Other Interests/Projects
The educational and enrichment opportunities taken for granted in communities across the country are dangerously lacking for teen girls on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Lakota Cultural Exchange began as an earnest attempt to offer one girl at a time the chance to participate in the empowering Girls Rock! Chicago camp. Enough interest in that camp was generated for them to start their very own Girls Rock! camp on the reservation, summer 2016. Across summer 2017, efforts to take enrichment directly to Pine Ridge were continued with the set-up of music programs at a couple of schools that benefit girls and boys, grades K-12.
Driving back from her family's Sun Dance, where I was honored to be invited, one of the Lakota Cultural Exchange Program's former guests told me all about the significance astronomy has in Lakota religion. Like music, science has the unique capacity to transcend cultural differences and connect people of otherwise disparate background. Months later, one of my good friends on the reservation told me she'd at least like to visit an observatory once in her lifetime. Between these isolated encounters and a startlingly timely conversation with one of my mentors in the Northwestern University Department of Physics & Astronomy, it became obvious that extending STEM outreach and opportunities to the reservation was a must.
For all of that fortuitous connection, planning for such outreach is now underway: in collaboration with the Northwestern University Department of Physics & Astronomy as well as the NU Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion to bring half a dozen middle-school-aged girls and a couple of chaperones to the Chicago-area for a weekend-long astronomy workshop. Tentatively in motion for September 2018, the weekend will afford the girls the empowering opportunity to engage with state-of-the-art facilities, women working in science and, ideally, a real research project that they will be able to take back to the reservation for continued study (in the style of citizen science).
I'm terrifically excited about the potential in this summer STEM enrichment experience, and really cannot wait for all of the moving pieces to come together for these girls!
On a less serious note, I'm the proud human of an adorable, if typically feline (read: mercurial), calico. Emma (pictured at right) is more of an impediment to work than a study buddy, but is actually a quiet, clean, and snuggly roommate.
I'm also not un-proud of this video I took of totality during the Great American Eclipse. And, though decidedly not a dedicated umbraphile (or astrophotographer), it has become something of a goal of mine to capture incredible astronomical phenomena whenever I get the chance.