Scientess
Scientess is a podcast for women about the joy of science, and why women might want to consider a career in science. We talk to women with successful careers in science about how they did it, why they did it, and what they love about the work that they do.
Scientess
Kemi Doll
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Dr. Kemi Doll is a gynecologic oncologist, Professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and Principal Investigator at the UW Medicine GRACE Center (Gynecologic Research and Cancer Equity). Her research centers on Black- White racial inequities in the care of benign and malignant gynecologic diseases in the United States, with a particular focus on endometrial cancer. She studies how structural racism shapes diagnosis, treatment, and survival and designs interventions to close those gaps.
She is also the co-founder of the Endometrial Cancer Action Network for African-Americans (ECANA), a national survivor-led non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to education, empowerment, and systemic change. Dr. Doll served as ECANA’s President from 2017 to 2022, bridging research, community leadership, and patient advocacy to advance more just cancer care.
You can also follow Dr. Doll on the Your Unapologetic Career podcast.
For bonus content, check out our website www.scientess.org and follow us on Instagram @scientesspodcast.
You can support the show at ko-fi.com/scientess.
Hello and welcome to the Scientess Podcast, where we talk to women with successful scientific careers about the joys of science. I'm your host, Karen Levy, an environmental health scientist at the School of Public Health at University of Washington in Seattle. I'm excited to share with you the stories of some pretty incredible women on this podcast. My hope is that these interviews will show aspiring young scientists that a career in science is not only possible, but can also be extremely rewarding and a whole lot of fun. Let's jump in with today's featured scientists. Dr. Kemi Dole is a gynecological oncologist and professor in the OBGYN department at University of Washington School of Medicine, and also holds an adjunct faculty position as a health equity researcher in the School of Public Health. She is the founding director of the Gynecological Research and Cancer Equity, aka Grace Center at the University of Washington, a multidisciplinary team that investigates causes of disproportionate suffering for benign and oncologic gynecologic health conditions. Her work has been published in high-impact journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and she has been funded by NIH, the Robert Wood-Johnson Foundation, and P. CORI, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Her research on racial disparities in endometrial cancer is regularly featured by national media outlets, including the New York Times, Good Morning America, NPR, and BET. In addition to being a physician scientist, Kemi is an advocate for better outcomes so that all people may live full and healthy reproductive lives. She intertwines her research with her community engagement work to create better health and healthcare systems for black women facing endometrial cancer. She co-founded Ecana, the Endometrial Cancer Action Network for African Americans, and she is the author of a book titled A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing. On top of all that, she's also a coach. And I'm not talking about baseball. She leads KD Coach LLC, an exclusive coaching company for women of color in academic medicine and public health. Her flagship coaching program, Get That Grant, helps high-achieving women of color faculty build the academic career of their dreams while securing funding to do the work they love. But wait, there's more. She's also the first guest on the Scientess podcast who has her own podcast. She is the host of the Your Unapologetic Career podcast, where she talks about common challenges that high achievers in academic medicine and public health face and offers strategies to walk away from institutional mindset and toward nourishing and fulfilling careers. Kemi, as a person who states on your website that you, quote, use multiple mediums to spread your messages of empowerment far and wide, end quote. I can't imagine someone better equipped to channel the joy that we aim for here at the Scientess Podcast. So welcome to the show. Thank you. What a welcome. That was so great. I'm so happy to be here. Great. So my first question is when do you sleep?
Speaker 1Oh my gosh. I get this question so much. It's so funny. I have to tell you, I sleep good. I sleep well. I am a product of my own coaching. Like everything that I teach faculty about efficiency and managing their time and boundaries are the things I have figured out how to do so that I can do all of those things that you say and like enjoy my life and hang out with my kids and read books at night and all of those things. So I have to tell you, I sleep a lot. My sleep is most compromised when I travel and like change time zones. And then you got to wake up for a 7 a.m. talk and stuff. Those are the times where it suffers. But otherwise, I have an alarm that goes off on my phone at nine o'clock and I'm in bed by 9.15. I'm going to bed.
Speaker 2That's impressive from somebody who stays up way too late on the regular. I do want to go back and get to the book and the coaching and the podcast. But before we go there, I want to wind it all the way back to the beginning. Can you tell me about the trajectory of your career? When did you first decide you wanted to become a doctor and a scientist?
Speaker 1Absolutely. So I think I was definitely a kid who was like, I'm going to be a doctor. My mother was a nurse, and I definitely had this sense of a doctor is like the grown-up job that you have. So I definitely would say that before I really knew what I was talking about. And then I remember when I went to undergrad, I remember knowing I wouldn't wanted to be pre-med, but I didn't want to, I just felt like studying one science felt boring. So I ended up majoring in biomedical engineering because I just felt like, oh, I'll have exposure to all sorts of different science and math and stuff. And I did, and it was great. But it also taught me that I really like people. And like, and like engineering was fun, but I wanted more of that connection. So that's how I figured out I wanted to be a physician.
