{"id":1904,"date":"2020-12-23T15:06:28","date_gmt":"2020-12-23T23:06:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/?page_id=1904"},"modified":"2025-07-02T14:37:38","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T21:37:38","slug":"interview-with-julie-kmec-on-her-prestigious-amazon-catalyst-grant-and-vr-research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/interview-with-julie-kmec-on-her-prestigious-amazon-catalyst-grant-and-vr-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Julie Kmec on her prestigious Amazon Catalyst Grant and VR research"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\r\n\t\tInterview with Julie Kmec on her prestigious Amazon Catalyst Grant and VR research\t<\/h1>\r\n\t\t<\/header>\r\n\n\n
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\"A
Julie Kmec<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

In 2019, Professor Julie Kmec and her collaborators were awarded a prestigious Amazon Catalyst Grant. The partnership between WSU and Amazon supports the development of novel solutions to problems, aiming for global impact. Kmec and her team, Cross-Cultural Optics, were awarded a grant to develop an innovative virtual reality environment that will allow women engineers in the United States to explore the experience of women engineers in other countries. While U.S. women hold 24% of engineering degrees and represent even less of the engineering labor force, in other countries, such as Malaysia, Jorden, and Tunisia, women engineers are as equally represented as men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kmec was part of a team that won a National Science Foundation grant in 2016 to conduct focus groups with women in engineering in countries where men and women are at parity. The findings from that research<\/a> are a key component of the VR (virtual reality) world her team is creating. Kmec and her team recently applied for another NSF grant to continue this research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the interview below, Kmec discusses the details of this innovative project. An initial interview was conducted last spring by Alana Inlow, the previous co-editor of Sociology News<\/em>. Sadie Ridgeway, the current co-editor, contacted Kmec this fall to see how the project has developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ed. Note: Interviews were lightly edited for clarity and brevity. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alana:<\/strong> What was the inspiration behind applying for the Amazon grant and what\u2019s your current activity on the project?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julie: <\/strong>We were inspired to apply for the grant because we have all this wonderful qualitative data from women in STEM and engineering fields from Malaysia, Tunisia, and Jordan, and it\u2019s a lot for the public to consume. So we thought, how can we convey these women\u2019s stories to individuals in the United States in a non-academic paper? We think we have important things to tell women who are engineers and other STEM scientists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Amazon Catalyst call said you had to produce something innovative and show its capacity to impact people. As a sociologist I was thinking, I don\u2019t produce things, I produce ideas and papers, and that\u2019s not what they wanted. At first we brainstormed, what kind of product can we create? Working with engineers they went right to VR. We were thinking, how can we use VR to convey to people what we are doing, and how would it be different than if we just set up a website they can visit?\u2014because we feel like that\u2019s not very interactive and there\u2019s so many out there that it gets lost. We wanted to build a world where women in the U.S. could go and observe engineering that\u2019s different because in these three countries women are at parity or just slightly more present in engineering fields than our women in the U.S. We wanted the U.S. women to hear these other women talking, hear their stories, and we developed the virtual reality world for this to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We proposed this to Amazon and we have no idea how to do this necessarily. And then I was out at a friend\u2019s house for dinner, and my husband called me over to meet this guy, because Jean-Marc (University of Idaho) is this VR expert. So we started talking, and I said, \u201cYou need to join our project because you have the skills, we have the data, but we don\u2019t know how to make it into a VR world.\u201d So four months later we got the grant, and we began working with him and Ian McGrath (graduate student at the University of Idaho).<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"An
Screen capture of the beta VR space described by Julie<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

