PPPL Young Women’s Conference speaker urges attendees to ‘reach for the stars’

Mike Morsch, Regional Editor
NASA aerospace engineer Aprille Ericsson told more than 600 seventh- to 10th-grade girls at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s Young Women’s Conference that she was depending on them to pursue their dreams and make their ideas a reality in the wide-open field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)., “You guys are very capable of so many ideas and I’m depending on you,” Ericsson told theaudience at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium at the March 23 event. “Don’t be scared to keep pushing forward until you achieve your dream.”, The purpose of the Young Women’s Conference is to inspire young women to enter STEM fields. The number of women in STEM fields has doubled in the past two decades, but while half of all college-educated employees are women, they still make up just 29 percent or less than one-third of the STEM workforce in the U.S., according to the National Science Foundation., The conference was the 16th hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the biggest to date with girls coming from schools from all over New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They spent the day doing hands-on science activities at some 30 exhibits in Princeton’s Frick Chemistry Laboratory, and they listened to talks by female engineers and watched colorful chemistry experiments before coming together for Ericsson’s keynote speech., Students got to test substances on a soiled car seat to determine if the substance was (simulated) blood. They tried out 3-D goggles and built models of the DNA of a virus., “They explored a lot of new science topics,” said organizer Deedee Ortiz, the program administrator in PPPL’s Science Education Department. “This is an opportunity that the majority of these girls would never have otherwise.”, PPPL had several displays in which students learned about plasmas, watched a 3-D printer at work, learned about how a computer is built, and got to try on firefighting equipment. Kathryn Wagner, of Princeton University, showed students chemistry experiments in which she made substances go “boom” and turn bright colors.  Students heard talks by Jyoti Sharma, a wireless engineer for Nokia, and Valeria Riccardo, head of engineering at PPPL., “It’s all cool science,” said Annie Dykstra, an eighth-grader from John Witherspoon Middle School in Princeton. Her teacher, Janet Gaudino, was equally enthusiastic. “I love it and I know the girls love it,” she said. “There are so many activities and all it takes is one booth for a girl to say, ‘I want to do that.’ You can’t manufacture that level of engagement in a class.”, In her address, Ericsson, the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Howard University, recounted how she became a scientist. Growing up in Brooklyn, Ericsson said she was inspired to go into a space-related field by movies like “Star Wars” and television shows like “Star Trek.”, By persevering, she became an engineer for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center just outside Washington, DC, in Greenbelt, Maryland. She was the project manager or engineer for numerous instruments, including the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) that measures the topography of the moon on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Mission, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009., Ericsson told students she believes humans could travel to Mars in their lifetime but only if future scientists solve some major challenges in the next decades. She charged the young women in the audience with that task. “We need you guys to develop new launch vehicles that will get us there,” she said., When astronauts look down to Earth from the International Space Station they don’t see any boundaries, Ericsson told the audience, “so there shouldn’t be any boundaries for us to work together. You are part of that dream and vision for diversity.”, PPPL, on Princeton University’s Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas — ultra-hot, charged gases — and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. The laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the largest single supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.