Yari Golden-Castaño first realized in regards to the moon, planets, and house whereas her grandmother in Mexico, Barbarita, taught her the best way to learn from an encyclopedia. Golden-Castaño had already earned the nickname “little astronaut” amongst her household due to an astronaut onesie that her mom dressed her in. By third grade, she had learn a e book stating that one wanted to be a instructor, a physician, or an engineer with the intention to change into an astronaut.
“One thing was put in my head as somewhat child, and I truly wished it,” says Golden-Castaño. “I didn’t suppose I may very well be a physician, and I didn’t need to be a instructor. I preferred to construct issues and felt like physics and math got here straightforward to me, so I made a decision I might change into an engineer.”
A dream deferred
Though STEM-oriented, Golden-Castaño did not expertise STEM in a hands-on method till eighth grade, when she was chosen for the Gifted and Proficient Schooling (GATE) program. She grew up in part of Southern California the place funding for STEM actions was scarce. Via the GATE program for superior science college students, she noticed ideas realized within the classroom come to life.
“Not everybody understands how issues work simply by studying a textbook. Personally, I want a visualization. Had I not been chosen for this program, I wouldn’t have recognized that I may very well be doing these hands-on actions,” she says.
For Golden-Castaño, the GATE program was troublesome not due to the STEM ideas lined, however due to the English language barrier. By highschool, she was higher capable of categorical herself and was excelling in all of her Superior Placement lessons. But, when she requested one among her academics the best way to change into an astronaut, he laughed in her face. “Are you excessive? What are you taking? You may by no means be an engineer or astronaut as a lady,” the instructor stated. Different academics shared his sentiment, pushing Golden-Castaño to attend a liberal arts faculty and suggesting that she research Spanish — in case she modified her thoughts.
“His response made me really feel silly,” Golden-Castaño says. “In that second, I made a decision I might cease telling folks that I wished to be an astronaut someday. I might simply go to engineering faculty and give attention to getting my diploma. I by no means as soon as thought of getting out of engineering.”
Mission to Mars
After graduating with a bachelor’s diploma in engineering science from Smith School in 2010, Golden-Castaño joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory as an information analyst in a gaggle creating air visitors management programs. On the laboratory, she was surrounded by like-minded people who shared her aspiration to journey to house.
“Shortly after I arrived, I heard that NASA had put out a name for astronaut functions, and lots of of my colleagues had been making use of,” Golden-Castaño says. “That gave me hope and impressed me to open again up about my dream.”
In 2013, when the Mars One mission to ascertain the primary human colony on the Pink Planet was introduced, Golden-Castaño jumped on the probability to acquire a one-way ticket there. By 2015, the 200,000 preliminary candidates had been whittled all the way down to 100: 50 males and 50 ladies. On the brief checklist of ladies was Golden-Castaño’s title. (The Mars 100 had been finally speculated to be down-selected to 24 finalists, however the firm backing the mission declared chapter in 2019.)
The supportive laboratory group and pleasure surrounding the prospect of venturing to Mars shaped the right mixture for Golden-Castaño to share her ardour for house. She began giving talks at faculties throughout Boston, and even in Mexico, about her dream to change into an astronaut and her path into engineering.
“Having the Mars tag gave me a wider platform to succeed in out,” Golden-Castaño says. “I now had one thing to share with college students. Once I noticed their response — wow, you’re one among us, you’re a lady, and also you did not cease chasing your desires when somebody advised you that you just weren’t succesful — I noticed that I had their consideration and may do one thing extra than simply discuss.”
Golden-Castaño had engaged in some academic outreach whereas serving as vice chairman of Smith School’s Society of Ladies Engineers (SWE) throughout her senior yr. She ran a four-workshop model of SWE’s annual Introduce a Lady to Engineering Day. Although the occasion went nicely, she thought that will be her first and final encounter with academic outreach.
“I used to be actually shy. I didn’t need to stand in entrance of anybody, not to mention have them depend on me for info,” Golden-Castaño explains.
