AASWomen Newsletter for October 4, 2024

Pride flag from NASA imagery, from item 5.
Credit: Rachel Lense

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of October 4, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Sethanne Howard, Hannah Jang-Condell, and Ferah Munshi

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

1. Remembering Amber Stuver
2. Career Profile: From Physics Student to Independent Scientist and Business Owner
3. Democratic Merit: What Separates Good from Great in Astronomy?
4. Great Women of Science: First Woman Nobel Laureate in Theoretical Physics, Maria Goeppert Mayer
5. The story of the pride flag made from NASA imagery: Bluesky’s most-liked image
6. Science Mission Directorate's 2025 PI Launchpad Event Dates Announced
7. Education Program Support
8. You can count female physics Nobel laureates on one hand – recent winners have wisdom for young women in the field
9. Women win a fraction of scientific Nobels. Marie Curie offers fixes.
10. Girls STEAM Ahead with NASA: 2024 Resources in Action
11. Job Opportunities
12. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
13. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
14. 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.

Career Profile: From Physics Student to Independent Scientist and Business Owner

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy has compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers, planetary scientists, etc. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

October 3, 2024 is National Women-Owned Business Day. Below is our interview with Sally Seaver, a space scientist, book author, business owner, scholar, and polymath. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California at Irvine and has had a self-proclaimed unconventional career path that was shaped by strong curiosity, courage, determination, confidence that solutions exist, and entrepreneurial spirit. Sally’s curiosity has taken her theoretical research in multiple directions, including investigating what force opposes gravity and understanding the initial conditions of Earth. She is the author of Mass Vortex Theory; Development of a Solar System From Atoms To Star and the accompanying website.

Tell us a little about your background.
My academic journey is very unconventional. As an undergraduate, I took Conceptual Physics as a breadth requirement, and I enjoyed learning about how the physical world works including the fundamental forces. It seemed weird to me (not in keeping with balance and aesthetics) that there would not be a balancing force to the attractive force of gravity. Then, I considered that if there was an opposing force, where would it come from? I reasoned that gravity is a force associated with mass. What is the opposite of mass? I reasoned that space seemed to fulfill this opposite. At any rate, it was something to investigate. 

As I attempted to write my ideas about space, I learned that space is defined academically as the set of all possible points. I visited several different professors during office hours to understand more about this and I was told that countably many points do not provide spatial extension, but uncountably many points do. To me, this is unacceptable magic! So, I set out to learn more about the assumptions of math and physics, resulting in a year-long course on mathematical logic. By the time that I concluded my bachelor degrees in Physics and Mathematics, I concluded that academic science had some problematic standards preventing productive advances:

• Defining space as the set of all points when a point itself has no distance or direction—distance and direction being critical for space

• The mathematical handling of infinitely many things using only the concepts “countably-many” and “uncountably-many”

• Major problems with Set Theory and its role as the foundation of Math, especially when Math provides the rigor (and language) for all science.

I learned that my curiosity is super powerful and it ended up taking me towards my impractical path. After earning my undergraduate degree, I worked temp jobs and did my research at night, Saturdays and holidays. In 1994, as a single parent, I was able to complete the first version of my big paper, “Working Together on Knowledge”, which to my way of thinking provides a better foundation for creating and developing formal scientific theories so that they are clear and consistent. As a certified producer for Boston Neighborhood Network (BNN) cable access station 23, I created a three-part show to present my research up to that point in October 2003.

Tell us about your research investigations.
In 2012, I watched a presentation about the Mayan calendar, which sparked my curiosity about reference dates. After doing some research and paying a physics professor to consult, I decided that I should write a book. My book is called Continental Cataclysm Theory. Friendly reviews found some problems with my assumptions about the initial conditions of the Earth, but I was not deterred. 

As I set out to explain the initial conditions of the Earth, I developed a new theory of planet formation, star formation and galaxy formation which is captured in my book, Mass Vortex Theory; Development of a Solar System From Atoms To Star (2019). This book is the first of five books in my Continental Cataclysm Theory Series. A distinguishing feature of my theory of planet formation is that every planet starts with an ice shell. Each of the inner planets has lost theirs, but the outer planets still have theirs. The goal of the Juno spacecraft, in orbit around Jupiter since 2016, is to explore the origin and evolution of the planet. Juno’s science themes include its origin and its interior structure in addition to two other themes. My model of Jupiter’s interior may be able to  contribute to the science themes of Juno.

