, have you ever run into a problem of not being able to set it up, where either communication 01:36:00fell through between researchers and the community, or there’s something happening on the research side, where it just wasn’t able to come off the ground -- has there ever been kind of that issue of trying to set something up, and it not working out for whatever reasons?  Vernon:  We’ve had definitely some failures. I mean, there’s no science without failure. You can definitely learn as much. There’s value in failing. Although you don’t plan to do that. But, it’s tough to do work in Africa. There have been times when we’ve gone to set up and just didn’t take into account how long the relationship-building needs to be just to cultivate interest; 01:37:00to be flexible enough to shift focus and develop the relationships that can help you sustain work that’s being done with very different infrastructure levels and emphases than in the United States’s stable power. A lot of places, it’s up and down, or the government may say, nah, we’re branding this out because we’ve got this other thing we want to do, and you don’t get any notice of that. But if you’re trying to run a scientific campaign, that can really kill instrumentation, your data stream, internet connectivity, communications, access. There’s been a couple of times where we wanted to go out and do sampling in Northern Mali and parts of Southern Sudan and Western Sudan. I can go out here in Arizona, just sort of cruise anywhere, 01:38:00stop my car, go out, and do some sampling. You do it out there, you do it at a different type of risk because some of the territories are contested. Couple of times, I’ve been surrounded by folks with guns, saying -- in a different language -- what are you doing here? And realizing, man, this is risky to get a soil sample. Is this soil sample worth it? There have been times when we’ve had really grand plans, but because we didn’t do the due diligence to cultivate relationships and understand what the challenges would’ve been and develop redundancies for those challenges, beforehand, some things have failed. We lost a tethered sonde in Senegal -- these huge dirigibles that you inflate and you anchor to the ground through ropes. 01:39:00A squall came through of crazy proportions -- just ripped the balloon up. Gone. So, you’ve got instruments, you’ve got data, and it’s just floating away, and you’re on the ground like, yep. It’s tough because some of these happened very rapidly, but if you don’t have the infrastructure to watch -- and then a radar system that’s saying, yo, there is a squall line coming at you that looks like a derecho, and you got to bring everything -- anything in towers, anything that’s aloft, you got to bring down now. You’ve got clear skies now; in two hours, it’s going to be a zoo. But you don’t have that information because you don’t have the infrastructure; there’s no replacing that, once it blows away. All that stuff that blew off, went over the ocean, and dropped, it’s gone. And you gotta pack it up at that point. So, there have 01:40:00been experiments like that. Literally that happened. There have been experiments that got truncated because you ran into a militia, and your only deal is when they say, hey, I want that shirt that you’re wearing. Okay, here you go. That’s the deal. There have been some extreme cases. There have been cases where it’s just a matter of, we came to do something, but you planned it external to the location. And when you got there, you realized the folks here don’t need what you’re doing, and why would they support you to do something that looks like the same thing that Europeans had been doing in this region for the last two, three hundred years? And should you even want to do that? Sometimes it’s not so much you couldn’t go ahead and go through with it. It’s just like, I’m not gonna do this. This happened in Ethiopia. 01:41:00We came out, and we had these designs to -- the monsoon season is shifting. There’s some real drought happening. This is several years ago -- 2014 or so. So, we could look at the space-based climatologies; you can look at the space-based land surface changes. You can look at the meteorology and say, okay, there’s some really interesting dynamical changes out here. We wanna go and study that. But to get out there -- and it’s a local problem where you are -- is very different. And convincing someone well you need a better model of predicting, and they’re like, what are you talking about? We do subsistence farming here. What we need is something different than what you’re saying, on a more immediate scale. So, you get there, and you realize, rather than me set up and do this thing that I said I was going to do and then just break, go back, and write my papers, I’m gonna take the time to just talk to people in this region and find out what are your 01:42:00environmental challenges; how do you perceive them? What would help you from your perspective, and what was I missing by just looking at this reading from space and models? Because there is no human element there. That’s reducing it to a physical problem, but the actual problem is a human problem. People are starving. People can’t farm anymore. Water is not available, so now there’s conflicts where it didn’t use to be conflicts. That has upended projects as well, but in a good way, because its forced us to reframe and change how we develop field campaigns and field projects and how we engage, hopefully, the stakeholders. Because each thing that you do as a geoscientist has human stakeholders.  Daniel: Okay. Thank you for sharing that. At 01:43:00least with the AEROSE campaign, could you speak on when that campaign and some of your other international research projects kinda picked up, and where you were at the time in your career when they started?