What we’ve developed so far is we’re going to have users be in this lobby and they\u2019ll be on-boarded onto what\u2019s going to happen. They\u2019ll be told by a virtual \u201cus,\u201d sitting on a sofa, about the questions we asked the women in these countries. We might give them statistics on the countries, such as the proportion of women in engineering, and then they\u2019re going to walk into a room with a table, coffee pot, and a couple of notebooks, and they\u2019ll see in front of them a cityscape of one of the cities, and to their left, they\u2019ll see scrolling words, which are our themes. And the woman in the United States, who is in the virtual world, will be able to pull a theme she finds interesting. For instance, one of our themes may be \u201cimpact of gender in engineering,\u201d and she will say, \u201cI want to know about that.\u201d She takes it off the wall, puts it on her notebook, and then from the notebook our categories will pop out. So one of them might be \u201cengineering women get discriminated against.\u201d She\u2019ll put it off to the side, hear more about that, and when she clicks on that again, an icon of a video, book, or an audio symbol will pop up, and if she clicks on the video, she\u2019ll see and hear a short video of a woman in one of these countries talking about her experience related to the category. If she clicks on the book, it\u2019ll be some narrative that she can read, and if she clicks on the microphone, then she\u2019ll be able to hear the story that the woman is telling about that theme and that category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jean-Marc is really interested in collecting data on the users\u2019 experience, and we\u2019re interested in taking the information we learn and ultimately passing it on to employers. That\u2019s the other thing we had proposed in the Catalyst Grant, they wanted to know how you can apply what you make to other places. So we decided that whatever the women are talking about and find interesting might be a relevant point for HR people or employers to know about. So they\u2019ll take the ideas that interest them most, put them in that notebook, and carry it out to the lobby. Then we\u2019ll have the data. We can see what interests them, we might do some exit interviews, and we\u2019ll have our project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alana:<\/strong> It\u2019s amazing. I can\u2019t even, it\u2019s so out of the realm\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julie:<\/strong> If you had asked me a year ago if I would be doing this, I would have said no. I had never done VR, but I visited the lab over at UI and they let me do it and it was so interesting. We hope that by getting engaged\u2014more than just reading a news article or a website or something like that\u2014it will resonate with the women. They\u2019ll recognize, because this happens in our data, that women elsewhere suffer from a lot of the same problems that women in the United States do, but their solutions to them or the situation they\u2019re in comes out differently. That\u2019s why there are so many women in engineering there. So we’re interested in that and hoping that, in expanding the VR project, we might think better about how women in the U.S. can utilize the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fall 2020 update<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Sadie:<\/strong> Please update us regarding the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julie:<\/strong> We\u2019ve connected with our colleagues in Malaysia and they are presently doing recordings that will be integrated into the VR space. Aziz Dridi, a graduate student at Purdue University in the department of engineering education, is the contact between the U.S. and Malaysia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadie:<\/strong> And you just submitted another NSF grant?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julie:<\/strong> Yes, and we\u2019re taking what we\u2019re doing in the Amazon project and using it as the beta test of our VR space. With the Catalyst Grant, we were able to make a much stronger case for what we wanted to do because we have all this data from women in several countries and this platform that we\u2019ve developed. If we didn\u2019t have the Amazon Catalyst, I don\u2019t think we would have a big chance of getting the grant. It’s hard to describe, and people could be like, \u201cCan you really do that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadie:<\/strong> It\u2019s so different and innovative. It sounds like it would be such a powerful experience, seeing the data in that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julie:<\/strong> We had to make the case in the NSF grant why the traditional methods of getting information from women have largely been qualitative interviews or surveys and we don\u2019t think they capture the important things that VR can do. Jean-Marc and Alejandra Magana at Purdue, she\u2019s another VR theory expert, they\u2019ve understood that what you collect and see in VR is different, you can see people\u2019s facial expressions, the length of time they spend looking at something, and the empathy people develop with the content in VR. In our grant application, we talk about why we are using it instead of other things. We couldn\u2019t just say we\u2019re using this new tool without saying theoretically why it\u2019s different or unique.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\r\n\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":8082,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"wsuwp_university_location":[],"wsuwp_university_org":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1904"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8082"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1904"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4105,"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1904\/revisions\/4105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"wsuwp_university_location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wsuwp_university_location?post=1904"},{"taxonomy":"wsuwp_university_org","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soc.wsu.edu\/socnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wsuwp_university_org?post=1904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}