Changing the Narrative From ‘You Can’t’ to ‘You Can’
Drawing on her own success story, Caroline Solomon (Ph.D. ’06, marine estuarine and environmental sciences) inspires deaf and hard-of-hearing college students to pursue careers in STEM fields.
Caroline Solomon’s (Ph.D. ’06, marine estuarine and environmental sciences) summer internship at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) nearly 30 years ago changed her life.
“That’s when I really fell in love with science, and it changed my entire career trajectory,” Solomon said. “And because of all those people there who believed in me, I’m a changed person, because they saw me not just as a deaf person, but as a scientist first.”
Since then, Solomon has felt a calling to pay that experience forward and inspire a new generation of students to pursue their goals in STEM fields. For 25 years, she shared her passion for science and the environment as a biology professor at Gallaudet University, a school for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Washington, D.C. Drawing from the challenges and inspiration that shaped her own success story, Solomon encourages young scientists to dream big and believe in their abilities.
“I think many students have been told for years, 'You can’t do this, you can’t do that,’ but my teaching style has always been to change that narrative to ‘You can,’” she said. “When you want to do something, you can do it. There shouldn’t be anything stopping you.”
In August 2025, Solomon became the first woman president at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), the world’s first and largest technological college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. An internationally recognized educator and environmental scientist, Solomon has been honored for advancing STEM education, developing a database of science terms in American Sign Language, and expanding research and career opportunities for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Both a scientist and a competitive swimmer, Solomon won 13 gold medals in the Deaflympics and was twice named the USA Deaf Sports Federation’s Sportswoman of the Year.
From swimming to science
Raised in Delaware, Solomon became deaf after contracting spinal meningitis as an infant. Her parents learned sign language early on, encouraging her every step of the way.
“In my immediate family, I was definitely involved in the dinner conversations my family had,” Solomon said. “My dad was an economist, Mom was a social worker, my brother was in political science, and if you look at my extended family, we have astrophysicists, physicians and other folks in STEM fields. So, I was surrounded by people who were curious about a variety of things, and they never stopped me from doing anything that I wanted to do.”
When Solomon was a teenager, her family moved to a house on a creek in Annapolis. There, her swimming career took off, competing in her first Deaflympics at age 13. Solomon always did well in math and science, but when pollution made her backyard creek off-limits, it sparked her interest in the environment.
“There were times when we were told we couldn't get in the creek because of pollution, and I thought, that's not fair, I should be able to jump in the water whenever I want,” she recalled. “But when I got to college, I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a lawyer fighting for the environment or a scientist in the lab.”
At Harvard University, Solomon took classes in science and law as an environmental science and public policy major. But by junior year, she still hadn’t found her niche. A summer internship at UMCES with Professor Pat Glibert, a phytoplankton ecologist, changed everything.
“I did an internship in Pat’s lab, and she is truly the reason I went into oceanography; that's when I really fell in love with it,” Solomon explained. “That summer that I worked with her between my junior and senior year of undergrad changed everything for me. And really, my whole career pivoted into science because of that summer.”
After graduating in 1996, Solomon accepted a Fulbright Scholarship in Australia and then earned her master’s in biological oceanography at the University of Washington. By 2000, she knew she wanted to return to Glibert’s lab for her doctorate, but she had also received a job offer to teach biology at Gallaudet. In the end, she chose both.
“I took Gallaudet's job offer, and I also went into the Ph.D. program,” Solomon recalled, “I was actually faculty at Gallaudet for six years while I was working on my Ph.D.”
Balancing her teaching duties at Gallaudet with her Ph.D. in marine estuarine and environmental sciences at the University of Maryland, Solomon realized she’d found her calling.
“As graduate students, we all really cared about teaching the next generation about the environment; that was instilled in each of us,” she said. “I loved science, and I knew that was what I wanted to do.”
Diving deep into research
At UMCES’ Horn Point Laboratory, Solomon delved deeply into research, working with professors who inspired her as she studied the changing conditions in the Chesapeake Bay.
“There are so many good people at Horn Point—Jeff Cornwell, Diane Stoecker, Bill Dennison, Judy O’Neil, Mike Roman and Bill Boicourt. They were all very supportive,” Solomon explained. “My research was all about the dynamics of the urea in the Chesapeake Bay. This research began during my summer internship and expanded as part of my dissertation research. I had to sample at least twice a day, once during the day and once at night, to see how much change had happened in the urea pool and which phytoplankton were using it. That exposed me to the fact that science doesn’t stop at 5 o’clock. Life goes on 24/7.”
After Solomon earned her Ph.D., her influence as a scientist and academic leader grew. Still teaching full-time at Gallaudet, her collaborations with UMCES scientists explored the health and nutrient dynamics of D.C. area waterways and allowed her to create impactful, hands-on research opportunities for her biology students. Meanwhile, in the classroom, Solomon developed an advanced, career-based STEM curriculum that made science active, engaging and visual.
“Making sure that the lecture or the information is visual benefits students who are visual learners,” she explained, “and that’s not just deaf and hard-of-hearing students, that can benefit all students.”
Exploring the signs of science
Collaborating with a University of Washington scientist, Solomon helped support the creation of a comprehensive database of American Sign Language (ASL)—essentially a visual dictionary that formalizes scientific and technological terms in ASL.
“It wasn’t necessarily about me developing signs,” Solomon explained, “but, more, it was asking what folks had already developed across the nation, fostering discussion about which signs were probably more conceptually accurate or more useful.”
In 2017, Solomon received the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography’s Ramón Margalef Award for Excellence in Education. She was named director of Gallaudet’s School of Science, Technology, Accessibility, Mathematics, and Public Health in 2020 and later became dean of the faculty. Now, in her new role at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, she hopes to continue mentoring students, even though she won’t technically be teaching.
“This is the first year I will not be teaching a full semester-long course, but one thing I plan to tell the academic community is, please invite me to your classrooms, invite me in for lab activities and on the field trips you go on,” Solomon said. “I really want to take advantage of those moments, to meet with the students and also get my teaching fix in.”
Whether it’s as a teacher, researcher or a visionary academic leader, for Solomon, it’s all about sharing her passion for science and taking STEM into the future, one student at a time.
“What I really want to do is to make sure there are more pathways for deaf and hard-of-hearing people in careers and leadership and also in how we make an impact on the world, because what we know and the way we see the world benefits everybody.”
