The Role of Leadership in the Journey to Gender Equity
03-24-17
In celebration of Women’s History Month, a panel discussion was organized to explore the steps taken to date by JPL and Caltech leadership to recruit, retain, and promote a diverse talent pool. The panel was moderated by Cinzia Zuffada, the JPL Associate Chief Scientist. The panelists were Caltech Professor Melany Hunt, JPL Director for the Office of Safety and Mission Success Jan Chodas, and JPL Deputy Director Larry James. The panelists shared some accomplishments in gender equality over the last decade, and highlighted the next steps. Professor Hunt broadened the topic beyond Caltech to share successful approaches used by MIT, Harvey Mudd, and Boeing. She emphasized the importance of changing the culture and environment to be more accepting and encouraging to women and minorities. For example, training supervisors on ways to effectively mentor under-represented groups and identify their own biases as they sit on evaluation and promotion committees. [Event details]
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MCE
KISS
Melany Hunt
JPL
Cinzia Zuffada
Larry James
Jan Chodas
2011 Caltech Space Challenge
09-20-11
The Caltech Space Challenge was a Keck Institute for Space Studies workshop led by Aerospace graduate students Prakhar Mehrotra and Jon Mihaly. It brought together two teams of students from around the world to develop plans for deep-space missions that could carry humans to an asteroid and back. Both teams planned missions to an asteroid known as 1999 AO10, which is between 45 and 100 meters in length and is thought to have a relatively slow spin rate. Since relatively little is known about this asteroid, both teams called for robotic precursor missions that could gather information needed to help plan the later human mission. The competing mission descriptions, from Team Explorer and Team Voyager, were so evenly matched that the jurors had to use three different judging methods to finally settle on a winner. In the end, the victory and shiny new iPads went to Team Voyager. [Caltech Feature] [NPR Broadcast]
Tags:
GALCIT
KISS
Prakhar Mehrotra
Jon Mihaly
Space Challenge
