Rachel R. Strickler

In spring of 2010 I began supervising UCSC undergraduate Matt Coleman on a project using FLASH to simulate the effects of a cluster environment on the evolution of a supernova remnant (SNR), and investigate the possible connection to magnetars which do not appear to be assosciated with SNRs. As of October 2010, a paper is in progress.

In summer of 2010, I also co-supervised UCLA undergraduate Nora Brackbill on a numerical and analytical project investigating the effect of asymmetric mass loss on the orbits of stars in globular clusters. This also evolved into exploration of a specific case of the three-body problem.

In spring of 2010, I began a collaboration with artist Nathan Kandus and fellow graduate student Jill Naiman. With support from our advisor, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, we conceived and built a piece titled Phase Space that combines sculpture, electronics, and the illustration of physical concepts. Although it is still in progress, it has been exhibited at the UCSC open studio, and at the College of Creative Studies, UCSB.

As a successful returning student, friends and colleagues often refer other students following a non-traditional path through academia to me. I have talked with several students about how to cope with being older than, or otheriwse different from, most of your peers; the advantages and disadvantages of obtaining a Master's degree before applying to Ph.D. programs; how to obtain good letters of recommendation when most of your recent work experience is outside of academia; and general strategies for success.

This is a particularly important avenue of outreach because women and people of color are more likely to obtain a Master's degree before obtaining a Ph.D (Lange, S. E., 2006, PhD thesis, Univ. Washington, Seattle). Encouraging such students is an excellent way to build diversity the field.

In 2006-2007, I was an NSF GK-12 Graduate Teaching Fellow through the Science Education Partnership and Assement Laboratory (SEPAL) at San Francisco State University (SFSU). As part of this program, I was paired with Shauna Poong, an 8th grade physical science teacher at Marina Middle School in San Francisco. Teaching at Marina was a special challenge. Although the school is located in a wealthy neighborhood, nearly all of the students are bussed in. Over 74% of students classified as socioeconomically disadvantaged, and 29% are classified as English-language learners. This made dealing with class and language equity issues an important aspect of effective teaching. Shauna was both a mentor and a partner, teaching me about classroom management and how younger minds learn as we worked together to design and implement inquiry-based science activities for the class.

During that year I also took a two-semester course on science pedagogy. Among other lessons, I was grateful to learn methods for creating better gender, race, class, and language equity in the classroom.

In my last semester at SFSU, I participated in a student outreach project associated with the SFSU planetarium and telescopes. Since SFSU is largely a commuter campus, many students are not able to do nighttime observing. In order to reach those students and get them excited about astronomy, I set up telescopes for solar observing on the quad over lunchtime hours. Since we were near solar minimum, students could see the lack of sunspots and compare that to images of the sun near maximum. They were also able to observe solar flares and prominences through a hydrogen emission line (Hα) filter. This raised awareness of our sun as a star, familiarized students with the solar cycle, and encouraged them to attend nighttime observing events.

At UC Berkeley, I took part in the undergraduate infrared astronomy lab, taught by James Graham. My class was the first to use a solar spectrograph built by Prof. Graham and Cyndi Bresloff. We used the spectrograph to extract sub-pixel Doppler shifts in the solar photosphere and use the measured velocity gradient to infer the solar radius and hence the sun-earth distance. After the class was completed, Prof.Graham approached me about creating a poster on the spectrograph experiment as a teaching tool to be displayed at the summer 2005 American Astronomical Society (AAS) conference. The techniques used in the experiment are similar to those used in the search for extra-solar planets; presenting the poster allowed me to promote the use of inquiry-based undergraduate lab experiments that have direct ties to current observational techniques.