I am the Vice President and Outreach Coordinator for Graduate Women in Science Hawaiʻi, an organization that focuses on empowering graduate and faculty women in science, as well as increasing the increase the participation of women in STEM.
As outreach coordinator, I lead workshops at high schools around Hawaiʻi with my female graduate students that involve detecting exoplanets in the data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope with Python. The goal of this program is to engage high school students across all the Hawaiian islands to foster an interest in science and higher education, particularly among female and underrepresented students, as well as connect them with female mentors. This work is funded by a Catalyst for Science Advancement award (award number: 223C) under NASA’s ICE-Five-0 grant, which I was awarded both in the Spring and Fall of 2024.