Throughout much of her life, Ciara Sivels had dreams of becoming a chef. Now she is the first Black woman to get a doctoral degree in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Michigan.
“I really had no idea (about engineering) until my junior year of high school,” Sivels said. “I had a teacher suggest I look into engineering because I had always been at good at chemistry and math, and I constantly excelled in all my classes.”
Sivels, a native of Chesapeake, Virginia, is the first black woman to earn a doctoral degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan, the top program in the country.
“It was something that was in the back of my mind as I was going through the program,” Sivels told HuffPost. “So yeah, it was something that I thought about, but I tried not to make it the focus because I didn’t want to add more stress to the rigor of the program.”
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Sivels, 27, successfully defended her thesis “Development of an Advanced Radioxenon Detector for Nuclear Explosion Monitoring” in October.
Congratulations to Dr. Ciara Sivels in becoming the first African American female graduate of the NERS PhD program!!
Sivels didn’t always want to pursue nuclear engineering. After high school, she had her sights set not on atoms but on appetites. “I was originally going to go to culinary school. In my junior and senior years, I was in culinary arts,” she said.
She took an AP chemistry class her junior year of high school, she says, and her teacher encouraged her to pursue a career in STEM. She went on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she majored in nuclear science and engineering.
“I remember the teacher from that class saying, ‘Oh, you’re really smart, you should think about doing something other than culinary,’” Sivels recalled. “So that’s kinda how I switched over into engineering and eventually ended up at MIT and ended up in the nuclear program.”
