EdEon News | May 9, 2025
NASA Neurodiversity Network Intern Presents at AGU 2024 on Eclipse Megamovie 2024 Project Work
Written by Hannah Hellman
NASA’s Neurodiversity Network (N3) was funded by NASA to make STEM education—particularly informal STEM education—more accessible to populations underrepresented in STEM education and workforces. N3 was inspired by Professor Lynn Cominsky’s work with an autistic student in her community, Alex, who started an informal project in the Sonoma State University lab at age 18. Cominsky fostered Alex’s interests in astronomy and physics, and Alex showed tremendous growth, not only in his academics, but in his self-efficacy regarding socializing and communicating ideas. Alex is currently pursuing a graduate degree in physics.
Lillian Hall, one of the N3 Interns, presented at the 2024 American Geophysical Union conference and was the first-ever N3 Intern to do so! She was accompanied by EM2024’s Juan Carlos Martinez Oliveros, and presented her work involving image calibration, registration, and co-location.
Eclipse Megamovie 2024 (EM2024) was funded by NASA to discover the secret lives of solar jets and plumes. EM2024 is similar to its predecessor in 2017, which was also organized by Dr. Laura Peticolas (Sonoma State University) and Dr. Carlos Martinez Oliveros (UC Berkeley). EM2017 recruited hundreds of citizen scientists who submitted tens of thousands of photos of the 2017 total solar eclipse. Their work aided efforts to study the Sun’s corona–something we can only study during total solar eclipses. Not only will the research and data collection method improve with this grant, the EM team will also be able to do more with the data collected in 2017. Many jets and plumes seem to disappear or change from the time they are formed on the Sun and when they move out into the solar wind. To learn more about these solar phenomena, we will use photographs taken by volunteers to identify solar jets as they leave the Sun’s surface and solar plumes as they grow and develop.