Leadership in the World of Stem and Beyond
The Majorville Medicine Wheel, located a short drive east of Siksika Nation in Southern Alberta, Canada, remains a sacred site for the Blackfoot. This Medicine Wheel dates back over 5,000 years. Remarkably, it is older than Stonehenge and located roughly at the same latitude.
It was well after midnight when Corey Gray got home from work at the California Institute of Technology’s and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Hanford, Wash. After getting some sleep, he checked his emails and one jumped out. His first thought after reading it: “It must be a test! This can’t be real!”
It was real. Shortly after Gray had returned home, in the early hours of September 14, 2015, LIGO had confirmed a prediction of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves over a century ago. LIGO’s discovery marked the first time gravitational waves were directly detected, the first direct observation of black holes, and the first confirmation that binary black hole systems exist in the universe. Additionally, this discovery meant a whole new way of observing and learning about the universe and ushered in an entirely new field of scientific inquiry, gravitational-wave astronomy.
Gray, a lead operator at LIGO, joined the Hanford Observatory in March 1998, a few months after graduating from Humboldt State University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. LIGO offered him the opportunity to join a project from its inception. Fast-forward 17 years to that monumental morning. “I do remember taking a moment after reading that email,” Gray says. “I thought about how we were part of history, and how something from the other side of the universe moved and vibrated metal and glass that my hands had touched!”
History had happened, but no one could say a word about it. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration was under an embargo not to reveal its results before confirming the detection, documenting it in writing, and crafting a plan to share the results with the world. During the embargo, Gray remembers watching a PBS documentary marking the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s theory. “It was so crazy that I knew this documentary would need to be updated with LIGO’s discovery!”
It struck a personal chord when Gray saw the LIGO data for the first time. “A month after we announced, I got a tattoo of the data from that first detection,” he says. “By happenstance, this was on Albert Einstein’s birthday, which was also Pi Day!”
When Gray gave a keynote at Humboldt’s American Indian College Motivation Day in November 2015, he had to remain silent. “I would have loved to share the scientific scoop of the century with all these Native high schoolers,” he says.
The big announcement was scheduled for February 11, 2016. To prepare for a global stage, LIGO brought in translators to draft the press release in different languages. An idea struck Gray. What about translating it into Blackfoot?
Gray doesn’t speak much Blackfoot, in large part because he didn’t often hear it. His mother, Sharon Yellowfly, grew up in Southern Alberta, Canada, where she was forced to attend one of the English-only residential schools that punished students for speaking their Native language. Fearing loss of the Blackfoot language and culture, at age 23 Yellowfly started jotting down all the words she could remember. She recorded her parents telling stories and then analyzed those words and added them to her burgeoning dictionary project.
Gray knew his mom would make the perfect translator. He emailed Dr. Joey Key, chair of the LIGO Outreach Group, and asked permission for his mom to have access to the monumental press release a couple of weeks before it was public, so she could translate the release into Blackfoot. Within two hours, Dr. Key wrote back a resounding yes.
Yellowfly agreed to participate, but she had a proviso: her son needed to be available when she had a query. “After all, it’s physics!” Yellowfly says. “But I was encouraged that Corey had faith I could do this.”
A big challenge arose when there were no similar words in the Blackfoot lexicon. For these words and concepts, Yellowfly got creative. When Gray heard his mother’s translations and the literal meanings of these new Blackfoot words in English, his first thought was poetry — “my mom is a poet for Albert Einstein and astrophysics!” he thought. One of his favorites is her translation of the general theory of relativity itself: bisaatsinsiimaan, with the literal translation meaning beautiful plantings. “My idea was to use a metaphor that would encapsulate the foundation of Einstein’s thinking,” Yellowfly explains. “Einstein was a brilliant man who gave ideas and stimulated queries in the scientific community because of his theory.”
When Gray heard his mother’s translations and the literal meanings of these new Blackfoot words in English, his first thought was poetry — “my mom is a poet for Albert Einstein and astrophysics!”