Speaker 2Then majoring in biomedical engineering with the intention always of becoming a physician.
Speaker 1I wanted the option. So I was like, let me do biomedical engineering because it felt like something I could explore and continue if I really liked it, as opposed to in my thinking. I was like, if I major in biology, I don't know where I'm going to go with that almost, if that makes sense. I don't know that that was accurate thinking, but I remember feeling like, well, this is an alternative career path in case I don't want to go to medical school. So I did end up going to medical school. And I thought I was actually going to do infectious disease and focus on HIV. I loved women's health so much. I loved my OBGY in rotation. And it was actually in medical school that I was first introduced to research because I applied for this program that was actually sponsored by the Department of Family Medicine. And they introduced you to research and family medicine. And as part of that, you had to do a research project. And so I did one on domestic violence screening in their outreach clinics. And that's when I first kind of got the bug of like, huh, funny. If you put on your researcher hat, you can ask people all types of questions. Like I it just got me like really intrigued. And then I would say the next level of being interested in the science side of it came in residency when it was just so obvious to me how much of care was influenced by non-biological factors. And it also was clear to me how complicated it was. So I remember when I was going to fellowship, I specifically was looking for training programs that I knew I could get a master's degree, like I could get some very rigorous training in health services research because I wanted to understand better the quality of care differences and things that I was seeing. And so that was really that was another kind of point of commitment. So I went to UNC, and there is when I could apply and do their master's of science and clinical research program. And I also did a postdoc there in cancer care quality. So that was kind of the trajectory of why I decided I want to be a clinician scientist. Like I don't just want to do one-on-one patient care.
Speaker 2So you were going through medical school and you saw disparities in treatment. Like what got you interested in the specific topics that you look at.
Speaker 1Oh, the different topics. Oh, yeah. So I was always attuned towards justice. Everybody told me when I was younger, you're going to be a lawyer. And I kind of recoiled against that because I actually don't like arguing, but I do like justice. And so I remember feeling like in medicine, I just felt like you could really, you could really serve people and help them fight their fights in the world. So there was this justice underlying the whole decision to be a physician. And then when I got to medical school, my medical school, when I tell you this care was so segregated by insurance and economics, which ends up essentially being racially segregated, it was the type of thing where like the ophthalmology clinic for people with private insurance is on the 10th floor, and the one for people with public insurance is in the basement. And it's like same doctors, but like literally, we don't even have these people in the same place. So that was so abhorrent to me. And I thought naively that that was a part of that institution. And so when I went to residency, I chose a hospital that didn't have a VIP floor where I thought I'm like, okay, there's no segregated care. Everybody gets care in the same way. And that's when I realized, oh, Kami, it's so much more complicated than that. And that's when I saw, oh, there are disparities within the same system. And there are disparities within the same unit. And that's what I mean about that complication is when I started really thinking, this is so much more than implicit bias, or this is so much more than the insurance program. Like you have to actually understand baked in. Yeah, it's baked in. And also the way that it shows up in a given condition is different. And I thought that that was really what pulled me towards wanting to disentangle is that you can't look at the disparity around hypertension control and the disparity around uterine cancer diagnosis the same. The clinical context of the condition, so that's where the biology comes in, interplays with how the disparity shows up and then how you're going to try to solve the inequity. How does it show up differently for those two? What do you mean by that? Okay, here's a different example. I'm gonna give you what's similar and what's different. Okay. So if we go to heart attacks, so there's that New England Journal of Medicine paper. I can't remember what yours published now, it's a while ago, where they had the actors at a cardiology conference and they had black women and black men and white women and white men, and they were all actors, and they read the exact same script and they acted the exact same script, basically giving symptoms that indicated that they were having a heart attack and they needed to go for a catheterization. And they clearly found, like without a shadow of the doubt, that black women were the least likely to be referred for the heart attack. So these actors are saying the same thing, same lines, but the impression is this person's fine. So that issue of black women's pain not being seen or taken seriously is something that we know we see across all types of conditions. So that's like the same thing that happens with the laboring mother who's about to give birth and gets turned away from the hospital because they can't see her as vulnerable. So in that sense, there are similarities, right? But then I'll take it back, I'll take it now to my world. If you now you're trying to understand why do we have disparities in ovarian cancer mortality and why do we have disparities in uterine cancer mortality, those reasons are very different because those conditions and how they show up are different. So in uterine cancer, there's this whole world of early diagnosis, and there's this whole world of symptoms and how somebody's culture and their experiences interact with how they experience symptoms and then what happens when they go to the doctor. In ovarian cancer, most women are diagnosed at stage three or four off the top, off the bat. And the disparities of mortality aren't about diagnosis. Those disparities are about response to chemotherapy and about the treatment phase. So if you are trying to paint one brush and saying, well, access to care is the issue, you're not going to actually be effective in the given condition. The fundamental cause theory is one that I'm quite obsessed with because I think it does a really good job of explaining both of those things, which is that there are some fundamental issues that span across all inequities that have to do with these differential access to key resources. But then how much that differential access actually impacts mortality outcomes is very dependent on the biology and the specifics and the clinical nature of the disease.
