As both objects of study and agents of discovery, Asian Americans across the twentieth century have played an important yet often unseen, stereotyped, and misrecognized role in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) in the U.S. This talk examines the making of the Asian American scientist as a legacy of Asian Exclusion and global geopolitics.

Mary Lui is Professor of American Studies and History. Her primary research interests include: Asian American history, urban history, women and gender studies, and public history. She is the author of The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton University Press, 2005), the 2007 co-winner of the best book prize for history from the Association of Asian American Studies.

She is the principal collaborator on the Asian Americans and STEM initiative at Yale along with Professor Theodore Kim in computer science and Professor Reina Maruyama in physics and astronomy. With Ted Kim, she recently published "Global Routes and Hidden Labor in the American Mathematical Society’s Cold War Chinese Mathematics Translation Program" in the journal, Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences (June 2024). She is currently working on a history of Asian American scientists in the twentieth century.