STEM Center and Learning Community Speaker Series

UPCOMING:
From the Community to the Stars - A woman's Journey!
Thursday, March 18, 2021
3:40 pm — 5 pm

STEM Speaker Series

Meet A Scientist: From Community College to NASA

Tuesday, February 2, 2021
3:30 pm — 5 pm

Join Dr. Farisa Morales, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), as she shares insight on career possibilities in STEM. This event is open to students in COM’s STEM Learning Community. Presentation and Q&A will take place in Canvas and livestreamed on YouTube.

About Dr. Farisa Morales

Dr. Farisa Morales is an active astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who hunts for planets and seeks to understand their formation, and is also a professor at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), and Moorpark College. Born in the US, Morales was raised in Jalisco, Mexico, where she completed her primary education.

As a teenager, she and her family migrated back to the US, where she completed high school in the Los Angeles County public school system. At 18 years of age, Morales married and began a family. With a three-year-old daughter and a six-month old baby, she began her college education at L.A. Mission Community College, where she majored in Mathematics.

The summer she transferred to UCLA, she participated in Caltech’s SURF internship program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Her summer internship turned into an academic part-time job at JPL, and while raising her kids, Morales graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Astrophysics from UCLA and continued on to a Master’s degree in Physics from CSUN.

Her work on planetary debris disks at JPL with the Spitzer Space Telescope evolved into her PhD dissertation project and attained her PhD in Physics from USC in 2011. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, Morales studies stars with planetary debris disks—the dusty ring-like structures, home to colliding asteroids and sublimating comets, that circle stars like the Sun, and hint at planet formation processes, their architecture, and composition. Morales also searches for the planetary companions stirring and carving the dust around nearby stars. She uses the powerful 10-meter Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the 5-meter Hale Telescope at Palomar Mountain in California to hunt for planets. These telescopes have been adapted with optics that enable us to mask the star’s intense radiation and see the faint infrared light from the orbiting planets. As a teacher, Morales has had the great fortune to involve CSUN and Moorpark College students in astronomical research at NASA’s JPL, opening the doors to a new generation of space explorers.