Speaker 2Sounds like you bring to this your clinical hat, and then you're merging that with your research hat on health disparities, research, and you're able to bring in those details about clinical care to your work. And so you were in medical school, you're seeing the disparities, and then you're adding on the research piece to your training, and you made a decision that research is the way to address this, because some clinicians might take it a different way through a business or through a, you know, any any number of things. But what is it that drew you to research as a way to address these problems?
Speaker 1Well, one is that what I how often I would hear and I would learn, well, black women have a worse X or they have worse outcomes with Y, or da-da-da-da-da. And then you'd ask the question, well, why is that? And the answer is we don't really know why. Clinically was not the answer because they were literally telling me, oh, we have all this clinical knowledge, but we have no idea why people who look like you don't do as well with this. So that was one of just like, okay, it sounds like we need more research. And then secondarily, when then reading the research, so both in residency, but I would say mostly in fellowship, when I was really reading the research on endometrial cancer, so consistently the assumption was this is a biological problem. Like we don't know why, but black women have some biological difference, and this is why they don't do well, and that's the end. And there's just no curiosity beyond that. Meanwhile, as somebody who's in clinical training, watching differential care, watching this issue of a black woman says something, we respond one way, somebody else says something, we respond another. You literally can feel and see that there's so much more than biology. So that's what drew me to research was recognizing one, the gaps in knowledge, but then two, and maybe even more profoundly, what knowledge is created is not objective. And when I understood that, because I mean I was a science girly, science is objective. I was like science is there's objective truth, like that's what it is. So when I was, when I realized from a scientific standpoint, from a mature clinical and scientific standpoint, oh, the research that is produced can be biased too. That's what I was like, okay, I'm coming in here. Because we need, we need a counter perspective to this unstated assumption that these problems are being generated because there's something broken about the black woman's body.
Speaker 2And I mean, there's also what questions do you ask with research? Exactly. Major biases in which questions we're asking in the first place. So you can use research as a tool for many different things, but you have to be asking the right questions. Correct. And interpreting the anyway, all the things, all the things. Yes. Yeah. So what's your favorite part about doing research? Have your interests changed over time, or are they more or less the same, just in differences on a theme?
Speaker 1I think my favorite part of doing research is the creativity and the flexibility. I love that the job of science and research is to ask questions and figure out new ways how to answer them. I love the problem solving of research. That's the engineering coming through too. I just really enjoy that. And I just feel like there are so few careers where you just get to ask questions and then answer them. So those are many things. You asked me for one thing. Those are many things I love about research. In terms of my research interests, I would say that they have broadened and become more sophisticated. So when I started, I would have branded myself as a health services researcher that was interested in quality of care. And the two areas I really focused on in my grad program was population-level data analysis. So I did a lot of state level analysis using all-payer data and then also patient-reported outcomes. So in cancer, especially, that was when there was a big push to say maybe we should ask the patients how bad their nausea is instead of just like us rating it on our own scale. So there was a big push at that time to develop these patient-reported measures of a lot of the symptoms that we encounter. So between those two, I was thinking, okay, I am going to kind of close this gap around the quality of how we assess treatments with the patient-reported outcomes data and their impact on people, as well as thinking about, again, really classic health services systems research. One of my papers for my master's was people being transferred from low volume to high volume centers and that kind of thing. And when it was so clear, I mean, I knew this, but seeing over and over how no matter what data set I was looking at or using, black women were always at the bottom. They're always a worse outcome. It's always an independent variable that predicts some poor outcome. That combined with Trayvon Martin's murder, where I think a lot, I know for myself, it was a real moment of like, what can I do in my space to make a difference for my community? Those two things combined to make me realize I actually want to take all this I've learned. Then this now I'm on the job market. I'm like, I want to take all this I've learned and I want to focus on black women and endometrial cancer. So it first felt like a narrowing. Like I'm, I want to tackle this problem. The reason why I say it's broadened is because the research showed me that Black women do not experience endometrial cancer just as this isolated cancer event. They experience it as the end of a gynecologic life journey. And so if you don't understand what's happened with people from the time they had their first period, fibroids, et cetera, then you're missing what's going on when they get endometrial cancer at 62. And because of that, it actually made me wonder: well, how much of the rest of gynecology works like this too? And we have just falsely divided these, this world of benign and cancer. And so that broadened my interest. So now I do research not just specifically on endometrial cancer, but also on hysterectomy rates and fibroids and bleeding and symptoms and abnormal bleeding and anemia and all these things because I realized that all of this actually intertwines to see some of the differential outcomes we see in the gynecologic cancer world. So in that sense, I feel like I'm broader. And then the other way I feel like I'm broader is that I love theory. I love theory and frameworks and I love applying them. I feel like in another life, maybe I would have been more of like a medical sociologist. I just think that I love the work that they do. So now, especially in more of a mentoring role, I'm really enjoying helping and guiding people on how to take some of these same frameworks and theories I've used and apply them to different populations and how they get adapted and they vary a little bit. I find that very intellectually stimulating.
