Shark Hero Talks: Jasmin Graham

Jasmin Graham is the president of MISS, Minorities in Shark Science. Founded by four Black female shark researchers, MISS strives to be seen and take up space in a discipline that has been mostly inaccessible for women of color. They strive to be positive role models for the next generation. MISS seeks to promote diversity and inclusion in shark science and encourage women of color to push through barriers and contribute knowledge in marine science. MISS also hopes to topple a historically exclusive system and create an equitable path to shark science. “Diversity in scientists creates diversity in thought, which leads to innovation.”-MISS.  

 

Jasmin is also a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. She has conducted many successful sawfish surveys, presented at Sharks International, mentored an undergraduate student, worked with Florida State University’s Saturday at the Sea program. She has achieved a lot of success in shark conservation, bridging the educational gap, and mending the divide between science and public policy.

 

As a human, Jasmin was very fun to speak with. In the 30 minutes we spoke, I could tell she is brilliant, practical, and driven. I was blessed to have the chance to talk with this very busy woman and provide the transcript for you below. 

How did you get motivated to save the shark?

 

“I first got into shark science research in my undergrad. I met Dr. Gavin Naylor at a research matchmaking event at the College of Charleston. He is very excited about sharks, and it was kind of infectious! I started getting excited about sharks even though I hadn’t considered shark research before that experience. I ended up working in his lab the summer after my freshman year as part of an undergraduate research experience. It was here that I fell in love with sharks.”

 

“During that research experience, I was studying the evolutionary history of the hammerhead family. That is when I realized how interesting sharks are as a group, how long they have been here, how slow evolving they are, all of the exciting things we can learn from sharks. I became passionate about shark conservation.”

 

“I left Gavin’s lab at the end of the research experience and told him that I was interested in focusing more on shark conservation for grad school. He set me up with Dean Grubbs, who became my graduate advisor. We wrote a proposal to study sawfish movement ecology, which was a great thing because it satisfied two of my interests. 1.Weirdly shaped elasmobranchs, and 2. Conservation”. 

 

Can you explain the mission of MISS for my readers that might be unfamiliar?

 

“The mission of MISS is to create a community of support for women of color interested in shark science. Through this community, we pull our collective voices to change shark science’s status quo to make it more inclusive and welcoming to women of color and people from marginalized communities. We also work to eliminate some of the barriers that keep people out of marine biology and shark science, such as financial barriers and lack of mentors.”

 

What sort of work do you do as the president of MISS to expand its mission and influence?

 

“One of the things that I do is I write grants to support our program. I find collaborators and partners to work with on different projects, programs, and internships. We are dedicated to changing the way that shark science operates. To do that, you have to get a lot of buy-in from other shark scientists and other shark organizations.”

 

“I work with connecting people and getting them involved in things like internships programs and explaining to people why the financial burden is keeping people out. I work with scientists to acknowledge that the way they are doing things is exclusionary and help them fix it. We work to write grants and fundraise so they can offer zero-cost spots to these research experiences for people from our marginalized communities.”

 

“To create this support system in MISS, I find shark scientists and people from a lot of facets that interact with shark science (policymakers, aquariums, things like that) and bring them in to do webinars with our members. The webinars teach them about all these facets of shark science and shark science-adjacent things and teaching skills like R and python and how to make the most out of a scientific conference. 

 

“It has been shown in literature that people of color, particularly women of color, have a much harder time finding mentors than their white and Asian male counterparts. Therefore, I am trying to connect people with people who could be mentors and get them the information they would get from a mentor. Since, unfortunately, women of color don’t have as much access to strong mentors.” 

 

“Also, we have social and virtual events where people can network and feel connected to other people. I work hard to create a community so that people can feel like they belong in science and have support to work through some of the challenges that many women of color face in science.       

 

What has success looked like in the early days of MISS?

 

“MISS is still very new. We founded MISS in June and became incorporated in August.”