Yellowfly has translated six press releases for LIGO, and she and Gray collaborated on a YouTube video of her reading the original press release in Blackfoot. In June 2018, the duo gave a presentation at the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. “This was my first opportunity to share the work I do in traditional Blackfoot territory,” Gray says. “It was topped off by getting to meet many Blackfoot educators from Siksika.”
In September 2019, they presented at the University of Montana Western and McGill University in Montreal. Yellowfly, who stopped working on her dictionary after her parents died, has been inspired by her collaboration with her son to restart the project.
As for Gray, he is incredibly proud of his mom, and very excited about working with cutting-edge science in its infancy. “I think this is a hot ticket for study and a career,” Gray says. “We can slowly peck away at the idea of increasing diversity in the sciences by getting more Native Americans involved in it.”
— Ann S. Boor
The name “Echota” was chosen in 1980 by the members of this tribe, who are descendants of Indigenous people of Alabama who hid from or otherwise escaped the infamous Trail of Tears.
As a little girl Kaitlin Russell had a big imagination. Her father fueled it by sharing his love of science-fiction movies, so for young Kaitlin, colonizing Mars wasn’t far-fetched and, she reasoned, there would have to be pets on Mars when people lived there and someone had to take care of them. “I knew I wanted to do something with space,” she recalls. “Space veterinarian?”
Russell is enrolled with the Echota Cherokee and is a descendant of the Haudenosaunee people. She grew up in Prattville, Ala., near Montgomery, and attended the local high school. That’s where her sci-fi imagination started to focus on robotics. She was the first person to sign up when her school started a robotics club. She learned to use power tools and built her first robot from scratch, not a kit. Russell would go on to design a robot that would win a Most Photogenic award and a Founder’s Award for Creative Design.
She went off to college at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, about a three-hour drive from her home. “I chose courses related to rocket propulsion and space mission development,” she says. Throughout her time as an undergraduate, Russell participated in space-related extracurricular activity teams for projects such as rocketry and payload design and competed in research poster presentation competitions. “One of the research papers I helped work on is published online,” she says.
As she progressed in school, she set a new goal. “My dream job, as unlikely as it sounds, is to go to space as an astronaut,” says Russell, who wants to be the first Native American woman to travel into space. She knows all about Dr. John Herrington, Chickasaw, the first tribally enrolled Native American to walk in space, and she wants to follow in his orbital footsteps. “My destination of choice would have to be Mars,” she says, “but I would be happy going to the moon or staying on the International Space Station and doing experiments or repairs.”
She’s remained committed to robotics and going to space as well as introducing others to that world. Russell gave classes to kids about physics concepts, rocketry, and basic space botany and received a regional Volunteer of the Year award at a VEX Robotics competition in Montgomery, Ala. During high school she worked with the Alabama Inter-Tribal Council assisting Natives with Workforce Improvement Act initiatives, which help with education and job training. “I would love to see more Natives involved in STEM and robotics, as I feel we are severely underrepresented,” she says.
Then came another big award — in fact, a worldwide recognition. “The 2019 VEX World Robotics competition was very exciting, and I enjoyed watching the high school and middle school teams compete,” says Russell. “There were teams from all over the world, and I was particularly pleased to see that VEX recognized Native nations as their own nations during the Parade of Nations ceremony.”
For Russell, the event was especially exciting because, thanks to her STEM outreach and volunteer history, she was recognized with the honor of being one of three Inspiration All-Star Hall of Fame inductees. “I was very excited!” she says. Russell won the coveted title in April, and her name will soon be added to the VEX website.
Russell’s focus on space continues to be a constant in her life. She graduated from the University of Alabama in December 2018 with a BS in aerospace engineering. “I have worked on contracts for NASA, the Missile Defense Agency, and the Space and Missile Defense Command,” she says. Currently, she’s part of a team working on a CubeSat testing project. (Affordable cube satellites are miniature satellites that can orbit a planet.)