Speaker 2Combining these interests is really hard to do. And it sounds like you have done it really effectively by wearing these two hats of clinician and more on the disparities.
Speaker 1Not easily though. And also the community engaged research, Karen. That's the other piece. I didn't get any training in community engaged research. That came after I started on faculty and I was just like, well, I need to engage this survivor community. I'm gonna learn things from them. And I just had no idea how much that would take off as a pillar of my work going forward. So that was another shift from the quote unquote plan.
Speaker 2So you were on the job market and you kind of had a shift when you went on the job market. So you did you start at University of Washington? Did your career? Yes. And so tell me a little bit about that path to getting the job and starting up your research program and your life here.
Speaker 1Gosh, what version of that? Do you want to hear? There's like the group. What version do you want to try? There's the PC version. Okay, so first of all, by that point I'm married. And I have unfortunately married another ambitious person. So my spouse is also an academic clinician, also wants to be a clinician scientist. So now there's two physician scientists on the job market trying to find a job. So just the stress. I knew I wanted to be competitive going on the job market, and I knew that it was rare for surgical subspecialties to be willing to grant junior faculty any kind of research time because you just make too much money for the hospital. Your procedures are very lucrative. So nobody is interested in paying you to sit in your office and think they want you to cut and sew. So I kind of approached that first job search, knowing that I kind of needed a plan to prove I'm a good bet. Like I'm serious about this research. This is my plan. So I had like a five-point, I mean, I had a folder, I got, I had color-coded, I had a I had a five-year plan. I had a financial ROI. Like, you're gonna invest this much in me. These are how many grants I'm gonna get. It was a very aggressive way that I went on the market because I understood, again, that this was, it's very rare. Like it's not common at all in gynecological oncology for somebody to come in and start off as a clinician scientist, especially somebody who's not lab-based, who doesn't already have a lab and maybe came up through training programs that way. And then at this, and then also I was balancing my spouse, who also was looking for a job where he could also do health services research, because that's what his interest in, although in a different different area. So it ultimately ended up that there were three institutions that we were finally seriously looking at, or groups of institutions, I should say. Like in some places, he would be at one place and I'd be at the other in the same city. And I ended up choosing University of Washington because it was by far the best microenvironment for my work, meaning that it was a rare division that had a track record of successful gynecologic oncology clinician researchers. They hadn't had any health services researchers, but still they had some concept of that. And then, two, they kind of were willing to go with my bet. They were like, You know, I mean, we'll give you a few years to see if you can get this all off the ground. And then, you know, the people and the leadership really spoke to me. Like, I felt like, you know what, I could fall flat on my face, but only because the work is hard, not because I would be fighting against my environment.
Speaker 2How do you think you knew your value so well? I think a lot of people go out on the job market, especially at the assistant level, they are just hoping to get a job, period. And it sounds like you really knew your value. Why do you think you had that confidence and that understanding of the way the system worked so well at that point in your life?
Speaker 1I actually talk about this in my book. So I won't give you all the details because you need to go out and get my book. But I would say on one level, I had already hit a rock bottom. And I had already been through experiences in my life where I'm like, oh, my future's not guaranteed. You know, like I I've I had already lost everything. And I don't, I wouldn't want to wish that on anybody for sure. But there was something about my experiences in undergrad and what I went through that made it so that my approach going forward was just, I'm gonna try my hardest. Like I'm leaving everything on the field. There's no plan B. And in that sense, there's a courage that comes with that that overcomes the sense of imposter syndrome or whatever. Because for myself, I just have to know I literally gave it everything I had. And then if it fails, it fails. But I have to know that. So it's that engine of achievement that combined with by the time I'm coming out of fellowship, I had receipts, for lack of a better word, you know, to use the to use the term the kids use, which is that as a fellow, I had to figure out how to pay my tuition. I had to figure out how to pay my salary for the years that I was doing my master's. I had to figure all that out. So I had to learn how to write grants as a fellow so that I could figure out how to get onto a training grant. I was the first MD ever accepted into the postdoc that I was accepted into. It was like a very school of public health PhD, very traditional postdoc. So I guess I had already exercised some of that muscle of like, okay, I know how to write. And I had to do a lot of people, but I started to learn the game. And again, that sense of I'm gonna give this my best. When I am really trying to learn or do something, in that case, it was learn how to write grants and learn all of that. I don't have a lot of embarrassment about not knowing what I'm doing. I'm just going to get the information that I need from whoever's in front of me. So I did get the training grant, and then I went on to keep writing grants. So I got, I also got an institutional cancer center award. I got a national foundation award. So I kind of came out of fellowship like these aren't huge grants, but I'm not scared of the ability to have to write a few pages and get somebody to give me money. So that was another kind of piece of confidence. Yeah, that's an amazing story.
