I was interviewed by the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), an international not-for-profit organization for advocating for women engineers, as part of their series highlighting Asian American early career professionals and graduate students. May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Below is my full interview.
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Caroline Juang is a Taiwanese-American scientist and artist from Long Island, NY, with an interest in Earth, space, and creating. She is currently a first-year Ph.D. student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University where she used satellite data and statistical modeling to understand natural hazards, particularly fire activity. She is motivated by her passion to increase access to opportunities in STEM and dedicates her time to mentoring students and volunteering for outreach and diversity initiatives in aerospace.
Tell us about your background: Where are you from, and what attracted you to the world of engineering or STEM?
I am an American-born Taiwanese and I grew up in Manhasset, NY, on Long Island. My parents have backgrounds in medicine and oncology. Their selflessness inspired me to be my best self. They gave me opportunities to explore many fields, which compels me to serve my community and give that same excitement I received about STEM to other young women and minorities. STEM attracts me because I can investigate the complexities of living and nonliving processes. I found my current research on how fire, vegetation, and human activities interact in today’s rapidly changing climate very fascinating.
What has been your personal experience as a (double) minority in STEM? What surprises (good or bad) have you encountered?
A New York Times article that came out this past December 2019 about the lack of minorities in graduate programs in geosciences was published in Nature Geosciences by Dr. Kuheli Dutt, Assistant Director for Academic Affairs and Diversity at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. I saw that some hallways at NASA were lined with older, white men. An article in Nature Communications in 2018 (Ford, Brick, Blaufuss, & Dekens) found that women were given fewer opportunities to speak or present compared to men at the largest American earth science conference. Despite these barriers, I am lucky that my Department encourages race and gender discussions. I am also fortunate to find other women and allies to whom I can share these discomforts and work with them to bring more diversity and inclusion.
Did you have any mentors or role models who helped shape your educational and/or professional path?
I am incredibly grateful to the many role models who have shaped my career path. I’m thankful to Dr. Dalia Kirschbaum, who was my supervisor at NASA GSFC. I’m also thankful to my senior thesis advisors Dr. Steve Wofsy and Dr. Bill Munger who oversaw my Harvard honors senior thesis research on statistical modeling carbon exchange. They made sure I had the tools I needed to do research, used their valuable time to walk me through challenging steps, believed in my ability, and pushed me when I was stuck. I am currently working with Dr. Park Williams at Columbia and am looking forward to learning from his research and STEM outreach!
What’s your first memory of wanting to pursue STEM?
In my senior year of high school, I applied for the NASA internships online and was offered to study landslides at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD when I transitioned from high school to college. I discovered that there is a lot to learn about the Earth from space, including tracking landslides using satellite data on rainfall. I declared Earth & Planetary Sciences as my concentration at the end of my freshman year at Harvard and continued my winding yet purposeful path through earth science and space.
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Read the full article on the SWE Blog.