LaToya Anderson ’24, was a dancer with a bachelor’s degree in that discipline when her career path took a turn. Her time as a dancer ended, so she entered Brooklyn College with a plan to become a doctor. That’s when she discovered and fell in love with physics instead and never looked back. Today she works as an HPC research facilitation contractor to help scientists at institutions like the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center scale their computational research to high-performance computer systems, speeding up a process that once took days to minutes. Alongside her dream job in physics, Anderson also pursues a passion for Olympics weightlifting. Here she speaks about how she created her own nontraditional path to a career in physics, the challenges of being a Black woman in the hard sciences, and the importance of finding a supportive community.

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I am a former dancer who earned my first bachelor’s degree in dance performance studying classical ballet and modern. Once that journey came to its conclusion, I asked what was next for me. I enrolled in Brooklyn College, took some classes, and fell in love with the school. I started as a biology major because I thought I would be a medical doctor. I very quickly saw that it was not in the cards. I was in a chemistry class when we reached this chapter titled Quantum Chemistry, and in it was something called the Schrödinger equation. It describes how electrons behave, how atoms behave, and  how they interact. It’s an equation that allows you to see what you can’t see with your eyes. And that just blew my mind. So I chose physics.

Some seeds were planted along the way earlier in my life, so it wasn’t that big a leap from the arts to science, but that landed me in physics.

What were those seeds?

The first seed is that my mom has always been interested in technology. She used to be in the military, and when she was there, she built circuits. I grew up watching her do everything from building ship models to building my computer when I went to college for the first time. Technology was just a regular thing in our household. Science was normalized. My grandmother was a nurse. My mom later became an occupational therapy assistant. I had always been fascinated with how things work, how different puzzle pieces fit together, why they work the way  they do.

Why did you choose Brooklyn College for your second bachelor’s degree?

The college has an excellent reputation in terms of the schools and the professors and how they support their students. I also chose it because it’s affordable. It was close to where I live in Brooklyn. It ticked a lot of boxes. And because I was interested in becoming a doctor then, it also has great programs. Another reason why I chose Brooklyn College was its reputation for having an incredibly diverse community, even in physics. For my last two semesters in school, I was one of three physics majors of color instead of one. To give you a sense of how big that is, approximately one hundred Black women have Ph.D.’s in physics in the United States. Professor Sophia Suarez here at Brooklyn College is one of them.

Having that sort of safe space to learn, mess up, try harder, and do all of those things made it much easier to go into more predominantly white spaces and show up as my whole self. Going to the American Physical Society Conference this past March showed me the importance of having a baseline community. I received that when I attended the conference for the National Society of Black Physicists. There are just certain things that are understood among us. Now you could talk physics, and after, you could talk about the latest Kendrick Lamar album. Support from Brooklyn College and the society of Black physicists allowed me to thrive in predominantly white spaces.

Being in a diverse environment was a big part of your undergraduate experience. Can you tell us more. Did you have a mentor who stands out to you?

One of the best-kept secret about CUNY is all of the resources that it has. And it’s a matter of going out and finding those resources, talking to professors and administrators. My first mentor was Prof. Jeffrey McLean. He was my biology lab professor, and he also had a non-traditional background going into the sciences. He started off as a tow truck driver and realized after about a year or so of working and talking to older folks in the field that it was not for him. He’d always been interested in biology and tried it out. Fast forward, he became a virologist and worked at the CDC. Seeing someone else who had a similar non-traditional background as I resonated. It helped me to feel connected to the science community at Brooklyn College. Before switching to physics, I reached out to the department and the undergraduate adviser, Professor [Ken] Miyano. He was my number one supporter. It took a long time to get my degree.

Did it?

Oh yes. Because I had to work. It was a combination of needing to support myself and the fact that because I already had my first bachelor’s degree, there was a lot of student aid that I could not access. I had already accessed it with my first degree. I had to get super creative with funding my education and living here. So Professor Miyano was pivotal  in advising me on the right courses and when to take them and providing the space and the educational resources I needed to even transition into physics.

There were a lot of mental shifts I had to do to feel like I could succeed to let go of some of the narratives that I had been told growing up because the talent was actually there, but because of society and people in my life saying, “Oh, well, you’re better in English.” Meanwhile, I look back at my transcripts from middle school and high school; I’m getting As in my math classes. It takes a lot more than math to do physics. And that was the part that I needed to connect. It was rough getting there, but it clicked eventually. When I was younger, I thought, this [math] is so hard. I don’t like this, whatever. And then I realized as I got older that I was good at math and I liked math, that math is just another language to help you tell the story of the thing you’re studying.

And now we’ve got movies like Hidden Figures.

I cried the entire time. I was in tears. We Black women could always do this, and we’ve been doing it.

You were a top student presenter at the American Physics Society annual conference. Can you tell us about that experience?

