On the last evening of March the University of Utah got a science lecture unlike any other—one populated by Whos, Things One and Two, and a Cat in a very tall hat.
Geraldine "Geri" Richmond, Presidential Chair in Science and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oregon, took the stage for the U’s Frontiers of Science series to deliver "Curiosity, Research and the Wisdom of Dr. Seuss."
Aurora Clark, chair of the Department of Chemistry which, with the College of Science, sponsored the event, called Richmond in her introduction "a trifecta of a human being" — groundbreaking research scientist, government science leader, and fierce advocate for women in STEM. Richmond pioneered nonlinear optical spectroscopy techniques to study liquid interfaces, earned the National Medal of Science and the Priestley Medal — the highest honor of the American Chemical Society — and served as Under Secretary for Science and Innovation under President Biden from 2021 to 2025, overseeing 13 national laboratories and the nation's largest federal sponsor of basic research.
She also arrived at the auditorium of the new L. S. Skaggs Applied Science building with Dr. Seuss characters hidden throughout her slides and a contest for the audience: identify the characters and name the books they came from. The record to beat, she announced with a grin, was 11. "If you find this talk too boring," she told the room, "just watch for the characters."
COACh: Building a Bench Deep Enough for Everyone
The molecular dance of meeting entities where they are is an apt metaphor for Richmond's advocacy work which has its roots in a moment of uncomfortable clarity. When she reached full professorship in the mid-to-late 1990s, she began noticing a pattern she couldn't ignore. "Women scientists, even when we thought they had reached the highest levels, weren't getting the type of awards, weren't getting the outside offers, weren't getting the accolades that a lot of the men were doing—even though they had equivalent, if not better, scientific records," she told the audience. "And I started to notice very sexist behavior that I thought would have gone away.”
“It didn't go away."
She took her concern to the Department of Energy, which funded a study. The stories that came back were not only concerning but damning — laboratory space quietly reassigned, women called upon only as tokens to diversity, senior mentors nowhere to be found. Richmond convened a group of senior women chemists and brought in professional skills trainers. She got results including on behalf of the colleague whose lab space had been taken away; she had attended one negotiation workshop and got it back.
COACh—the Committee on the Advancement of Women Chemists—was born.
What started in chemistry expanded across all scientific disciplines and eventually around the world. Today, roughly 26,000 women scientists across more than 200 institutions have come through COACh programs, including former chair of the U’s Chemistry Department Cynthia Burrows and others in the audience. Former participants now serve as department heads, deans and chairs. Currently, Richmond is running a program for women volcanologists in Rwanda, funded by the Gates Foundation. "Every one of them has a story," she said. "I look at these faces and it makes me almost tear up."
The sentiment was felt by many in the audience as they gazed upon the wide diversity of faces from around the world projected on the screen as it was when Richmond talked about her work with fighting childhood stunting. Appointed as a science envoy to work in the Lower Mekong River countries like Laos and Cambodia—“Oh, more places you'll go, and more people to meet!” she interjected channeling, again, Dr. Suess—she focused on culturally embedded dieting practices during pregnancy. “It's not just the size of the child [impacted by poor nutrition], she explained, “but brain development.” That was when she brought in neuroscientists to work with local hygienists and nutritionists to propose “unheard of” interventions.
Science, Power, and the Art of the Possible
When the White House called Richmond—"completely out of the blue"—and asked her to serve in the Biden administration, she said yes for one reason: climate change. What awaited her was a portfolio of roughly $14 billion annually across the Office of Science and the applied energy offices, and the daily challenge of deciding whether dollars flowed toward nuclear physics or wind and solar. "I had gone from running my research group to now having to figure out what to do with $14 billion," she told the audience. "And it was really hard."
Bridging pure and applied science—and making the case for both to lawmakers—required storytelling as much as technical mastery. Among her most consequential acts was institutional: recognizing that no one on Capitol Hill appreciated how much artificial intelligence work was already humming inside the national laboratories. She created the Critical and Emerging Technologies Office and launched FASST—Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security and Technology—uniting DOE's supercomputing power, vast scientific datasets, and tens of thousands of researchers into a coordinated national AI strategy. "That program has become the nation's lead program in AI," she said. "I'm very proud of that."
Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Richmond closed her lecture the way she had opened it. The Seussian lines she chose from Oh, the Places You'll Go! clearly tracked her own accidental autobiography and served as inspiration to those in attendance:
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
You'll get mixed up, of course, as you already know,
You'll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step, step with care and great tact,
And remember that life's a great balancing act.