Upon becoming a member of the laboratory, she as an alternative grew to become concerned in group outreach, together with volunteering at a Boston meals pantry, cleansing up the Charles River, and serving to native farms put together their soil for farming. However now that she was a face of the Mars One mission, she felt compelled to get again into academic outreach and inform her story.
Golden-Castaño volunteered at an Introduce a Lady to Engineering Day occasion run by laboratory colleague Damaris Toepel. Inside just a few years, Golden-Castaño took over operating the occasion and commenced noticing that the fifth by means of eighth grade women had been uninterested in the content material and complaining that that they had already executed these types of workshops.
“Their suggestions made me understand that these are women who’ve entry and alternative; they’re the daughters of our engineers, and attend faculties the place academics can afford supplies for hands-on demos,” Golden-Castaño says.
Poised for blastoff
Disheartened by this realization and remembering her personal restricted alternatives as a scholar, Golden-Castaño in Might 2017 created a by-product of this occasion known as Women House Day Journey. With different volunteers, she assembled eight hands-on space-related demonstrations to convey to MIT in collaboration with ladies within the Division of Aeronautics and Astronautics. To recruit members, they contacted faculties within the Better Boston space, aiming to succeed in underserved college students (focusing on however not limiting to women) who might simply journey to MIT campus by way of subway. A coed turnout of round 60 college students rotated by means of the demonstrations. Nonetheless, recreating that occasion proved troublesome as a result of most of the volunteers subsequently left the laboratory. Small-scale variations of Women House Day Journey have since run onsite and at close by faculties, because the demonstrations had been formatted to be introduced independently.
In parallel, Golden-Castaño started an exterior eight-week program for second and third graders, known as “Mission to Mars.” Every week focuses on a distinct facet of what it takes to go to Mars, comparable to residing beneath the planet’s gravity, designing an appropriate habitat, and rising greens that may flourish in Martian soil. On the final day, the scholars don an astronaut go well with and navigate an impediment course as they impart with their “floor management” accomplice by way of walkie-talkie.
Supporting Golden-Castaño as these outreach efforts took off was her now-husband, R. Daniel, whom she met by means of Mars One. He helped her construct most of the demonstrations, even earlier than he began working as a contractor within the laboratory’s Laser Communications Group.
After internet hosting Women House Day Journey and Mission to Mars, Golden-Castaño had an thought to make outreach extra self-sustaining over the long run by having demonstrations prepared for volunteers to deploy at completely different faculties. From that concept, the Women’ Innovation Analysis Laboratory (G.I.R.L.) was born at Lincoln Laboratory in 2019. This system sought to create standalone hands-on workshops on various STEM subjects, encourage deprived women to participate (although occasions are coed), and help ladies or any laboratory workers members keen to volunteer as STEM position fashions.
“The objectives of G.I.R.L. are to encourage women to innovate applied sciences that serve our communities and empower them with the abilities, information, assets, and confidence to pursue STEM. For me, one other aim is to provide ladies the boldness to volunteer and study a subject that they might be unfamiliar with, after which go train it,” says Golden-Castaño, who needed to step exterior her personal consolation zone to just do that.
An unlimited house
Since its inception, G.I.R.L. has hosted about 50 workshops and reached greater than 300 college students. Employees from the laboratory’s Communications and Neighborhood Outreach Workplace have established relationships with a number of Better Boston space faculties; organizations together with Brookview Home, Women Inc., Boys and Women Golf equipment of America, and Home of Hope; and occasions comparable to Science on State Avenue and the Christa McAuliffe Heart STEM Week Open Home. G.I.R.L. offers the assets and supplies volunteers want for his or her demonstrations.
“We’ve got a reservoir of sensible ladies on the lab, and so they have information that may be shared. Volunteers can suggest demonstrations on subjects of their selecting and independently take them to varsities or organizations. We now have a full ‘menu’ of demonstrations that we are able to run at any time. Having youngsters entry these hands-on actions that I did not get to expertise exterior of the GATE program is inspiring.”
