Outreach and education is a high priority to me. Specifically, I am greatly committed to increasing awareness and interest in science, technology, and engineering among women and underrepresented minorities. I am currently serving on the American Astronomical Society Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy. This group submits recommendations for AAS action to enhance technical understanding and experiences of minorities in the field. Since 2008, I have been the editor of the CSMA's bi-annual newsletter SPECTRUM. If you have any article ideas, please feel free to contact me as we are always interested in new material!

I have also participated in outreach activities of the National Science Foundation's Center for Adaptive Optics here at UCSC. In particular, I was an instructor for the 2008 Astronomy Short Course at Hartnell Community College in Salinas, CA. The course centered on study of galaxies and the distant Universe, and students undertook astronomical research projects that they designed themselves.

In May 2003 (my junior year at MIT), I attended the 202nd AAS meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, where I met Professor Meg Urry of the Yale University physics department. She jump-started my interest in issues related to underrepresented groups in astronomy, and she persuaded me to attend the Women in Astronomy II meeting at Caltech the following month. I presented two posters there: one on "the Status of Women and Minorities in Physics at MIT: A Look at the Last 35 Years" (here's the PDF) and another on "The Young Women's Leadership Charter School of Chicago: Preparing Urban Girls for Careers in Science and Technology" (here's the PDF). The meeting really inspired me to do as much as possible to improve the status of women and minorities in the sciences.

That Fall, I conducted a survey with Professor Donna Nelson of the University of Oklahoma that measures faculty demographics of all the PhD-granting U.S. astronomy departments. The work was under the auspices of MIT, and it disaggregates data by gender, race, and rank. This breakdown enables us to assess the status of individuals typically overlooked in other studies (such as minority females). The full results were published in the June 2004 issue of SPECTRUM. We presented the findings (in conjunction with Dr. Nelson's survey results for thirteen other science disciplines) at a Congressional Hearing on academic diversity in January 2004 and a National Academies Dinner in February 2004. A PDF of the full report on academic diversity in the sciences is located here, and the text of my congressional testimony is here.