The challenge of being neurodivergent in STEM

Charlotte Fuqua’s love of chemistry ignited when she was 7 and her parents bought her a book filled with science experiments for kids. One of them, she recalls, introduced her to the concept of molecules. “I was completely awestruck.”

Fuqua was so captivated by her newfound knowledge of chemistry that it was all she could focus on; she spent the next week spouting facts about molecules to anybody who crossed her path.

“My teacher had to be like, ‘Charlotte, we’re in the middle of a lesson. You can tell people about molecules later,’ ” Fuqua says. “Coincidentally, that’s the year I got diagnosed with ADHD.”

ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is a neurodevelopmental condition often marked by difficulty regulating one’s thoughts and actions. It’s considered a form of neurodivergence, an umbrella term that refers to thinking, learning, or communicating differently than what society considers typical.

Other neurodivergent conditions include autism spectrum disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and learning disabilities, like dyslexia and dyscalculia, but that’s far from an exhaustive list. One study estimates that 15–20% of the world’s people have some form of neurodivergence (Br. Med. Bull. 2020, DOI: 10.1093/bmb/ldaa021).

It’s less clear what percentage of those neurodivergent individuals find their way to working in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), though studies have suggested that their traits can be assets in these fields.

“The way I organize my thoughts and the way I approach a problem is very, very different from a lot of my peers,” says Fuqua, who is now a chemistry PhD student at the University of Connecticut. “It has paid off quite a bit in terms of research.”

But despite the benefits neurodivergent people bring to science, many of them say STEM isn’t built for them. That feeling is accentuated whenever their neurotypical colleagues in research and academia don’t accommodate aspects of their neurodivergence or perpetuate stereotypes associated with their conditions.

Ariana Castillo, an atmospheric science PhD candidate at Harvard University with bipolar disorder, remembers being advised against going to grad school. She was told that it would be “really demanding, mentally” and that she “wouldn’t be cut out for it,” given her diagnosis.

Castillo ultimately decided not to listen to that advice, but others could have easily taken it to heart.

When that happens, the field loses out on perspectives that could have benefited science, says Dominic Sirianni, a chemistry professor at Daemen University who is autistic and has ADHD. “Study after study shows that diverse perspectives enhance the overall impact of discovery.”

Missing accommodations

A lack of adequate accommodations and the existence of negative stereotypes are two main reasons why people with disabilities have a difficult time succeeding in STEM, particularly as they make their way through higher education (Intervention Sch. Clin. 2012, DOI: 10.1177/1053451212443151). That population includes neurodivergent individuals, although not everyone who is neurodivergent identifies as disabled.

Fuqua experienced both those difficulties during her first year of college when her ADHD made it difficult to manage her schedule, she says. As her grades slipped, she sought help from her university, but the resources it offered “just weren’t sufficient.” Eventually, the school academically dismissed her.

When that happened, all the negative messages Fuqua had ever received about her ADHD echoed loudly in her head. Much of this negative messaging is about “how you’re less than. How you can’t do things. What your inadequacies are,” she says. One of her professors even told her that she wasn’t “cut out to be a chemist.”

Uma Chatterjee, a neuroscience PhD student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had an equally rough undergraduate experience. But unlike Fuqua, she didn’t know she was neurodivergent at the time. Later-in-life diagnoses of many neurodivergent conditions are common for women, people from marginalized racial and ethnic groups, and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (J. Learn. Disabil. 2016, DOI: 10.1177/0022219410374236; Autism 2019, DOI: 10.1177/1362361319853442).

So when Chatterjee dropped out of college after failing several of her classes, she concluded that a STEM career just wasn’t for her. “I fully shut it down as a possibility,” she says.

That all changed after she discovered that a lot of her struggles could be explained by a nonverbal learning disability that affected her visual processing and spatial awareness. For instance, it hindered her ability to understand what she was seeing under a microscope, a necessary skill for her neuroanatomy classes.

“It’s not that I’m not working hard enough or that I’m stupid,” Chatterjee says she realized. “My brain just works differently.” Chatterjee’s diagnosis permitted her to request accommodations that could help her at school, such as being given extra time on tests. But asking for accommodations was terrifying, she says.

Indeed, research has shown that faculty hold negative attitudes toward students receiving accommodations. Some instructors believe accommodations give students unfair advantages, while others dismiss these students’ very real challenges as laziness or a lack of motivation (Neurodiversity 2024, DOI: 10.1177/27546330241277427).

“These people were going to be recommending and evaluating me for my PhD programs,” Chatterjee recalls thinking. She chose to request accommodations anyway, but many students don’t (Psychol. Rep. 2022, DOI: 10.1177/00332941221078011).

And accommodations can become even harder to request in graduate school and other STEM work environments. Since disability service offices and human resources departments are mainly equipped to provide accommodations for the office or the classroom, individuals seeking them for lab-related tasks might need to go directly to their supervisors, disclose their neurodivergence, and hope the conversation goes well.

For some, it does go well. Kit Wallis is a laboratory manager at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and has schizoaffective disorder, a condition that causes her to experience the symptoms of schizophrenia and certain mood disorders. When she disclosed her situation to her boss, he was very understanding. “He told me, if I need to take a mental health day or take a few days off, just email him and let him know,” Wallis says.

But Wallis worries about having that conversation at a new job with a different supervisor. “The interactions I’ve had with other [principal investigators] over other things don’t make them seem like people I could say, ‘I’ve got a severe mental health condition that affects everything I do, including my job,’ ” she says.