Tell us a little about your business.
For 10 years after graduating from college, I worked as a contractor for companies such as Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), AT&T Computer Systems, ADP, and Fidelity Investments. I was able to take time off from 1994-1996 for full-time research. Then, I worked three years at MFS Investment Management doing desktop publishing and automation projects. In March of 2001, I left MFS to found my own company, Active Lightning. Work includes database publishing, custom software and ecommerce websites. Since 2018, the focus of Active Lightning has shifted to creating business-to-business [B2B] websites heavy on integration with relevant business systems - essentially, Active Lightning has pivoted from doing services work to being a software company with two proprietary products, Active Hub and ActiveTransfer. In 2021, I started working on developing an energy storage device, which was inspired by an online college course (edx.edu) in materials and discoveries from my space science work on Mass Vortex Theory. The patent is currently pending.

I also founded an ecommerce company, Egyptian Cotton TShirts LLC, in 2007, in order to take advantage of what I had learned from clients. You can read about that experience here.

What do you like most about your working environment?
I get to work from home on my own schedule and I get to work in the comfort of my home. I don’t lose productive time commuting.

However, being a small business owner is not very family-friendly. I am self-employed (my bill rate is $125 to $150 per hour), so when I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I work a lot for income and then spend other time working on my research. I often don't get enough sleep.

What advice do you have for achieving work-life balance (including having a family)?
Have your children early in your life while you have plenty of energy

What do you do for fun (e.g., hobbies, pastimes, etc.)?
A girl friend from my church who had done science reporting at Princeton University, put me in touch with a post-doc mathematician at MIT. He read some of my work, but he was not taking me seriously - and let’s face it, my work is a departure from established orthodoxy. I asked him point blank if he believed that a woman such as myself could make a significant contribution to mathematics. He confessed that he did not. I left that meeting and resolved that I would work with color and light by getting more involved in beading (as in necklaces and earrings). I go through phases of doing beading and oil painting as time allows. I also enjoy reading fun escapist novels or watching HGTV.

To learn more about Sally's specific career route, please contact her at sally_at_placeofunderstanding.com (replace the _at_ with @) and check out her website, Place of Understanding.

Remembering Amber Stuver

By Members of the CSWA

Amber Stuver, 1978-2024

We are saddened to share the news that Dr. Amber Stuver has passed away. Amber was an astronomer, faculty member at Villanova University, and member of the CSWA.

We remember Amber fondly, both as an enthusiastic supporter and advocate for the advancement of women in Astronomy and for her work in championing and promoting the needs of women from historically marginalized groups. Her work on the CSWA was tireless and invaluable. Amber was a genuinely kind person who was generous with her time, always willing to volunteer and was someone who could be counted on to help students and colleagues alike.  She will be missed professionally and personally.

Add your remembrances of Amber at:

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/triblive-tribune-review/name/amber-stuver-obituary?id=56299141

AASWomen Newsletter for September 27, 2024

AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy
Issue of September 27, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

From Item #1

This week's issues:
1. Workshopping Success Beyond Research  
2. Request for Comments: F.18 MOSAICS DRAFT Text  
3. Gender-plus analysis of Canadian science and engineering grants     
4. Job Opportunities 
5. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
6. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
7. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

Workshopping Success Beyond Research

By Emily Rice, CUNY Macaulay Honors College

Group photo of participants, outside of the Museum of Science & Industry (Chicago).

Have you ever experienced workshop whiplash, in a good way? It’s a term I just came up with to describe what I’m feeling after attending the “Empowering Diverse Voices to Communicate Science” supported by the AAPT. I had applied for the workshop on a whim, not fully knowing what to expect. It sounded interesting, fit into my schedule, and offered travel support, so I took a chance on it. Now that I’m home (after delays from the CrowdStrike debacle), I can’t believe how much I learned in just one day, and I’m eager to follow up on so many opportunities!

The workshop was organized by six scientists from across the US representing academia, national labs, and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), and career levels from graduate student to CEO. The overall format of the workshop was four independent sessions all clearly focused on the “empowering diverse voices” theme. The evening and morning before the session began, organizer Sherry Yennello (Texas A&M University), led us in some communicating and networking activities that established a collegial and supportive atmosphere that endured through to our trips home.

I’ll describe the sessions in reverse chronology because the first ended up being my favorite (though they were all very useful). In the final session Katelyn Alley (University of Oregon) explained the importance of contributing to Wikipedia and started to guide us through the process of contributing and creating new pages. Unfortunately setting up our accounts hit some snags, so we weren’t able to accomplish much, but it was enough to inspire me to consider a Wikipedia workshop for my own students. Prior to that, Prof. Malika Jeffries-EL (Boston University) led us through exploration of the entire social media landscape, and convinced us that yes, we really do need our own websites and social media accounts! She covered so much, though, that there wasn’t time to put her suggestions into practice during the workshop, which would have been helpful. Prof. Shelly Lesher (North Carolina A&T State University) used her podcast My Nuclear Life as a case study for how to think about our own science outreach and communication projects. A high-level takeaway from her workshop is to call it “public scholarship” to help our departments and institutions appreciate the value of these activities.

