Women in STEAM – Proteus

Image Credit: Jenny Woodman Image Credit: Jenny Woodman Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Imagine a robot for exploring an ocean world.

What would your robot look like? On November 10, students were quick to respond–scissors and glue, googly eyes and glitter combined to create outlandish portraits of robots designed to transport humans to dark and unexplored corners of our planet via live-streamed video footage and high speed satellite connections.

Fueled by a never-ending stream of snacks and an absurd amount of M&Ms, 20 high school girls joined me for two days of engineering and ocean exploration from dry land.

As a writer, leading a robotics workshop seemed a daunting task. What on Earth do I know about hydraulic systems and force multipliers? The short answer is: nothing. However, digging a little deeper into my experiences over the last two summers reveals I know a bit more about robots than even I imagined–I know enough to help teenagers learn how we explore the ocean.

Regular readers know that since 2017 I’ve spent over just two months at sea on two different scientific vessels, the NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada and the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus. On the Nautilus, robots or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are the workhorses of ocean exploration. ROVs Argus and Hercules work in tandem to help scientists explore deep sea environments, paleoshorelines, and active underwater volcanoes like the Lōihi Seamount. Argus and Hercules collect data and samples while streaming video to a live audience of scientists and fans.

With these two ROVs, humans are able to explore and study places no one has ever visited before, from the safety and comfort of a ship, a classroom, or even a couch in someone’s home. ROV exploration is helping scientists accomplish a range of vital research programs from managing and protecting National Marine Sanctuaries to planning for future space exploration.

When looking for ways of connecting young girls with career pathways in ocean science, I jumped at the chance to partner with my local ChickTech chapter for their annual kickoff event, ChickTech High School. Founded in 2012, this nonprofit is working to provide a pathway into tech fields high school-aged girls.

The ChickTech conference takes place at Portland State University’s Maseeh College of Engineering. Once a year, the college, usually bustling with overworked college students, is taken over by 150 teenage girls from area high schools. The students have no prior experience with technology and engineering; they are referred by their teachers who are asked to look for students who may have some aptitude for STEM fields in spite of their limited exposure.

Each day opened with breakfast and guest speakers. Saturday’s speaker was Oregon State undergraduate Sienna Kaske who spoke about the challenges she’s experienced navigating predominantly white environments in high school and college. She encouraged the girls to find their own communities—whatever communities match and accept their many identities—and work with others to break down the barriers the will undoubtedly encounter in STEAM fields.

Then, the girls headed off into smaller groups for all-day sessions on topics ranging from writing code for video games to designing and 3-D printing jewelry. I led a workshop titled Exploring an Ocean World (with robots!).

Given my non-technical background, I’m profoundly grateful to Derek Wulff from Pathfinders Design and Technology, for donating wonderful wooden kits for our participants. On the first day, students put together cherry pickers and excavators, which helped them learn about hydraulic systems. On day two, teams worked to build robotic arms, which are similar to the Kraft Predator arm used on the ROV Hercules.

Weekend workshop participants teamed up to build robotic arms while learning about ocean exploration. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman Kaitlyn Becker gave students a tour of her robotics lab at Harvard. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

In between building with the kits, I spent time guiding workshop participants through how explorers are learning about the ocean with sea floor mapping and robotic exploration. Via Google Meetup, we spoke with Ph.D. student Kaitlyn Becker in her Harvard lab to learn about her squishy robot fingers. The next day, we spoke with Mugdha Flores and Kylie Posternack while they were on board E/V Nautilus off the coast of California.

My presentation (which you can view here) included profiles of many of the women I sailed with in 2018, partnered with information about what those women studied when they were in school. My goal was simple: highlight the many pathways to exciting work in STEAM fields while emphasizing the invaluable role women play in ocean exploration and discovery.

