SALT LAKE CITY — Today is National Barbie Day, marking the 65th anniversary of the doll's first release on March 9, 1959.
And one woman here in Utah was instrumental in creating a line of "Explorer Barbies," geared toward inspiring more girls to enter the STEM field.
Nalini Nadkarni is a professor emeritus at the University of Utah in the School of Biological Sciences. In 2021, she worked with National Geographic and Mattel to create a line of Explorer Barbie dolls.
"In the 1990s, there were a lot of real problems that started happening with deforestation, with forest fragmentation, with climate change, with invasive species, and I felt that I as a scientist and I as a person really needed to do more than only publish papers for other scientists," Nadkarni said. "And so I began thinking of ways that I might raise awareness of the importance of trees and forests to all people."
And she thought: who better than Barbie?
But it wasn't all easy.
"So I approached Mattel — this was back in 2004 — and said, 'Hey, how about doing a treetop Barbie?' And I can help you by, you know, like making a little pamphlet about canopy plants of the northwest," Nadkarni said. "And they at that time said, 'No, we're not interested. We make our own Barbies. Forget it, forget it."
But that all changed three years ago.
"In 2021, I was approached by the National Geographic society because they decided to partner with Mattel to make this line of Explorer Barbie dolls — you know, a polar astrophysicist, a wildlife photographer Barbie, an entomologist Barbie," Nadkarni said. "And so they asked me to be an adviser on this because I had had sort of the original idea to do this, and of course, I was delighted that they had kind of changed their mind."
They even made a special one-of-a-kind doll to honor Nadkarni.
"They made this one-of-a-kind Nalini lookalike Treetop Barbie, which I have here in my office, and so it was really not that they produced Treetop Barbies en masse, but it was the way really I think of acknowledging that little girls now — and little boys, hopefully also and their parents and their aunties and their uncles — understand that little girls can aspire to be scientists and adventurers and explorers and protectors of nature," she said.
But have little girls really felt inspired? Nadkarni says yes.
"I have gotten letters from grade school teachers. I've gotten letters from little girls. I've gotten little videos that these little kids have made and sent to me saying... 'I want to do work in the treetops' or 'I want to help save trees."
"Hi, I'm Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, the treetop scientist," one little girl said in a video. "I work in Costa Rica, studying the rare plant life at the tops of some of the tallest trees in the cloud forest. Did you know the wind can move trees up to 180,000 miles per year? I do, because I'm the one who calculated it!"
She says moving forward, scientists should embrace relationships outside of academia like she did with Mattel, because that's how we can all make the world a better place.
"I think we have a greater chance of promoting the kinds of messages that I think at heart, we all want to promote, which is how to create a better society is what it comes down to," Nadkarni said.
