Nationally recognized scientists speaking at Honoring Women in Math and Science

Two nationally recognized scientists, Leslie Ruyle and Jayne Morrow, with Montana roots are coming to speak in Havre tonight at Havre Public Schools and Montana State University-Northern’s Honoring Women in Math and Science Fields, at 6:30 p.m. in the Havre High Auditorium.

Ruyle, who earned her undergraduate degree from Northern, and Morrow, who grew up in Harlowton, are two of the speakers at the event and will speak to local students, male and female, about their experiences in life and what opportunities are around them in their local communities.

“What I hope they can leave with is to be inspired to tackle challenges in life by working within a team,” Morrow, Montana State University’s research and economic development assistant vice president, said, “finding folks that inspire and motivate them and realize that there are resources and mentors and engaged people all over the state of Montana and the nation and the world that are there to help them. That we are all in this journey together and I just hope that they are inspired and excited about opportunities in (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) as well as opportunities in going to college and the doors that are open for them.”

Morrow said that after working in Washington, D.C., for a number of years she moved back to rural Montana because she wants to contribute to building the small communities that she had grown up with. She added that she also wanted to give her children a similar experience she had and teach them what the hard-working lifestyle really is.

“It’s exciting,” she said. “It’s awesome. I love talking with young people, young women. I have a real passion for helping women see opportunity in some fields.”

She added that the event is for all students, with male and female students able to benefit from attending the event.

But for the longest time, math and science fields were not considered for women and minorities, she said. Over the years that has gradually changed, Morrow said, adding that it is exciting to see the benefits of having women in the workforce. Students can use math and science fields and think creatively to solve problems, she said, either in the backyard or something they see in society.

She said she hopes they have a number of students who see opportunities in STEM fields as an exciting opportunity and to see what they want to do with their life.

Morrow said that she worked for the federal government for 14 years before she started working for Montana State University. She said she took the job at the university because she sees many opportunities to improve economic and social issues through technology, science and research. Her job at the university is to work on realizing those opportunities with the other staff members in the university system. The development is aimed at reaching smaller, rural communities and growing them through strategic connections to benefit Montana in the future.

“It was a great chance for me to start to work on problems that I was thinking about for Montana and I’m just really excited to pull people together start to solve those issues,” she said.

Morrow grew up in the Harlowton area, graduating from Harlowton High School before moving to Bozeman to attend Montana State University and earning her undergraduate in civil engineering. After graduating from MSU she moved to Connecticut to obtain her master’s and doctorate in environmental engineering from the University of Connecticut.

She said that her father was an engineer and, because of him, she became interested in the career. She added that becoming an engineer is a great way of contributing to society and really helping solve problems at a local level. Morrow said that she is a problem solver at heart and because of that becoming an engineer was good fit for her.

Growing up in Montana, some of the problems she saw that the state faced is that smaller towns having a combination of population decline and aging populations, and they are struggling to receive health care services in those in communities, she said.

She said she wants the economy in these communities to thrive and one way they can achieve that is through technology. Technology can have a large impact in small towns, and is already shaping how producers are providing agricultural products and services.

“I am excited about the potential,” she said. “… They are emerging and we are just starting to see the benefits and challenges of these technologies.”

Morrow said that she found the greatest reward in her career was the excitement of new ideas and creative solutions people are coming up with. She added that groups of people are coming together for a vision for the future that they can achieve together.

She said that, during her time working for the federal government, she worked with several groups, such as scientists and federal agencies to improve communication opportunities and communities. Some of the projects she worked on were getting firefighters the support they needed from federal agencies to respond to the biological threats that came shortly after the 9/11 attacks in the early 2000s.

She also worked with people around the world to develop an international system of measurement for biology, which is not yet in existence and is still an ongoing project. She said that she was recently in France for a meeting about that issue.

Morrow added that she also had the chance to work under former President Barack Obama’s administration’s science advisor in Washington to address some of the world’s biggest issues, such as responding to the Ebola virus when it first came to the United States in 2014.

“I’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of different career opportunities and I hope to share some of that here with folks on the Hi-Line,” she said. “I grew up here in Montana, and Montanans can and are changing the world, which is really fantastic.”

Morrow said that she moved to Chinook four years ago and works remotely out of her home. She served as a scientist and policy analyst for the federal government. In the last few years, she worked for a science agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology, located in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She said that she recently took the job with MSU to work with small communities in Montana.

One of the reasons she moved back to Montana, she said, was that she wanted her children to share and see the freedom she had when she was growing up and have an opportunity that they wouldn’t have had in the Washington area.

“Montanans are hard-working, dedicated and humble,” she said. “I think that our people are filled with the grit and grace that is really needed everywhere in the world.”

Leslie Ruyle

Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University Assistant Professor Leslie Ruyle, Ph.D., will be the keynote speaker at Honoring Women in Math and Science Fields and will be receiving a Montana State University-Northern’s Founder’s Excellence Award Friday during the Founder’s Excellence and Athletic Hall of Fame dinner.

Ruyle said that she had many experiences at Northern that helped her become the person she is.

“The importance of friendships,” she said. “I had some really amazing friends at Northern.”

