Deborah Daley 00:06
Hello and welcome to Changemakers, a podcast series brought to you by Nature, where we shine a light on fascinating and extraordinary scientists. I’m Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature’s Black Employee Network, and I’m very proud to present this series where we explore exclusion in science and how some researchers are doing something about it.
In episode five, we meet an Iranian environmental scientist who struck up an unlikely partnership with NASA and created, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for her minority students.
Arezoo Khodayari 00:52
I’m Arezoo Khodayari, associate professor of environmental engineering at California State University Los Angeles, which is a beautiful campus in west coast of United States.
I’m also an affiliate to NASA JPL Jet Propulsion Lab, where I work with my collaborators to create a pipeline program that can take Cal State LA student to NASA JPL, to work on NASA-related projects.
I grew up in Iran, and, you know, I was always a very curious kid, a kid that had questions about everything, especially anything to do with universe.
I was the kid that was always asking so many questions during every class from every teacher.
So everybody, every teacher knew me by name, because I was the one that was asking all these questions.
I’m a first generation college student, so I was, you know, the first one in my family that went to college, so I had to navigate all the challenges of being a first generation college student on my own.
So I learned everything the hard way, but it was, you know, that gave me a deeper understanding of all the challenges that a student in my situation could go through. And at the age of 24 I thought I want to do something more.
I want to do something out of my comfort zone, and I want to pursue higher education at the university that’s best of best, if possible.
So that gave me the idea of coming to US to pursue my PhD at the University of Illinois, at Urbana Champaign.
So then I emigrated to US, and that was a new journey, a new challenge, that I had to again navigate everything on my own.
That was also a very rewarding experience, because for a 24-year-old girl that was never away from family, now living on my own, navigating the immigration challenge on my own, learning how to be a student in a new school system. And all that was a lot. But an amazing learning experience.
When I was doing my PhD, I came to meet my PhD advisor, who was one of the pioneers in the field of climate change, and he was such a great mentor that he kind of instilled the love of science for me even more, especially the love, for the love of science for climate change.
Because I could see through his work and my own experience of living in this current time how climate change is important and how science can help humanity to recover from all the damages that have been caused by climate change or to work for a better future.
So then, you know, after doing my PhD, I did my postdoctorate with him, under his supervision, and I focused on climate change for my post doctorate. And you know, during that time, I also developed a love of teaching, I discovered that teaching is my true passion.
I would like a career that involves teaching, involves research to, you know, research, questions, answers to all the questions I had in mind.
So I figured out that academia is the perfect place for me. I can, you know, I can, you know, be involved with teaching, which is my true passion.
I can help a student with their own curiosity and their questions that they had for anything related to science, while I can research my own questions and work on my own projects.
You know, astrobiology is a discipline that deals with how life formed on planet Earth, or how life could exist, evolve or distribute in various environments in other planets.
It combines disciplines such as chemistry, biology, physics and planetary science to investigate the question of life.
What are the conditions that can sustain life, and if life could exist on other planets and in moon. Astrobiology is focused on chemical conditions that supported life on planet Earth, or chemical conditions that could support life on other planets.
These chemical conditions are conditions that we do study in environmental engineering and chemical engineering.
So basically in chemical, environmental science, environmental engineering, we study how different chemical processes could improve the quality of life.
So basically, I can say environmental science and astrobiology, they both share the focus of ecosystems and habitability of planets.
So we can basically study both fields by tweaking the chemical conditions of our experiments.
In short, I can say environmental science is basically astrobiology on cosmic level. They both have chemistry in common. They both share the focus of ecosystems and chemical conditions that are relevant for our ecosystems.
About 10 years ago, I had a student who was doing an internship at NASA JPL. JPL is Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is one of the NASA centres in Pasadena, California.
And she was also taking a graduate course with me, and during that course, she became very interested in doing her master thesis with me.
But my area of expertise, environmental engineering, environmental science, pollution control, which was not related to what she was doing at her internship.
At first, it was not even remotely related. She was working on astrobiology-related project and…but she had an interest in both fields.
She wanted to continue her internship, if possible, work on astrobiology full but she wanted to also work with me.
So then we decided that it’s best for me and her mentor at JPL to meet and discuss how best we can help her.
And once we met, (her mentor was at the time Dr Laurie Barge at NASA JPL), and when I met with Laurie and we discussed the student situation and our own research interests, we realized that this is perfectly doable.
We have to just decide what are the research projcts that could answer questions from both field, and we had to just do some research to determine what’s the good intersection that we can focus on.
Since then, we’ve been working together. So it’s been about 10 years that we have been working together to create projects that are focused at the intersection of astrobiology and environmental science.
