Transforming Campus Culture Through Equity & Inclusion

How can universities make moves to build lasting, values-driven campus culture rooted in equity and inclusion?

In this episode of The EDII Catalyst, Dr. Mona Rahman (Research Awards Officer, Queen’s University) joins us to reflect on her journey in STEM and academia, shaped by community, mentorship, and identity.

Hosted by Mark Aloisio, this episode explores Dr. Rahman’s path from biochemistry research to research administration, the systemic and cyclical barriers faced by scholars belonging to minority groups, and the critical role of institutional infrastructure in fostering equitable and inclusive campus cultures.

Transcript begins below video. 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvJS62bsSAA

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Today, we are very excited to have Dr. Mona Rahman, who is currently the Research Awards Officer within the Vice-Principal Research Portfolio here at Queen's University. We are honoured to have her join the conversation today to share her perspective.

To begin, could you share a little bit about yourself and your journey through STEM? Where did you grow up, how did you become interested in your area of expertise, and how did your career path lead to where you are now?

I was born and raised in a little town on the edge of Lake Ontario. I am the last of the Hôtel Dieu Babies of Kingston, Ontario. My father came to Queen’s in 1968 to complete his PhD in Electrical Engineering, so I am a Queen’s baby. I like to say that I've been at Queen’s from diapers to degrees!

As a member of the Muslim community, I think our community back in those days—and there were only about ten families at the time—were either students or faculty at Queen’s. As a result, I come from a very academic community.  If you asked me what I wanted to be at 5 years old, I would have told you that I want to get my PhD and I want to be a professor—even though I probably didn't know what a PhD was and what it entailed.

I grew up in Kingston and went the normal route: I attended Centennial Public School, then Calvin Park Public School, then LCVI [Loyalist Collegiate and Vocational Institute], then Queen's University. I know people might be shocked to hear this, but my schools were pretty diverse because they were right by the An Clachan Complex [graduate student housing], so a lot of the graduate students’ kids went to Centennial. With respect to the school populations, that area is and has always been the most diverse with respect to ethnicity, country of origin, and socioeconomic background. You had the chance to get to know and learn about everybody.

I am inclined towards STEM in general; my dad is an engineer and many of the people I grew up with had parents who were professors in the Department of Electrical Engineering. I grew up knowing Dr. Khalid bin Sayeed, who taught Political Studies at Queen’s, and we learned a lot from him. My childhood friend's dad is a sociologist. But like I said, I think I was inclined towards that; I loved learning more about languages as well as history.

You might think in a very stereotypical South Asian immigrant family, they would want their kids to be doctors and engineers—later on, the stereotype shifted to include lawyers. But that was a big joke, I think, within the Muslim community: that you had two options, doctor or engineer, and then later lawyer. My dad, however, is very much not of that mindset. As an engineer, he was also very involved with social justice issues. He always taught us that doctors and engineers are not going to be the ones changing the world—it's the political scientists, the historians, and the journalists, so if you’re good in those fields, you should go into those fields.

That's my background; I think I've lived a very privileged life in that there's always been people around me that have supported and opened doors for me. An equity officer who works for the school board once told me that was because my parents set up a community for me that was safe and encouraging. We had split grade classes growing up. When there was no more math for me to do in my grade level, my Grade 6 math teacher brought in math books and allowed me to accelerate two years in math.

I had a physics teacher in Grade 11/12 whose daughter is a friend of mine, and he was very, very encouraging of our interests in STEM because he really wanted to see females excel in physics. We also had a history teacher that empowered us to tell our own stories, teaching us that history is an interpretation of the facts and that when you look back through history, you need to realize that there are different perspectives of the same issue.

In terms of getting into STEM: like I said, I was always on the path of STEM. My dad's supervisor had five girls, and I'm the same age as the youngest daughter so we all grew up together. My quote unquote big sister, daughter number 3, went into computing and biochemistry, and so she put into my mind the possibilities outside of engineering and medicine. She eventually defected and completed her PhD in computing, but we won't hold that against her.

When I was in high school, I tried my hand at biochemistry. I did a science fair project on the factors affecting enzyme activity, and a teacher contacted a professor at Queen’s. My partner and I were able to go and check out a lab. We weren't allowed to use the equipment because, you know, we were sixteen or seventeen, but it was that kind of opportunity.

When I applied to university, I applied to engineering and biochemistry at Queen's University, engineering at McGill University, and biochemistry at the University of Toronto—covering all my bases. At the very last minute, I went to a March open house and I realized, you know what? Engineering is not for me. So at the very last minute we ran down to change my application and the rest is history. I became a biochemist.

