Vivian U

I visited a pre-school class of two dozen four-year-olds for Career Day to talk about what it's like to be an astrophysicist! We explored the scale of the universe, ran an IR camera demo (complete with ice), passed around a Roman Space Telescope model, and tried on diffraction glasses. Based on the conversations the kids had with their parents afterward, it seems to have been a hit — you're never too young to catch the space bug!

Excited to share our group's JWST results on active black holes with students at Scottscale Community College and Chandler Gilbert Community College as part of the NASA Community College Network Shapley Lecture series. Speaking to students about becoming a scientist and an astronomer is reallly one of the best parts of this job!

My first Astronomy on Tap debut at none other than Mi Chola in Aspen! I think usually there are 2-3 short talks, but in this case, I was (nearly) a one-woman show, complemented by my host Gautham Narayan with trivia questions and awesome swags. It was a ton of fun!

Excited to be recommended by Presidential Medal of Freedom awardee and JWST Chief Scientist Jane Rigby to be an invited speaker at the TEDx Manhattan Beach event in November 2024! I look forward to sharing with everyone what we have learned about the nearby universe from the JWST thus far.

PBS Nova has an episode on the new results from JWST called New Eye on the Universe that features, among other great teams, our GOALS Collaboration! It was a lot of fun filming for this episode, and it is suitable for sharing JWST results with families and kids. Thanks to this Nova episode, I now have my own IMDb page!

I join 3 other women scientists on a panel to discuss sustainability and inclusivity as part of the 2023 Global Women's Breakfast event held by the National Academies Board on International Scientific Organizations, representating the International Unios of Pure and Applied Physics. Let's break barriers for women and achieve sustainable development goals!

I am excited to be able to connect with alumni from UCI's School of Physical Sciences and to share our latest JWST results in a public talk for the first time at this Celebrate Physical Sciences event!

I have been interviewered by a variety of online media sources where I discussed specifically JWST and the science that my collaborators and I do with this fantastic instrument. Here are the links to several of the press articles or podcasts:

• Aug 2022: New Scientist: JWST has caught two galaxies smashing together and sparking starbursts
• Jul 2022: Nature: Landmark Webb telescope releases first science image — astronomers are in awe
• Jul 2022: Only Sky: An astonishing new tool reopens the question of human significance
• Feb 2022: UCI Grad Division: Q&A With Vivian U
• Dec 2021: California Science Center Ever Wonder? podcast: ...how scientists will use the James Webb Space Telescope? (with Vivian U)
• Dec 2021: Scientific American: Galaxy Collisions Preview Milky Way’s Fate
• Sep 2020: Extragalactic pioneer
• Sep 2020: Webb Space Telescope: NASA's Webb Telescope Will Explore the Cores of Merging Galaxies
• Sep 2020: NASA: NASA's Webb Will Explore the Cores of Merging Galaxies

The Challenger Learning Center of Alaska hosted a JWST Community Event where folks gathered for a night of space fun and explored the amazing capabilities of JWST. I was only able to join virtually, but nonetheless had a pleasant experience engaging the audience and sharing my excitement about using JWST to study supermassive black holes and interacting galaxies. I even fielded questions about observing exoplanets and "faraway galaxies" with JWST, and hopefully did my colleagues proud!

NASA's Universe of Learning is an integrated astrophysics STEM learning and literacy program. In particular, I participated as a Subject Matter Expert and shared with an engaging audience of 100(!) my excitement about using JWST to study nearby galaxy mergers in the August 2021 Science Briefing series. Safe launch and deployment, JWST!

The Breakthrough Junior Challenge is a global competition for students age 13-18 to discuss complex scientific topics within life sciences, physics, or mathematics in engaging and creative 3-minute videos. Honored to serve as a judge, I was quite impressed with how these high-school students demonstrated their mastering of college-level concepts and with the imaginative ways they showed in carrying out effective science communication.

Since 2019, I have been a penpal to a middle schooler through the Letters to a Pre-Scientist Program where we exchanged hand-written letters four times over the course of the academic year. Targeting low-income middle schools, this program connects STEM professionals to students who love (or hate) sciences, some of whom might otherwise not have considered continuing education beyond high school. For me, not only was this an opportunity to personally connect with young kids and spread the joy of working in a STEM field, but it gave me an excuse to practice handwriting and use my cool stamps on actual letters!

Giving public lectures challenges us to really understand our research both at the fundamental level and in the context of relevant press releases to be able to explain it to the taxpayers how astronomers are pushing the frontier of knowledge as a whole. This summer, I was honored to have been invited to give talks at both the Riverside Astronomical Society as well as the Lick Observatory Summer Series' Music of the Spheres and to engage the public at a personal level. My Lick talk has been posted here:

https://slideslive.com/38909510/monitoring-the-growth-of-monster-black-holes

It was a blast volunteering at the UCI Eclipse Viewing Party on campus serving a huge crowd of 1000+ from within the community. All the activities from telescope viewing to science demos and kids craft station were immensely popular. It was also a great opportunity just to enhance public interests in science in general.

Serving on the UCI Women in Physics and Astronomy executive committee, the UCI departmental Committee on Inclusive Excellence, and the UCI Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion, I advocate for the inclusion and equal opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities (URM), particularly victims of harassment, in physics and astronomy. Changes to improving the field's climate for women and URM start with raising awareness and should be followed by actionable items, which include communication of specific issues and application of the corresponding remedies on the part of those in power.

As a TMT affiliate, I participated in the Journey through the Universe (JTTU) event that took place in Hilo, Hawaii in early March, 2015. It was the annual astronomy outreach event jointly hosted by the 'Imiloa Astronomy Center and all the other observatories. As part of the eventful week, I held a family-centered discussion with a public talk on Colliding Galaxies, and went into a high school classroom as an astronomy ambassador to talk about optics and planets.

In December 2014, I gave a public talk at UC Riverside to ~60 people on how merging galaxies give rise to supermassive black holes. Questions about black holes from the audience are almost always as fun as giving the talk itself! This series of public talks as given by faculty and postdocs (sometimes in Spanish) seeks to educate the public about the breadth of astronomy.

As the astronomy outreach program at UCR takes off, I have had to chance to participate in several activities, including eclipse viewing (only do so under safe conditions!) and folding origami stars with high school female students.

When I was a graduate student at the IfA, our outreach committee was very involved in spreading astronomy throughout the island, including the annual IfA Open House, stargazing, and starlab. As a city, Honolulu suffered sufficient light pollution that the starlab shows we presented with our portable planetarium at various schools remained the best option for children to learn about the night sky.