Schools

MHS Teacher, Students Join NASA Research Project

Monrovia High School teacher Pamela Thompson and three MHS students were selected to team up with a NASA scientist for a national astronomy research project.

A science teacher beat out "fierce" competition and was selected to participate in a NASA astronomy research project, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Wednesday.

Pamela Thompson, an astronomy and earth sciences teacher at MHS, will partner with Dr. Varoujan Gorjian of NASA and a team of three other teachers in conducting astronomical research over the next year that will be presented to the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

Thompson will enlist the help of three students from the school's Math and Science Academy--Gabriel Uribe, Tressa Mikel, and Mary McGeeney--to conduct research in the classroom.

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"This program is unique because each team does original research using real astronomical data, not canned labs or reproductions of previously done research; and each team writes up the results of their research and presents it at a meeting of the AAS," said Dr. Luisa Rebull, staff scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), in a prepared statement. IPAC is funded by NASA and headquartered at the California Institute of Technology.

Thompson was one of 14 teachers chosen for the program out of a pool of 50 applicants, according to a NASA news release.

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"We are proud of Pamela Thompson for being chosen for this great honor. She will most certainly be an asset to this project," wrote MUSD Superintendent Linda Wagner in an email.

Thompson and her team will begin work on Monday after she returns from the AAS headquarters in Austin, TX, where she travelled Tuesday with other teachers chosen for the project. Her team will be studying the color and velocity of "active gallactic nuclei, which is a "fancy way of saying a center of a black hole," she said in a phone interview.

Thompson's team will be studying data produced by NASA sky surveys and she said she was thrilled with the prospect of doing original research.

"We have a lot of data thats available to us--real data--and that's kind of an exciting thing," she said. "We might discover something that no one has before, so that's really cool."


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