Disobedient women are the best kind

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”*

At a time (2025) when American women’s hard-fought contributions in science, technology, and mathematics are being systematically erased…

Introducing Dr. Deborah Swackhamer (1954-2021), an American chemist, environmental scientist, staunch advocate for integrity in science — and 2018 recipient of an MIT Disobedience Award.  

Dr. Swackhamer earned her PhD in Oceanography and Limnology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985. Her main area of study was the transport of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in lakes. According to the University of Illinois, PCBs are a group of manmade chemicals, widely used pre-1977 in the United States in hydraulic fluids, lubricants, and plasticizers. The primary company that made PCBs in this country was Monsanto. In 1979, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of PCBs because of health effects caused by exposure, which include cancer, infertility, and neurological disorders. 

As an environmental chemist, Dr. Swackhamer applied her expertise to studying how toxic chemicals are spread and their effects, because they remain in the environment for such a longtime. Her work helped to develop policies anddressing exposure risk. 

She taught and conducted research at the University of Minnesota for nearly three decades, from 1987 until her retirement in 2015. The University credits her with “a wide-ranging impact on the University’s research into the environment and water quality issues.”

During the course of her tenure, Dr. Swackhamer was co-director of the University’s Water Resources Center and co-founder of the interdisciplinary Institute on the Environment. She taught and mentored students in both the Humphrey School’s Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy area and in the School of Public Health’s Environmental Health Sciences department. 

Dr. Swackhamer’s reputation as a researcher and scholar was recognized internationally; she was named one of 20 inaugural fellows of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), the world's largest and most prestigious organization of environmental and toxicology chemists. 

From 2003 to 2012, Dr. Swackhamer was a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Advisory Board, and served as its chair from 2008 to 2012. She later served as chair of the EPA's Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC), an independent external panel of experts that advises the agency's office of science.

She was widely recognized for a very public conflict with the EPA during the Trump administration, when the agency’s chief of staff asked her to change congressional testimony she was preparing to deliver in June 2017 about the administration’s meddling with the EPA’s scientific panels. She refused to do so and a few months later, she was removed as chair of the BOSC. 

It was for this refusal that she was awarded the MIT Disobedience Award.  

Read more about Dr. Deborah Swackhamer’s Congressional testimony here. 

(Photo courtesy of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Sources: Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Wikipedia, University of Illinois)

* Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 1976