Vernon:  Wow. Well, AEROSE got formulated, when I was at NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] Goddard. 1994, I started Howard. Worked there. Got tenure in 1997. Went up fast for tenure, for a couple of reasons. Some early frustrations -- just being at an HBCU, but having come -- I did my one postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, second postdoc 01:44:00was at UC [University of California] Davis, but also worked with some folks in other UCs -- so there was a particular level of speed and research infrastructure that I was used to. Came to Howard University, and it’s not at the same level. I think a lot of the aspirations of individual researchers are at that level. There’s individual labs that are doing fantastic things, but, institutionally, a lot of the leadership doesn’t do research or never did research -- certainly, no research at an R1, so their understanding of what you need to sustain things was challenging. When I got there, I didn’t have a lab. They didn’t provide me with space to do the work that I’d proposed to do. I got into field work, primarily, because that was the work that I could do. I could extend my theoretical work. I could design and go out into 01:45:00the field and do measurements in the field because I didn’t have a physical lab, where I could do the lab work that I proposed to do, so that’s what I did. I published and got some awards, but after three years -- going into the fourth year -- I was like, let me explore some options. So, I took a visiting position at NASA Goddard, which is not far away -- didn’t have to move -- but it was at a NASA facility. Great resources, a big focus on field work, flight work. I got into that for a couple of years. While I was there -- I was there but two and a half years -- while I was there, debating on whether I should come back to Howard University, started looking at biomass burning and dust and volcanic regional transport of these aerosols, and what were 01:46:00they doing to the chemistry. Because then, there was still a lot of uncertainty in the atmospheric chemistry and atmospheric sciences community whether aerosols are really reactive; were they in the atmosphere long enough for their reactivity to be significant or not? A lot of people said, no, they’re not. They’re static things. They get up in the atmosphere; they block or influence radiative transfer, but they’re not really -- then they fall out, and that’s it. As a chemist, that just didn’t sit well with me. I was looking for ways of -- if you believe that, where’s the proof? Because what you’re really telling me is an assumption not based on chemical intuition; it’s just, I don’t believe it reacts. Okay, who tested that? Nobody. No one can produce any information to justify a prevailing thought. Which, as 01:47:00a scientist, you say, well, there’s some science to do right there. That’s when I started talking with Roy and some different folks, and there was interest in these dust storms. That’s how we backed into that. Around 2001, I had to make a decision to come back to Howard University or not come back to Howard University because I had been gone. I kept extending. Ultimately, they don’t hold your position forever there. They say, crap or get off the pot, in some vernaculars. So, I was debating. I liked it at NASA a lot, a lot of great resources, a lot of flexibility on what you worked on. You’re working across disciplinary lines. I could go work with the folks in space science; I could work with folks in atmospheric science, but then there was a change in leadership. That 01:48:00change in leadership roughly coincided with the time that I needed to make a decision, and that change in leadership really reduced the flexibility of what you could do. It went to something called full-cost accounting. All of your time had to be confined to a fixed budget of a project. So, if you had a new idea, and there was no project assigned, you’re not supposed to spend your time doing that. Leading up to that, you, literally, could go to the lunch room, sit down with some folks, and on the napkins, come up with an idea. Hey, let’s go check this out; let’s go; let’s pursue this. I loved that, and that was gone almost immediately with this new leadership that came in. So, I said I’m going back in university because that’s where my flexibility is. I hadn’t stopped collaborating with people. I was in 01:49:00the vicinity. I still had students that I was advising -- still collaborating with faculty. There was a proposal, an opportunity that came up. I had already committed that I would help work on it, but then at this decision, I came back to Howard University to put a lot more time into it. That was the proposal for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Science