➜ Council of Elders member Phil Lane Jr. recently completed an interfaith peace mission to countries in the Middle East, including Jordan and Israel. Lane is CEO of the Four Winds International Institute and president of Compassion Games.
➜ AISES Board of Directors member Kristina Halona, program manager at Northrop Grumman’s Antares Systems Engineering, facilitated a live Q&A on the NASA Wallops Flight Facility Facebook page in advance of the February launch of an Antares rocket.
➜ In February Dr. John Herrington, the first tribally enrolled astronaut, participated on a panel at the National Air and Space Museum, in collaboration with the National Museum of the American Indian. Dr. Herrington and Alaska Native pilot Ariel Tweto discussed their IMAX film Into America’s Wild, described as an “unforgettable cross-country adventure into the hidden wonders of the natural world.” Dr. Herrington is a former member of the AISES Board of Directors.
➜ The Brookings Register published a profile of Morgan Catlett-Ausborn. She is the adviser for the AISES College Chapter at South Dakota State University, where she serves as program coordinator and retention advisor for Native students.
➜ Dr. Judith Brown Clarke has been appointed chief diversity officer at Stony Brook University, where she will serve on the University Council. In her previous role at Michigan State University, she served as diversity director of the Bio-Computational Evolution in Action Consortium.
➜ Northeastern State University senior Lindsay Howe was featured in both the Muskogee Phoenix and the Tahlequah Daily Press for her winning poster presentation at the 2019 AISES National Conference. The cellular and molecular biology major took home second place.
➜ As part of its observation of American Indian Heritage Month, the Naval Sea Systems Command website profiled James Herbert Oxendine. In addition to his personal background, the article included a description of his Lumbee heritage and pointed out that he has been active in AISES since he was a young student. Oxendine, who holds a master’s degree in material science engineering, is a system safety engineer with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division.
➜ AISES founding member J.C. Elliott High Eagle has completed “Malagueña Nueva,” a major work for classical guitar. An adaptation of the 1928 work “Malagueña,” by Ernesto Lecuona, High Eagle’s composition comprises a prelude and seven movements. High Eagle is a retired NASA physicist and a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers whose compositions have been performed by symphony orchestras around the country.
➜ MIT News, a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, featured Kristy Carpenter in an article titled “Computer Science in Service of Medicine.” Carpenter, a senior majoring in computer science and molecular biology, participates in leading the AISES College Chapter at MIT. She hopes to earn a doctorate and pursue computational approaches to biomedicine.
➜ A posthumous 2019 inductee of the National Native American Hall of Fame, Sequoyah Member Mary Golda Ross (d. 2008) was an inspiring trailblazer in aerospace. One of the country’s original rocket scientists and Lockheed’s first woman engineer, Ross did pioneering work for NASA. She was a strong advocate for STEM education and received the highest AISES honor, the Ely S. Parker Award. For more on Ross, see “Hidden Native Figures” in the Fall 2017 issue of Winds of Change.
➜ Tia LeBeau, Beau DuBray, and Allison Gross, students at Timber Lake High School in South Dakota, were interviewed for the Timber Lake Topic about their experiences at their first AISES National Conference. Two of the students, DuBray and Gross, participatedin the pre-college poster presentations in Milwaukee.
➜ The efforts of Jason Baldes to reintroduce bison to the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming were featured in an extensive story in the Great Falls Tribune. For more on Baldes, see the Fall 2017 issue of Winds of Change.