History of Pride - Shelley Diamond
- Public Event
As we get ready to wrap up Pride month, GSC and CPA have a planned a lecture on the history of pride, seen through the eyes and life of Rochelle ‘Shelley' Diamond, who is the facility director emerita for the Flow Cytometry/Cell Sorting Facility at Caltech. The lecture will be in Beckman Behavioral Biology B180 on Wednesday 26th at 4 PM.
Throughout her life, Shelley has played important roles in both biology research and the development of the LGBTQ+ STEM community. She will give us a short history of her career and how it relates to the founding of NOGLSTP ( now Out to Innovate), taking pride in how far scientists and technical professionals have come since the early 1980s. We will also look at where the LGBTQ+ STEM community currently stands and how we can all play a part in helping the community.
About the Speaker: Rochelle ‘Shelley' Diamond
Rochelle ‘Shelley' Diamond is a Member of the Professional Staff at the California Institute of Technology. She is the lab manager (42 years) and researcher for Dr. Ellen Rothenberg's developmental immunology group at Caltech. Rochelle's primary research focus since coming to Caltech has been on early murine T-cell differentiation. Using flow cytometry and cell sorting to investigate developmental states and lineages in these T-cell populations, she has authored over 25 publications in scientific journals. She offers guidance to all lab members, troubleshoots experimental protocols, and oversees instrumentation. She is the safety officer for the Rothenberg Group. She also manages the day-to-day budgets and ordering and conducts all lab business pertaining to the institute and outside vendors and consultants. She is also facility director emerita and consultant for Caltech's Flow Cytometry/Cell Sorting Facility (40 years), that services various university divisions. Prior to her arrival at Caltech, Rochelle was a researcher at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, City of Hope Research Institute, and UCLA. She has owned and operated a prototype scientific instrumentation company and helped to build and operate protein sequenators for the City of Hope Research Institute. She was a member of the City of Hope/Genentech research team that cloned the human gene for insulin in 1978. Rochelle is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and chair emerita of Out to Innovate formerly known as the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals, Inc. She is a member of the International Society for Analytical Cytology, American Chemical Society, and an active participant on the Purdue Cytometry On-Line forum. She has received numerous awards for her LGBTQ+ diversity work. She has been listed in ‘Who's Who in Science and Engineering' and ‘Who's Who of American Women'. Recent web archive interviews are the Caltech Heritage Archives interview with David Zierler (https://heritageproject.caltech.edu/interviews-updates/rochelle-diamond) and the Outwords interview (https://theoutwordsarchive.org/interview/rochelle-a-diamond/). Professional publications include: co-editor of the professional text In Living Color: Protocols in Flow Cytometry and Cell Sorting (Springer, 2000). "Separation and enrichment of cell populations by centrifugal elutriation", Methods Vol 2, Issue 3, June 1991.