Ronald Gamble
Cosmic Pathfinders Program Update

Good morning.
Good morning.
Thank you for having me.
I am Ronald gamble.
I'm in the cosmic Origins Program office where I am kind of both a cosmic origins research scientist and then also a visiting assistant research scientist with UMD.
So I wear many hats, as you can see, but I'm here to kind of give you a little a very brief overview of what we're doing in the cosmic pathfinders program.
Where I'm the director of so very quickly and I'm sure we've we've kind of all seen this map, but there is there's a lot of science and this is part of the motivations for this program, lot of science.
But how do we get access to it?
More importantly, how do the students and early careers get access to all of the science that we're putting out? And then even further, the new science that's not out yet that their careers would be impacted later on VIS a VIS have worlds, right?
So that is kind of the motivation. And then also well, what what happens with their career advancement opportunities, internships, what have you, right, so.
Getting a little off the surface of the motivations of the program. This is kind of the map that I put together in terms of putting together the program.
So it's not just looking at the statistics, we can have those, but also how do we actually combine many things together, which we're trying to do in our missions.
Same ideas, but for people, right? For our early careers and our students.
That will be succeeding us. And so I looked at kind of a deeper understanding of what is it, what is it?
What is diversity actually mean?
And how how can we kind of derive a nonlinearity to this?
So I am a theorist by training.
So I I promise you there's no equations in here.
But that's about it.
And so it's a, it's a combination of mapping the cultural experiences, racial, ethnicity, gender, education thought, even other experiences, right?
How does all of that map together to give us something like the cosmic pathfinders program and play please?
There we go.
So as you can see this is kind of like a combination a very brief overview of our first year.
We started officially January 2024, so now we are one year kind of eclipsed and we've done a lot. And so we have now over 600 students and early career signed up in the first year and we probably after AA S this week it might.
Be over 700 and so the program is growing very, very fast.
And so it's almost growing too fast.
I have to keep up, but that's a good problems, right?
But one of the other things that.
It is doing very well, is it's capturing all of the students that were kind of missing all of the ones that either you're they're not getting the NASA internship that they would like or they're not getting postdocs. They're not getting into, you know, the grad programs that they.
Would like to right and so where are they going?
What opportunities are available for them?
What are they doing next?
And so that is the emphasis of the program.
Of course, we are capturing everybody that's in.
Their their you know program of choice.
Do that.
But I think something cut off.
Oh, there we go.
It gets back on.
And so this is kind of like a an overall demographic of or some demographics of what the actual participants are doing.
So we've reached students and early careers across pretty much every continent except Antarctica, and that is my 2025 goal.
I know there's somebody at Ice cube that wants to sign up here.
And so it just keeps turning off.
OK.
So kindly as you can see, we've got 55% domestic, 45% international and then across our here we go our individual spread these these are where our students.
This is our early careers are looking at. So we've done a really good job at capturing a lot of undergrads, but then also the I will kind of point you towards this post back gap year percentage.
12% of our sign ups are those post back gap years.
And.
We OK.
It's just going to keep going.
So we are trying to capture. We have students that are in the program, we have forensic science students who've signed up that want to pivot in their career because now they feel like they found an Ave. to actually pursue astrophysics where they couldn't see one before.
And so the program is open up to all STEM majors because we consider that not every university has an astronomy department.
And that's just facts.
Not every university has PhD departments either.
In physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, what have you?
And so we're really trying to run the full gamut of where exactly are early careers and students are.
So as you can see, we kind of have, we've got over 600, we've got over 400 in our private slack space.
And a kind of another interesting kind of caveats in terms of the reach of the program.
Is that including? Well, not including this invitation today, but in the past year we've received kind of over 10 to maybe 20 invitations to come speak and spread the idea of the program and actually give updates. So they it is very wide reaching.
And a new thing that we will be trying to capture more of is our online interactions.
So I did a quick check last night before I got up here and that is in fact over 100,000 kind of interactions.
Across our individual student leadership channels and my channels as well and our LinkedIn space, our slack space.
So all of our online footprint, we're building a lot of traction. The last thing that I will mention is that bottom box.
