{"id":4475,"date":"2023-02-03T13:05:03","date_gmt":"2023-02-03T18:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/?p=4475"},"modified":"2025-07-23T16:41:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T20:41:00","slug":"katrina-ramirez-meyers-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/katrina-ramirez-meyers-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Katrina Ramirez-Meyers \u201911"},"content":{"rendered":"

C<\/span>ombining material science engineering and public policy for her Ph.D. education was a natural choice for Katrina Ramirez-Meyers \u201911<\/strong><\/span>. Her passion for social justice\u2014as well as her appreciation for batteries\u2014comes from lessons she learned across the world.<\/p>\n

Ramirez-Meyers\u2019 desire to tackle social issues began at home. Her mother is a federal public defender who believes in redemption, and her father teaches her to think across borders by supporting his family in America and his relatives in Mexico. Learning about international love and justice led Ramirez-Meyers to participate in the Peace Corps from 2012 to 2014.<\/p>\n

During that time, Ramirez-Meyers trained in Sierra Leone and became a math teacher who worked to increase students\u2019 confidence. She noticed that many students were intimidated by math, so she started demystifying it by trying \u201cto get people to view math as puzzles to solve,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Outside of school, Ramirez-Meyers built relationships with her neighbors and colleagues. She remembers exploring the capital city, Freetown, jumping rope with neighbors, and tutoring children off-the-clock. She\u2019s also extremely grateful for her host family, who taught her Mende, which is the local language, and other life skills. \u201cEverything was exciting,\u201d she admits. \u201cLearning how to do laundry was exciting. Learning how to cook was exciting. Even learning the language.\u201d By living in West Africa, she also realized that \u201ctechnology doesn\u2019t get used in a vacuum. You have to think about the communities: what assets they have and what cultures influence their development projects and leadership structures.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University, Ramirez-Meyers studies chemistry, quantum mechanics, and electricity while contemplating her work\u2019s impact. She aims \u201cto think about how to translate these huge social problems that motivate me down to the battery design space,\u201d she says. \u201cOr how to integrate batteries into systems in a way that translates to those social impacts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ramirez-Meyers credits part of her mixed interests to her time at Goucher College. She fondly recalls professors encouraging individuality. This was an important foundation for her Ph.D. program. Ramirez-Meyers says, \u201cThe way that Goucher allows for people to explore diverse interests helps me think about making crazy connections between literature about social equity and material science. I just think there\u2019s a lot of cool opportunities at Goucher to make really interesting connections between seemingly different fields.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, Ramirez-Meyers connects her social equity perspective and love for batteries in her professional career. As a young woman of color, she\u2019s proud to be part of the Graduate Education Minority Fellowship, which funded her internship at the National Renewable Energy Lab. She\u2019s happily making space for upcoming women of color and expects to receive her Ph.D. in May 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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