On Sunday evening, the workshop ended with a showcase for parents. Students decorated our classroom and walked their parents, siblings, and friends through our activities over the weekend. As they left with their completed kits and newfound enthusiasm, I answered a litany of questions from parents about more workshops and activities to help carry on with what we started here. A quick search for ROV camps in Portland turned up nothing, which left me wondering if this writer may end up running more robotics workshops in the future.

If you’re interested seeing a program like Seaperch in Portland or scheduling a classroom visit for your future ocean explorer, please email us at: editor@proteusscicomm.org

Jenny Woodman, Proteus founder and executive director, is a science writer and educator living in the Pacific Northwest. Follow her on Twitter @JennyWoodman.

Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics by American Association of University Women

Why Does it Matter if Women Work in Technology and Engineering?

By Jenny Woodman

There is a growing mountain of research and initiatives attempting to figure out when and where young girls are being driven out of technology and engineering. The disproportionately low number of girls entering into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM fields, has generated conferences, after-school programs, summer camps, clubs, and non-profit groups like ChickTech.

Only 12 percent of engineers and 25 percent of computer professionals are women. The American Association of University Women looked at data from multiple sources and found that four out of five of the best STEM careers lie in these two disciplines. Women do have stronger representation in other STEM arenas, particularly health-related fields, but engineering and technology careers can be far more lucrative and offer a more diverse range of opportunities for employment. According to U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2016/2017 median annual income for a computer professional is $114,520 and $91,010 for an engineer.

Equal representation also saves time and money when designing new, innovative systems, and when women aren’t in the room some pretty big oversights might occur. When the first voice-recognition programs were being designed, the developers calibrated them to male voices; the unintended result was that the programs literally couldn’t recognize female voices. While this problem initially only impacted luxury car owners, these types of technologies are often brainstormed and iterated in high end products. Then, they go on to be widely used as the technology becomes more affordable and accessible in other important ways like assistive technologies for people with physical impairments.

Failures to consider diverse users isn’t just an inconvenience. Early airbags in automobiles were designed around the dimensions of adult male bodies, and women and children died as a result. Katherine Shaver, reporting for the Washington Post, notes that women and children are far more likely to suffer more serious injuries in a car accident, because smaller bodies aren’t able to withstand the tremendous forces of a crash. It wasn’t until 2003 that the federal government required manufacturers to use shorter female-sized crash dummies in some testing.

Engineering and tech are realms where job growth is projected to be exponential in the coming years. There are approximately 3.6 million computer jobs; by 2024, U.S. Department of Labor predicts 13 percent growth or an additional half million jobs. If our graduation rates continue as they are today, the U.S. may only be able to fill about 30 percent of those spots.

For those of today’s high school students who, they might be looking at unprecedented opportunities – if they possess the right stuff and barriers are removed.

(This is a revised and updated excerpt from Jenny Woodman’s master’s thesis, Stellar Works: Searching for the Lives of Women in Science)

This photo essay-letter was created on board the Exploration Vessel Nautilus during the 2018 Lōihi Seamount Expedition, a joint project between Ocean Exploration Trust, NASA, NOAA, and a number of academic institutions. The mission used this underwater volcano off the coast of Hawai`i as an analog for future space exploration to distant ocean worlds. Click on photo captions to scroll through the images and read more detailed bios of these phenomenal women working in science, technology, engineering, arts, and math fields.

Dr. Zara Mirmalek and Mary Nichols on the social deck. Zara is an ethnographer studying communication, and work practices among scientists and engineers conducting science and exploration in the ocean (with remotely operated and autonomous robots) and in planetary analogs (for future human and robotic planetary exploration). Mary is a video engineer and professor emeritus at Middle Tennessee State University. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Martynas Graban is the first officer on the Nautilus where she has served for two years. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Basia Marcks is an ocean science intern on the Nautilus and a PhD candidate at University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. Her research focuses on the interactions between biology, geology, and chemistry in past periods of climate change. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Proteus Executive Director and Lead Science Communication Fellow for the E/V Nautilus Jenny Woodman. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Dear 2nd Graders,

I really enjoyed speaking with your class this morning. It is always fun to tell people about the work we are doing on board the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus, a 211-foot science vessel outfitted for exploring the ocean floor with robots and studying what is happening in our planet’s ocean.

