STARS IN HER EYES
Meg Walker meets NASA datanaut and women in STEM advocate Fionnghuala O’Reilly
MY INTEREST IN STEM WAS IGNITED AT A YOUNG AGE I always gravitated towards maths. I love a quantifiable challenge and being able to find a specific answer. My dad, who’s from Dublin, was in the military, so by the time I was 20, I’d lived in or travelled to 20 different countries and went to 11 different schools. When I was living in San Francisco, there was a programme at UC Berkeley in California that my maths teacher encouraged me to apply for. I was 14 or 15 and this was the first time I started learning to code, and someone broke down for me what it really meant to be a scientist, technologist, engineer or mathematician – at that age, I wasn’t looking out for those careers. When I applied to university, I knew I wanted to be an engineer, and I did my degree in systems engineering at George Washington University in Washington DC.
WORKING FOR NASA A friend said to me, “I’ve heard about this programme, and think you’d be great for it.” The datanauts programme is one of NASA’s Women in Data initiatives to spotlight more women in data science. I looked at everything I needed to qualify, and although I had reservations, I thought, this would be unbelievable. I had never been interested in space – it wasn’t something I ever thought I could do because I didn’t know people who looked like me doing it; but as soon as I saw this programme, I knew it would be an amazing direction to move into. I work remotely from Dublin. It’s an international programme so the 49 other people in my class live all over the world and we work on different innovative products and processes for NASA, and it’s all utilising the open data from NASA’s experiments.
ENCOURAGING WOMEN INTO STEM I’ve worked with nonprofits and different organisations over the last couple of years to promote diversity and women working in industries that are dominated by men. It’s 2019 and there’s still a massive wage gap and very few women in executive positions, and there are still very few women of colour working in these industries. Out of all Fortune 500 companies, there are currently 33 that have women CEOs, and out of those 33 there are zero black women, zero Hispanic women, and I believe just two women of Asian descent. I’ve never let anything deter me. Sometimes people can be discouraged when they don’t see others like them working in an industry, but we are here and I think it’s time we create visibility for women who are breaking stereotypes. I’ve seen a massive amount of support both in Ireland and internationally from people who realise the need to spotlight women who are doing dynamic things. I’m the director of the NASA Space Apps Challenge in Washington DC – NASA’s global annual hackathon. It’s international, and there are 200 locations in over 75 countries. It’s one of NASA’s ways of encouraging diversity and collaborative innovation. It runs October 18-20, so I’ll be going to Washington DC to host the event and we’re running a #ReachfortheStars hashtag to spotlight really amazing women working in STEM to show younger girls that there is so much you can do working in STEM, and that it’s cool to be able to create a career for yourself. Last year, I was also at the launch and landing of the InSight mission to Mars, and was invited to put out programming for over 80,000 women and girls interested in STEM. I was able to partner with Girls Who Code so that we could put out a behind the scenes tour of the Jet Propulsion Lab.
ROLE MODELS Mathematician Katherine Johnson is inspiring to me. Working as a human computer in NASA at a time when it was very hard for women of colour in that part of the States, she never let anything deter her from pursuing her goals. I am one of six sisters, and my mum has always encouraged me to be myself and embrace my uniqueness – my hair was a massive issue for me growing up. As an African-American, my mum embraced her differences and showed us that it was okay to come from a diverse background.
NO LIMITS My ultimate goal would be to go into space, but there are many things I want to do. I would love to have my own tech company, to be able to use my platform to not only make those dreams come true for myself, but to encourage other women, particularly Irish women of colour, to reach for their highest goals. Working in STEM has taught me confidence and how to walk into a room and be strong when I have an opinion. If you don’t stand by your ideas, then you won’t be able to move forward in your career.