“I think that medicine is a great intersection of science and humanities,” she said.

A University of Louisville School of Medicine alumna, Caster is a physician scientist who specializes in nephrology (kidney diseases), specifically glomerular diseases, which are autoimmune kidney diseases. She serves as an associate professor and the co-director of research for the UofL Division of Nephrology and Hypertension. Caster is a recognized researcher in the field of glomerular diseases, with a translational lab that is focused on identifying novel biomarkers in lupus nephritis and evaluating mechanisms of inflammation in lupus nephritis.

Many components inspired Caster’s motivation to pursue clinical medicine. Her mother was a teacher who encouraged her from a young age to pursue an education and a career. Her decision to specialize in nephrology was motivated by both her mother’s diagnosis of kidney disease and the many strong role models and mentors in the division.

“I was fortunate to have exposure to many amazing female faculty members,” Caster said.

Caster highlighted Eleanor Lederer (former interim chair of medicine at UofL School of Medicine and former president of the American Society of Nephrology) and Rosemary Ouseph (chief of the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension) as faculty who directly inspired her to pursue academic medicine.Ìę

The passion for research came to Caster later from a patient interaction during her training. During her nephrology fellowship, she encountered a young patient with lupus nephritis who ended up in kidney failure at 18 years old.

“I was frustrated with the outcome and wanted to understand more about the disease,” Caster said.

Soon after, she became involved in a research project on lupus nephritis and the project evolved into her scientific career.Ìę

Caster hopes to make a difference for young girls pursuing a career in science or medicine. She highlighted the importance for young girls to have role models in their chosen career fields, as she did.

“It is critical for girls and young women to see successful women in science so that they can know this is possible for them,” Caster said.

Caster hopes to see more young women and girls taking up space in the science and medical fields.

“When I was younger, I was often worried about making the ‘wrong’ choice or failing at something,” Caster said. “I also hope that they will be inspired to speak up more, ask more questions and not be afraid of failure.”

“Everyone sleeps and it’s fascinating to me. We know so little about sleep scientifically that it really piqued my interest, and my project is right at the intersection of cardiovascular health and neurodevelopment, so it is kind of the perfect niche for my interest,” said Sears, assistant professor of environmental medicine, a researcher in the University of Louisville’s and a UofL alumna.

Sears is leading a project to discover how exposure to mixtures of common chemicals and pollutants during gestation and infancy affects sleep health in adolescence. Ultimately, she believes the exposures may be linked to cardiovascular issues later in life. Her work is part of research at the Envirome Institute to understand relationships between the environment and human health.

“Sleep is increasingly recognized to be central to cardiovascular health.ÌęWe know that a variety of lifestyle choices and environmental factors affect sleep, but we know little about the effects of chemical exposure and pollutants,” said Aruni Bhatnagar, professor of medicine and director the Envirome Institute. “Clara’s work could provide new knowledge about factors that affect sleep, particularly in adolescents, so that we can improve their quality of sleep and future cardiovascular health.”

Sears’ team is examining exposure to combinations of phthalates (common components of plastics), metals and per-/polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS – known as “forever chemicals”). People are frequently exposed to these toxicants through their diet, as well as use of consumer goods and household products. Sears said they chose to study mixtures rather than individual chemicals because most people in the U.S. are exposed to them in combination.

“We know pregnant women and children are exposed to these chemicals in mixtures and sometimes they can affect similar biological pathways, or they can interact in ways that may magnify an effect on a health outcome,” Sears said. “So, if we study them in isolation, it is hard to get the real-world relevance of how they interact with each other to affect health.”

The work is funded by a five-year, $2.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to determine whether there are connections between these early exposures and poor sleep quality and increases in allostatic load in adolescents. Allostatic load is the cumulative burden of “wear and tear” on the body resulting from stressors that eventually can disrupt an individual’s immune, cardiovascular and metabolic functions. A person’s allostatic load can be assessed through biomarkers and other measures such as inflammation and body composition.

Sears is working with experts in pediatric environmental health, sleep and cardiometabolic health to analyze data from two long-term studies that track prenatal and early life exposures and other health information. The Health Outcomes and Measures of the Environment Study and the Maternal-Infant Research on Environmental Chemicals Study have documented exposures and other health measures in more than 550 children from before birth through pre-teen and teen years, along with sleep health in adolescence.

Sears hopes the study will lead to understanding the link between early life environmental factors and cardiovascular health later in life, informing efforts to improve the environment for infants and children so that they can be healthier into adulthood.

“Sleep impacts every aspect of your health and your day-to-day functioning, so if we can find ways to improve sleep it can have huge impacts on health overall.”

See previous sleep research from the Envirome Institute: Reduced sleep linked to environmental factors | UofL News.