Speaker 2And you've given a great plug for your book because now you want to go read it and fill in some of those details. And what happened with your spouse? Did they did he get it? He did, yeah.
Speaker 1So he also it was the best. Yeah, I should have said that. I I should say I'm I get very used to not talking about him because he is a private person. He is amazing, but also he does not care about any of this. So he also had a good setup. And we had, it was literally a balance. Like for neither one of us was it perfect, right? First, I studied black women with uterine cancer. I'm moving to Seattle with a population of 4% African American. Like I understood, and people were like, What are you doing? And it created a challenge for me because from the very beginning, my work had to have a regional or national scope. I could not do what a lot of clinician scientists do, which is recruit from their clinic. So all that was never aligned for me. So it was hard, but I'm actually grateful for it because it allowed my work to be more impactful and generalizable earlier because, like, my career development projects were national projects. I had to recruit from all sorts of sites. So that was a downside for me, right? But also he had a good setup in terms of a place where, again, he had protected research time. He's an interventional cardiologist, he's interested in studying peer review and the quality of care in that world. So it just worked out that it made sense for both of us. Whereas there were other people that's an optimization problem, right? Exactly. We just had to optimize for each person and then go from there. I mean, if this was a relationship podcast, I could talk to you a lot more about how to. I don't think that there's a lot of good quality conversation about how people navigate professional ambition and career ambition with their partners, especially centered on women. And it bothers me because I I feel like people kind of fly blind. And I felt like we were to some extent, but we also learned a lot of things. I don't know, maybe that's another book, but anyway, we made it through.
Speaker 2We sort of think everybody's flying blind at that point. And you don't know what's gonna happen. And so you kind of have to take a leap of faith and hope that whatever position you start in works out. And if it doesn't, you move on to another, yep, another situation, I suppose. So you mentioned a little bit about imposter syndrome. Are there other times when you've had imposter syndrome? You mentioned not having it actually, but what would you talk about about imposter syndrome? Have you had it in your career and how have you overcome it?
Speaker 1Okay. Um I have to think about what I'm gonna say because I have a whole episode on imposter syndrome. I feel so strongly about this topic. First of all, have I had imposter syndrome? Yes, when we're very clear about the definition of what imposter syndrome is, which is that I have had times where even though there is documented evidence that I am capable of doing something, I still feel somehow that I might not be capable of doing it again, or that it was a fluke, like whatever the evidence presented was just a fluke. And so therefore, in the moment, I don't feel as confident as I want to feel in that moment. And that's how I think of imposter syndrome. There's evidence already, and you're not incorporating that evidence into your confidence. And so you feel like an imposter, you feel like a fake. So I've experienced that. When I started my postdoc, I felt imposter syndrome because I was like, what am I doing here? These are real PhDs. Kevin, like, I'm like, Kevin, these people, these are real scientists. You somehow smooth talked your way into here. They're gonna figure out you don't know what you're doing. Like you just got a degree two seconds ago. That was because you were a clinician and you were going into the state. Yes, and because I was going in history. Exactly. And so I just felt like the these are the real scientists, and I'm here playing at science because my path had been different. So I remember feeling that. And for me, the mitigation of that and not letting the imposter syndrome take over was honestly being present to my own contributions and recognizing, like, oh, you're you're talking and contributing just like everybody else. You're asking questions just like everybody else. You put together a proposal or whatever, and it's reviewed. And it's like, this is this is this sounds like everybody else's review. So basically, just incorporating the evidence early that there isn't this complete mismatch. Frankly, sometimes you see the mediocrity of other people's work and you're like, I'm fine. I mean, I and I think everybody can appreciate this right now in 2026 in the United States of America. We got to get rid of imposter syndrome. We have literal nut jobs running the country who I want to be clear, are not swift. Like these people are not intelligent. You can tell how they talk. You're like, oh my gosh, you are this is we're not, we're not quick here. So I just think that there is a way in which, if you're open to also accumulating more data, it does help with imposter syndrome. Now, the reason why I said I feel strongly about it is because I think some people misdiagnose imposter syndrome. Because if you actually haven't done it yet and you're like, I'm terrified and maybe I can't do it or whatever, that's not imposter syndrome. That's just you're scared. You haven't done it yet. That's fear or excitement, et cetera. Sometimes people have skill gaps and then they keep calling imposter syndrome. And if you don't know how to do something, then closing the gap in how to do it is the answer, right? Not just being more confident. So I'll leave it there.