Cooperative Science Center. We ended up getting funded for that, and that helped us propel the AEROSE campaign into a reality, from some small vessels around Puerto Rico to asking for the NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] vessels and, look, we want to sail from one side of the Atlantic to the other side of the Atlantic. We’re gonna chase down a dust storm. We’re gonna measure this chemistry; we’re gonna measure the physics; we’re gonna do profiles, we’re gonna do oceanography during the same time to really understand what happens from mixed-layer ocean to stratosphere, when these things come across. That 01:50:00was the first mission dedicated to doing that. No one else had really said, this is what we’re going to study; this is why; this is how. And it was very naive because it’s never been done; you’re going to put a lot of Black and Puerto Rican scientists and students on this multimillion dollar vessel, and say, we’re gonna chase a dust storm. We’re not sure when it’s going to come off, but we know the time that it typically comes off, and we’re gonna do all of this science, and we’re gonna show you that it works. That was a huge risk for NOAA. Now, it’s a huge risk all the time because if white scientists had proposed that, it’s still a huge risk. But the perception of the risk is very different. And the implications of a failed experiment are very different. That white scientist will go back and 01:51:00say, well, didn’t get this time, let’s do it again, and they [say], okay, go and do it again. But if a Black scientist does it, these guys, they don’t know what they’re doing. Look what happened. Let’s not ever do that again. That might not be said that way, but that would be what happened. So, there’s a lot of pressure on that. And I’m gonna have to call out Pablo Clemente-Colón, who was the director of the U.S. National Ice Center ultimately -- a Puerto Rican scientist inside of NOAA -- who really advocated to make, hey, look, you give these same opportunities to white scientists who’d failed repeatedly. Look at the justification. Is there anything wrong with justification that they gave you? There’s nothing. I mean, it was an experiment waiting to be done that no one had really done. And we fully equipped the ship. A lot of times oceanographers go out, and they do oceanography. And then, maybe an atmospheric science crew goes out, and they do atmosphere. 01:52:00Since when does the atmosphere never talk to the ocean? It’s like, why are you doing science this way? For us, because of perspectives, fundamentally, okay, we need to measure everything, so let’s go build a team that’s capable of measuring the physics of the upper ocean, the chemistry of the upper ocean, the flux at the interface, the boundary layer, the troposphere. Let’s measure the whole thing because we have the capacity to do it. There’s a lot of back and forth. We started lobbying for that. We got the award in 2001. We started doing experiments and getting basic data from that point forward, and we got the go-ahead for the ship, about two years later, to launch in 2004. Yeah, that 01:53:00with that campaign was pretty tense because it started off clear, beautiful seas, and we’re just like, man. This was at a time when internet on the ship -- you got two data drops a day. You didn’t have satellite; it was a real small kilobyte limit to which your messages could be. You typed your messages; there was an upload, and you can also download whatever came the night before. Then, later in the evening, you had another upload, download. You, basically -- twelve hours apart -- could communicate with land. We’re trying to do an experiment where we’re looking upstream thousands of kilometers to hope that there’s a dust storm happening, where does it happen, and we want to navigate the ship, so that we 01:54:00hit the dust storm as it’s coming in. It was a huge challenge, but we had a good relationship with NOAA. They were sending us these telex images -- black and white images over the telex to the ship -- where we could sort of make out dust. We had some folks who were doing some analysis. Ultimately, fortuitously, one the largest dust storms that occurred in the springtime -- and this is up until, really, two years ago or three years ago -- there was this monstrous storm that came out. The storm that we ran into was of that same magnitude. It was this huge storm. About five or six days in, we ran into the storm. We anticipated that there was a storm, but at the time, we had no sense of the magnitude. So, we were trying to use 01:55:00the satellite data to adjust the ship tracks, so that we would hit the storm and not end up going south or north of it. We ran into a dust storm that was so intense, that