After we ended our talk with you, one of your comments stuck with me. Your teacher asked me to speak about what girls do on our ship, adding that you all thought only boys could be engineers and that made me a little sad.

As a matter of fact, I couldn’t sleep for quite some time even though it was 4:30 in the morning here off the coast of Hawai`i. But, I woke up with a plan: I’d gather all the girls on our ship (there are a lot of us) and take a photo for you. I thought maybe if you saw how many girls are out here doing exciting work, you might start to see how many important things get done by both boys and girls.

But there was one really big problem…

Jess and Antonella prepare Hercules for his next dive to an underwater volcano off the coast of Hawai’i. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Jessica Sandoval is an Argus pilot on the Nautilus and a Ph.D. student at at the University of California, San Diego. She works on bio-inspired robotics and bio-materials. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Antonella Wilby is a Ph.D. student at the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego, where she builds robots to explore extreme environments, in particular, ocean environments. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Wendy Snyder repairing Argus’s frame. Wendy is a graduate student at University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography; she is working on low power inertial navigation systems for glider type underwater autonomous vehicles (AUVs).

All the girls working on the Nautilus are very, very busy. Eighteen members of the 31-person science team on the Nautilus are women. We serve in all roles — from engineering to communications, from the very highest leadership position down to our student interns. There is no place on the Nautilus where women do not work incredibly hard.

I went to the back deck of the ship where Wendy, Jess, and Antonella were busy repairing our robots, Hercules and Argus. Without these robots, (we also call them remotely operated vehicles or ROVs) we wouldn’t be able to travel to the ocean floor to learn about volcanoes, octopuses, sharks, and creatures no one has ever seen before. As ROV pilots, a big part of their job is maintaining and fixing the ROVs – Wendy, Jess, and Antonella are engineers, so they are really good at what they do!

I ducked around the corner and up the stairs, following Mary and Nicole, but it turned out they were busy too. A camera needed fixing, and as video engineers, they needed to tackle the job. Cameras are very important to the work happening on the Nautilus; they are like eyes on the robots and they help the pilots to safely move around; cameras also record all the amazing images from places humans can’t safely go. As a retired journalist and video engineer, Mary has lots of experience to help guide and train Nicole who just graduated from college.

One sample from the ocean floor is divided up into many samples for scientists all over the country. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Brianna Alanis is a graduate student at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her work focuses on creating autonomous proxies for primary production measurements using dissolved oxygen. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Dr. Leigh Marsh is a deep sea ecologist who specializes in the acquisition, processing, and analysis of ROV and AUV imagery and remote sensing data for vulnerable ecosystems in the deep ocean. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Leigh Marsh and Megan Lubertkin in the Nautilus lounge. Megan is a graduate student at University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Repairing a camera housing — Nicole Gottschalk, video engineering intern, and Mary Nichols. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Our science data team — Leigh and Megan were also quite busy. They spent part of the afternoon brainstorming how to manage the thousands of images and samples being gathered with each dive, and they met with expedition leaders to share their ideas about how to do even more with the limited space available for so many scientists on the ship.

Then, I went to the wet lab, but another member of the science data team, Brianna, was busy organizing the equipment the science team uses after Hercules collects those samples and brings them back to the ship; one of her jobs is to prepare those specimens for scientists all over the country to study back on dry land.

Dr. Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert is a member of the Nautilus’s science/data team. She is doing post-doctoral work at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where she studies the microorganisms that live in environments where sunlight (or products of sunlight) cannot be used for energy.

