AI Grad Now Guides Inclusion at Wellesley College

When Robbin Chapman SM ’99, PhD ’06 arrived at MIT as a graduate student, she felt starstruck by the well-known computer scientists in her department. But during the next 16 years on campus, the Institute became not only her school but her workplace, her com­munity, and her family.

“The things I like to talk about, the way I like to think, the excitement I get about whatever I’m working on, all of that—everybody else is doing that too,” she says of the MIT community.

As a master’s candidate in the artificial-intelligence lab, Chapman developed algorithms to interpret sign language. She also volun­teered at the Computer Clubhouse, the Media Lab’s after-school technology center where students, ranging from 10 to 18 years old, worked on design and engineering projects.

As a PhD student with MIT’s Lifelong Kindergar­ten Group, she built a com­puter program that helped those students explain how they think through and design projects. “I’ve always been very interested in how humans learn,” she says.

You can’t just come and take your academics and gradu­ate. You have to know how to be in the world and how to be constructive and effec­tive.

As a resident of New House, which is composed of four cultural houses, Chap­man developed programs to encourage cross-cultural communication. She then began tackling diversity and inclusion at MIT as a whole.

While working for the School of Architecture and Plan­ning, she set up a monthly diversity roundtable and helped increase enrollment of graduate students of color and those from low-income backgrounds. With the MIT provost’s office, she helped organize a career workshop for minority faculty.

Now, as the associate provost and academic direc­tor of diversity and inclu­sion at Wellesley College, Chapman is using pursu­ing similar goals. Under her guidance, Wellesley recently partnered with the Posse Foundation, which identi­fies and supports talented high schoolers who might be overlooked in college admis­sions, to bring a diverse group of students from the Houston area into the Class of 2021.

Under a new evalu­ation process, faculty articu­late how they will include diverse reading materials and use culturally respon­sible teaching methods. In recognition of her contribu­tions, MIT created the Dr. Robbin Chapman Excellence through Adversity Award for Institute seniors.

Education needs to be more than job preparation, says Chapman, who was recently honored as a distin­guished lecturer by Sigma Xi, the science and engi­neering honor society. “You can’t just come and take your academics and gradu­ate. You have to know how to be in the world and how to be constructive and effec­tive.”

First published in the March/April 2018 issue of MIT Technology Review.