Katie Brown ’06: Promoting women in STEM

Katie Brown ’06 is pursuing a unique set of passions. One is testing explosives. Another is strategizing ways to attract women to STEM careers. There’s also Irish step-dancing.

Her interests are as diverse as her liberal arts education at Cornell, where she majored in chemistry and minored in music, performing on bassoon and steel drums. Now Brown is a scientist at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head in Maryland, where she has researched explosives for the U.S. Navy since 2020. She said she finds her work challenging and very rewarding.

“I test explosives on the small scale to try to predict their performance on the large scale, and we are especially concerned with testing those explosives that are safer to handle,” said Brown. “It is a national security role where, at the end of the day, we want to protect service men and women and give them the tools they need to be safe and do their jobs well.”

Brown earned her doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, then worked for seven years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a scientist.

She was a top student at Cornell, earning Phi Beta Kappa status as a junior. She remembers the chemistry program both for its rigor and the fun they had.

“The chemistry department had such a good time. It was just a great faculty group. Anytime I get to visit campus that’s who I want to go see,” she said, citing professors Cindy Strong, Charley Liberko, Craig Teague, Truman Jordan, and Addison Ault.

“I still look up to Cindy. She’s so smart and so nice,” she said.

Brown recalled a prank during Advanced Inorganic Chemistry in which all the students who were 21 made mimosas in class without Strong knowing. “Cindy found out about this on Facebook three years ago and was not happy!” she said, laughing.

Her earliest Cornell memory is her music audition, which still makes her smile.

“Bassoons are not the most well-known instrument, and I was very used to people at my high school saying, what is that? I played my song, and [Professor] Marty Hearne looks at me and he goes, ‘What instrument are you playing?’—meaning the brand—and I just looked at him and said, ‘it’s a bassoon.’ ”

He laughed, and then so did she. She received that music scholarship and the bassoon gave her what she calls a big brother and sister at Cornell, the first and second chairs of the bassoon section, Jen Schneidman Partica ’04 and Lance Till ’03. “After band every day, we would sit there for another 10 minutes and they would impart their Cornell wisdom on me,” she said.

The pace of Cornell’s One Course At A Time curriculum continues to impact Brown’s work.

“The thing I’m best at at work is that last-minute push and just getting it done. The problem is I still want three days off every month!” she said.

Brown is optimistic that more and more women will enter STEM fields.

“We’ve made a lot of progress getting and maintaining women in my field,” she said. “And we’ve started to have conversations about not just women, but racial diversity. We talk about strategies and how to improve that pipeline of women. It’s not going to be fast, but I think we’ll get there. We need more Cindys.”