if you stood on the deck with your hands out, dust would accumulate in your palms. This is not at the coast of Africa; this is just four days off Barbados. So, you’re not even at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; you’re just in the ocean somewhere. That was a turning point, in a lot of ways, for what I ended up doing because I had just recently come back to Howard University and tried to say, okay, I’m gonna do this thing. We ended up getting a major proposal, so I had to set up this research center, and we needed to have, sort of, a home run for this research center because it was only funded, originally, for three years. So, 2001, 2002, 01:56:002003. We’re, actually, in our last year and going to get evaluated to say, well, why should we continue this center? What have you done? That cruise put us on the map, in a way that said, this investment needs to be continued because they’ve done something no one else has actually done before. And it’s going to affect our understanding of this event that we see as being more and more fundamental to our understanding of hurricanes, tropical cyclogenesis in the tropical Atlantic, food security, health, desertification. It’s affecting the most sensitive region of the Atlantic, the Tropical Atlantic, which is most climate sensitive region, could affect biodiversity. It had all of these implications, and the scientists and students who were responsible for returning the first comprehensive dataset were students from University of 01:57:00Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, Puerto Rican students, Black students from Howard University, and some of the partners. They, actually, took some of the results to Capitol Hill and got Capitol Hill to justify extending the program based on this work. That was a big turning point because then it’s not a one and done, you say, okay, well, we understand what happened this time. This was a phenomenal, probably anomalous, event. We need to go out and continue this work. So, since 2004 to this year, it’s been just about every year we’ve gone out. It was a way of recruiting students. It was a way of recruiting faculty in scientific collaborations. It was a way of having this international footprint because as we went through the different international waters, we got Barbadian scientists, we got scientists from Trinidad, scientists from Senegal, scientists from 01:58:00Nigeria. It allowed us as a fairly small and fledgling program to have a national -- international -- footprint by saying, this campaign, we’re generating the types of data that theses can be developed from. Lots of undergraduate research, international connections, connections to the federal government, and connections to actual products -- improving satellite retrievals, improving global model forecasts, improving regional model forecasts of weather and climate, of chemistry forecasts. So, the outcome from the project also was multifaceted. It also helped us entrench sustained funding for the research center. That research center, started in 2001, is still going. So you have twenty years of funding to do this fundamental thing that had we failed, it could 01:59:00have gone the other way. That’s it. And then my trajectory as a scientist…now I’m committed to doing field work. I can’t go back and say, I want to do this lab work only. It’s like, okay, I gotta extend this out. So, that was a turning point in a number of ways.  Daniel: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s almost two decades now that the project’s been going on; that is amazing. It’s nice. It’s really cool and interesting and awesome to hear the whole national and international diversity that’s going on within that ship, but also with people using that data, which I think is fascinating. Slightly 02:00:00transitioning now, as we’re coming towards the end of our conversation. This also goes back to what we first started off with, in the beginning, where you’re talking about, specifically, about ASU and some of the initiatives that they’re putting on related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Throughout your career -- but also in the last few years -- you’ve been publishing and presenting a lot about diversity, equity, and inclusion or systemic racism -- systematic racism in academia -- specifically focusing on geosciences and also doing things like the call to action that you put out. I wanted to, one, see if you could speak on what that call to action 02:01:00was, and why you and your co authors put that out there, and what prompted you to write a lot of these publications, do a lot of presentations in the last few years -- talking about racism and talking about diversity inclusion and that frustration that you and co authors were feeling.