Originally from a small town in Colorado, she moved to Havre to attend Northern for her undergraduate degree and to play basketball for two years and volleyball for four years. She said she loves Colorado but wanted to study wolves.

Growing up, she read books written by Jack London, such as his famous work “White Fang,” and always loved dogs and canines in general, Ruyle said. She always loved the pack mentality and thinks canines are the most beautiful, iconic species of the West.

“The United States has some of the most amazing wildlife on the planet,” she said.

She added that her passion has always been animals, wildlife and conservation and always saw herself one day going into the Peace Corps. She first was planning to attend a college in Alaska, but the college cut its athletic program shortly before she enrolled. That was when Skylights basketball coach Loren Baker contacted her and flew her up to Havre. Ruyle said he made her fall in love with Northern.

She said that after her first year at Northern, Baker took the job of coaching the men’s basketball team and Sherry Winn took his place as the woman’s coach. Ruyle said that the best thing that Winn did for her in her life was setting up the Adopt a Light and Skylight program, where she met Renelle Braaten and Wayne Koepke, who acted as her surrogate parents while she was at Northern.

Ruyle said that Braaten and Koepke attended all of her games while she was at Northern and acted as good mentors throughout her life. She added that even to this day she still calls them regularly and is very close with them.

“I am eternally grateful to Sherry Winn and the baseketball program for creating the Adopt a Skylight program,” she said. “They are the most amazing people on the planet.”

Braaten and Koepke had a profound effect on her life, Ruyle said, adding that she still treats them as family and asks their advice occasionally about business questions or retirement questions.

After graduating from Northern, Ruyle moved east to work at the Baltimore Zoo as a zoo keeper, she said. While in Baltimore she played hardcore volleyball, traveling up and down the East Coast playing with different teams. Because of volleyball she needed weekends off, she said, and had to leave her job at the zoo.

One girl she played volleyball with worked for Procter and Gamble, multinational consumer goods corporation, and helped Ruyle get a job with the company, she said. She worked there for three years, with the idea of joining the Peace Corps always in the back of her mind.

After getting hurt playing volleyball, she had her chance and used vouchers she earned from traveling for Procter and Gamble to buy a ticket to Africa where she joined the Peace Corps.

“I fell in love,” she said. “… I just love wild creatures and wild places.”

The Peace Corps was fantastic, Ruyle said, and while she was there she helped create protected areas, which were managed by local tribal authorities rather than outside entities. She worked closely with people in the community, four different tribes, trying to find maximum amount of benefits for people while protecting certain habitats.

Eventually the area was separated into four different zones, a core zone, a buffer zone, a hunting zone and nursery grounds, she said. For the project, Ruyle and her team won the United Nations Equator Prize for their initiative for grass roots conservation.

She said that she learned how important working with communities is and how important understanding what motivates people is.

“And how to use that to really find win-win solutions for as many stakeholders as you can,” she said. “It sounds simple now, but back then it was a big lesson to learn.”

She said that all of the big ideas taught in western institution have specific guidelines and they can occasionally forget about the local voice in conservation work.

“I just wanted to understand as much as possible and that’s really driven me throughout my career,” she said. “Just going to in to the Peace Corps was one of those really good ways of creating confidence in being able to navigate exotic places and different ways of doing things, traveling by yourself and understanding different cultures. The Peace Corps was just a way to open up the world to me.”

Peace Corps, for her, was the perfect match and was what she needed for personal growth because she was originally shy and it helped her concur that, she said.

“I really want to leave the planet a better place than when I came and trying to find these win-win solutions for people, for wildlife, for wild places,” Ruyle said. “That’s really important to me and the Peace Corps was a really good way to help me look at it from a different perspective.”

After serving in the Peace Corps for two-and-a-half years, she said that she wanted to go back to school to achieve her Ph.D. She took opportunities available to study ecology at the University of Georgia and to work at a Smithsonian tropical research center in Panama. While in Panama, she said that she worked with world-class researchers.

She later traveled to Honduras to work on another project before becoming a professor with Texas A & M managing a national science foundation, she said. One of the things the foundation does is act as an angel investor for entrepreneurs in third world countries who have businesses geared toward conservation and benefiting the communities. One business she had recently invested in was a solar company in the Congo which is working to provide energy to the people in that area.

“I really do believe in this mantra in the Peace Corps that it’s the toughest job you’ll ever love,” she said.

She said she also is working on a variety of projects currently with national parks around the world.

“If we can come up with these really forward-thinking innovative entrepreneurship programs, then that might be one of the really good ways to address both conflict and conservation,” she said.

She said that she is a huge advocate for taking students abroad, with the world having so much to offer and learn from. She added that she also encourages some students to look into the Peace Corps, but she understands it’s not for everyone.

“Because you just learn so much no matter where you go, and the more you interact with local people the more you really broaden your mindset to what is the planet we live on,” she said.

The world has so many opportunities for people, and family can be found no matter where people go, she said.

“There is so much value in family and appreciating who your family is,” she said. “What I do is just really widening that lense on who your family is. It’s not just Havre, it’s not just Montana, it’s not just the U.S., it’s not just the western world, it’s the entire planet.

“There are amazing people around the world. We all want the same thing, we all want a better life for our children, we all want peace and prosperity,” she said, “and working together and having empathy for one another may be the best way of doing it.”