As galaxy evolution sciences are revamped and revitalized through new observational facilities, so too is the culture of astronomy through new ways of creating, collaborating, and sharing knowledge. Throughout every stage of my academic career, I have devoted significant efforts towards the creation and support of a variety of mentorship, outreach, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Below is a highlight reel of some recent efforts.
NASA-PEER: Upon entering NASA-Goddard as an NPP Fellow, I founded NASA-PEER — the first post-baccalaureate research and mentorship network at NASA. See NASA-PEER for more info!
Poverty in Astronomy Collective: I am a part of a team that conducted a nation‑wide survey to assess the scope and impact of poverty on aspiring and present day astronomers across the United States. We reported our preliminary results at a AAS 245 special session and have a paper in preparation of our results and guidelines for the field. To see the special session slides and preliminary data, please check out our github!
Equitable Teaching Workshop: During my PhD, as President of a Diversity and Inclusion group, I developed a yearly equitable teaching and mentoring workshop to provide research mentors and teaching assistants the resources to employ equitable teaching and training practices in and outside the classroom. The workshop included many participatory modules, with re-enactments of real world situations that might arise within the classroom or research setting. The workshop highlighted how the systemic barriers that exists within the entirety of the academy can also be enabled on the individual level as mentor or teacher. The workshop showed specific examples of how bias can seep into how we teach and train physics students with examples such as how bias can present itself in determining which research assistants are likely to succeed,” to which struggling students are given the benefit of the doubt” in the classroom.
See slides for this workshop here!
As founding member of my PhD Institution’s Departmental DEI Committee, I also helped create the first departmental-wide survey to assess the climate within our department. The intent of this survey was to embolden members of the department to implement a variety of suggested infrastructural changes and creation of new resources to further support marginalized graduate students with the department. Find out more about this here: https://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/about/committee-for-diversity-and-inclusion/
Erini Lambrides 