Vernon: You captured it right there. Frustration. This is 2020, and 2020 was a rough year. It was a lot of brothers getting killed in 2020. I was looking at that, and I had already made a commitment to leave Howard 02:02:00University. So, I was at a point where I was already thinking about professional transitions. But, the context of a professional transition was just tough because there was a lot of business as usual. It felt like people were getting -- like brothers are getting killed every month, every couple of weeks, someone’s getting killed by the police. When I looked at it,  Ahmaud Arbery was especially triggering for me because I lived in Atlanta for a long time. I’ve ran in Atlanta, like, that could be me. That could be me. The national response to it, all the way down to the response at Howard University, especially for the scientists was like, yeah, but that doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re doing. It was just, oh, that’s terrible; next thing. 02:03:00I’m going to work, and I’m troubled every day, but I’m still trying to do, like everybody else, just keep writing papers. And, it was like, I can’t do it like this. I can’t not say anything. This is dumb for me to be silent and just go about my business. I can’t do it. And I’m leading this center. At that time, we had a thirteen member center. We’re doing science; we have thirteen institutions, forty faculty; there’s hundreds of students, and we’re all like this. [Silent.] Whatever happens in society is just happening, but it doesn’t have anything to do with us. So, I guess one day, where we had a joint meeting, I kinda broke down. I was just like, 02:04:00I am pissed, and I feel responsible. And I am not fulfilling my responsibility…give me a second here…I let everybody have it, but I was really letting myself have it. This has been going on, and we’re doing what we are trying to do within this limited framework, but, at the same time, we’re acting like it doesn’t connect to the larger challenges. Like I said, we can’t -- I can’t do it 02:05:00anymore. I just blew it out for a while -- probably like fifteen minutes -- I was just like, we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing. Yeah, we’re mentoring students in our places, and, yeah, we’re writing papers, and yeah, we’re good role models and all that. If we don’t stand up and say something and point to the problems that we’re fighting, that they’re not changing rapidly enough because we don’t have enough community -- and we’re part of the problem by not speaking up; we are part of the problem. At Howard University, we are part of the problem. At Jackson. We are part of the problem. At the University Puerto Rico. We are the problem, if we don’t stand up and say, that this should stop now. So, I got that out of my system, and then later that night, again, talk about Roy. Who’s 02:06:00a…give me a second again, I’ve got to pull it together, I’m sorry.  Daniel: Take your time.

Vernon: So, I worked with a good crew of folks who just said, look, put it out there, just lay it out. And challenge the community like you challenged us, and we’ll respond. That’s where it came from. Then stuff continuously got worse. That was back in -- that was before George Floyd, to tell you the truth. So, I called a group 02:07:00of folks together -- men, women, African descents, Latino, indigenous, and I said, look, this is a problem in STEM. We know it. We’re all in geoscience, but we know this is bigger than us. We know this is nationwide. Let’s, in our community, not be silent anymore, and that’s where the name came from. We wanted it to be more than, hey, everyone should treat everybody nice. That’s true, but that’s not what’s happening here. You can be treated nicely and still be excluded. Sorry, there’s no room for you here; why don’t you try this? You know what, I think you’re doing a great job, but a master’s degree is better for you. I think you can be treated nice. Fewer and fewer people are not being treated nicely, but it’s allowing the atrocities to continue 02:08:00that are systematic that also allow these blatant atrocities to happen. What we wanted to design was, here’s where things can change in our area, and these can translate to all areas, whether it’s academic, federal, private sector, NGOs, professional societies. There are specific things that can be done. Then, we also pledged as a group -- we’re ten signatures here. We each have networks that expand out, and we have to challenge our networks to be better as well. That’s where it came from. It, actually, ended up coinciding with another letter that Hendratta Ali I know was one of the leads on.That letter came out actually before we put our letter out. When we looked at it, we said, we 02:09:00were gonna just say, everyone sign this letter. This is great. Then, when we looked at it again, it was like, well, that’s not quite what we’re saying. They’re starting from the individual, and we were really focused on the structural. So, we said we’re gonna put ours out anyway, and we’ll see how it goes. We didn’t expect it -- I had to get it out of my system. My network of folks were very supportive. Yes, get it out of your system. You’ve got a different type of stature. It was from more of a practitioner viewpoint as well. A lot of things I was seeing were very academic. I saw myself as being in the trenches at Howard University and with these international programs and said, look, I’ve worked with Atlanta Public Schools. I’ve worked with 