Waching daily Aug 1 2018

I'm Alessandra Abe Pacini and I'm the CEO of InSpace LLC, which is a company dedicated

to outreach and education products in space science.

I'm also now visiting scientist at Arecibo Observatory doing some space weather research

and solar astrophysics investigations.

I was born in San Paulo, which is a very big city, and I was inspired by astronomy topics

since I was young.

My father always had many scientific books in our house so I've been always reading about

sky and technology, and I always like it.

During my college, I actually started working with Solar Physics Center of Radio Astronomy.

I went to talk to this professor ,Jon Pierre Holar and he end up being my advisor

for six years.

And he showed me a movie of the sun exploding and rotating and I just thought it was so

beautiful.

So my first research topics was solar flares and radio waves and how the electrons got

accelerated and it's just a crazy lab and it's awesome.

When you see the picture of my defense you only have men, the professors, and my first

PhD.

The second one I already had already an opponent in my defense and she was a woman from Greece,

but very late in my career I start working with women in science.

And there's a story I got inspired and starting writing a book absolutely a girl who get a

telescope and then start discovering the sky, and this became a series of books and the

books had the preface written by females scientists from different parts of the world.

When they start kindergarten, everybody is interested in science the same way.

The girls and the boys, they are talking about it, but something happens in the end of elementary

school and the beginning of middle school that the girls just disappear from this topic.

So something needs to be to help these girls to keep engaging, because then when they are

in high school, we already lost these girls, and that's why I wrote these books and target

is these age group, from 9-13.

I want to reach out those girls to try and inspire them to come to science and understand

the beauty of thinking in space and become a future AGU member.