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Melrose High School Senior Organizes Webinar To Highlight Women Role Models In The Space Industry

BOSTON (CBS) -- Even before Sally Ride was the first American female in space 38 years ago, women have been playing a major role in our journey to the stars. That mission of female leadership and scientific discoveries continues to inspire one generation to the next.

"I wanna be an aerospace engineer. So I want to build the rocketships, I want to help all the astronauts go into space and launch the satellites," said Melrose High School senior Randi Sullivan.

Randi has had a passion for math and science from a young age. "When I was younger, whenever I was learning about space, I always learned about the male astronauts. I never really learned about any females in the space industry."

As part of her senior project, Randi is hosting a webinar on Tuesday called First Girl To The Moon.

"I wanted to use this webinar as a source for younger girls, girls in my community to have different girl role models in the space industry, so they know that it's a possibility for them. It's hard to imagine yourself doing something if there is no one like you doing it," she explained.

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Juliana Garcia-Mejia (WBZ-TV)

The webinar features an inspiring all-female panel of scientists, including Juliana Garcia-Mejia, a Ph.D. student at Harvard who grew up in Colombia with an interest in astronomy at a young age.

"From a very, very young age I've had people in my family who have shown me through their actions their love for science and their love for leadership, and I think I have combined those two things into wanting to lead the building of the observatory you see behind me."

However, Garcia-Mejia said her path into a stem career has had its challenges.

"It has not been easy by any means, especially being a woman, who is also a woman of color in the sciences, has been very challenging and it has taken a lot of self-reflection in a sense of really learning to differentiate between the parts of the system that are making it harder for me to get to where I want to be, and the parts that I have to work on to become a better scientist. But I think when you are very young and a woman starting in the sciences you tend to confuse those two things and the messaging you get is that you aren't good enough or intelligent enough but in reality, intelligence is something we build every single day," Garcia-Mejia said.

She specializes in making telescopes and using them in our search for new planets.

"We took this old instrument and we're going to add a new camera to it have I have designed and built along with a group of wonderful engineers and scientists. And the idea is we are going to look for planets that are the same size as the earth but are orbiting around smaller, redder stars. The idea there is that if the star is smaller, your capability of detecting that earthlike planet comes greater," explained Garcia-Mejia.

A recording of the First Girl To The Moon event can be found on the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics YouTube channel. A link can be found here.

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