Dr. Michele Yatchmeneff is an assistant professor of civil engineering at University of Alaska, Anchorage. She’s also an Unangax (Aleut) woman who grew up in rural villages along Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
There aren’t many like her in academia. Less than 5% of indigenous people have graduate degrees compared to 13.4% of their White peers, according to a 2018 report by The Education Trust.
In the sciences, only 48 research doctorates were given to Native American and Alaska Native students, out of the 11,764 doctorates awarded to U.S. residents in 2012.
At her university, Yatchmeneff is now a co-principal investigator for the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP), which supports Native American scholars pursuing graduate education in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
As a student, she participated in the program herself not once, but twice. When she earned her master’s degree in engineering management, she was the first SIGP scholar for the University of Alaska. She then participated in the program a second time as an engineering Ph.D. student at Purdue University. Today, she works on recruiting and retaining indigenous students at University of Alaska campuses as a leader in the program that facilitated her graduate education.
“It’s really important to me to give back and help those students — and help the program that also helped me get my degree,” she says. “Honestly, I wouldn’t have probably considered a master’s degree or a Ph.D. without it.”
Currently, SIGP serves students in STEM programs at the University of Alaska, Anchorage; University of Alaska, Fairbanks; the University of Arizona; University of Montana; Montana State University; Montana Tech; Purdue University; and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