In terms of career, like I said, I've always had doors open for me. I was privileged to get a summer lab job in my first year of university with the Department of Biology because they didn't take biochemistry students until third year, when we actually learned biochemistry. I worked under the late Dr. Downe in biology dissecting mosquitoes, and the next year, I was decapitating blow flies with Dr. Steve White.

In third year, I received a national award. That also opened doors: Dr. T. Geoffrey Flynn, who was head of the department, connected with me. I was applying for a studentship and he said, ‘well, why don't you come work for me?’ I was like, ‘okay!’ I didn't qualify for the studentship anymore because the NRC [National Research Council Canada]—this is how old I am—was not answering. But yeah, I was able to work and gain a lot of experience, especially being trained by the senior graduate students there. My love of science and research came from those experiences that I had in the lab.

Dr. Flynn always asked me, ‘hey, Mona, do you want to go to Harvard?’ But my brother was four; I wanted to stick around here and watch him grow up. Dr. Flynn encouraged me instead to apply directly into the PhD program at Queen’s, which I did. From there, I just kept going. My PhD dissertation was on structure-function relationships of kringle domains of apolipoprotein(a)—a big, long thing. I gained a lot of experience from different things, a lot of things that I had to learn by myself because it was a relatively new lab. You figure out the skills that you need for your work.

I did take two years off after my PhD because I was a little burnt out after that. It was meant to be a one-year break, but it turned into two before I did a postdoc at the Robarts Research Institute. There, I was looking at smooth muscle cell differentiation and using microarrays to pinpoint genes, like a genetic fingerprint. I then took another two years off to get married and start a family. I came back to Queen’s and called people up asking if anybody had any positions. I was privileged to join a multidisciplinary research group with Dr. Kanji Nakatsu, Dr. Zongchao Jia and the late Dr. Walter A. Szarek, which I really, really appreciate.

I can't say enough about Dr. Szarek, honestly. I mean, the second meeting that we had, he looked at me and said, “I remember you. You were in my class. You sat in the front row.” I was like, “Dr. Szarek. I never sit in the front row because I need to put my feet up. I never sit in the front row—I was in the second row.” But just the fact that he remembered... He was such an amazing man to remember us. One thing I really appreciated about Dr. Szarek is that he always asked me my opinion and he always listened to my opinion, and I really appreciated that because I found I wasn't always being heard in other spheres.

Your journey seemed like it followed the traditional academic pathway up to your choice to pivot into research administration; could you speak more on that decision?

The reason I pivoted to research administration is because, if you remember, Canada went through a stage where there was no research funding. One of the governments had cut funding to fundamental research; we did all the protests in response. But because of that, it became very difficult to secure funding, such that even when the government changed and the perspective changed, getting over that deficit was very, very difficult. We had a period where there just wasn't funding, but then when funding returned, it was very difficult to secure as things were ramping up again.

We came into a situation where my old TA from Analytical Chem and I ended up being colleagues in the same research group, but we had to be paid postdoc salaries because of the lack of funding. Then there came a stage where even that role became part-time. Because it was a multidisciplinary group, I worked with Dr. Jia in terms of structural biology, so looking at the crystal structure of inhibitor enzyme complexes in order to optimize inhibitors for this enzyme.

Even though I worked in Dr. Jia’s lab, Dr. Nakatsu was the main Principal Investigator. In that way, I could add on some activity that worked closely with Dr. Jia's group, so I sort of pieced together full-time work. But it's difficult, right? And that was the situation we were in at that time, when it was very difficult to support fundamental research. At one point, Dr. Nakatsu decided, ‘that's enough.’ He was set to retire already, so he decided he would be closing his lab because the situation was not sustainable.

It was just serendipitous that there was a position that opened up in the Vice-Principal Research Portfolio. I knew the person who had previously held this role, and she was encouraging me to apply, saying ‘Well, why don't you apply for this?’ At that time, I said, ‘no, no, I like research.’ And then I came back and said, ‘well, maybe I'll try this out.’ Honestly, research administration is very eye opening. I like it because I can interact with all the researchers across campus rather than my own little silo. Even though we were a multidisciplinary research group and I did interact with different departments, to see the range of research happening at Queen’s and understand its impact was very rewarding.

