Name: Deborah Berebichez
Age: Early Thirties…
Location: New York City
Occupation: Physicist
“I would love to become a female role model for those girls who love science but somehow feel trapped, like they can’t achieve their dreams,” Dr. Debbie Berebichez says. “Much like “Bill Nye, the Science Guy,” I want to be “the Science Gal,” to inspire teenagers and adults to look at science with a fresh and fun new eye.”
Dr. Berebichez has become a prominent female voice in both physics and scientific leadership, even though she found little encouragement for her love of science and math from her family and peers while growing up in Mexico City. Although she would spend hours looking at the stars on the roof of her building, and she’d ardently read biographies about scientists, she didn’t have much external support when it came to her budding thirst for knowledge. She attributes this to a conservative community that strictly adhered to gender roles as they understood them, where girls were told they “shouldn’t pursue a career in science.” Although she dreamed of becoming an astronaut or a rocket mechanic, she instead focused on theater and writing, opting to treat her love of left-brain learning as a childhood phase. It was when she was a Philosophy major at Brandeis University that her scientific swooning reemerged, and today she is a professional physicist and risk analyst on Wall Street.