| Katrina Miller was used to being the only Black woman in the classroom. As a physics major in college, she was often either the sole Black person, or the lone woman—or both. But it was only once she started pursuing her PhD at the University of Chicago that she became hyperconscious of how much of an outsider she was. Professors and peers frequently commented on her hair. Faculty members mixed her up with the one other Black woman in the department, even though the two of them look nothing alike. In group meetings, men tended to talk over her, and she found herself growing increasingly silent. That duality—being seen for her physical differences but invisible when it came to her ideas—reinforced her feeling that she simply did not belong. One day, while googling for evidence of other Black women who had gotten PhDs in her field, she happened across a database called The Physicists, which kept track of all African American women in astronomy, physics, and related fields. She sorted it by date and started looking for names from her university. She quickly found a woman who had graduated in 1987. "I scrolled through the next page," Miller writes, "and the next, and kept scrolling until I finally reached another UChicago entry in 2015." That meant she would be the third Black woman to earn a physics PhD from her institution. Miller was floored. She became determined to understand why there were so few—and what it might take to finally change the numbers. Sandra Upson | Features Editor | 
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