I am heavily involved in outreach! This page lists a few of my favorite highlights. For a full list of outreach and professional service activities I’ve been involved with, check out my CV.
Yale Openlabs
is a graduate student organization aimed at outreach to the local New Haven community. We're very proud of the close link we've fostered between Yale and the greater community, and others seem to think so too: In 2023 we won the Seton Elm-Ivy Award, which is an annual award bestowed upon organizations which strengthen the connection between New Haven and Yale. I served on Openlabs leadership as Public Relations Chair in 2023, and I've been an active member and volunteer over my entire graduate career.
Some highlights:
- I won Best Poster Explanation in the 2024 edition of Flipped Science Fair, where graduate students present (and are judged) on their research by middle school students. Check out my poster here!
- Check out my 2022 Science Cafe talk How We Discover Exoplanets on Youtube!
The Warrior Scholar Program
is an organization that aims to prepare enlisted veterans and transitioning service members for undergraduate level education. In 2023 I worked with the Yale branch of WSP to design, write and teach a two-week intensive bootcamp centered around understanding and applying methods of numerical integration with the goal of proving hands-on research experience and develop coding and critical thinking skills. Numerical integration is a tricky topic to get across in two weeks, but I'd like to think I did a decent enough job! I still have the notebooks used for the course somewhere, and they can probably be dug up upon reasonable request. I'm pictured here with two of my students. It was an extremely intense, but very rewarding experience!
ERES VIII
aka Emerging Researchers in Exoplanet Science, is a conference specifically dedicated to early-career exoplanet researchers. We hosted the 2023 edition at Yale, where I was one of the main organizers. This conference hosted over 100 early-career exoplanet researchers for a two-day program in which travel, lodging and travel funds were completely covered for those in need. I served on the Scientific Organizing Committee as well as performing various administrative tasks on-site. Please enjoy this photo of me passed out on the last day. Organizing a conference is hard work, apparently!
We wrote a write-up about our experience hosting the conference. Check it out here: Levine, Gerbig, Louden, Lu, et al. (2024).
Other quick highlights
- I won second place in the 2022 Joan and Arnold Seidel Science Writing Contest, and my article was featured in that year’s edition of the Griffith Observer Magazine. Check out a manuscript of the article: A Hidden Planet in the Outer Solar System - The Search for Planet 9. They also sent me about 1000 physical copies, which are available upon reasonable request for the right price (read: nothing).
- Check out my talk Hidden Things: Pulling Back the Veil on the Universe on Youtube, which I gave as part a series with Yale Science in the News.