She received her Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania and has written on the history of standards and instrumentation in materials science, engineering and the building trades. Her most recent book , Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Harvard University Press, 2010), traces American ideas about race and technical aptitude since 1940. Current projects include the blog http://STEMequity.com/, and a study, with sociologist Mary Ebeling, of economic equity in nanotechnology training and employment. She is also writing on distributions of blame between workers and materials for failures in contemporary building technologies, as economies of scale and automation continue their long incursion on the labor of commercial construction. Download paper (252 KB)