02:10:00different grassroots groups, worked with undergraduate populations. I’ve been in the hostile environments and created a program that has, at least, influenced a federal agency significantly. There’s actually a way to do this, and it’s not theoretical. It’s like, this is how you do it. This is what you need to do. I’ve been a member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, the American Chemical Society. I’ve seen what they’ve done. I know how I feel; I’ve talked to other members. I know what needs to be done for that to be a more inclusive professional society -- or those to be -- so let’s not treat it as if the problem would be solved, if everyone was nice to each other. Because if you don’t change policy, and you don’t change power systems, and you don’t change hierarchies, and you don’t say, we’ve gotta tear some of these things down, so that we can rebuild it in a way that is truly inclusive, then you’re not gonna make any progress. You’re just gonna have a lot of empathy and sympathy, and 02:11:00then it doesn’t change. And then next year is the same as this year, which is what we’re seeing in a lot of police engagement. A lot of talk, but no one changes policy, so that the policies keep getting enforced the same way. That’s where it came from. Then, what we did was sort of double down on making sure that the committees and advisory boards and councils that dictate policy changes in professional societies for federal programs change and also commit to making changes in the academic institutions where we sit. As I transitioned to ASU, I came to ASU, and I told [them] in every interview, here’s this link. This is what I think. This is what I’m committed to. If this doesn’t fit, don’t hire me. I’m okay with 02:12:00that because I’m looking for a place where I’m going to continue to promote these things. And ASU was very receptive to it. That was something that we’re carrying forward. We’ve got people. I don’t want to out people because there’s a lot of resistance. There’s a lot of resistance at a lot of levels that people would rather talk and furrow their brow, and [say], yeah, we need to get more data, and not do anything. We’re trying to transform things. Make meaningful transformations in this window of opportunity that we have. Because, if you look at history, there’s a disruptive activity; there’s a riot. Something happens. There’s a surge of efforts. Then, following that surge of efforts, there’s a really strong pushback. In fact, we’re already seeing some of the backlash and pushback on voter 02:13:00rights, on LGBTQ rights. One thing rises the prominence, and that’s an opportunity for the stuff that’s a little bit not in prominence to just get gutted. You’re starting to see that the state levels where they’re really trampling on equity and human rights of people that are gonna undercut anything that we do in terms of equity for African Americans in STEM or in geosciences. As you take rights away from the LGBTQ community, as you take voting rights away. As you are, basically, still empowering police to do the things that they’ve been doing by saying, okay, we’re going to establish a slap on the wrist for this particular thing. Well, that’s a message. The twenty-two year sentence is a message. Nikole Hannah-Jones not getting tenure at the University of North Carolina-Chapel 02:14:00Hill for critical race theory. These are undercutting any advances that we make. So, what we try to do is coalition-build beyond geosciences and beyond sciences to push for, here’s a way of changing these institutions structurally. So, ASU has stepped out, AGU has stepped out -- which we put a lot of pressure on to say you’re one of the largest professional organizations, the largest in geosciences. You need to be a leader. Same thing at ASU. You’re one of the largest academic institutions in the nation. Be a leader in this, too. Yes, number one in patents. Yes, number one in innovation. Yes, number one…great. What about equity? Be number one in equity. And that’s gonna make other people [say,] okay, I gotta compete now, right? That’s 02:15:00what that emphasis is. It’s taken up a lot of bandwidth and energy. I think it’s a good thing. We have to put in structure that is sustainable. Otherwise, the backlash eats away at any advances that you make or just falls through because that wasn’t worth doing, so let’s not do that, and it’s another ten years before people reinvest. So, it’s been good. It wasn’t meant to be exclusive, but we wanted to construct it, get it out. We wanted to indicate that it is about coalitions. A lot of new coalitions have really built up. The Asian Pacific Islander groups in geosciences, Black in geosciences, Black in marine sciences, Unlearning Racism in Geosciences. There’s a lot of great student and early career professional momentum, and what we’ve done 02:16:00in No Time for Silence is connect with those groups and try to amplify their voices. And at the same time, let’s understand that the struggle is connected. We need our affinity spaces, and we need to have our individual voices, but there has to be a coalition, and a coalition comes with conflicts. So, let’s address the conflicts. There’s a generational conflict. There’s a lot of folks my generation who say, we gotta preserve some of these structures. There’s younger generations like burn this -- burn it down. I’m like, yeah, let’s burn some of it down. There are perspectives on things that you’ve got to hash out and argue about until you can get to the