Many are not willing to take the gamble. For example, Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of the Science family of journals, who recently opened up about his autism diagnosis, has heard from students who fear sharing their own neurodivergence. They feel “it’ll just be one more way they get criticized,” Thorp says.

But people who feel they can’t disclose their neurodivergent conditions often end up masking them instead, as one study looking at the experiences of neurodivergent graduate students in STEM found (Front. Psychol. 2023, DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1149068). “There’s a lot of hiding imperfections or perceived imperfections,” says Connie Syharat, a research assistant at the University of Connecticut and one of the authors of the study.

People can go into overdrive, Syharat says, either to prove that they’re capable of succeeding in STEM or to compensate for differences in their reading ability, attention, or time management. With ADHD, that can mean meticulously checking over things, like emails, to avoid small mistakes.

“No one’s seeing the extra anxiety that I’m going through to try and check and double-check and triple-check myself,” says Syharat, who has ADHD.

On top of anxiety, several of the grad students who participated in Syharat’s study reported having other mental health conditions, such as depression, which masking can contribute to (Mol. Autism 2021, DOI: 10.1186/s13229-021-00421-1). Other work has suggested that masking can also lead to an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors (J. Autism Dev. Disord. 2020, DOI: 10.1007/s10803-019-04323-3).

At its core, masking is exhausting. Many people with autism, for instance, consciously or unconsciously force themselves to make eye contact, modulate their tone, or socialize with colleagues more than their energy naturally allows. But not masking runs the risk of being seen as rude or difficult to work with. In extreme cases, it can also lead to bullying and discrimination (Autism 2023, DOI: 10.1177/13623613231206420).

“Masking takes an enormous cognitive toll and leads me to burn out more quickly,” Sirianni, the chemistry professor, says.

Sirianni has found that when a neurodivergent person experiences burnout, it’s usually far more intense than it is for their neurotypical counterparts. For him, burnout can affect productivity at work and even his ability to speak. “I just cannot speak,” he says. “And there’s nothing that I can consciously do to combat that.”

Embracing neurodiversity

What can the STEM field do to ensure that neurodivergent students and researchers receive the support they need and feel less pressure to mask? Arash Esmaili Zaghi, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Connecticut and one of Syharat’s coauthors, says the answer starts with embracing neurodiversity.

Neurodiversity holds that because everyone’s brain is wired differently—regardless of whether they’re neurodivergent—society shouldn’t favor one way of thinking, learning, or behaving over another. “Neurodiversity is taking a step back and saying, ‘Maybe we completely got it wrong,’ ” Zaghi says. Maybe STEM is hurting itself by trying to force others to conform to more neurotypical ways of doing science, he adds.

For example, in a paper published last year, Zaghi and his colleagues argue that overemphasizing written text in science pushes out researchers with dyslexia (eLife 2023, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.93980). But that exclusion can inadvertently hamper scientific discovery since dyslexia also comes with strengths in memory, spatial processing, and problem-solving. Zaghi’s other work found that engineering educators tend to undervalue the creativity and rapid idea generation often associated with ADHD (J. Eng. Educ. 2020, DOI: 10.1002/jee.20310). Zaghi has both dyslexia and ADHD.

Likewise, autism brings strengths in pattern recognition and attention to detail, even though it can make navigating social situations challenging, Thorp says. Autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen has noted that Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton showed many signs of the condition. “Autistic thinking has enabled a lot of scientific progress,” Thorp says.

In addition, several researchers with autism and ADHD have pointed out that their ability to hyperfocus, or concentrate intensely for a period, has come in handy in their careers. “The ability to hyperfocus is pretty remarkable,” says Emily Arndt, an industrial polymer chemist who has both conditions. Even though Arndt can’t consistently work 8 h days, she says that being able to hyperfocus can help her accomplish the same number of tasks, if not more, than her neurotypical colleagues can.

Wallis, the lab manager with schizoaffective disorder, also sees the benefits of another condition she’s diagnosed with: OCD. Although it can be debilitating, she says it has aided her lab work. “I tend to do everything in the exact same way every time, which is really good for consistency.”

That’s not to say neurodivergent individuals are superhuman, Zaghi says. Like everyone else, “they’re very good at certain things, and they suck at some areas.” The key to helping them thrive in STEM is to nurture the strengths of their neurodivergence while supporting traits that don’t fit as neatly within societal expectations.

In the classroom, Sirianni encourages his students to embrace their identities and “not shy away from doing things that would level their own playing field and give them a fair shot.” That includes asking for accommodations when needed. Zaghi, meanwhile, works with the natural abilities of the students he supervises by giving them more of the tasks they’re good at and fewer of the ones they’re not.

“Focusing on strength helps us to restore self-image and helps with mental health issues at a broader scale,” Zaghi says. This approach is based on findings from his research.

But, Thorp says, while it’s helpful that neurodivergent scientists are working to make STEM more inclusive for others like them, the rest of the scientific community also needs to do its part. As the majority, neurotypical people are frequently the ones determining whether their neurodivergent students or colleagues get the support and accommodations they need.

Sirianni agrees. “We are your colleagues, no matter if you realize it or not,” he says. “And not only do the actions of each of us in STEM, and in chemistry, set the tone for the community that we have—they also kind of set the tone for what the community can be.”