Speaker 2Yeah. Interesting. I like that distinction. Okay. What are ways that being a woman has positively impacted your career?
Speaker 1Oh my God, I'm so glad I'm a woman. Are you kidding me? First of all, I think okay. Okay, so many reasons. One, um, it's so weird, right? Because what's the counterfactual? I don't know what it's, I don't know what it's like not to be a woman. But I would say I think there's probably a reason why most of my team are women of color, not just women of women of color. I always forget what broader academia is like until I go to conferences and stuff, or I go visit another department. I'm like, oh, that's right, all dudes. So what is the shift that I'm feeling? One, I think because of socialization, not because of binary essentialist gender politics, but because of socialization. People who identify as women or femmes, I will say, tend to have a different level of emotional intelligence and emotional responsibility for themselves that I enjoy in a workplace. So it doesn't mean we're all perfect, but I appreciate the fact that I feel like I bring that to my work and that my colleagues who are mostly women that I work with bring that to their work because the work is hard enough. And I don't like to have to add managing somebody's personality on top of that or managing their unrecognized emotional needs. Another reason is I study women, me personally. So I study gynecology, et cetera. And so given that sexism is rampant and we still have major problems with access and equality with regard to women, I personally feel really good about doing work that uplifts women, my community. That's really important to me. And I would just add, because I can't really separate being black and being a woman, I think it's all the same thing. I feel the same way about being a black woman. I feel like though we live in a society that constantly makes things harder from that perspective. I also get to pull on a community of people that are still here anyway. And I think that there is something kind of unstoppable about that. Like it's almost like there, it's like the underdog advantage. It's like that advantage of the system isn't built for me, but I'm still gonna be here makes a win so much sweeter. And maybe anybody, any woman in science can appreciate that. It's like it just makes sense. It's like how we felt about Christina Koch and the Artemis too, right? Everybody's like, ha! It's like, why do you feel that way? Because the win is so much bigger. So yeah, those are all the reasons.
Speaker 2And you have to come up with creative ways to navigate the system that maybe wasn't made for you.
Speaker 1Oh, yeah. You I mean, I know we're being positive here. So I'm not trying to like polyana all of it. There's some things I need to change, but I would never discount also the pleasure, right, in doing well in a system not built for you. There, there's pleasure in that of being like, oh, it's like that feeling of competence, right? It's that feeling of like, I did it. And that that is great.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's like an additional opportunity to feel a sense of accomplishment. Like that take on it. That's interesting. What about men in your career? And have you had examples of where men have been really great allies or mentors or helped helped pave that way for you?
Speaker 1Yeah, I definitely have. I mean, oh my God, I definitely have. I have a mentor, a distant career mentor, I would say. He definitely just like emailed me out of the blue kind of thing and was like, hey, I've seen your work. It's really good. You should come give a talk at my institution type thing. And I was like, okay. And I came to the institution, the way that this man treated me. I remember sitting here thinking, like, I mean, I just had this moment of like, wow. He was just really like, we're so happy you're here. He introduced me to all the different faculty, was talking about my work. And I think I was so taken aback because I'm so used to having to be like, I deserve to be here. And this is my like, I'm so used to doing all that work that to have somebody in a position of power, department chair, man, you know, come in and just be like, you don't even have to do all that work. I'm happy to tell them how amazing you are. And and then just the care in the visit and all of that, it really shifted something for me, actually. It happened maybe three or four years into my career. And it was kind of the first time where I was like, oh, I'm not just doing well enough, you know, like, okay, I'm doing well. I got my grants. My work is really meaningful here.
Speaker 2So it was, it was an ally move because that's really interesting because it's such a small act of kindness or act of grace that yeah, it had a big impact on you that he might not even, he might not even remember any huge impact on me.
Speaker 1Now I stayed in touch because I was like, wait, you are very small, but you're right though, because those are the things that's like there are some things you can't give yourself, right? This is why we all need allies, right? This is why allies matter, because we all say, listen, women can't fight alone. Black women can't fight alone, right? We all need the allies. But that moment showed me the power of endorsement almost, like the power of that is real. It was a sponsorship power, and it made a difference for me. And I know that people have had similar experiences where they're like, yeah, it really and also not wanting anything, right? Not there's no like, oh, now I did this for you. Nothing. Just like, no, I just like to spotlight great scholars. That's it.