common ground. Understanding as you’re going through the argument, we’re in this together. Not, well, you just do your thing, and we’re gonna do our thing, because that’s what leads to the nonsense and 02:17:00chaos. We’ve got to have intentional and structured chaos, not anarchic chaos. That’s been fun. I’ve really enjoyed talking to a lot of groups, engaging with a lot of groups, publishing some papers, getting out the word. And when I speak, I speak more from a practitioner perspective. My Ph.D. is not in organizational dynamics. I read a lot on that, and it informs what I see and how I articulate certain things, but I’m speaking from someone who’s been inside the organizations for twenty-plus years and understand this is how they work. So, bringing some reality to the theory, so that we can come up with better designs on how to disrupt and change. That’s a lot of what I’ve done 02:18:00lately, and I hope to keep the pressure on, and we’re expanding forces. So, it’s not just me, but it’s me, and a hundred other folks in science and engineering and across physical sciences, the social sciences, communicative sciences, and humanities. I hope we make some progress.  Daniel: I want to thank you, again, for sharing that and for me and other people maybe listening to this. It’s comforting to hear that, even though there’s pushback in areas, that some groups and some individuals and some organizations are being receptive to, one, putting out that frustration, but also taking 02:19:00it to heart to do some type of change. So I’m personally happy to see that, at least, that is going on. Going into one of my last questions is, what do you foresee for future generations to need to do to continue to see this type of change, or continue to push for change or make change happen? You can talk specifically about geosciences and STEM, or you can go broader as well.  Vernon: Yeah, I’ll talk generally. Again, my context largely is in geoscience, but I see it the same in chemistry. I was talking to Juan Gilbert at University of Florida. He’s got a program there -- he’s an African American scholar in computer science. 02:20:00I think he said something like eighty percent of the Black faculty in computer science have come from his program. So, you’ve got places where it’s been figured out, but we like to talk about problems a lot. I think one thing is find the places where people have figured it out and amplify those and get those out. I think it is a major thing. It’s easy to feel isolated as a Black student in a scientific or engineering discipline because very few programs have critical mass. What the benefit of the groups are -- and this is why I think it’s great and amplifying it, sort of connecting to some of these initiatives -- is that you can find that community across institutions 02:21:00that can help put pressure on your institutions to change. A lot of my generation, one of the problems that we’ve had, one of the problems that we’ve created, is that we’ve been silent. We’ve sort of struggled in silence, like, I’m here alone. Some of it is because of contexts. I’m the one Ph.D. student who’s coming out at Georgia Tech. If I look nationwide, there was one other student who graduated my year, and I actually know him, Greg Jenkins, graduated from Michigan. It’s two people nationwide. Not a lot you could do to amplify the voice. You’ve gotta kind of survive. But we’ve gone past survival now because there actually is in the hundreds of students in graduate school, but we’re still scattered. But we can’t be silent anymore, right? Even as you feel isolated, I think Zora Neale Hurston said, ”If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it,” 02:22:00so we gotta have voice. That’s one of the things that I’m doing currently, and I encourage the other students. Don’t be silent about it. If something happens, it’s kind of crazy where you are, connect with a larger network, amplify that. This is wrong. This has got to change. This is what is happening right now. I think the folks who are waking up -- I don’t believe that there is as much wokeness as the TV cameras portray -- keep it on their near-field radar. Stuff is effed up right now for a lot of people, and it’s not changing because of talk. It changes because you change policy; it changes because you transform the system. And getting people into positions of power and decision-making. Now I’ll go to atmospheric sciences, in particular, when you look at the full professors, the 02:23:00distinguished professors, the chaired professors, that’s still over ninety -- I think it’s ninety-three percent in atmospheric sciences -- white males. You say, well, seven percent’s not bad. Well, some of it are non-U.S., European males and females. Then, you have white females, and you have a few Asians. You’re down to the tenths of percents of people of color, period. Now, everyone who’s a person of color is not your friend. Just because you see a Black or brown face doesn’t mean that they’re not there for themselves because we’re raised in a capitalistic society that says, I’m an individual, and I’m gonna get mine. You can get yours because that’s how the society works. If you didn’t, you didn’t work hard enough. If you really work hard, and you don’t cause me problems, then I’ll try to support you. 02:24:00But I’m not gonna support anyone who’s gonna take away my individuality. I don’t think science should be that way. Most of what I spoke about is really communal, collaborative science. I think, two, recognizing