Ayana Tamu Holloway Arce

North Carolina · connectedBorn 1950

American physicist

Worked at Duke University

physicist, researcher

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

Since I started working in high energy physics it certainly hasn't been lonely and there haven't been a lack of female role models.

Black women are a different story. But there were minority women working at the Fermilab experiments whom I was very happy to see. And at the ATLAS experiment there are a noticeable fraction of African descent. So I think things are improving because, historically, all of the icons in our field have been white men.

I didn’t know what my life would look like as a black postdoc or faculty member.

I looked to the women such as my mother who had had academic careers, and tried to think about how I could shape my life to look something like that, and I realized that it could be something I could make work.