Speaker 2Yeah. And also then it's also exhausting to have to promote yourself. And there's the expectation should be that you don't have to do that. If your work is good, somebody will do that for you.
Speaker 1Yeah, but except that's literally not, as you know, that is not actually how it works. But yes, ideally. So it was like, I think I had that moment of the ideal. That was amazing.
Speaker 2And how about your spouse? You said you both are academics, you're both having these careers. How do you balance that? How do you balance the workload? You said you have kids.
Speaker 1A ton of support. I mean, paid support. This is the other hill I'll die on. First of all, we don't have anybody, we don't have family that lived in the area. We don't have a grandma that lives in the house, we don't have nothing, nothing like that. We're out here on our own. We have two kids. When we moved here, our son was one and a half, and then we had our daughter a couple of years later. So one reason why it works is because we spend a lot of money on support. So we have a full-time nanny that we pay full-time over the table, payroll tax, benefits, everything full-time. Number two, we have cleaning service that comes to clean the house. Number three, I get my lunches delivered because it's one less thing I have to worry about because a salad company delivers salad. So I don't have to worry about lunches. Oh, we do babysitters, we try to do a babysitter at least once a month so we can go out, just the two of us. One way that we do have family help that is no small thing at all, is that my in-laws will take our kids for a week so we can go on vacation once a year, which is huge. Yeah.
Speaker 2That's I love that it's so that you can go on vacation. Yes. It's so you can work.
Speaker 1No, we go on vacation. So I'm just emphasizing this. There are other things, obviously, like good communication. We still love each other, super helpful. We also like each other. There are these other things that we've learned how to manage, but I don't think that there's enough really explicit conversation about the fact that both of our retirement accounts would be higher if we spent less money on the support. But it means that when we come home, we can focus on each other and the family. And that was a big thing for me. I don't want to spend all weekend doing domestic labor and not connecting with you and the kids. When we get home from work, I want us to connect. Oh, and also not too many kid activities. So I don't know if you've heard of the saying, it's like you could have a parent-focused family, a kid-focused family, or a family-focused family. We really try to be a family-focused family, which means that we're trying to make decisions that are good for the whole unit. And so that means that, yeah, sometimes my kids want to do like this activity and four more. And I'm like, okay, you get one during the season and you get one, and that's already enough. Like baseball and softball season happening at the same time is enough. We can barely make it to all the practices in games. So that is another way that we make it work. Yeah.
Speaker 2I get the sense that you're very strategic about what you say no to, but you also say yes to a lot of things. And so you have your academic career and you have coaching and writing and podcasting. So, how do you make decisions about what do you say no to and what do you say yes to? Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1When I first started, I would say that I was very good at saying no to things that I could not see how they clearly and specifically supported my career goals, meaning that I have these are my clinical goals, these are my teaching-oriented goals, these are my research goals. If somebody's bringing me an opportunity and I can't see clearly how does this directly support this goal, then I would say no, because that's not moving me towards where I need to be. As you go along, I say this to the early career researchers for sure, as you go along, when you're very good about that, you will then produce work, right? Like you'll start meeting those goals that you set for yourself. That creates more opportunity. So now it's about how do I discern, right, what opportunity, because now they all fit within my goals, but what opportunities make sense for me in this season and where I'm trying to go next. And that I fully use my own internal compass of what makes me feel alive, what makes me excited. Because I remember learning this in medical school, honestly, going through the rotations, which is that if you pick what you do based on your perception of one, how prestigious it's going to be, or maybe how easy it's going to be, or whatever, none of that will make up for doing something you don't enjoy. It will not make up for it. So I saw that, or at least for me, the equation never works. And the opposite is true, which is that if you are doing something that you genuinely enjoy, even when it gets challenging, I mean, the work you really care about it, or the opportunity, the committee, whatever, even when it gets challenging, you will have access to more energy for that than you would if you only did it because, well, I'm just trying to check this box, or somebody told me to do it. So I really go by that. So all the things you said, yes, they're they're a lot. And I don't do them alone anymore, but they fuel themselves in that they are nourishing to me. So working on them replenishes me. So I don't feel like, oh my God, I can't, unless I just do something terrible and overschedule myself like crazy. But that's why my assistant helps me not do that.
Speaker 2I can completely relate to that. I mean, this podcast is a great example of it. Exactly. Fun. I'm really enjoying it. And so I'm doing it, even though you know it's not a good thing. You got a lot to do with them. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Something that, yeah, it may brings me joy. So speaking of that, what is it that brings you joy day to day? What are your hobbies? How do you treat yourself?