These individuals are making discoveries that contribute to UofL’s achievement as a “Research 1” doctoral university, with very high research activity by the .ÌęWomen faculty, students and alumni are innovating, building unique STEM careers and mentoring other women and girls to pursue their own careers in these fields.

Olfa Nasraoui, professor of computer science and engineering, leads a campus-wide initiative that promotes success for women faculty in STEM fields. Since its launch in 2019, (ATHENA), has served nearly 1,000 UofL employees through faculty mentoring, education and awareness, as well as a new data capture process and workshops to improve inclusion and equity in the recruitment process.

Igniting excitement about STEM fields is a mission for , associate professor and co-lead of the Advanced Heart Failure Research Program, which is world-renown for developing and testing artificial hearts and mechanical circulatory support devices. Monreal founded Heartwheels! with Steven Koenig to bring fun and interactive heart-related exhibits into the community to give young people hands-on experiences with cardiovascular technology. In February, the team shared heart-related exhibits with more than 2,500 kids and their families at the Kentucky Science Center’s 2024 Engineering Day event where theÌęchildren got to work with a mock circulatory loop. In November, Monreal and Koenig took Heartwheels! to Central High School and Sacred Heart Academy, teaching the students about healthy and diseased hearts and allowing them to interact with a pig heart and mechanical circulatory support devices used to treat end-stage heart failure patients.Ìę

“We love sharing the awesome research we get to do here every day with members of the community,” Monreal said.

UofL News will commemorate Women’s History Month by highlighting just a few of the women at UofL who are making history and changing the world. Follow along on ourÌęÌęthroughout the month as we recognize exceptional women in STEM.

When she was in the eighth grade, her stepfather helped her make an eye model using clay and a yarn spool. She entered the project in a science fair at a local university. Judges of the fair asked her to explain how the eye works internally, sparking interest in the study of the eye.

Durrett has been a part of the UofL family since enrolling in the School of Medicine’s Pre-matriculation Program in 1993. In 1997, she became the second African American graduate from the UofL School of Medicine to match in ophthalmology and the first African American woman resident in UofL’s Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences.

Durrett is a part of a small community in the United States, where less than 5% of the country’s ophthalmologists identify as African American.

“I am humbly grateful to not only be an ophthalmologist, but also a retina specialist,” Durrett said.

She started the non-profit Vision Ambassadors (VisAmb) to provide “educational assistance to help students obtain terminal graduate degrees with the intent of community wealth building and service.”

Durrett’s aim is to continue to build upon the legacies of many others –Ìęfor others. She’s helping establish the Mary S. Joshua Endowment Fund, Portnoy-Berberich-Payne ‘Vision Heirs’ Endowment Fund and Dr. Delores Gordon Alleyne Lecture Series to honor their contributions in medical progress for all.

Ìę

P. Gay Baughman ’81 recalls how she and other women were treated differently than male students.Ìę

“I’d be the only female taking a particular oral exam, and the professor would ask me all the questions,” she said. “I dealt with what seemed like unfairness by changing my personality. I became very quiet, because if you became small maybe they wouldn’t notice you as much.” Ìę

Upon graduation, Baughman said she found her voice again as a business owner, setting up a dental practice in Louisville’s Fairdale community and, as someone who loves learning, participating in numerous continuing education courses. Throughout her career, Baughman found support through the Kentucky Association of Women Dentists. Ìę

“My son was born in 1986. I had no family nearby and my husband traveled. Through this organization, we would share with one another about how to manage the challenges of being both a dental professional and a mother,” she said. “Women carry the weight and responsibilities of parenthood differently than men. Even among dental students who become parents while in school, it is more difficult for women.”ÌęÌę

After 28 successful years in private practice, Baughman joined the School of Dentistry faculty in 2007, determined to give female dental students a better experience than her own. Baughman has helped female students gain a sense of belonging in part by launching a student chapter of the .Ìę

Third-year dental student Nikki Sanders is president of UofL’s AAWD chapter.Ìę

“I have always been a huge advocate of women supporting women,” Sanders said. “We provide an outlet for discussions about the gender disparities that still exist in our profession, advocate for more equality for all women and take part in efforts to support women outside the profession through outreach, including clothing drives for the Center for Women and Families.”Ìę

Sanders says she’s grateful for the lifelong friends in AAWD and for Baughman, whom she considers a mentor. In return, Baughman hopes female dental students now have an easier path forward and she is glad to be a part of their lives.Ìę

“I get up every day and say ‘I’m going to dental school!’ – I love these kids,” she said. “I hope I am half as good for them as they are for me.”Ìę

She was dressed for a Division 1 football game – and she was the first woman to do so.

Her love for the game started at an early age. The Alton, Illinois, native recalled playing football in the front yard with her 12-year-old brother and his friends when she was just 6 years old.