Lifestyle was a factor, too: when you have little ones, it’s not disadvantageous to move to research administration. As a biochemist, things don't always work within a 9 to 5 and that can get difficult. So yeah, the pivot to research administration was unexpected, but definitely worth it.

Being at Queen's for such a long time, would you mind sharing your initial experiences with systemic barriers? How did you and your peers break through those barriers?

I have had a lot of privilege as I was growing up as a child, as a teenager, and within university. Part of that has to do with my relationship to people that came before me, and also because my father graduated from Queen’s and went to RMC, but he was still very connected to Queen’s. He was involved with the establishment of the Human Rights and Equity Office. He was on the board of the Queen's University International Centre (QUIC), which we used to call the International Centre back then.

Because we didn't have a mosque built yet, all of our community activities from the Muslim community centered around Queen’s University. So because we had to book prayer space and everything, we had a lot of connections and I knew where the resources were on campus, so if something were to happen to me or to somebody else, I knew where to go. In that way, it wasn't really a big deal if something did happen.

In first year, when I was frosh, I knew that I would not be participating in frosh week. It wasn’t somewhere I would feel comfortable. There's a lot of alcohol, a lot of rowdiness and things that I knew I would be uncomfortable with because of the ones that came before me. My frosh year was ‘No Means No’ year, and I know it's in the history books now, but it was a very bad year. It's also the year that the women at École Polytechnique were killed, so there were a lot of things that happened not directly to me, but there were a lot of things happening that year.

There were programs that were put into effect to educate students on campus, which resulted in a lot of positive change. However, a university culture is cyclical, and it really depends on who is on campus. We had programming in residences across campus, but then ten years later, we had students on the highway with misogynistic signs. Ten years after that, we had programming and everything, things got fine again. Ten years after that, we had another incident that was misogynistic. So that leads to the need to not just have short term programs, but to actually develop a campus culture that is not necessarily dependent on who's there—to put in infrastructure and say, ‘these are the principles by which our campus will run.’

I must say that I'm very used to doing things on my own, like how I had to do math on my own; in Grade 6, we had a chemistry teacher in high school that was very keen on independent learning as well. He was great, but that also taught us to challenge ourselves. We received a lot of encouragement from teachers and from my community, and we were always taught, ‘you don't take the easy way out. If this is what is required, you need to do that.’

We had an advisor in my department who helped you pick your courses as you were coming into first year. Biochemistry students need to take a lot of the same chemistry courses that the chemists will take, but I was told by an advisor, ‘you don't need to take these chemistry courses. You can take the general level one and do well in it.’ I just said, ‘well, this is the prerequisite for my program, so I'll take this one anyways.’ An upper year student on my bus had once commented that she used to be in biochemistry, but she was discouraged from taking the high-level math. So she left, changed programs.

What my friends and I and my classmates realized was that women were being told this, but not men. I did well in my first year, so that advisor stopped giving me this advice. When my friend and I were in line to plan our courses in second year, we told all the women, ‘the advisor is going to tell you this. Don't listen. Do what you're comfortable with.’ I never really understood why he recommended those courses to women specifically, because when I dealt with this person later on, that was not the vibe that I got from him.

I have very few instances of discrimination that happened to me directly and I’m very grateful for that, but they did happen. When I was in second year, I was in a chemistry tutorial where I think I was the only woman that wore hijab in the room at that time. We were talking about hydroplaning, and the professor looked at me and was like, ‘well, you might not understand this, but those Canadians over there will.’ And one of those Canadians was my classmate who is of Chinese heritage from Gloucester. I was taken aback. I've never had to deal with things like that. I was completely taken aback. It's like, I grew up in Kingston—the lake’s right there, and I grew up skating on that lake. So that really threw me. I then realized throughout the decades that the attitude that professor had demonstrated was not unique to that particular person.

Another instance: when I received a national award, it was covered by The Kingston Whig-Standard, but it was never covered by The Queen’s Journal. The reason it was covered by the Whig-Standard was probably because one of our community members who's a journalist saw it. He called my dad to say, ‘oh, did you see this?’ But it wasn't covered by The Queen’s Journal. Same thing when I graduated: usually they list the award winners in the yearbook and that year I received the Governor General's Silver Medal, but my name is not in the yearbook as having done that, and I think it's the only one. It's interesting. You could say it was just an oversight, but looking back, it seems more like a trend; it really depends on who's in charge and what their perspective is.