Speaker 1Yeah. So I'm a big reader. I love sci-fi and fantasy books. I love romance novels, and I love nonfiction, like theoretical physics. I just really love nerding out on the universe, basically, for lack of a better word. So reading is a big one. Recently, one of my research coordinators, Gen Z, introduced me to this concept of cozy games. These are video games that are just relaxing. They're not competitive. So I have been playing something called Camp Grove, which I don't know, you just go around and help out the bears work out their emotional problems and you make food for them. It's great. And you fish and you just have a good old time. So that's very new. That's within the last year. So I like doing that. And this is gonna be so cliche, but I like genuinely like my kids. They're really funny, especially they're 11 and 7. So I'm in this beautiful window post being little kid, but they're not really teenagers yet. And they are really fun right now and really funny. So laughing with them and hearing them talk about their day, genuinely joy, genuinely joyful.
unknownYeah.
Speaker 2They're pretty fun still when they get to be teenagers. It's just uh they get they're they get interesting. Okay. Well, we'll we'll see how that's in conversations with them. And then how do you take care of your body and stay physically and mentally fit?
Speaker 1Oh my gosh. Okay, we're long on recording, so I'll save the little story of my knee injury, but I would say now I walk every day. So I usually walk two miles in the morning on a treadmill in my basement, and that keeps me sane and also helps with my cardiovascular risk factors. And then I have been in physical therapy for almost two years, and I go twice a week, and that's for my knee, and that's quite a that ends up feeling like quite a workout. So that's what I do physically. Mentally, I'm a big journaler. So even if it's only a couple lines, I have structured journals, unstructured journals, I have a reading journal. I just I get my stuff out in writing. So that helps too. And then, you know, my really good friends who are always a voice note or a text away, all those things help a lot.
Speaker 2Well, I know you're a coach. Uh-huh. And so you have a lot of advice for other people coming up. And I wonder if there's some nugget that you'd like to share. And I'll just say, well, go and listen to your podcast to uh so many more. Lots. So yeah, lots of nuggets. But is there anything you could say, like if you could give one piece of advice to a young woman coming up in science, anything you could distill it down to? Um I've stumped you.
Speaker 1Because I'm trying to distill it down.
Speaker 2I know.
Speaker 1I would say that if you're a young woman coming up in science, it is likely that you have the ability to work very hard at Something and to persevere, you probably already are a fairly resilient person. And I want you to understand that you're always going to be choosing on behalf of what are you working hard. And if you want to feel like you lead your career, make sure that you are working hard for the things that you care about. Make sure you're working hard for the science you care about. Make sure that you are receiving the benefit of all of your hard work. That's what I would say. That's fantastic.
Speaker 2I love that. And I will say that I feel like I could talk to you forever and pick up so much wisdom. But again, I'm just gonna refer the listeners to the Your Unapologetic Career podcast where you can hear Kemi talk at length about so many different topics. And I think there's so much to learn from you. Okay, so now if you weren't a scientist, how would you spend your days? What would you do? And it's a kind of a funny question for you because you do a lot of things.
Speaker 1I know, right? Directly science, but I know, but I'm trying to think. So I'll take out the author part too, because that's like from the science. So I would say I would probably I feel like I would probably be in mental health. I think I would be like a therapist, or I could see that it's like kind of a cousin to the coaching world. I just get so much benefit out of pouring into people and motivating and inspiring people and helping people out of their pain in different ways. And I feel like medicine actually just was one way to do that. And I discovered through coaching, oh, this is another way. So I think I would probably be in the mental health world. Yeah. Now I would love to just be a backup dancer for Beyonce, but I don't have the skills. I just want to I want to be clear. Like I was answering in a realistic fashion. If you're saying if you could have any job you want, I would absolutely be a backup dancer for Beyonce. I would, I that's what I would do.
Speaker 2So do you have imposter syndrome about being a backup dancer for Beyonce or you just don't have the skills? I don't have the skills.
Speaker 1I don't have the skills required to have imposter syndrome. Oh, but that would be so amazing.
Speaker 2That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, Kimi. This has been just an amazing conversation. I really feel like we could just talk forever. And thank you so much.
Speaker 1You're welcome. This is great. And thank you for having me on the podcast.
Speaker 2And then just quickly before we end, can you tell me about your book and what it's about and when does it come out? Oh my gosh, yes.
Speaker 1So to this audience, I will say my book represents what it looks like to incorporate science into all of you and then share that with the world. And it is about the crisis that's going on in black gynecologic healthcare and how we can learn from what goes on with black women and the gynecologic conditions to help improve care for everyone. The book is called A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing. And it published on May 5th, 2026. And you can pick up a copy anywhere you buy your books. Thank you. All right.
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