Diversity in Astronomy

It is my opinion that as space inspires all, astronomy and astrophysics should be welcoming and inclusive to all. Currently people from many different groups are under-represented in astrophysics as an academic field. I am passionate about addressing the current imbalance and making astronomy wholly inclusive and through initiatives reaching from individual to institute scales.

IDEEA (Inclusion, Diversity and Equity in European Astronomy)

With Dr. Gabriele Betancourt-Martinez, I set-up and helped to run the community IDEEA, where those working within astronomy can come together to discuss the issues surrounding inclusion, diversity & equity within the field, with a focus on the experiences and working environments found in Europe.

Born out of the pandemic, IDEEA provided an online community to discuss EDI issues for 4 years. You can find the website here here.

I frequently talk about EDI initiatives. I gave a talk at the international conference ESO ASTRO 2022: The present and future of astronomy in Feb. 2022 on behalf of IDEEA entitled 'The present and future of the state of diversity in astronomy.' Furthermore, IDEEA co-organised the Diversity Day at EAS 2022, hosting an IDEEA-run lunch session with interactive activities, discussions and more, which I hosted. I also presented a talk at EAS 2023, discussing diversity and early career researchers. Finally, I was an invited speaker at EAS 2025, where I spoke about mental health and observatory work.

I have written for the UK-based organisation POCSquared, which seeks to highlight the contributions of people of colour to science. In this blog-post I chose to highlight the contribution of the First Nations people of Australia to ancient astronomy, who within their oral traditions documented phenomena such as stellar variability.

During my PhD, I really enjoyed working on the ‘Astronomy for All’ Workshop at the University of Leeds where we developed new signs in British Sign Language to make astrophysics more accessible to the deaf community.

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