Issue of September 22, 2023
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell
[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]
This week's issues:
1. The Story Behind the Book, “MOTHERS IN ASTRONOMY"
2. 2024 NASA Heliophysics Mission Design School Applications Due October 26, 2023
3. Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group's (ExoPAG) 28th meeting
4. Women from diverse backgrounds still face leadership barriers, says Australian study
5. First Latina in space hopes video games inspire STEM interest in kids
6. ‘I want to see the first African woman in space’: the Kenyan stargazer bringing astronomy to the people
7. Job Opportunities
8. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
9. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
10. Access to Past Issues
An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.
It was Autumn of 2021 when my second child was just a few months old, and my colleague and good friend María Claudia (Macla) Ramirez-Tannus approached me to ask me questions about combining motherhood and academia. Macla had just had her first baby earlier that year. We are both astronomers, and at that time we were both working at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Germany. I was a research group leader and Macla is a MPIA post-doctoral fellow. She was not the first mom in academia who approached me to ask me these kinds of questions, and for many of them I did not have any actual answer.
I remember very well the circumstances in which Macla asked me her questions. We were in a restaurant trying to have lunch, breastfeed, distract our babies; trying not to make everything dirty; and all at the same time. I asked Macla: how many moms do you know who are astronomers? And she replied “You”, and we laughed.
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-story-behind-book-mothers-in.html
Enhance Your Early Career! NASA’s Heliophysics Mission Design School (HMDS) is a 3-month-long career development experience for Doctoral candidates (requires advancement to candidacy), Post-Docs or early career researched within 10 years of receiving their Ph.D., Junior faculty within 10 years of receiving their Ph.D. and with a continuous teaching faculty role in that period, and Non-research Engineering Master-level students within six to nine months of graduation who are not planning to pursue a Ph.D. will be considered on a space-available basis. U.S. Citizens or legal permanent residents (and a limited number of Foreign Nationals from non-designated countries) are eligible. Applicants from diverse backgrounds are particularly encouraged to apply. Diversity, equity and inclusion are important to us, and we strive to create a welcoming environment where participants’ contributions and unique perspectives are valued.
Learn the process of developing a science hypothesis-driven robotic space mission in a concurrent engineering environment, while getting an in-depth, first-hand look at mission design, life cycle, costs, schedule & the trade-offs inherent in each. A NASA Science Mission Design School, HMDS is led by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in collaboration with Goddard Space Flight Center & Applied Physics Laboratory.
2024 HMDS: Preparatory Sessions February 12 – April 19.
Culminating Week with JPL’s Team X April 22 – April 26.
Roughly equivalent in workload to a rigorous 3-hour graduate-level course, participants spend 11-12 weeks in preparatory webinars acting as a science mission team, prior to spending the final culminating week being mentored by JPL’s Advance Project Design Team, or “Team-X” to refine their science mission concept design, then present it to a mock expert review board.
To learn more & apply, visit
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/intern/apply/nasa-science-mission-design-schools/
Do you like researching planets INSIDE and OUTSIDE the Solar system?! Do you like interdisciplinary science? If so, then check out the Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group's (ExoPAG) 28th meeting on Oct 1st! It will include a community forum on science topics related to exoplanet and Solar system synergies with the goal of strengthening the connections between the astronomy+planetary science communities. A status of the Exoplanet Program, review of urgent questions from the Planetary and Astrobiology decadal surveys, and an interactive business meeting will also be held.
The meeting will be remote AND in person at the upcoming DPS-EPSC conference (Marriott Rivercenter Salon I) -- but registration is free and not dependent on the conference. Please see the website, including agenda, for more details:
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exep/events/461/exopag-28/
by Monash University
Australian leaders with diverse backgrounds have expressed a sense of resignation and despair about the lack of women from First Nations and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds in leadership roles.
Published in BMJLeader, the qualitative descriptive study by Monash University health and social care academic and clinician researchers interviewed five high-profile Australian women about their lived experience.
Read more at
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-women-diverse-backgrounds-leadership-barriers.html
Read the peer-reviewed study at
https://bmjleader.bmj.com/content/early/2023/09/13/leader-2023-000794
By Marina E. Franco (Noticias Telemundo for Axios)
Astronaut Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman to travel to space, tells Axios Latino she hopes having her life story featured in a video game can motivate more Latinos to explore a STEM career.
Driving the news: Ochoa was added last week as a character in the Minecraft Education suite, a learning version of the block-building game. Other characters include Gloria Estefan and civil rights activist Monica Ramirez.
Read more at
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/19/marina-nasa-ellen-ochoa-stem-latino-minecraft
By Sharon Machira
It’s 1.30am in Kenya’s parched and sparsely populated north, and 50 people are lying on their backs on the shore of a dried-up river, staring up at the night sky. Thousands of stars create a vast, glittering canvas with the ghostly glow of the Milky Way clearly visible.
These stargazers have travelled 250 miles (400km) overland from Nairobi to Samburu county to witness the Perseid meteor shower – a celestial event that happens every July and August. They are not disappointed: every few minutes, arrows of light shoot across the sky like silent fireworks, prompting gasps and arm-waving as people try to pinpoint individual shooting stars.
The Star Safari is organised by a Kenyan astronomer, Susan Murabana, who has brought the SkyWatcher Flextube – a 50kg, 170cm-long telescope – to allow the group to view Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus, and deep-sky objects such as the Orion and Trifid nebulae, star clusters and galaxies such as Pinwheel and Andromeda.
Read more at
For those interested in increasing excellence and diversity in their organizations, a list of resources and advice is here:
https://aas.org/comms/cswa/resources/Diversity#howtoincrease
- Percival Lowell Postdoctoral Fellowship, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, AZ
https://lowell.edu/about/career-opportunities/
- Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Earth and Planets Laboratory, Washington, DC
https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/16682d5c
- Tenure-track Assistant Professor, Dept. of Astronomy, Boston University, Boston MA
https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/25624
- System Engineer for the Afria Millimetre Telescope, Dept of Astrophysics, Radboud University, Netherlands
https://www.ru.nl/en/working-at/job-opportunities/system-engineer-for-the-africa-millimetre-telescope
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