You know, at California State University, it’s a minority-serving institute, so more than 70% of our students are Hispanic students.
A majority of them are first generation college students.
Graduation and retention is always a big challenge for us. Many of these students, they never had a good mentor. They don’t know how to navigate college life.
They have imposter syndrome, and you know, they don’t have the cultural capital to help themselves. So mentorship is very critical for them to help them succeed, and to help them grow.
And in the context of what I have been doing with NASA, and especially with our first students, I realized how much of a life-changing experience this could be when we give them this opportunity to work with top minds at NASA, when we give them the opportunity to work on interdisciplinary projects, where they have mentors in academia, at their own home school and at JPL, and when we give them all the support that they can have.
That experience of witnessing the success of our very first few students made us realize that we should come up with the ways to make this more sustainable and secure funding so that we can continue to do what we have been doing informally.
And that’s basically gave me and my collaborator, Laurie Barge, at JPL, the idea of creating this pipeline program where we can bring students to JPL to do internship under our supervision. So I can be their mentor at Cal State LA.
Laurie can be their mentor at JPL, and we can basically provide research opportunities to them, funded research opportunities.
Because most of these students, they have to work. They most of the time work even full time outside the school to support their family, to support themselves.
So it’s very hard for them to do work on research projects if they are not paid, and they don’t even know that there are research projects that are paid, because, you know, everything is new to them. They are new to this college life. They don’t have the cultural capital to know how they can help themselves, that there are opportunities to work on a research project while they can get enough income that can support them and their family.
Oftentimes they can even sometimes make more income compared to the other part-time jobs that they have.
Because, yes, engineering could be very challenging to many students, but if you can make that exciting by relating that to, you know, NASA mission, or relating that to our universe, how the universe has formed. Or, you know, how is life in other planets? You can make science very exciting to them.
Focusing on the engineering aspect you can also make science very relevant to them. You know, it’s very interesting, because it relates to life on other planets, but also it could help them develop engineering techniques that can improve water quality, remove nitrate pollution from water, so that can be also very, very valuable, because it applies to their community needs, the need for clean water. So if you can make science applicable, relevant and exciting, you capture their attention.
You know, programs like this are extremely important for the success of the workforce that we need in our current time.
First of all, it’s the interdisciplinary project. They get to work with astrobiologists, with planetary scientists, with environmental engineers.
And this interdisciplinary approach, in my opinion, makes people very creative, because they learn to, you know, address a problem from different angles.
And when you do that kind of a practice, when you try to address a problem from different viewpoint, different angles, it makes you very creative. It’s basically a recipe for creativity, in my opinion.
This is very important for our society and our student because when you bring diverse talents to the team, when we are giving opportunities to under represented students or underserved students, students that are not normally taking these internship roles at JPL.
When we give opportunity to this new group of people, we are bringing diverse talents to the table. And when you have diversity, when you have people with different backgrounds, different viewpoint on your team, your solutions become very diverse.
You come up with solutions that are having the roots in community needs. So you have community-driven solution to your problems, and that’s the key, because not one every recipe works for every community, for every group, especially when it comes to pollution control and climate change.
I think learning about life on other planet or the conditions that could support life could be very interesting in teaching us how to approach climate change, how to mitigate climate change. When you learn about resource scarcity, when you learn about extreme conditions under which you can still support life, you get more prepared to address climate change or extreme weather conditions as a result of climate change or addressing a scarcity of resources.
So this is very important for this current time, that we have to learn how to adapt to climate change, we have to learn to mitigate mitigate climate change.
So the interdisciplinary skill of knowing how astrobiologists search for life on other planets, how life could exist on other planets under extreme conditions, could be very helpful in helping us address climate change.
Take risk. Be comfortable to take more risks and be comfortable with change. And be comfortable to come out of your comfort zone to seek more opportunities, to seek and to take more risks.
And be an explorer. Because unless you come out of your comfort zone, unless you go for all of these opportunities that are, you know, maybe having high risk associated with them, you cannot grow.
The advice that I would give my younger self is to take more risk and be comfortable with it and try to be more resilient.
And that’s where the growth comes, and that’s where the opportunity comes. At first, it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy for astrobiologists to work with environmental engineering because it’s challenging at first.
You don’t know much about this other field. It’s new, it’s unknown, but we have grown so much through that experience, because we kind of force ourselves to learn about this other discipline, all these new ways to do science.
And even though it was challenging and difficult at the time, but we have learned so much through that experience, and we grow so much.
So always take more opportunities and be ready to take risks, because it’s going to be very rewarding.
Deborah Daley 17:37
In the next episode, we meet a US researcher who works tirelessly to bridge the Native American world view with western science.
