shiiloveu

Latest Posts by shiiloveu

Toptal Scholarship | Mentorship for Women in STEM

When my generation starts to imagine their future, instead of hope and the image of greener grass, we stop and shudder. The vision of wars over fundamental resources like water and food, massively shrinking coastlines, and the decimated rainforests encompass the mind. Our vision of our future is interrupted by the fact that if our society does not change our current course, we will have no future at all. A gloom and sense of defeat sets over me when I think of a future without the necessary changes, but I refuse to succumb to despair.  I do not want this vision of the future.

In elementary and middle school, I would do all I could to live a more sustainable life; I started a recycling club, read every book from the library I could on the facts and figures of climate change, and would collect and sort all trash I could find. All the adults in my life would smile and pat my head, they would say I was adorable but that climate change would be solved by the time I was an adult. As I grew up, I saw scientists and experts get drowned out by confident, louder voices. I grew up in Los Angeles, the city of cars and when I was inevitably stuck in traffic, I would look around and see a sea of little combustion generators all making the problem incrementally worse. I would see myself,  a hypocrite, sitting in my gas guzzler and know that we deserve better.

In many moments similar to that one, I decided that I want to be someone to help directly solve this problem. A global crisis like climate change requires global collective action as our world’s economy runs off of a source that is hurting us.

I want to help engineer sustainable transportation and electric power for the world.  My vision for the future is one that involves human life living with their basic needs powered by a source that does not harm us. I decided to become an electrical engineer, with a focus on engineering systems to support sustainable transportation and power.

In some aspects, this was an obvious choice. I love transportation. I love moving on and the joy and surprise that comes with venturing to a new place or a blissful familiar one. It's what moves society. I love bikes, cars, long roads, planes, and rockets because they get us to where we need to go, and there is nothing more fundamental to humans than the ability to move forward. I hope to make technology that will move us forward in a sustainable way.

However, in my first ~18 years of life, I can never recall meeting a scientist or an engineer, or especially a female scientist or engineer for that matter. The closest I got was a Barbie in a lab coat. And as much as I adore Barbie, I knew that engineers existed but they did not exist on my radar. They did things that always seemed a few footsteps removed away from my life or consciousness; I knew that calculus existed but never as something that I would ever do.

My entire family are teachers and lawyers, and while they are respectable and necessary professions, I always saw myself becoming a teacher and never thought much of it.

The mentorship opportunities the Toptal Scholarship offers are invaluable to me, as I do not have adult guidance in my field.  I think I know what I want, but I would love to have a mentor who I could learn and listen to. I would especially value a female mentor as women only earn 12.5% of the Electrical Engineering Bachelors' degrees, according to the American Society of Engineering Education.

I remember sitting in Calculus 1 on the first day of my freshman year of college, shaking and anxiously looking around the massive lecture hall for a familiar face. From my position at the leftie desk, I calmed myself by attempting to count the number of other girls in the class. The professor began his lecture while I was only halfway through the room but the class was about 35% female and I felt a little relieved. However, as the quarters became years, I saw the women dwindle away. I saw many of my female friends switch to different majors or drop out. Some of them genuinely did not like the material and chose to follow a different passion, but for many, their mental health deteriorated under the constant stress and pressure of engineering academia, in parallel with family obligations and toxic relationships.

I am no exception to this. For the majority of my freshman year, I was hopelessly lost and alone. I felt like the odd one out in all of my classes. I struggled tremendously with calculus and physics as I realized that I never learned how to properly learn in previous education. I needed a mentor, I needed someone who had been where I was and could tell me how they worked past it. While there are dozens of campus resources with STEM Girl-power language, and I appreciate the effort, it felt empty at a certain point.  I almost quit engineering many more times than I am proud to admit. At that time I had no friends in STEM and a sexually abusive boyfriend that left me feeling silly and ridiculous for even trying.

However, it was my goal to help engineer a better tomorrow that kept me on my path and I am beyond thankful for that. Even though I am worlds more mentally healthy than I was in my freshman year of college, I still would value a female STEM mentor to help guide me. I want a woman I can look up to and I would appreciate the opportunity for one more than anything.

I decided that to help accomplish my goals outside of university, I would start by helping solve those problems through university organizations. I am very passionate about sustainable transportation and electric cars so I joined Formula Slug, UCSC’s Electric Racecar team. In my first year with them, I designed my first sustainable project, a solar charging station. In Formula Slug I learned a multitude of valuable skills like surface mount soldering, PCB design, TIG and MIG welding, project management, engineering logistics, AutoCAD Design, and project fundraising, leading our team to raise tens of thousands of dollars. By my junior year, I was Vice-President and Project Manager of our team.

At the same time, I am also very passionate about sustainable engineering and so me and a group of like-minded students formed the UCSC Chapter of Engineers without Borders. I was the founding Vice-President of UCSC-EWB and wrote several successful grant proposals for our project. Our main project is our solar project in Takui, Cameroon. The people and schools in Takui and towns nearby run on unreliable power and we are working to design a system that provides power and will function effectively for 10 years with minimum need for repairs. We designed and are implementing a solar micro-power grid and water purification system as well as selling individual home packages to provide power to the homes in Takui.

