In 2017, the year after Donald Trump’s first election, a microbiologist from Lilburn, Georgia decided she’d had enough of watching from the sidelines. Dr. Jasmine Clark had a PhD from Emory, a career in science education, and a mounting sense that the people making decisions about public health, education, and the future didn’t actually understand any of those things. So she ran for the Georgia House of Representatives — and won, flipping a seat that had been in Republican hands for over two decades.
That was 2018. Since then, she’s been reelected four times, called out her own state’s governor for manipulating COVID data, organized the March for Science in Atlanta, and taught undergraduate and graduate students at Emory’s nursing school, all while raising two kids in Gwinnett County. Now she’s running for Congress in Georgia’s 13th Congressional District, an open seat in a race that would make her the first female PhD scientist, and the first Black female PhD scientist, ever elected to Congress.
Her campaign is grounded in the same conviction that got her into politics in the first place. Facts matter, science has to have a seat at the table, and the people making policy about families should actually know what it’s like to be one. She has a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old. She knows (all of that and then some)…