Tashica Williams Amirgholizadeh

Abstract

Tashica Williams Amirgholizadeh credits her parents and their military careers for nurturing and cementing her interest in science at a young age. Today, she serves as a patent litigation attorney at Gilead Sciences. Her parents were not scientists—her father was an Army pastor and her mother a cook. Nevertheless, they gave her telescopes and microscopes and fostered her desire to understand the way the world works, Amirgholizadeh says. Likewise, the teachers at military base schools in Germany and elsewhere overseas saw her as just a student who happened to be talented at science and math, and they encouraged her interests, she says. The bases were culturally rich and diverse, and it wasn’t until high school, when she returned to the U.S., that she felt labeled as a “black” student—stereotyped as someone who should not go into science. She spent high school in California, Hawaii, and Texas. At Seaside High School ...