I was there because of research  I had been doing for about two years at an internship at the Simons Foundation. The short story is that it is a foundation started by Jim and Marilyn Simons. Jim Simons, in particular, was a mathematician. He was the department chair at Stony Brook University, and he had ultimately decided that he wanted to try something else. He started a hedge fund company that used the same mathematical models he had already used as a professor in school. The hedge fund was a success, so he started the foundation. It touches on scientific outreach support for math teachers, but there’s an arm called the Flatiron Institute, which I was a part of as an intern and then as an employee. The Flatiron Institute houses all of the basic research, including biology, neuroscience, astrophysics,  math, and quantum physics, all doing what we call computational research. So research on computers, large scale computers. My work, in collaboration with Dr. Tim Berkelbach, now co-director of the Flatiron Institutes Initiative for Computational Catalysis and Associate Professor at Columbia University, was studying atoms and molecules and electrons at their very core: how they interact with one another using these computing systems. That eventually led up to presenting my research at the American Physical Society.

That must’ve been such a high for you.

The culmination of a lot of hard work and other synergistic things helped me get to that point because it wasn’t just about the research. Before working at the Simons Foundation some of my jobs involved science outreach and learning how to communicate science to different populations across New York City. So I took that skillset and married it with the research; the results speak for themselves.

Did you receive any assistance from Brooklyn College or any grants or scholarships?

I received two scholarships: the Lila Lustig Science Scholarship and a Harold M. and Carolyn R. Krouse Scholarship. They helped me to finish my degree because, like I shared before, I had to pay out of pocket. So having those additional resources and institutional support are what continued to help push me.

Switching from student to teacher and physics to environmental science—you’ve worked as a citizen science educator at the Stem Research Academy at Brooklyn College. Is there any crossover between the two disciplines for you?

The great thing about physics, and the thing that makes physics hard, is that physics is everywhere. One of the things that was incredibly helpful with having gone through my physics degree while working as an environmental educator was that I could take those problem-solving skills to the classroom for students. It was an opportunity to show that to my high school urban ecology class, all those concepts that you learn, volume gases, the chemicals that arise when you mix certain pollutants, and that’s what you’re smelling when you’re walking out in the street, that all stems from physics. But the fact that it’s also intermingled with chemistry and biology—that’s what makes it exciting for students, and it helps to rope them in. The goal is to rope them in and get them excited about the environment. Yes, you can take care of this concrete jungle of New York City. Yes, we have trees. Yes, we have forests. Yes, we have wetlands. They all play an important role in keeping our air clean, getting our waterways cleaner, and using science, and physics, in particular, as vehicles.

Today you work as a software engineer in high-performance computing research facilitator. Can you explain that in lay terms?

What I do as an HPC research facilitator is help scientific researchers take the programs or the code that they have written to study everything from molecules to other biological systems, and figure out how to take this small program that can be run on a person a computer and have it run on a much larger set of computers? For instance, I am running a program that studies how much energy a single molecule has.  But now I want to multiply the number of molecules I’m studying because I have the prototype. How do I do that on a larger computer system?  The goal is to run their system exponentially faster than they could on their own computer. It can take a long time to calculate how much energy something like a super atomic atom—a cluster of multiple atoms that behave like one, with its own chemical properties—contains. So if I were to run that calculation on my laptop, it could take a couple of days, versus if I were to send that same calculation and run it on the larger computer system, that would take maybe 15 to 20 minutes. The sooner you get those calculations, the sooner you can move on to the next step and the next step of the next step, which may eventually have real-world applications.

You’re a masters athlete in Olympic weightlifting.

Once I decided to switch to science and my dance career ended, I needed a physical outlet. Part of what brought me over to Olympic weightlifting was CrossFit. CrossFit is a lot of things, but it has been the biggest driver for women going into strength training. And that’s what brought me over because I did CrossFit and realized my favorite part of the class was the weightlifting section, particularly Olympic weightlifting. So I tried it, and I was hooked. It’s also very technique-driven, just like ballet and modern dance.  I was able to compete in three local competitions in my weight class. And yeah, it was great. I loved it.

Do you have any advice for students who are interested in your field?

Students should not be afraid to chart their own paths. I think one of the things that, in my opinion, contributes to the lack of diversity in my field, in particular in physics, is that there’s this very narrow path that you’re supposed to take to get to, let’s say, a Ph.D. program. A path that students who don’t come from a background of academic support in their family can’t always take. So don’t be afraid to take things out of order. Ask your academic adviser and figure out what works best for you. I realized I had to do what worked for me—I couldn’t take off for three months in the summer to participate in a research program for undergraduates in Kentucky, Texas, or California. I didn’t have that amount of PTO from my job, but what I could do was find jobs that had some science background to gain that knowledge and the research experience that I might need for grad school. Don’t be afraid to go off that path if it still gets you where you need to go.