“If I was going to hang with these boys six years older, I had to show them up,” vanTonder said during a recent interview. “It made me more competitive and I played sports my whole life.”

Throughout the years she played soccer, swam competitively and even turned heads at her high school’s powder puff football game when she made a 30-yard field goal. The players urged her to try out for the team, but she was reluctant – worried of what others might think of a girl on the high school’s football team. She also had her sights set on a collegiate soccer scholarship.Ìę Ìę

She went on to play four years as a goalkeeper for the UofL women’s soccer team while studying engineering. During that time, she even spent a year on the women’s swim team when the program was at risk of being dropped. In the months that the seasons overlapped, she’d go straight from the pool to the soccer field, all, she said, for the love of the sport. But the immutable sense of regret from high school never left the back of her mind.

vanTonder’s collegiate soccer eligibility was over when she started working on her master’s degree at the Speed School of Engineering. With a final year of collegiate eligibility, and the encouragement from the women in the athletic administration, the Cardinal goalkeeper asked then head football coach, Ron Cooper, for a tryout in the spring of 1995. Ìę

“He was a little taken back, like ‘Is she real? Is this just for attention?’” vanTonder said.

Still unsure of the eager prospective kicker, Cooper asked her to show him how she would approach a football if she were kicking a field goal – right there in his office. A few days later, vanTonder made 12 of 14 extra-point attempts in 30 mph winds to earn a spot on the roster. Ìę

UofL football made national headlines because of vanTonder, who undoubtedly became a familiar face around Louisville.

“I would go to the gas station down by UofL and I remember the attendant saying ‘Aren’t you the kicker? Hey, go for it,’” vanTonder said.Ìę

She was not dismissed, discouraged or disparaged. She was not told that she did not belong in that space.Ìę

“I only received positive reinforcement from everyone that I met and ran into,” vanTonder said. “[I received]Ìęso many letters from fans cheering me on. I really did have so much support from the community and even within the school.”

That’s not to say it was all smooth sailing. The equipment didn’t fit well, so she made it work. There were no women’s locker rooms at the stadium, so she changed in an equipment shed. She had to complete a summer co-op for engineering, so she attended voluntary workouts at 6 a.m.

“I think that showed [the team] that I was serious,” vanTonder said.

They took her in and treated her as the teammate she was. They’d adjust her sleeves and shoulder pads to make her oversized uniform look tighter as they explained that she needed to show off “her guns.”

“I have to give credit to the team,” she said. “They treated me like I was their little sister. I just felt like they took me under their arm and under their wing and looked out for me.”

Senior day came and the kicker had yet to see the playing time she, and a supportive fanbase, longed for. In the final quarter, the old Cardinal Stadium crowd chanted her name – a moment that still makes her tear up 25 years later.

“My teammate came over to me and said ‘go stand by coach, I’m going to score a touchdown and I want you to score the extra point,’” vanTonder said.

Although that opportunity never came, the support of teammates meant the world to the kicker.

“I’ve always said it didn’t end the way I wanted it to, but the experience was still probably the best experience of my life,” she said, holding back tears.

Although she didn’t see it this way at the time, vanTonder broke down barriers for women in sports. Simply following her passion led her to becoming the first woman to make and dress for a Division 1 football team. That feat allowed more women, like Vanderbilt’s Sarah Fuller, the first woman to score in a Power 5 football game, to shatter ceilings of their own.

“[Initially] I just did it for the love of it,” vanTonder said. “You realize that it’s bigger and you can represent your gender at the time to give people more opportunities down the road. It’s about representing the future.”

Graw was a talented player who won several awards, including the 1958 Women’s Falls City Championship as a teenager. In 1960, Don Kaiser, UofL’s men’s tennis coach, needed more athletes to compete, so he invited Graw, a then-18-year-old freshman, to tryouts. Two other women, Liz Crady and Nancy Butler, also tried out for the team. All three made it. Ìę

According to Graw’s husband, Paul, also a former UofL athlete, Kaiser wanted to harness Graw’s championship energy for the team. In fact, Kaiser offered her a partial athletic scholarship for joining the team, making Graw the first woman at UofL to receive such an honor.

“Coach Kaiser thinks so highly of (Graw’s) potential that she was given a partial scholarship,” wrote Marvin N. Gay, Jr. in a 1960 sports column in the Courier Journal. “Athletic director Peck Hickman said (Graw) is the first girl in the school’s history to receive aid because of athletic ability.”

At the time of Graw’s scholarship, most financial aid was based on academics or need rather than athletic ability, said Nancy Worley, associate sports information director for the Cardinal tennis teams.

It would take many years before other women had the opportunity to follow in the shoes of Graw, Crady and Butler.

“Officially, we did not have women’s athletics until 1975 when Title IX was interpreted to include sports for women,” Worley said. “The NCAA did not offer women’s sports until 1982.”