 

“Since our formalization, we’ve been doing a lot of work. So far, we have 157 members from 15 different countries. We have three partners: Seaquest, the Bimini shark lab, and Oceans Research in South Africa. Through those partners, we are hoping to reach more than 100 people.”  

 

“We are doing Seaquest programs with high school students from underserved communities. Seaquest has eight different locations and is running this program out of all eight locations and should take 20 students per location. We’re very excited about that.”

 

“With the Bimini shark lab, we are combining our resources to create two internship positions in 2021 for people to go work at Bimini shark lab. Bimini shark lab is a hugely important career-launching program that is unfortunately very expensive, so we’re very excited to work with them to create these zero cost positions.”

 

“Oceans Research in South Africa is another significant career starting experience. We are working with them to create a no-cost internship position. I’m super excited about that. 

 

“We are also doing things like offering ally training to shark scientists. We are starting with the American Elasmobranch Society; we’re hoping to expand that to other scientific societies dedicated to shark science to show people what it means to be an ally and create a strong force of allies. So that in scientific spaces and conferences, we have people that feel like they’re adequately equipped to be allies for women of color in those spaces. We’ve got a lot going on, and we’ve accomplished a lot in a short amount of time, and we’re all proud of that.

 

 

What can you tell me about your business Learning with Jasmin?

 

“That was a tutoring thing I used to do before MISS filled my schedule. I’ve always been interested in education and decreasing the learning gap.”

 

 “Whenever high schoolers are preparing for the SAT or ACT, a big deciding factor in how well someone does is whether or not they can pay for personalized training and instruction. SAT prep courses are costly, so for people who have the financial ability to put their children in these programs, their children score better. It is not because these students know more or are better equipped for university. It’s simply because their parents were able to afford training for these tests. That’s one of the issues that I have with standardized testing as a requirement for college.”

 

“To mitigate that, I offered a low cost SAT prep workshop and 1-on-1 tutoring, and also tutored in math and Spanish. I wanted to offer an alternative to these costly SAT prep programs. I used to work for an SAT prep program and noticed how expensive and unfair it was, so I offered it at a much-reduced rate and even did free workshops at public libraries sometimes.”

 

What did you write your senior thesis at Charleston about?

 

“I wrote it about the phylogeny of hammerhead sharks.” 

 

“I studied phylogeny using anatomical and molecular data because there are conflicting hypotheses about the evolution of hammerhead sharks. I decided to dive deeper using new technology instead of doing traditional dissections. Anatomically I used digital segmentation, a process where you CT scan museum specimens and then basically digitally dissect, which gave me better resolution for measurements, looking at angles at how things are shaped and identifying different structures.”

 

“Molecularly, I used a technique that was developed in Gavins’ lab: mitogenome capture, a process where you extract the entire mitochondrial genome. Instead of looking at the little sections of nuclei DNA, which is much longer and harder to get the whole thing, I did the entire mitochondrial genome, which evolves much slower because only mothers pass it to their offspring. 

 

Can you elaborate on the disconnect between the scientific community and public policy?

 

“A lot of the disconnect comes from the general fact that most scientists are poor communicators. Many scientists are good at communicating with other scientists who know what they’re talking about. Meanwhile, they’re awful at communicating with people outside of science. This leads to a lot of confusion between the public and scientists.”

 

“So the way science works is you have a hypothesis, you test the hypothesis, but you are never positive, you cannot confirm a hypothesis. You can find evidence that supports your hypothesis, but you can never totally confirm it. This causes a lot of confusion whenever scientists talk to the public. In science, we purposely don’t use language that’s very confident because nothing is totally provable. When the general public hears this, they kind of go ‘well, sounds like you’re not sure and don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Scientists do know what they’re talking about, but in science, scientists accept that nothing is 100%.”

 

“Another problem that science has is that science is very hidden. The process of science is very hidden; it’s very niche. Nobody ever talks about it or explains how science works. So whenever people see things in the news, they don’t understand what ‘peer-reviewed’ is. Therefore, they can’t make intelligent decisions about what to trust and what not to trust. The news is news to the general public, and if they see a headline, they take it as the real thing. If you tell them ‘well, according to the literature,’ they respond with ‘well, it’s your literature’s word against my news source.’ They don’t understand how things get published in the literature and how strenuous of a process it is. Therefore, they don’t understand the value of a peer-reviewed journal vs. a secondary source.”

