Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (she/her) has emerged as a transformative scientific voice—one that welcomes complexity and insists that the natural world has always been far more fluid than we were taught to believe. A queer, neurodivergent scientist, author, and educator, Kaishian blends scientific rigor with lyrical storytelling, revealing the diversity of fungi, slugs, eels, and other species that defy rigid categories. When she describes herself as neurodivergent, she means that her way of thinking and sensing the world differs from the so‑called “normal,” allowing her to notice overlooked patterns in nature and question the oversimplified “either/or” labels imposed on both people and ecosystems. Raised in the Hudson Valley, Kaishian found early refuge in swamps and other overlooked wild places, where she felt seen long before she had language for her LGBTQIA+ identity. Her  book, Forest Euphoria, deepens the exploration of how Western science built its ideas about sex and bodies on narrow assumptions that shaped the questions biologists asked and the categories they created, describing fungi with dozens of mating types and reminding us that gender in nature is far more expansive than the simple male–female model suggests.