I was always planning to stay at Queen's for graduate school, but I did apply to other places. One university—I mean, I didn't really even look at it because I wasn't planning on going there—my father looked at the letter and pointed out that they gave me a letter as if I’m an international student. I figured, oh well, whatever, I'm not going there anyways, but he said, ‘no, you need to do something about this.’ So I spoke to my mentor, Dr. Flynn, who at that time was the Head of Department of Chemistry at Queen’s. He looked at it, got upset, called the Head of Department over there, and they issued me an apology.

This just goes to show that these things happen. We do dismiss them, but it is more significant than we might think it is. In this case, it wasn’t just about me. How was that school processing applications differently for everybody? They were treating people differently.

You mentioned in your discussion that university culture has a cyclic nature. At Queen’s, UCARE (the University Council on Anti-Racism and Equity) was created to address this. Having these resources on campus is critical for the student body, especially when that knowledge is lost generationally. Dr. Rahman was the inaugural chair of UCARE alongside Stephanie Simpson. Can you speak more on this program and how it strives to better the campus as a whole?

I've been here for a long time, but there were certain years that I was not on campus. During those years, when Principal Daniel Woolf was principal, there were a couple of STEP reviews that were done. There was a Henry Report and then the PICARDI Report [Principal’s Implementation Committee on Racism, Diversity, and Inclusion Report], and they put forth some points as to what was happening on campus and some recommendations to address these. That's when I came back to campus.

I believe UCARE was established at first to look at these recommendations and to, if not implement them directly, to oversee the implementation and act as an overseer to ensure that they were being done. It wasn't just another report. This is the problem: we do all of these reviews and we put out these reports, but what happens after? It's like, okay, well yeah, things aren’t great. What now? So UCARE was formed in order to oversee the implementation of these points of the report.

I was inaugural chair of UCARE and part of my role was to get things set up, asking ‘how are we going to do this?’ There were a lot of meetings to figure out what this committee was going to do and how it was going to do it. Since I left, they put together working groups, and now there are sub-councils that deal with things pinpointed as crucial to maintaining the culture we want on our campus. Because, as I said, the culture of a campus depends on the people that are there, and you get a completely new generation of students about every ten years, which is why we saw that change in culture.

Crucial factors include student recruitment, forming an inclusive committee, the curriculum that we're teaching, and faculty and staff’s recruitment and retention—because that's also always a problem. Everything that forms campus culture is something that we need to keep an eye on. We can say, ‘oh, well, it's Queen's tradition.’ Well, there are things that are seen to be Queen's tradition that weren't being done when I was an undergraduate student. And things change not only according to who is on campus, but also according to what's happening in the world.

When I was in undergraduate student, we went through two Gulf Wars. I had a friend that was assaulted in a café by somebody who was out on parole and drunk. There were death threats at An Clachan Complex and in the Department of Engineering. But if you talk to my friend who's been graduated for a long time, her experience at Queen's wasn't tainted by that. The attitude then was that these acts of hate were coming from a small group of people that were loud.

My friends would get yelled at on the street, but they didn't take it as an all-encompassing, ‘everybody hates us’ type of thing. These problems were recognized, and because we had a lot of connections to the administration at that time, they were very quick to rectify situations, make statements and make sure that students were okay.

The people that grew up after 9/11 grew up in a very different way. Now we've got 24-hour media, we've got social media, there’s an increase in discrimination, discriminatory behavior, harassment. We see a rise in Islamophobia, and—always in parallel—we see a rise in antisemitism. There were attacks on racialized professors, the likes of which I'd never seen before. It's a different world. And so you need to have different infrastructure to maintain that and provide that inclusive culture, but also to say ‘these are our principles and we do not accept this type of behaviour.’

There was a rise of incidents against the Muslim community at Queen’s, and they didn't feel heard by the administration at the time. They started documenting these incidents because, you know, we are a research-based university. They created a website and were also documenting cases of antisemitism, because you did see that that was happening in tandem. They made a campaign against hate, for which they received the Equity Award from the Human Rights Office in 2008.

The thing is, that was student led. I think we put a lot of burden on the students to take on things that we should be doing as more permanent members on campus in order to maintain an inclusive environment. When people are coming from wherever they're coming from, they should feel that this is their home away from home and a place where it’s safe to learn about different perspectives. There is nothing wrong with that.

Do you have any recommendations for the next generation of students/future academics as they enter the academic sphere?

One of the things that we seem to have lost, judging from my own journey, is our openness to other ways of knowing. We don't all think the same way. We all have our own unique perspectives. There are Indigenous ways. As a Muslim, education was very much emphasized for me growing up. In history, scientific methodology came from the Muslim scientists. That is part of how we were raised: always striving for knowledge no matter where it takes you, but also raised to acknowledge that there are different ways of looking at things.