Workshops have spanned various fields, together with programming, mechanical and electrical engineering, robotics, synthetic intelligence, cybersecurity, optics, forensics, planetary science, and chemistry. One workshop, on Scratch programming with a Makey Makey Board (controller board), teaches college students the best way to assemble a circuit and program a musical instrument to play once they contact keys on the board. In an synthetic intelligence-themed workshop, college students play an AI-or-not guessing sport and type gadgets comparable to candies to imitate how a decision-tree algorithm works. A workshop masking cybersecurity and web security teaches college students to see the dangers of placing private info on-line, decrypt messages, bodily decide locks, and perceive web protocols. In a workshop on the fundamentals of sunshine, college students assemble light-emitting diode (LED) color-mixing crystals after which use light-diffraction glasses to watch how mild splits into completely different colours at numerous angles.
Extra lately, G.I.R.L. launched a workshop on chemical reactions, by which college students make their very own colour reactions and find out about chemiluminescence. The most recent workshop centered on mechanics, with college students assembling a mechanical arm out of cardboard by tracing a hand template and utilizing string to maneuver the fingers by means of a mechanism just like a puppeteer controlling a marionette’s limbs. College students additionally connected a strip of LED onto the again of the arm; Golden-Castaño wrote code to make the sunshine change colour relying on which finger is curled.
For Golden-Castaño, one of the vital fulfilling components of G.I.R.L. is capturing the eye of scholars, particularly those that initially appear disinterested.
“I’ve arrived in lots of school rooms the place the youngsters are being disrespectful and speaking over us,” Golden-Castaño says. “Then, we begin the demo, and even the loudest child is now attentive and asking related questions. Watching them interact with this system is rewarding.”
To maintain this momentum going, all G.I.R.L. workshops ship college students residence with follow-up hyperlinks or supplies offering further studying assets. The volunteers additionally share their educational and profession journeys in order that college students can envision a path ahead.
“One necessary lesson I’ve realized is that youngsters don’t need to hear you have recognized from the start what you need to be if you develop up and the whole lot has labored out for you,” Golden-Castaño says. “For a lot of college students, G.I.R.L. represents their first hands-on expertise with STEM or the primary time they’re listening to they will do STEM. So, I’m all the time sincere with them. I inform them that I did not have straight As, and it’s not too late for them to start out right this moment.”
In addition to the dearth of publicity to STEM, some G.I.R.L. members face a language barrier, which Golden-Castaño is aware of all too nicely. Fluent in conversational Spanish however missing a technical vocabulary in that language, she has been attempting on the fly to translate classes delivered in English into Spanish. Earlier this yr, she ready forward of time a presentation in Spanish for a chemistry workshop.
To infinity and past
5 years in, the G.I.R.L. program remains to be going robust, having withstood the challenges introduced by the Covid-19 pandemic, which necessitated operating the workshops just about and transport supplies like pre-made kits to school rooms.
“We’ve got a system that works total,” she says. “However we’re at some extent the place I might prefer to see one other burst of participation from a brand new set of volunteers arising with new demonstrations.”
Noting the various work ongoing on the laboratory throughout its R&D areas, Golden-Castaño has a number of future workshop subjects in thoughts: sensible materials, biochemistry for menace identification, underwater laser communication, fast prototyping, know-how options for local weather change, and security with AI. The probabilities are limitless.
Golden-Castaño, in collaboration with the group that led the Women House Day Journey on MIT campus, additionally has an app thought for matching volunteers to school rooms in a extra automated, focused method. The app would function profiles of volunteers — stating their STEM background, demonstrations they lead, and scheduling availability — that academics might scroll by means of to find out who enhances their classroom curriculum. For instance, a instructor of an environmental science class might request the volunteer main a climate station workshop.
“G.I.R.L. has been a very good journey. Thanks to everybody who made all of it attainable. I’m grateful to have the help of the various volunteers, instructors, my group leaders, and the Outreach Workplace,” says Golden-Castaño, now a part of the laboratory’s Methods Engineering Group, the place she focuses on the meeting, integration, and testing of laser communication programs.
Whereas holding a watch out for the following alternative to pursue her dream of turning into an astronaut, Golden-Castaño considers her work on the laboratory as foundational for future house exploration: “I’m engaged on know-how that would allow future human missions to house.”
