Flowers and Space
This past month, my club FemSTEM hosted five women in various STEM careers. Ranging from grad students to NASA engineers, our panel was each at a different step in their STEM journey. This article dives into Ariel Vaugn and Amanda Chou’s stories: what inspired them, what steps did they take, and where are they now.
Ariel Vaughn grew up in a rural town in California just outside of Yosemite. Just 30 minutes outside of a Miwake reservation where her ancestral roots were tied. She was always surrounded by nature, frequently going on class trips to Yosemite and other surrounding parks. From these class trips, she quickly fell in love with flowers. Once she went to high school, she took her first chemistry class. In her small rural town, the women grew up in typically female jobs like hairstylists or homemakers. Ariel’s chemistry teacher quickly opens her horizons, however. She realized that there are more scientists out there than the stereotypical Albert Einstein or Isacc Newtons. Her position as a woman had no bearing on her science career.
After high school, Ariel stayed at a local community college until she eventually worked at a pharmaceutical lab in California making cancer drugs. During her PhD, she began to do research with lasers and understand how molecules behaved. During her PhD, she got to attend conferences, spend time in various labs, and even received a reward in Hawaii. Ariel quickly discovered that chemistry was more than chemical reactions and blowing things up in a lab. It can be related to big things, like explosions, or even things as different as discovering molecules’ orientations with lasers.
Ariel eventually found her niche in outreach. She runs summer camps for indigenous middle schoolers and teaches them about green energy and various STEM topics. She hopes to inspire youth in STEM similar to her own journey.
Currently, Ariel is focused on research about how people learn chemistry. She focuses on writing homework assignments that allow students to see that chemistry is all around them, and outside of just a lab setting. She hopes that students can learn to see themselves as scientists as they work with their peers to discover different truths about chemistry.
Contrasting the small-town story, Amanda Chou came from a city outside DC. She found her joy and interest in Smithsonian museum visits and watching the lights in the planetarium. Just like how Ariel felt connected to nature, Amanda always thought that she was going to study astronomy.
When she was younger, Amanda was constantly taking apart different things that were broken and worn down in hopes of discovering their problems and improving them. She always wanted to know how and why things worked. She ended up going to a science magnet school for high school that specialized in tech and computer sciences. Even though she was determined to resist the STEM draw and took classes in theatre and drama, she ended up going to Virginia Tech. That same lure of the planetarium that interested her as a child drew her into an aerospace major with a minor in astrophysics.
During her undergrad college years, Amanda did a variety of interns. The one that inspired her the most was an intern at Pratt and Whitney. She got to opportunity to see how field filters were built and then inspected. She watched groups working to optimize engines and find new ways to make them safer. Amanda realized that engineering was more than building things. It could also be researching and discovering how to make things work better, just like she had done as a child.
Amanda’s undergraduate research was in a large aro-acoustics tunnel studying the types of noise that come off of large wind turbines. Her supervising grad students allowed her to get her hands dirty: running parts of studies, climbing into the machine, test different materials.
Into her grad studies, she focused her research on smaller-scale things looking at tiny air fluctuations close to the surface of an airplane. At this time, NASA had put out a call for co-op students. Amanda began to work with NASA and was asked to permanently stay on after she finished her PhD. She is currently continuing her interests in discovering how things work and doing basic physics and aerospace research.
Both Amanda and Ariel were introduced to their interests very young. They grew up in environments surrounded by nature and STEM. With that said, they both took unique paths to get where they are in their career right now. Even things as simple as flowers can inspire someone on their very own STEM journey.