Negative data is still data; it still tells a story. I would tell future academics to just be open to different perspectives. We all come with our own perspectives. There's actually a verse in the Quran that says, ‘o humanity, we created you from male and female and made you into nations and tribes so that you may get to know each other.’ This teaches us to learn different things and different ways of knowing; that diversity is there to enrich a community.

I always quote my dad who said, “ignorance leads to distrust, which leads to hate and prejudice; to fight the hate, you have to counter it with education to get rid of ignorance.” I mean, maybe Yoda said it as well, but I'm going with my dad! These words are based on that Quranic message of diversity as existing so that we can learn from each other.

Because I can now say I've been here for decades, I've noticed throughout the years that discussion and environment—being able to have debates and discussions, not necessarily agreeing with each other, but having a discussion so you can see where the other person is coming from—we don't have that as much as we used to or as much as we should in an academic environment.

Audience Member: You're very humble in the way that you talk about the challenges that you've had as a woman of colour, not only in science but within the education system as a whole. We have a lot of folks of colour who are facing similar challenges because of the cyclical nature of campus culture. Is there a piece of advice you would give to folks that don't have your network who are going through this? Is there any advice you could give on how to cope with this?

I was in a UCARE meeting once and there was a student that said she was thinking about running for the AMS, but she's never seen people that look like her running for this position. I said, you know, ten years ago, the head of the AMS was a racialized Muslim woman of Bangladeshi origin who wears hijab. But the problem with the University is that we have a very short historical memory.

Depending on the year, there were two to four Bangladeshi families in Kingston throughout my childhood—not including students, since they come and go. Nobody spoke my language of heritage. My identity growing up was, ‘I'm not American. I'm not Pakistani. I'm not an engineer. I'm not going into engineering. No, I'm not going to be a doctor.’ There were a lot of nos. In those days, I was a minority in the Muslim community and the academic Muslim community. I'm just different. And I always say, ‘every half of what you assume about me is probably wrong.’

I briefly taught for two weeks in a biochemistry course, and I knew some of the students. One of the things that was said to me was, ‘I've never had somebody that looks like me in your position.’ I understand that if you see somebody that looks like you, it opens your eyes to what the possibilities are. But for those that are students, I would say that it doesn't matter if you're the only one. You don't have to see people in the roles you want for that to be open to you. You could be the first. Know your abilities, know your strengths, know your weaknesses but don't dampen your expectations of yourself.

My motto has always been 'high hopes, low expectations.’ You have to try. I mean, you see these cheesy sayings like, ‘Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.’ But I think that's true. I think we tend to limit ourselves and the things that we will pursue based on who is already out there.

As I'm looking back on my life, I remember that there were some instances where I didn't feel I was being heard. I would be in group meetings and I would make a suggestion, nobody would listen to it, and then later I'd find a paper with that idea. It's like, ‘look, they did what I said we should have done, and now we can't do it anymore.’ People do their own thing, which is why it's so important to listen to different perspectives.

I didn't speak up as much back then as I probably do today, because now I'm at the age where I don't care anymore. But I would speak up for other people. It's hard to speak up for yourself. I think it's really important to have a network of like-minded people to give yourself confidence, but you also need to know that you can forge your own path, and you shouldn't be hesitant to do something if you really believe that is what you want to do.

Thank you, that's great advice. One last fun question: what is your favourite element?

This is really difficult because I've been out of the lab for so long, but... I will say, I like nickel. I did a lot of histidine tagged purification of proteins. I loved the way the nickel would change colour depending on the pH, from green to a nice baby blue. It was great when I could use cobalt instead, which would give us pink. What's the fun in science if you can't make science fun? And you can always find the fun in science.

Thank you very much to Dr. Rahman for joining us today, and thank you to our live audience for joining us. We hope to see you all back again soon.

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The EDII Catalyst is a podcast series hosted by the Carbon to Metal Coating Institute (C2MCI) at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. 

In this series, we explore topics of equity, diversity, inclusion and Indigeneity in STEM featuring guest speakers from diverse backgrounds and perspectives discussing their lived experiences. We provide helpful resources and tips on how to create more inclusive and equitable environments and hope to inspire you to become a “catalyst” for change in your own communities and workplaces!

The EDII Catalyst is made possible by the support of the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (#NFRFT-2020-00573).

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