My connections from Formula Slug alumni got me an interview and internship at Joby Aviation, an electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) company as first a Software Certification Engineer and now as a Radio Frequency Electrical engineer. Joby’s goal is to create electric air taxis to replace the average person’s commute and help relieve the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. I am very proud and honored to be working for Joby because it brings me to my goal of working toward sustainable transportation for the masses.

My passion for using science to serve others is not simply within transportation engineering. I am also incredibly interested in biotechnology and nuclear energy. This interest has led me to recurrently begin working in UCSC’s nuclear medicine lab. Our team is designing an optimized PET scan for head and neck cancers. I have begun working as the lead of a sub-project, designing a detailed simulation of the positron emission topology scan in C++. This simulation will allow our team to know how changing different elements of our set-up will affect gamma-ray emission and therefore, where to put the ray emission suspectors. My research professor does not want me to publish my code on GIT publicly yet so I have not attached a GitHub link, I apologize.

I have many interests and passions but at the end of the day, I want to help engineer the world to be a better place. I would be honored to receive the Toptal scholarship and mentorship opportunities, but I understand that there are many distinguished applicants so I thank you for reading.

Ground in my lab is not properly connected and so the oscilloscope read this signal while attempting to read my sinusoid. My sine and the ground distortion are superimposed (the waves are added together) and it created this. 

I love electrical engineering because it craves balance, we all need to be grounded and to be properly understood. A circuit and a soul all the same, sorry for being fake deep, late nights in lab will do that. 

Zero to hero. My task was to create a sinusoidal generator via a Deadbug (the ugly metal plate with circuit elements soldered onto it) and a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). In theory, my sinusoid generator works but applying an electric current to a tank circuit. A tank circuit can be configured in many ways but I used a self-wound inductor and a capacitor in parallel, this works because the current induces an electric field in the capacitor and the E field induces a magnetic field in the inductor and they go back and forth creating oscillations. My tank is connected to a transistor (JEFT) that amplifies the oscillating signal. 

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl Sagan, Contact (via thoughtkick)

speak the language of math, you speak the language of the universe

CONTACT (1997). Robert Zemeckis directs Jodie Foster in this sci-fi drama of alien contact adapted from the novel by Carl Sagan.

I just designed my first antenna a few days ago, a 6 GHz Horn antenna and the complexity and beauty of antennas is something I can’t wait to spend a lifetime exploring. 

-KN6IID

Around the World in Seven Ground Stations

Happy Birthday, Jules Verne!

Considered by many to be the father of science fiction, French novelist Jules Verne takes his readers on a “From the Earth to the Moon,” “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” and “Around the World in Eighty Days.” In his honor, let’s take our own journey around the world, exploring seven far-flung ground stations and the communications networks they support. These ground stations downlink data from science and exploration missions, maintaining the critical link from space to ground.

Our Deep Space Network supports far-out missions like Voyager 1, a spacecraft that’s now over 13 billion miles from Earth. To communicate that far, the Network uses antennas as large as 230 feet in diameter. The network has ground stations in Pasadena, California; Madrid, Spain; and this one in Canberra, Australia. The ground stations are strategically placed for maximum coverage of the night sky, ensuring that deep space missions can communicate their data back to Earth. Check out that lizard!

Our Space Network uses relay satellites in conjunction with ground stations to provide continuous communications coverage for satellites in low-Earth orbit like the International Space Station, enabling 24/7 connection with astronauts onboard. Spacecraft using the Space Network beam their data to the constellation of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, which forward that data to the ground. This is a photo of a Space Network ground station in Guam, a U.S. territory. The spherical structures around the antennas are called “radomes” and protect the antennas from the tropical storms!

Optical communications uses lasers to provide missions with higher data rates than radio communications. Optical terminals also offer missions reduced size, weight and power requirements over comparable radio antennas. A smaller system leaves more room for science instruments, a weight reduction can mean a less expensive launch and reduced power allows batteries to last longer. This ground station in Haleakalā, Hawaii, will relay data to California through a groundbreaking optical communications satellite, the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration. The demonstration will show the power and promise of optical communications to support the next generation of science missions.

Antarctica may seem like an odd place for radio antennas, but McMurdo Ground Station is vitally important to our networks. In 2017, we used the McMurdo ground station to demonstrate a new technology called Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), sending a selfie from McMurdo to the space station through numerous DTN nodes. DTN protocols allow data to be stored at points along its route that do not have an open connection to the next intermediary, preventing data loss and improving data returns.

This Near Earth Network ground station in Santiago, Chile, might not be our only South American ground station for long. The Near Earth Network is considering Punta Arenas, Chile, as a possible location for Ka-band antennas, which would provide missions with higher data rates. The Near Earth Network is also experimenting with Ka-band arraying, which uses multiple smaller antennas to provide the same capabilities of a larger, Ka-band antenna. Ka-band services will greatly increase the amount of science data we can gather!

