Can Title IX do for women in science and engineering what it’s done for women in sports?

U.S. Navy researcher Dr. Debra Rolison will take up that question Tuesday (Jan. 24) at West Virginia University when she discusses,The Path Forward: Title IX as a Change Strategy for Science and Engineering.Her talk will be at 7:30 p.m. in Assembly Rooms A and B, in the National Research Center for Coal and Energy, on the Evansdale campus.

Passed by Congress in 1972, Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in federally assisted education programs. And while it is best known for opening intercollegiate athletics to women, Title IX also helped increase numbers of women entering professional schools, such as medicine, law, business and engineering.

But Rolison, a chemist who heads the Naval Research Laboratory’s advanced electrochemical section, would like to see those numbers notch up on the other side of the desk, as well.

She calls for usingthe logic of Title IXto address the disproportionately low retention of female Ph.D. graduates as faculty members in science, technology, engineering and mathematics departments of colleges and universities across the country.

WVU ’s Center for Women’s Studies is hosting Rolison’s visit as part of its seventh annual Women’s Studies Residency in Honor of Judith Stizel, the center’s founding director and a professor emerita of English.

During her two-day stay, Rolison will also meet with students and faculty in the College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, and in the chemistry, physics and philosophy departments.

Funding is provided by the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences’Eberly Family Program Fund and by the Women’s Studies Residency Endowment. For more information, contact Dr. Barbara Howe at barbara.howe@mail.wvu.edu or 304-293-2339 ext. 1155.