Samples from the ocean floor must be divided up, preserved, and prepared for delivery to many scientists around the country. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Vice President of Exploration and Science Operations and Expedition Lead Nicole Raineault and Sam Wishnak, digital media coordinator for Ocean Exploration Trust. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

As the Vice President of Exploration and Science Operations for the Trust, Dr. Nicole Raineault works with the Nautilus team’s extended network of scientists to organize and plan the science objectives of the cruises. As an Expedition Leader she facilitates seeing those plans through on board the vessel. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

I ran over to the social deck, just in time to see Elizabeth rushing off to her lab. She had to place a bottle of seawater in an incubator, which is like a small oven. She wanted to test how long it will take her to process the samples Hercules will bring up to the ship from the volcano.

I was sure I’d be able to wrangle Sam and Nicole, but as part of the leadership responsible for the success of this and future expeditions, they were busy coordinating the hundreds of items that need addressing each day.

First Officer Martyna Graban helps survey the ship’s hull. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Ariel and Mugdha work on telling the story of this Nautilus expedition. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Science Communication Fellow Mugdha Flores is a marine biologist and informal educator; she loves teaching students about the ocean and aim to inspire them to become stewards of our ocean. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Thais Drummond da Silva is the third officer on the ship who stands watch on the bridge and is in charge of keeping everyone safe. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Speaking of the people who help this ship run smoothly, Thais and Martyna are officers in charge of running the ship so all this amazing science can happen. Today, Martyna took a crew out on a small boat to inspect the hull, and Thais makes sure everyone on the ship is safe at all times.

My friends Ariel and Mugdha were also busy, shooting video to help tell the story of science, ocean exploration, and marvelous feats of engineering.

Even I had to stop and take a break from writing this letter to you; Amy and I were needed in the studio where you saw us this morning. We had to talk to a group of people gathered at a museum in San Francisco – we showed them pictures and answered their questions just as we answered yours.

Dr. Darlene Lim is the principle investigator for this NASA SUBSEA project; she’s based at the NASA Ames Research Center where she is actively involved in the development of operational concepts for human scientific exploration of our solar system. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Darlene Lim in the wetlab with Jeff Seewald. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Amy Smith and Jenny Woodman in the television studio speaking to a group gathered at a museum in San Francisco. Dr. Smith is an astrobiologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; she studies where microbiology, astrobiology, and the origin of life meet. She seeks answers to whether life could exist on other worlds in our solar system and beyond. Image Credit: Sam Wishnak

Science Communication Fellow Ariel Waldman is the founder of Space Hack and serves as an adviser to NASA. Image Credit: Ariel Waldman

My last stop on this adventure was the lounge where Darlene was sitting at her laptop on a big leather sofa. As principle investigator for this project, her days are really long – she’s working even when she looks like she might be relaxing. When I found her, she was getting ready to go on NASA TV and talk about the work we are doing; two million people tuned in to watch her today!

I’m writing this letter because I’d hate to think that there are any young girls in your class who think it isn’t cool or possible for them to build robots or rockets, and I’d hate to think that there are boys who think they shouldn’t do the thing they dream about doing, whatever it may be.

Following science out to sea has taken me to some pretty extraordinary places. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

And, if you don’t want to be a scientist or engineer, but you love the sea creatures — if you dream about what it might be like explore the ocean, I have a secret for you: not everyone involved studying the ocean is a scientist or engineer. I’m a writer. My job is telling true stories about this work so people can better understand the world we live in. Folks like me — anthropologists, painters, teachers, filmmakers, chefs, and all sorts of people play a big part, making amazing things happen every day for organizations like the Nautilus!

Thanks for asking us such smart questions. I hope you will stay curious, have fun and keep exploring!

Jenny

Jenny Woodman, Proteus founder and executive director, is a science writer and educator living in the Pacific Northwest; she is a 2018 lead science communication fellow on board the Exploration Vessel Nautilus. In 2016, she wrote her masters thesis on women in STEAM and continues to explore this topic in her work. Follow her on Twitter @JennyWoodman.

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