that it’s gonna take a community effort beyond yourself, beyond your network, and you’ve got to coalition-build. Again, coalition-building does not come without challenges, does not come without conflict, but that’s the only way that you actually make progress. I think, third, when you start going down the ranks, you have to get leadership involved. In the academy, to change the entire field, where do you go to get training? You get training in the academy. You go to some institution. If the institutions don’t change, you’re probably not gonna get all these other changes because most of the changes there are predicated on people of my generation 02:25:00or older who lived in a segregated U.S., and it was okay. It was okay to not ever see a Black person other than the maid or the janitor. Those are the people who are on the National Science Board, who are in the National Academy of Sciences, who are running the science mission agencies, who are running the Fortune 500 companies, and technical companies. Their vision of the United States is an older, really segregated and non-inclusive, vision. So, you’ve got to connect with them and say, look, this is crap right now, and this not where things are going. You’re not gonna win everyone over, so you don’t waste time on people you’re not gonna win over, but you’ve got to change what that pipeline is into those places, and that comes from the coalition-building again. You find the few allies that you can find who understand that their lensing of the world is a 02:26:00Jim Crow segregation lensing. That’s how you see the world. Whether you knew it or not, if you were in graduate school in 1950, 1960, early 1970s, it’s Jim Crow. So, you’re now leading agencies or schools or professional societies, and you haven’t realized that. You’re just amplifying Jim Crow structures onto 2020 people. I think if anyone looks at that, critically, there’s gonna be a little bit of change. There might not be wholescale change, but at least a little bit of change. We have to incorporate history; know your history and be able to communicate that history. It’s our history, right? All of it. Jim Crow is U.S. history. Slavery is U.S. history. African American history is U.S. history. If you know your history, and you can communicate your history in context, then you can start to have conversations with people, 02:27:00even if there are conflicts in those conversations, it’s a conversation. It’s not, I’m here, you’re there, I don’t wanna hear what you got to say. It’s, this is what it is. You remember, didn’t you grow up here? You know what was happening there at this time? This is the history of this place. It’s not the current history, so how do we change? How do we work together to get this done? I think that is what I’ve been trying to advocate. Keeping lines open, keeping networks open. Knowing your background, but not being silent. Not letting the isolation silence you because if we’re not up front about what is needed -- what we’re going through, what the solutions are -- then we’re allowing other people to exert their power over us. That’s a 02:28:00no-go. That’s too much frustration. Like, now, I don’t have that weight on my shoulders as much. I think there’s a lot of survivor’s guilt that creeps into my mentality. I’ve seen a lot of really talented people just shut out and shut down. I carry that with me. That’s what I wanna change. That drives a lot of my motivation and priorities to make things inclusive, to make them collaborative. When I leave, it should not be the same as it was when I got there. That’s the challenge here at ASU right now; it can’t be the same when, or if, I leave. It can’t be same 02:29:00as when I came in because it’s gotta be forward of where it is.

Daniel: Okay. With that, the last thing is, was there anything else you wanted to -- as we close out the interview -- was there anything else you would like to share or say today? To leave with somebody or leave a thought, idea, or something for those who may be listening to this later on?

Vernon: Yeah, that’s a good one. I don’t know. I think just recognize that it’s not easy. You got a limited amount of bandwidth. So, I think, I’ve run into students who are trying to do a lot of things, 02:30:00and the landscape’s changed, since I went through. But I think trying to do things that are aligned with your values and have the maximum impact should be how you prioritize what you go after and what you engage in. Instead of trying to do everything, because you risk burnout. Burnout is real for scientists of color. It will evolve over your career, but try to focus on what is the lasting impact that you want to make. How will your decisions support that lasting impact that you want to make? If you can try to stay as aligned with that strategy and apportioning your time and effort, you’ll be able to look back and say, okay, it’s time for me to transition to something else; this place is better than it was 02:31:00when I came in. That’s some general advice I’d give to folks who are earlier in their career than I am. I’ve got a couple more miles to go, but there’s folks who are coming in with a lot more mileage -- a lot more gas in their tank -- than I got. I hope I can support them along the way.  Daniel: Okay. Awesome. Thank you again so much. That concludes that interview portion between me, Daniel Smith, and Dr. Vernon Morris for the Black Excellence in STEM Oral History Project. Let me go ahead and end the recording. 02:32:00[End of Interview]