A multi-institutional team of space researchers, led by BU astrophysicist Merav Opher, won a major new grant from NASA that she hopes to use to support diversity in the field as much as discovery.
Headquartered at Boston University, Opher’s SHIELD (Solar wind with Hydrogen Ion charge Exchange and Large-scale Dynamics) DRIVE Science Center studies how the sun shapes the solar system. It also invests in outreach to train, recruit, and retain underrepresented populations in space plasma and in related fields of electrical and computer engineering.
“I want to try to reach people who fall between the cracks, because they’re not the right sensibility or [because of] their gender or they’re an immigrant,” says Opher, one of the few woman theoreticians in the field. “We can scoop them up and embrace them.”