Yale and Wright Lab have partnered with the GAINS Network again to host the 2022 Girls Advancing in STEM (GAINS) Conference on November 13-15, 2022.
The GAINS conference brought together 121 high school female and non-binary students along with 30 teachers from public, private, and charter schools across the United States who have an interest in STEM with 54 volunteer scientists from Yale University and several from Sikorsky Aircraft to explore STEM topics and careers.
Originally, GAINS had planned to hold an in-person conference at Yale in April 2022, but plans changed due to the pandemic. The April conference was changed to a remote conference, with the agenda slightly condensed, and it took place on April 7-8, 2022, via Zoom. See this article for more information about Wright Lab’s role in the April conference.
The Fall 2022 conference opened on Sunday night with a keynote address from associate professor of biomedical engineering Anjelica Gonzalez. On Monday, students were on the main Yale campus and attended a networking and connection session, a panel discusssion, various STEM tours, a career mixer, and an evening activty at the “It” ropes course. On Tuesday, students went to West Campus for tech talks and additional STEM tours.
The full agenda and session descriptions of the conference can be found at the conference website, linked below.
In addition to assisting with the coordination of the logistics of the conference, Wright Lab hosted one of the STEM tours on Monday, November 14.
The tour opened with a brief tour of some of the Wright Lab instrumentation development facilities–including the Teaching and Research machine shops, the Advanced Prototyping Center, clean rooms, and the “Vault” assembly area–given by Wright Lab program manager Victoria Misenti. Next, the students travelled to individual lab spaces to interact with the following Wright Lab members and talk to them about their research and career experiences: postdoctoral associates Mike Jewell (HAYSTAC) and Pranav Sanghavi (CHIME/Newburgh Lab); and graduate students Emily Pottebaum (CUORE/Heeger-Maruyama Lab), Ananya Rai (RHIG), Youqi Song (RHIG), Andrew Tamis (RHIG), Molly Watts (SIMPLE), Sierra Weyhmiller (RHIG), and Sierra Wilde (nEXO).
Photos from the tour can be found on our Flickr page here.
The conference was coordinated by Monica Ortiz, the director of GAINS; Karin Shetty, the assistant director of GAINS; Diane Reardon, School Store Manager at Greenwich Academy; Victoria Misenti, program manager at Wright Lab; and Ann Rho, director of development for science strategy at Yale .