“My dream job . . . is to go to space as an astronaut,” says Russell, who wants to be the first Native American woman to travel into space.
She also works with NASA’s InSPIRESS program, a free, nationwide STEM-based program for high school students who compete in groups to develop a payload concept for a theoretical space mission.“Teams learn the design process, engineering concepts, and presentation skills that will help them when they enter the workforce,” she says.
Russell continues to work hard. “I currently work at the University of Alabama in Huntsville as a researcher,” she says, having started as a part-time research assistant and moving up to a full-time research associate helping run a research project.
She has been active in AISES since her undergraduate years and recently became a Sequoyah Fellow. She’s also hoping to be formally inducted at the National Conference in Milwaukee, and to have the opportunity to meet another Sequoyah Fellow, astronaut Dr. John Herrington.
After all, she would like to follow in Dr. Herrington’s footsteps. “I would like to become the first Native American woman in space, though I would still be excited if someone beat me to it,” she says. “The sooner that milestone is reached the better.”
— Patty Talahongva
For tens of thousands of years the vast homeland of the Fort Nelson First Nation, or “People of the Land,” has been the northeastern plains of British Columbia.
For Jacob Calderone, setting goals and following through on them has always been second nature. “I think that comes from my mother,” he says. “My mother uses her dedication and hard work to accomplish goals in her life. Her success motivates me to work as hard as I can for what I want.”
Although he is far from the Fort Nelson community in British Columbia, where many generations of his family lived, his closeness to his immediate family — and their support — has helped him discover and follow his passions. “I’m thankful that they allowed me to be my own person and choose what I wanted to do,” he says.
Calderone grew up in Toronto, where the urban environment, with its many diverse and vibrant communities, gave him lots of opportunities to explore. He went to Forest Hills Collegiate Institute, and found that its numerous class offerings actually made it more difficult for him to choose a path. “I took a wide range of classes, from French to music to history to physics,” he says. “I felt like I could only make a decision if I gave each course an honest and fair shot.”
He eventually fell in love with chemistry, math, and physics. The connections he drew between what he was learning in chemistry classes and the real world helped fuel that passion. He found that he was constantly looking for different ways to approach problems, and soon realized that he wants to be an engineer. “I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of combining health care and innovation in engineering,” Calderone says. Biochemical engineering felt like the right path.
Last fall he enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, but his transition from home to university hasn’t been entirely smooth. His course load has been challenging, and adjusting to the social aspects of university life has been difficult as well. “Everything was new and foreign, and sometimes I just felt lost and overwhelmed,” Calderone says. Having to meet new people, and find those with the same interests, has meant taking a big step out of his comfort zone.
Overcoming these difficulties was a matter of hard work and a positive attitude. The academic problems he tackled by putting in long hours studying. By dedicating himself to the task, he was able to excel. Addressing the social situation required approaching the issue from a different angle. Realizing, for instance, that everyone else around him was also feeling that overwhelming sensation of newness helped him move past it.
“During the few monthly meetings with the regional and national representatives everyone was so welcoming, and they made it abundantly clear that they will always be there to help me in any capacity necessary.”
Joining AISES also helped him find support. He was one of only two first-year students on the executive team in the Queen’s chapter of .caISES, and this summer he was elected the Canadian Junior National Representative. The support he’s received since has been overwhelming. “During the few monthly meetings with the regional and national representatives everyone was so welcoming, and they made it abundantly clear that they will always be there to help me in any capacity necessary,” he says. “I am so appreciative of it, and it makes me want to do the same for others.”
His goal-seeking hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. Calderone’s career aspirations lie within medicine, and he says he could see himself loving any part of that field where he’s able to keep learning and creating, whether that’s coming up with new drugs in the pharmaceutical industry or improving and replacing biological tissues in tissue engineering. “My ultimate career goal is to become a biochemical engineer who wakes up every day yearning to help others and make people smile and feel valued,” Calderone says. “I hope I can do just that in the very near future.”
— D.J. Pollard