Mentorship
Effective mentoring is a vital skill for academics to develop, but similar to education, very few astrophysicists receive training in mentorship. As such, I have centered gaining mentorship experience and training throughout my career.
Intent to Impact
In Fall 2022, I completed the Intent to Impact mentoring course offerred by Movement Consulting. The course is extremely informative and transformative, focusing on creating a radically nourishing space where academics can be vulnerable and learn to center the experiences and voices of people of marginalized identities. Through self-reflection, readings, and interactive lessons, Intent to Impact helped me become even more aware of my positions of privilege as well as the systemic oppression within academia and our society at large. Importantly, the course also gave me the tools to form stronger relationships with my colleagues and community, resist systemic oppression, and resolve conflicts.
Research mentoring
In Summer 2024, I began mentoring one undergraduate student, Ricardo Mendez. Ricardo's project is described on my Science page. Beginning in early 2025, I began supervising two more undergraduates in research, Luke Moffett and Dilhan Flores. I have also engaged in informal research mentoring of students in my research groups at Texas A&M and Dartmouth College.
Ricardo is now a PhD student at UW Madison!
Peer mentoring: MAGIC and GASP
Alongside Taylor Hutchison, I founded Mentoring and Advising Graduates in an Inclusive Community (MAGIC), a program at Texas A&M that matches incoming astronomy graduate students to a network of current graduate student mentors, including one dedicated primary mentor for each incoming student.
We aim to build a supportive, inclusive, non-judgmental, and compassionate community for graduate students at Texas A&M. In this way, MAGIC provides a built-in community and support system for incoming graduate students.
In addition to monthly group meetings that serve to build a community and demystify graduate school for new students, mentors meet with their mentees every month. Through entry, mid-year, and exit polls, MAGIC shows significant improvement in students feeling both prepared for graduate school and certain that they belong in graduate school.
I served as MAGIC coordinator from 2019–2021, and I served as a MAGIC mentor from 2019 until I graduated with my PhD in 2022.
In 2024, alongside Quinn Casey at Dartmouth College, I founded the Graduate Academia Survival Program (GASP), a peer-mentoring program for incoming first year graduate students, modeled after MAGIC. We match incoming graduates with graduate student and postdoctoral mentors, and hold full group meetings multiple times per term to provide all new graduates with a strong community, a direct support network, and clarifying information about the graduate program.
Postdoc-Graduate Student Mentoring
After becoming a postdoc at Texas A&M in 2022, I took leadership of the postdoc-graduate student astronomy mentoring program. In this program, each astronomy graduate student is assigned a postdoc to serve as their informal mentor, meeting once per month over the course of the year. The purpose of the program is for the postdocs to provide an avenue of support for the graduate students, providing guidance and resources as they navigate graduate school and academia. As leader of the program, I coordinated the mentor-mentee pairings and served as a mentor to three phenomenal graduate students.
In this role, I also coordinated the postdoc-faculty mentoring program, wherein each astronomy postdoc is assigned an astronomy faculty member outside of their direct supervisor to serve as an informal mentor. As with the postdoc-graduate student program, faculty meet with their postdoc mentees each month to provide support and guidance for navigating academia.
PENGUIN
A number of community creations were born during the 2025 choir conference that I organized as a member of choir. One of these creations is Preparing the Emerging Next Generation Using Inclusive Networking (PENGUIN), a network creating one-step-ahead mentors across multiple academic institutions for early career researchers in astronomy. I have served as a mentor in this program since 2025.