Dr Darshana Joshi and Dr Vijay Venugopalan are working to make science education accessible to all.
Science outreach has always interested Darshana Joshi. While completing her PhD in physics at the University of Cambridge, UK, school students often would visit her lab to see science in action.
“We used to simplify advanced concepts through hands-on activities” such as demonstrating superconductivity using a magnetically levitating train model, or explaining how to extract a DNA sample from a banana, says Joshi.
During her vacation time, Joshi would visit her home in India, where she and her partner Vijay Venugopalan, also a physicist, created similar experiences for local kids, running science workshops for more than 8,000 students across the country within three years.
Once they had completed their PhDs in 2019, Joshi and Venugopalan launched VigyanShaala, a charitable organisation that aims to democratise science education and access for students, especially those from marginalised and underprivileged backgrounds.
VigyanShaala – which currently has ten full-time staff and eight members of a support network, who help in areas such as financing and curriculum advice – has since established two mentorship programmes: the Rural STEM Champions Fellowship and their flagship Kalpana Fellowship, which focuses on creating opportunities for women and girls in STEM.
The organisation has also worked with local governments in India to collect comprehensive data on STEM education and careers, with hopes of informing policies to address the systemic barriers faced by women in the field.
Hit the ground running
Before founding VigyanShaala, Joshi and Venugopalan visited several organisations across India to understand the STEM outreach landscape. They realised that a few high-profile academic institutes had great outreach programmes, but “these have not percolated into the not-for-profit space, and are not scaling into the country anywhere”, says Venugopalan.
They also found that existing programmes were good at inspiring enthusiasm for science among school students, but failed to foster an understanding of skepticism and critical thinking. “In terms of excitement and joy, India has done really well,” says Venugopalan. “We need the next step of scientific questioning, of using a methodology to solve issues. Those we haven’t reached anywhere.”
Joshi and Venugopalan’s background research for VigyanShaala also involved surveying teachers and students from more than 130 schools in remote villages and townships in Uttarakhand, a northern Himalayan state in India. Out of that exercise, the Rural STEM Champions Fellowship was born. The fellowship programme identifies promising students from colleges and schools in rural communities and provides them with mentorship and hands-on science experiences.
The mentorship programme, which runs over three to five years, involves connecting students with working scientists and researchers over Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp. VigyanShaala advertises these volunteer positions through their network and partner companies, and currently has a team of more than 200 mentors from around the world.
Forty students have completed the mentorship programme so far, and these graduates have gone on to mentor more than 2,000 students from local schools.
Diksha, an undergraduate student studying biological sciences at a local government college, was mentored by Hemant Tripathi, an ecologist from Leeds University in the UK, as part of the Rural STEM Champions Fellowship. She also received a year-long internship with a London-based think tank to work on a forecasting tool for climate-resilient agriculture. “Sitting in [the Himalayan town of] Pithoragarh, Diksha is bringing the voice and the knowledge of her community to the world,” says Joshi. “When people like Diksha succeed, they become role models for other younger people in the community.
Mentoring women in STEM
In early 2020, while interacting with one of the student cohorts, Joshi realised that women engaged far less in an exercise when they were part of a mixed-gender group. “It’s not that they don’t want to [engage], but their enthusiasm, their voices, get suppressed by the loudest voices in the room,” she says. To fix that, says Joshi, “our Kalpana programme was born”.
Kalpana, a mentorship and career development programme, engages women who are pursuing science and engineering at a university level. The programme offers career guidance, personal development courses and STEM skills training, as well as advising women on how to deal with challenges such as balancing work and family. Influential women in STEM, such as Nivruti Rai, head of Intel India and Nature India’s chief editor Shubra Priyadarshini, are invited to talk to participants on a weekly basis.
The programme is delivered remotely, and a typical cohort runs for eight months. It consists of two stages: the incubator stage, which runs for 8-10 weeks and involves large group mentoring sessions; and the accelerator stage, which offers those who complete the incubator stage more specialised mentoring on job readiness, such as interview preparation and building CVs and LinkedIn profiles, over a 12-14 week period.
In the two short years since its launch, the Kalpana Fellowship has already proven its worth. Aparna, a woman from the Indian state of Kerala, was mentored by Dr Swathi Lakshmi, a research engineer at French manufacturing company Saint-Gobain’s India-based R&D centre, to develop a prototype of an electrochromic window that changes colour when an electric field is applied. The prototype helped Aparna secure an internship at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, through which she earned a fellowship in 2023 from Mitacs — a Canadian non-profit that funds research internships — to pursue her research in Canada.
Kalpana has grown rapidly, reaching more than 3,000 women from 220 districts across India. The goal, says Joshi, is to reach 10,000 women by the end of this year by leveraging their networks at leading public research institutes in India.
Impact through policy
Alongside mentoring and teaching through fellowships, Joshi realised that a major impact could be had by working with local governments to help shape policies. When she started to look into it, Joshi noticed that there was a dearth of data about women participating in science in India. Something as basic as sectoral data on women at different levels in the workforce, for example, was missing. “[India] is looking at creating a trillion-dollar economy, but that cannot be done without an understanding of where we stand today,” she says.
Around the same time, the government of the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, got in touch with Joshi, asking her to map out the challenges that local school students were facing. Over the course of six months, Joshi and her team completed a comprehensive sampling of three districts, interviewing more than 1,200 students across 140 schools in Uttarakhand.
When they analysed the data, Joshi and her colleagues were struck by a policy that offers school students an ‘exit’ from maths in class 9, allowing them to opt for home science, which focuses on areas such as cooking and nutrition. They found that more than 75% of female students took this opportunity in class 9, and by the time they’d reached classes 11 and 12, more than 90% of girls had dropped maths.
“It has become socio-culturally acceptable for girls to leave mathematics in government schools,” says Joshi, adding that this impacts future opportunities for a career in STEM. “It’s really unfortunate because you are systematically enabling them to remain marginalised in science,” she says.
Gathering such information through interviews and research can make systemic problems like this visible, says Joshi, and can be used to inform future policies. The Uttarakhand government is now piloting large-scale maths education programmes for students in primary school to tackle “maths phobia” and bring about “intergenerational socio-cultural change,” she says.
Joshi is surprised by how open communities and governments have been in working with VigyanShaala. She hopes to leverage this trust and iterate their programmes to solve challenges in India more broadly. “With VigyanShaala, particularly in the women in STEM space, we want to solve challenges at scale,” she says.
Joshi has ambitious plans for the future. She aims to have VigyanShaala reach 10,000 women across India by the end of 2023 through the Kalpana Fellowship programme. “As we reach this mark, we will better understand how Indian women see access to careers in [STEM], and how many women have access to career guidance and role models.”
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Story by Pratik Pawar
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