 

“Lastly, these issues start with children and scientific literacy in early education. I’m super dedicated to informal science education, where you expose kids to science and how science works. Those kids are going to grow into adults. If you don’t train them in scientific literacy early on when they become adults, they are not going to know how to be informed when it comes to science issues and policy positions.” 

 

Why did you choose to study the Sawfish specifically?

 

“I have two answers to this question.”

 

“Firstly, I am intrigued by sharks that have weird shapes. Sawfish have this giant saw on their face, so what’s up with that? That’s something I’m always curious about. I started with hammerhead sharks, moved to Sawfish. Now I’m starting to dabble with other interestingly shaped critters such as chimaeras and rays. I just really liked weirdly shaped animals, not the most scientific approach, but it is what it is.”

 

“Secondly, sawfish are critically endangered, and I’m very passionate about conservation. I was interested in the intersection between science and policy and thought that this would be a great way to get involved because my advisor Dean is on the sawfish recovery team. He directly sits in that interface between science and policy. When Dean presented me with this project that would directly impact the system, I was very excited about it.

 

“I’ve always liked very applied science, and I like my science to have an impact beyond contributing to the knowledge of science. Having a project that I knew would have an impact on the conservation of a species was exciting to me, so I decided to take Dean up on his offer to work on this Sawfish project.”  

 

If you were to obtain a research grant from a university right this second? How would you use it?

 

“I feel like I would use it to (assuming it’s infinite) go out and do SPOT tags on sawfish, but the nice expensive ones that give you real-time data. I would tag sawfish when we think they mate and see if I can find their mating ground. I would finally figure out where and when sawfish mate. Shark science has a general idea and location, but we don’t know very much about sawfish mating, so that is what I would tackle if I obtained a research grant right this second.”

 

What facts about sharks matter the most when legislation is involved?

 

“Whenever talking about legislation, the things that I try to convey to people is just how slow-growing a lot these shark species are. How long it takes them to mature, how few pups they have, and how it all contributes to their decline because we are fishing them out before they can replace themselves. There is a tendency to believe that sharks will be fine because they have been here for a long time. They have, but that was before people got here, and people can do a lot of damage.”

 

“When you introduce things like big commercial fishing gear that can wipe out sharks in a short amount of time, sharks have not had enough time to adapt around that. People evolve their technology so much faster than any animal can adapt to it. People need to recognize how slow-growing they are and how few young they produce. If you look at the math, you’re like, ‘Man, we’re gonna wipe out these animals real fast if we don’t change’ the math for sharks does not look good.

What is your biggest advice to undergraduate students pursuing careers in conservation?

 

“My big advice is to find a community that is going to support you and find good mentors that can support you. Finding a good mentor is a make or break for success. Go to office hours even if you don’t have any questions and know what’s going on, just go and talk to your professor about their research and what they do. Most professors, once you get them started, they will talk and talk and talk, you can gain a lot of knowledge from them.”

 

“My other advice is to get involved in research as early as possible. Get involved in REU programs, internship programs, stuff like that.”

 

“Lastly, have confidence that you belong in this space. You have every right to be there as anyone else does. Often, we get in our heads where we’re like, ‘am I a scientist? Can I be a scientist?’. As soon as you ask a question and look for the answer yourself, you are a scientist. That can be when you’re eight, or that can be when you’re 80. Anyone can do science. There are a lot of things that people hold themselves back on because they don’t feel confident going into science spaces or talking to scientists because they don’t feel like they belong or know enough. I would instill in people that you deserve to be in science. Science is for everyone. Anyone can do science. Hold your head up high and go be a scientist if that’s what you want to do.”

 

Stay in tune with Jasmin’s fantastic work by following her on Twitter here! MISS has an account as well.