Tennis led to love off the court for Graw, too. She met Paul, a former track athlete, in the summer of 1962. Paul loved Martha’s exceptional talent for the sport and how happy tennis made her no matter where she was. The pair became engaged their senior year, in 1963. That year, both also lettered in varsity sports.

When Paul left for Texas to attend Officer Training School, Martha taught tennis in the Louisville Public Parks program. The couple married upon his return and Martha took a step away from tennis to have two children. After moving to Wright Patterson Air Force Base during Paul’s service, Martha found there was an incredible tennis program, and she even got Paul to share in her passion.Ìę

“Marty (Martha) and I played singles together a lot. It was an awful long time before I won a set from her, but eventually I could win a set every now and then,” Paul said. “We liked to play mixed doubles. Over the years, that became really important. We, through her, got to be a part of the local tennis scene.”

Graw was a natural athlete who took pride in her athletic victories and shared her love for the sport that helped pay her way through college with anyone who was willing to learn. She died in 2014 after a battle with cancer, but her legacy lives on in the hundreds of women who have taken the courts, fields, tracks and pools for UofL since Graw’s first serve

UofL President Neeli Bendapudi is included on its list of 25 women.Ìę

The 10th annual special edition highlights “women who have made a difference in the academy by tackling some of higher education’s toughest challenges, exhibiting extraordinary leadership skills and making a positive difference in their respective communities.”Ìę

In 2020, President Bendapudi led UofL’s operational shift to online and hybrid classes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Also under her leadership, and despite the crisis, UofL achieved a number of milestones in 2020, including a record-breaking year for research, the launch of health care cybersecurity curriculum thanks to a $6.3M funding round from the NSA, and the pediatric integration of UofL and Norton Healthcare.

In July, President Bendapudi announced a plan for UofL to become the “.” The university has since made a number of key hires and added programming to support that goal.

She joins 24 other women in Diverse’s 2021 class, including (alphabetically):Ìę

• Venessa A. Brown, associate chancellor and chief diversity officer, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
• Karen Carey, chancellor, University of Alaska Southeast
• Laurie Carter, president, Shippensburg University
• Robin R. Means Coleman, associate provost for diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, Northwestern UniversityÌę
• Karlyn Crowley, provost, Ohio Wesleyan University
• Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education emeritus and founding president of the Learning Policy Institute, Stanford University
• Carol Fierke, provost and executive vice president, Brandeis University
• Angelica Garcia, president, Berkeley City College
• Ayanna Howard, dean of the college of engineering, Ohio State UniversityÌę
• Parneshia Jones, director, Northwestern University Press
• Caroline Laguerre-Brown, vice provost for diversity, equity and community engagement, George Washington University
• Cynthia Lindquist, president, Cankdeska Cikana Community College
• Felicia McGinty, executive vice chancellor of administration and planning, Rutgers UniversityÌę
• Tracey Meares, Walton Hale Hamilton professor of law and founding director of the Justice Collaboratory, Yale Law School
• Traci Morris, director of the American Indian Policy Institute, Arizona State UniversityÌę
• Erica Muhl, president, Berklee College of Music
• Maureen Murphy, president, College of Southern Maryland
• Madeline Pumariega, president, Miami Dade College
• Desiree Reed-Francois, athletic director, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• Jeanne Craig Sinkford, dean emerita, College of Dentistry, Howard University
• Raquel Tamez, CEO, Society of Hispanic Engineers
• Nancy Jean Tubbs, director, LGBT Resource Center, University of California, Riverside
• Tara VanDerveer, head women’s basketball coach, Stanford University
• Geraldine Young, chief diversity and inclusion officer, Frontier Nursing UniversityÌę

The event, which celebrates Women’s History and month, will feature the Olmsted Academy South’s string orchestra playing with the UofL Symphony Orchestra.

The groups will perform the premiere of “Revolt of the Brave” by composer and UofL alumna . The piece was commissioned and funded through , a national organization which strives to introduce students to the experience of creating and performing new music.

“The purpose of this event is to show young ladies what they can do,” said Kimcherie Lloyd, UofL Director of Orchestral Studies and Co-Director of Opera Theatre.

The 6 p.m. event will also feature student presentations of famous women in history and students’ artwork with accompanying string ensemble music.

“We are so excited to collaborateÌęwith UofLÌęfor our third year of ‘Because She Did, I Can’,” said Courtney Schisler, Olmsted Academy South’s Orchestra teacher and UofL alumna. “Our motto is that we areÌębrave. This event gives our young ladies theÌęopportunity to show how brave theyÌęare andÌęallowsÌęthemÌętoÌęconnect with and learn from brave women ofÌętheÌępast and present.”

The event is free and open to the public. Attendees will be directed to programming in Comstock and Bird Recital halls, School of Music, 105 W. Brandeis Ave.