Being a woman of color in science does not mean that you should have to work twice as hard to get the grant. Dr. Kemi Doll, no stranger to hard work, believes that she holds the keys to navigating the complexities of academia, prioritizing grant writing, and unlocking your career potential.
Dr. Doll has a medical degree from Columbia University and a master’s degree in clinical research. She trained as a OBGYN resident at Northwestern University’s McGraw Medical Center in Chicago, held a fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in gynecologic oncology, and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in health and policy management. During her time in residency, she saw firsthand how the care you receive gets dictated by the hospital or area of a city that you live in, a reality that ultimately affects health outcomes for many marginalized patients. She always felt drawn to medicine, but her inspiration to pursue research resulted from a strong desire to untangle the relationship among health inequities, health outcomes, and biology.
As she strives toward this goal, Dr. Doll currently works as a professor at the University of Washington’s OBGYN department and as founding director of The Gynecologic Research and Cancer Equity (GRACE) Center at UW. She hosts a podcast called “Your Unapologetic Career,” in which she discusses tips and tricks to help women kick imposter syndrome and pursue their dream jobs. She has also founded KD Coach, an academic coaching business for women of color in academia that fosters a program called Get That Grant.
A Woman of Color Makes Her Way in STEM
Throughout her career, Dr. Doll has experienced many obstacles as a woman of color in academia, but she has not let that stop her. In a recent interview, she discussed fighting against the duality of hypervisibility and invisibility: the fact that not only do you physically stand out in a room, but you must hide your ideas to better blend in and get along.
“There’s so little tolerance in academics, in science, and in our society for a woman of color to question authority, to question dogma, to question what’s ‘right.’ And yet time and again, we come back to what science is and the likelihood that your perspective is different,” she said. Historically, women of color have not received an open-armed welcome in the academic or scientific space. “If you’re a woman of color in science, you’re supposed to be grateful that you are there. You’re supposed to be a research scientist in somebody else’s lab. You are supposed to be helping somebody out. You are not supposed to stand up and say, ‘I think this idea is wrong,’” explained Dr. Doll, “You get met with a lot more resistance to your work. And you get emotional responses from men and people to scientific ideas because of the body you’re in.”
The inspiration for Get That Grant
After joining UW as a faculty member, she wanted to step away from working as a surgeon and dive more into research. “I just came in and hit the ground running. I wrote grants like it was my job,” she recalled. “If I wanted to have this career, I knew I had to create it from scratch.”
GET THAT GRANT IS PERFECT FOR:
- High-achieving “WOC” faculty in academic medicine who want to secure grant funding doing the work that inspires them.
- Ambitious women who want to work SMARTER, not harder, to 3x their productivity and submit multiple grants in the next 12 months. High-achieving women who have BIG GOALS to achieve and don’t want to sacrifice their life in order to be successful in their career. Driven women who are motivated, teachable and. ready to take action right NOW.
- Dedicated women who really CARE about their research, their ideas, and the change they can bring to their patients and community.
GET THAT GRANT THIS IS NOT A GOOD FIT FOR:
- People who don’t have an academic faculty position — you have to be faculty!
- People who have NO CLUE what they want to contribute academically or what their research, papers, and/or grants would be about.
- People who have NO EXPERIENCE in any scholarly work at all (ex: papers, abstracts, grants, and/or new research projects). You need to know the basics of academic writing.
- People who want to COMPLAIN, always be comfortable, and are not willing to try anything new.
- People who REFUSE to grow in a nurtured, curated “group” setting.
Suddenly, people across all departments at UW started coming to her for help. They asked her how she balanced having a family with constantly writing grants. In that moment, it hit her that she had a special set of tools and something to teach.
So, Dr. Doll decided to create Get That Grant, a coaching program geared toward high achieving women of color in academic and public health, launching it in July 2019 with a few trainees who heard about the new effort from her Facebook Live video. Now over 200 women have completed the training and have obtained more than $80 million in grant funding, and the waitlist for each cohort has grown to up to 300 people.
Part of the curriculum teaches women how to diversify their funding and how to select the agencies they apply to. This advice has proved useful in the current scientific funding climate, with the termination of federal grants related to diversity and the study of diverse populations.
“One of the core tenants of Get That Grant from the very beginning was to diversify your funding. There’s NIH, but what are other ways I can get money? A lot of our faculty focus on marginalized populations, equity issues, et cetera,” Dr. Doll acknowledged. “I explained to them that that their connection to that kind of work gives them a leg up on all the non-NIH funding, because many funding agencies care about your heart, they care about your commitment, they care about the story.”
She said that women who have completed the training tell her that it has forever altered their career and helped them change their trajectory as a scientist. She believes this result makes her program amply rewarding. “Most important to me: We have supported the ideas of women of color in science. I think the ability to exponentially change how people see their own potential is the biggest impact,” Dr. Doll emphasized.
She also insists that Get That Grant represents just the doorway and a foundational bootcamp. Since the program has been so successful in its early years, she and her team have created a total of four additional coaching programs. These go beyond Get That Grant to help people work on grant revisions or think about careers beyond those in academia.
Advice for Young AWIS Scientists
Dr. Doll encourages women in STEM to move outside their comfort zone. “I would tell young AWIS scientists that I understand the desire to prove to everybody that you can do what they do just as well as, if not better than, them,” she clarified. “I totally get that desire and the motivation to make sure that you learn and create a firm foundation of skills that are very clear to you. But your career, your success, your joy, your nourishment will come from the unique things that you bring. Success will come from the idea that you may at first think is silly. It may come from your side hobby. When you’re comfortable enough to move the thing that the system puts at the periphery to the center of your career, oh my god, you will transform how you experience your career.”
Marissa Russo (she/her) obtained her BS in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, with minors in computational biology, Spanish, and psychology, from the University of Rochester in 2021. At the U of R, she played on the varsity softball team for four years. She is now a PhD candidate at the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Florida and studies glioblastoma extracellular vesicles and the tumor microenvironment. Marissa previously participated in the 2025 AAAS Mass Media Fellowship where she was a science reporter with STAT news. She participates in the Leadership in PhD (LeaP) program and the Neuroscience Equity Diversity and Inclusion (NEDI) committee, and she has a deep passion for patient advocacy and for increasing health literacy and trust in science in underrepresented populations.
This article was originally published in AWIS Magazine. Join AWIS to access the full issue of AWIS Magazine and more member benefits.