If the space station ever has communications trouble, we could communicate with our astronauts through emergency very high frequency (VHF) communications ground stations like this one in Wallops Island, Virginia. VHF offers voice-only, contingency communications for the station and the Soyuz spacecraft, which ferries astronauts to and from the station. We maintain two VHF stations strategically placed to maximize contact with the space station as it orbits above North America. International partners operate VHF stations that provide contacts as the station orbits above Asia and Europe. NASA’s segment of the VHF network recently underwent critical upgrades that improve the reliability and durability of the system.

This beautiful photo captures Near Earth Network antennas in Svalbard, Norway, beneath the glow of the Northern lights, a phenomenon that occurs when charged particles from the Sun interact with various gasses in Earth’s atmosphere. If one were to visit Iceland, one could see these same lights above Snæfellsjökull volcano, featured in Jules Verne’s “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” as the imaginary entrance to a subterranean world.

A lot has changed in the nearly two centuries since Jules Verne was born. Verne’s 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon” and its 1870 sequel “Around the Moon” imagine a giant cannon capable of launching three men into lunar orbit. These imaginary astronauts used opera glasses to survey the lunar surface before returning safely to Earth.

Such a story may seem ridiculous in an age where humanity has occupied space for decades and satellites explore distant worlds with increasing regularity, but Verne’s dreams of spaceflight were novel ­– if not revolutionary – at the time. This change in worldview reflects humanity’s inexorable technological progress and our mission at NASA to turn science fiction into science fact.

As the next generation of exploration commences, our ever-evolving communications capabilities rise to meet the demands of missions that dreamers like Verne could hardly imagine.

The seven ground stations featured here were just a taste of our communications infrastructure. To learn more about space communications, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/SCaN

“Do you hear me?”

Antennas of the earth station at Raisting, Bavaria

Vaporized Memories, Ikebukuro 池袋

Kate Rubins is an icon- biologist turned astronaut. Such a badass

Ever wanted to ask a NASA astronaut a question? Here’s your chance!

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins will be taking your questions in an Answer Time session on Thursday, October 17 from 12pm - 1pm ET here on NASA’s Tumblr! Find out what it’s like to live and work 254 miles above our planet’s surface. Make sure to ask your question now by visiting http://nasa.tumblr.com/ask!

Dr. Kate Rubins was selected in 2009 as one of nine members of the 20th NASA astronaut class. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular Biology and a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. During her first spaceflight from July - October 2016 as a member of the Expedition 49 and 50 crew, Dr. Rubins made history by becoming the first person to sequence DNA in space. She also worked on the Heart Cells Experiment which studied how heart muscle tissues contract, grow and change in microgravity. Before becoming a NASA astronaut, Dr. Rubins worked with some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens, heading 14 researchers studying viral diseases that primarily affect Central and West Africa. 

Dr. Kate Rubins Fun Facts

Dr. Rubins and colleagues developed the first model of smallpox infection.

She conducted her undergraduate research on HIV-1 integration in the Infectious Diseases Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. 

She conducted research on filoviruses (Ebola and Marburg), Arenaviruses (Lassa Fever) and collaborative projects with the U.S. Army to develop therapies for Ebola and Lassa viruses. 

She has logged 115 days in space and 12 hours and 46 minutes of spacewalk time.

She enjoys running, cycling, swimming, flying, scuba diving and reading. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

Today is Copernicus’s 541th birthday. You may remember Copernicus as the man who said “Hey, what if the Earth went around the sun?” To which the Catholic Church replied “Hey, what if we set you on fire?” 

Happy Valentine’s Day

Love, Mean Girls

Do you play Doctor Who: Legacy?

Well those guise just told us that a new character, Stormageddon (Dark Lord of All) will be available as of tomorrow! The character will be exclusively in the fan area of the app for the first 30 days as a reward for completing the new level, ‘Infestation’. The Doctor Who: Legacy Facebook page is also giving 12 lucky people codes to unlock Stormageddon. We’ve heard that more allies will be added in the upcoming Fridays, so keep your eyes and thumbs out and ready.

If you haven’t played Doctor Who: Legacy yet, here are links to find it on Android and iOS.

Pancakes

"Pancakes are love"

-Speed Racer

It is nice to finally meet you - bitch

mosaics are made from broken pieces but they’re still works of art and so are you

I LOVE HOW HE JUST WALKS BY AND TAKES HER CLOAK OFF WITH SUCH A STRAIGHT FACE.

LIKE.

“‘SCUSE ME, BABE, GONNA NEED TO BORROW THIS.”

CYBORG’S LIKE, “UUUUUH, WHAT JUST HAPPENED.”

ROBIN’S JUST LIKE, “BB WATERUDOIN.”

STARFIRE HADN’T EVEN MOVED.

AND RAVEN’S LIKE, “DID YOU JUST.”

extremely important gif, inspired by cards against humanity:

NO CAPES !

Batman is a total ice queen

Happy birthday Roger Sterling…I mean…John Slattery!

Speed racer should REALLY come back!