My favorite session was led by Dra. Nicole Cabrera Salazar, founder of Movement Consulting. I was familiar with Movement and had participated in several remote workshops a couple years ago, and my high expectations were blown out of the water! The topic was “Pitch Perfect: TED talk-style elevator speech”. Nicole guided us through creating a mood board, how to approach creating a pitch, sections of an effective pitch, the importance of timing, and several rounds of ruthless but invaluable practice. Each of us even recorded our pitches, a process that went surprisingly smoothly - too bad we didn’t have time to watch them all! I also would have loved to have craft materials available for the mood board, just to amp up the personalization and *something* of the session. I would highly recommend this workshop as a phenomenal experience for scientists at all levels, both to empower individuals and to foster networking within a group.  

I only wish the workshop was longer! Collaborative time for the last two sessions was cut short to keep us on schedule, and even then we ended up with very little time to explore our host venue, the Museum of Science & Industry. It would also have been amazing to incorporate work-life balance discussions into the workshop. Informally I learned about other participants’ personal/family lives affecting their careers (for example, having a child has been shown to alter a woman’s career in STEM more than a man’s). As a small first step, how awesome would it be to have a workshop for women in science that explicitly included children, especially at a science museum?!

My three takeaways:

1. More workshops like this, please! The boost I got from meeting so many amazing women, each impressive in their own way, was invaluable. 
2. Funding for these types of workshops is essential, both to encourage participation and to make their professional value explicit. Possible sources include NASA’s Topical Workshops, Symposiums, and Conferences and The Heising-Simons Foundation. 
   
3. Take a chance on an opportunity that interests you, even if you don’t know where it might lead!

Last but not least, a huge thanks to the organizers:

• Robin Bjorkquist, Seattle University
• Beth A. Cunningham, American Association of Physics Teachers
• Jessica Esquivel, FermiLab
• Priscilla Lewis, COACh, University of Oregon
• Stephanie Lyons, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Sherry Yennello, Texas A&M University

And to Kathy McCloud, NSF Program Director, for her support of the workshop. 

AASWomen Newsletter for September 20, 2024

Congressional Gold Modal for Katherine Johnson, item 5.
Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of September 20, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, Hannah Jang-Condell, and Ferah Munshi

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

1. Crosspost: Encieh Erfani brings attention to fellow displaced scholars
2. Women in Astronomy Citizen Science Event
3. 2025 NASA Astrophysics Mission Design School Applications Due November 4, 2024
4. Call for 2025 ExoExplorers and ExoGuides
5. NASA's 'Hidden Figures' awarded Congressional Gold Medals for pioneering space work
6. Disappearing scientists: Attrition and retention patterns of 2.1 million scientists in 38 OECD countries
7. Letters of Intent and proposal deadlines for IAU Symposia in 2026
8. Examining how a documentary film can serve as an intervention to shift attitudes and behaviours around sexism in STEM
9. Decadal Survey Incubation Program
10. Nature Editorial: Why aren’t there talks with the Taliban about getting women and girls back into education?
11. Job Opportunities
12. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
13. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
14. 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.

Crosspost: Encieh Erfani brings attention to fellow displaced scholars

By Rachel Brazil, for Physics Today

The Iranian cosmologist has struggled to find a professional and physical place to call home after she publicly supported the country’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement.

Image Credit: Encieh Erfani (Physics Today)

Everything changed for Iranian cosmologist Encieh Erfani in the fall of 2022. On 16 September, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Tehran following her arrest for allegedly breaching the country’s strict dress code for women. In Mexico at the time for a visiting fellowship, Erfani followed the news as the largest demonstrations in Iran since 2009 ensued. 

A week after Amini’s death, Erfani spoke up in support of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement and resigned from her faculty position at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences in Zanjan. Soon after, she says, her family in Iran received a threatening phone call. Erfani chose to remain in exile, fearing imprisonment if she were to return home.

Notably, she chose not to wear a hijab at conferences or on social media when she was outside Iran. “I knew that my colleagues [in Iran] would see and that I would pay for that,” she says. But, until recently, she “could never imagine that not wearing the hijab could cause you to be killed.”

Read more at

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/43050/Q-A-Encieh-Erfani-brings-attention-to-fellow