A SMITHSONIAN STATUE AT THE
Greenwich educator, STEM advocate honored with life-sized, 3D replica
GREENWICH — Erika Kurt had a slightly unnerving — but exhilarating — experience earlier this month at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
She came face to face with a life-sized statue of herself.
“Most of the time, when you see a statue of someone, they’ve already passed away,” she said with a laugh.
But seeing the statue of herself, made of lightweight acrylic by a 3Dprinter, was also a high honor. Kurt, a resident of Old Greenwich, an educator and advocate for women in the laboratory, was one of 120 women who were honored at the Smithsonian for their work advancing human knowledge in science, technology, engineering and math.
Kurt said it was a thrill to meet women neuroscientists, computer engineers, marine biologists and innovators who were also highlighted at the event.
“It’s an incredible honor, and invigorating. And it felt very validating,” she said of the event, which commemorated Women’s History Month in March.
The concept of statues to honor women in science served a purpose, Kurt said.
“If you look across the United States, there are thousands of statues of historical figures. And if you take in the biggest cities, there’s less than a dozen that are women. Whom you choose to honor in society, and set out as role models, really means a lot,” she said. “The exhibit — it’s a role model for young girls to show them what they can do next . ... If she can see it, then she can be it.”
A New Haven woman active in public health, Crystal R. Emery, was also honored at the Smithsonian by the IF/THEN Initiative, which aims to promote women in the sciences. The IF/THEN Initiative is continuing its outreach in other ways. Kurt will be speaking on a panel at Comic-Con International in San Diego later this year, an event that attracts thousand of comic-book and sciencefiction fans.
The science-educator is president of Small World Initiative, a non-profit educational, advocacy and health organization based in New York City. Its mission is multi-faceted: to encourage women to take up and continue work in scientific fields and to achieve real-world results in microbiology and medicine.
According to the IF/ THEN organization in its appraisal of Kurt’s work, “She empowers STEM students to not just dream about using science to save lives, but to actually dig in and help save the world, starting in the classroom.”
Kurt has been involved in the sciences from her earliest days, growing up in Dallas, Texas, as the daughter of a physician.
“I started off as a complete science nerd,” she recalled. “My dad used to literally read clinical studies to me as my bedtime stories.”
At Vassar College in New York, she signed up as a physics major, but lost interest because of the way science was presented, she said, a scenario that plays out for many young women.
“Science is really taught as memorization and regurgitation. Focusing on theory, not practice,” she said. Kurt later studied law and developed a specialty in comparative medical law involving intellectual property, genetically modified crops, drug-trial protocols and other healthcare issues that cross national boundaries.
At Yale University, science professors were seeing women drop out of STEM fields at high rates. In 2012, a team of professors developed a new program, one that made students find and cultivate soil microbes as part of their studies.
In medicine, it has long been observed that certain kinds of bacteria are very effective at killing off other strains of bacteria. So soilbased bacteria that students were collecting have the potential to create potent new drugs against drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, which have come to be labeled “super bugs.”
The initiative at Yale, starting with just six students, was “discovery based, hands-on” and offered a new kind of science instruction for young women, Kurt said.
That model developed in 2015 into a non-profit, Small World Initiative, of which Kurt is now the president and CEO. Her organization trains professors, as well as some high school teachers, on laboratory and field-skills they need to identify and cultivate soil microbes, as well as the curriculum to implement the program. The program now reaches nearly 400 schools in 15 countries, with 10,000 students doing the course. It is offered at Greenwich Academy and the main campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
“It’s a real thing students can do, just like they do at pharmaceutical companies, to find new drugs,” said Kurt. Some of the bacterial strains that have been identified are showing promise as drug treatments, she said.
Beside helping to usher women into the field of STEM, Kurt is also a firm believer in advocating for the role of science in everyday life and in the public square.
“I think we really need a scientifically literate society. We don’t just need more people in the field, we need society as a whole to be more literate: It helps people make better decisions for themselves and their families and discern what kind of information they’re receiving, and that’s really valuable,” she said. “I feel that science needs to come to the people, it shouldn’t just be for people in lab coats.”