Camille Smith leads a new wave of women in STEM under her guiding pillars of accessibility and intimacy. With her passions for teaching and fostering networking spaces, her leadership is defined through its multifaceted nature.
A Journey to STEM
When Camille first entered Villanova in the College of Engineering, she admits her difficult major in Chemical Engineering on a pre-medicine track was prompted by a skeptical high school teacher who doubted her success. Now, Camille’s resilience in STEM has not just led to her full time career as a scientist, but also to a lifelong passion for making information and study more digestible and clear for everyone.
While her academics claimed the utmost of Camille’s time at Villanova, her extracurriculars in Blue Key Society and a cappella kept her college calendar busy. During her time in Blue Key, Camille was one of the founders of a DEI program within the organization, ensuring equity in all parts of the tour guiding process. This commitment to inclusive spaces carried into her career as a scientist and brand-builder.
Accessibility
Today, Camille works as a Senior Upstream Process Development Scientist at GSK, a global pharmaceutical company. She describes her job as “almost like scientific babysitting,” relying on analogies to communicate her complex and difficult position. Camille described her daily responsibilities of watching cells’ reactions and behaviors to various temperatures and substances in bioreactors. In accounting her role, she prioritized simplistic language. This mirrors her fundamental approach to accessibility in STEM fields.
However, Camille believes her job should be the least interesting piece about her. Instead, she pours her heart into her content.
Camille believes everyone is capable of learning anything (even complex scientific ideas) with the proper resources and time to grasp concepts. For her, the mark of a smart person is the ability to explain technical or complex topics in layman’s terms. She resists the tendency for people outside the scientific world to feel excluded from knowledge. With these passions, Camille hosts her own podcast “STEM Talks on Tap,” where she breaks down basic parts of life from a biological, physics or chemical perspective. It’s available through Apple and Spotify podcasts and more information can be found on the podcast’s Instagram. Some podcasts are entitled “What Actually is Turbulence?” and “How do Compression Sleeves Work?” Through education,
Camille’s leadership seeks to explain the ordinary science around us all, determined to prove that comprehension of STEM around us is easily obtainable with the right teacher. She says: “Dunk competitions? That’s physics. Beer and wine? That’s fermentation.”
Intimacy
Only a year post grad, Camille felt the same sense of loneliness that accompanies most young alumni in their entrance to the workforce. She lacked what she described as third spaces. Coined in 1989 by sociologist Ray Oldenberg, third spaces describe an external community. First spaces, Camile says, are where you live, for example, a home. Second spaces are places of work and study. Yet these two spaces were simply not enough to maintain and create connections. So, she took matters into her own hands. In 2023, she founded STEMSoulcial, an independent networking third space for Black women in STEM. The organization has chapters across the country with goals to go global. There, Camille is able to meet women in her field across the United States. With nearing 14,000 Instagram followers and approaching summits in New York City, Boston and Detroit, Camille’s third spaces have made a national impact in community formation in the STEM field.
When asked why she believes networking spaces for specifically Black women are so important, Camille cited the necessity of these spaces in fields where they are overwhelmingly underrepresented. She says, “Something I learned very quickly is that you can be the smartest person in the room, but if you don’t have access to a community to belong to, being smart isn’t enough to keep you happy and thriving in that environment.”
At Villanova University, Camille was one of 4 Black students in her major. Now Camille says that representation and community are crucial for retention in the field. She says: “I think it’s important for us to be able to have a space for Black women around the globe to be able to go and be like, hey, you know, we might not be the same discipline. You might be a civil engineer. I might be a chemical engineer, so I might be a pharmacist, but like we all have the common ground or similarities in our upbringing, our culture, so and so forth. That hopefully will help, you know, retain people in their respective fields.” The support behind STEMSoulcial translates to greater confidence in Camille’s scientific work at GSK.
With this backbone, she’s gone on to create the journal newsletter “Diary of a Multi-Hyphenate”, where she shares her innermost feelings and advice for other young people balancing their many passions and goals as well. Available through Linkedin and Instagram, “Diary of a Multi-Hyphenate,” seeks out likeminded and diversely curious people looking to find their way and build their own brand and personal lives. The platform has almost 700 subscribers and three editions detailing Camille’s life advice.
Outside of this publication, Camille’ social media presence stretches further in her long list of hobbies, tokening herself a scientist, socialite, frequent flyer and fitness influencer. With 33,000 followers on Instagram, Camillie believes her digital life on Instagram and Linkedin, coupled with her accessible podcast, “Stem Talks on Tap,” and fun alluring social scene, have encouraged others to stay in her otherwise challenging STEM field.
A Multifaceted Approach
Camille’s widespread interests, achievements and platforms demonstrate her commitment to leadership through nuanced understanding and compassion. She says she aims to empower others to actualize their dreams while navigating STEM careers and public brands like hers. Camille’s leadership style is an outstretched hand in a jumble of careers, passions and hobbies, serving as the role model and inspiration for those overwhelmed with their continuously working and vastly interested brains. Camille’s work is deeply personal and rooted in the diversity of people and ideas, working to build community and educate everyone.
“I lead with accessibility, intentionality, and community at the forefront. My leadership philosophy centers on making knowledge approachable, creating spaces where people feel seen and supported, and empowering others to pursue their ambitions unapologetically. I believe effective leadership isn’t just about opening doors, but it’s about ensuring others have the confidence, resources, and community to walk through them.”