Life takes interesting turns, and mine took me to the Bay Area. It’s a place I long dreamed of moving to after completing a internship in 2011 at NASA Ames in South Bay. After my short tenure pursuing a PhD on the East Coast, I wanted to get back out west. I applied for several jobs in the Bay Area and with luck I was hired as a Science Instructor at the Chabot Space & Science Center in the amazing Oakland hills. This center has three observatories, several classrooms, a megadome, and a world class planetarium (that has both an analog Zeiss projector AND a Digital Sky digital system.

My duties are primarily to educate K-12 students about the wonders of the Universe, and teach them to be good stewards of the Earth. I’ve been trained on our portable inflatable Cosmic Ray Planetarium, as well as several in-house classroom lessons relating to space and sustainability. It’s been great getting to know the team at Chabot and even better being able to work in the field of Astronomy.