So we have launched over the first time university chapters in the program.
So we have three open petitions right now for university chapters.
This is exactly the same model as like an SPS chapter or.
Something and so this is now kind of inside NASA.
So I'm sure in the exopag may have some university chapters as well, but that is going to be very interesting because it gives us a chance to actually again.
Place kind of.
The NASA network.
The NASA footprint inside these departments now and now we can really capture.
We can really see what are the needs of the students.
And so right now we've got three student leaders.
All three are in grad school.
One is a master students at CUNY.
That's she's a first year and the other two are PhD candidates at UMD College Park. So as you can see there, they're usually very busy, but some of the benefits in being now a student leader in the program is that your travel is either covered or reimbursed. So.
Everywhere we are traveling to conferences.
As Saknas Nspp Agu, what have you? The students are going with me, essentially. And so again, that promotes an even higher level of career advancement. It gives them management training that they're actively getting by being a student leader.
So now they are knowing kind of the inside workings of. Well, what is cosmic origins do?
What do you do in the program office?
What exactly do we do in the program office?
And so they're now getting a better understanding and then are stepping up into their own universities and other outside.
Of this program into leadership roles across the broader community.
Another highlight of the program is our.
Speaker series. So we have what's called the cosmic chatter speaker series. I know I love these names.
And so the benefit of this series is that we it gives a platform for students and early careers to present their talks as if they're presenting like a, AAS.
But in this platform, these are invited talks.
They are recorded.
They are posted and blasted throughout the NASA astrophysics community so that the wider audience can get to know their work, who they are, and what opportunities. They're also looking for.
So those two one is now a master student at CUNY as well, and the other one is looking for graduate opportunities.
So this is part of the program.
This is part of what we're doing in the program and it's actually working fairly well.
The other thing inside of our cosmic chatter speaker series is we're bringing in.
Subject matter experts in veterans from the field to come talk to our students in our community and so in the fall, we had Jessica Harris give us a charting the cosmos.
It was a mentoring workshop for our students that was fairly well received and so another highlight that was recent was at Sacnas where we had kind of the first type of this session where we're combining.
Non science things with the science and so this session was the art of storytelling in stem.
And it was geared around a panel discussion.
In the first half.
In the second-half, a more interactive component talking about, well, how do you actually tell the story of science using other methods?
And so we looked at combining, well, how does science influence by art?
And you saw that from the astrobiology?
Artwork, which I'm actually very jealous of, but then also my background is in physics and Fine Arts. I was a double major in undergrad so but it it helps me.
In communicating the science, and I'm sure language is an art which we have to use in communicating our science.
Along with visual, how do you actually visualize your science? And so we had 150 participants in that one session with standing room only in saknas.
So that was a a very exciting highlight.
Will it play?
It will.
And so this is a QR code where you can actually find our chapter petition form that's on our cosmic origins website.
Site.
And the sign up form for signing up for the cosmic cathfunds program in my contact guest, my contact info is down there and I'll take any questions.
Thank you very much, Ron, and thanks for all this exciting work. Questions go ahead.
This is Gillen bergston, University of Arizona.
Can you tell us about some of the logistical and administrative support that goes into organizing this program and maybe some ways that the Exoplanet Office can support a similar program in the way that the cosmic pathfinders is?
Yeah. So this program is.
In the first year, it was kind of like a pilot, so we did receive some.
Funding. I did receive some a small little little bit of funding from our program office to support the travel both of our students and to support the compensation of our invited speakers, right. So our subject matter experts that are coming in outside of NASA in the Astro commun.
And things like that. Other than that, in terms of administrative support, it's it's more or less in house. So a lot of it is kind of.
It's a lot of it is me and our student leadership, which we will be expanding to.
A maximum of seven. So we have 3 right now. So more hands make light work.
But again, it is I I can imagine as the program grows, especially after the first year, more support will come.
And I've already been in talks with.
The ExEP about how we can kind of collaborate and do you know that the C3PO as we call it collaboration, right.
So yeah, more more.
I.
I trust that more will come.
Thank you.
Another quick question we can take. Yeah, please go ahead.
Hi, Jonathan.
Jpl.
This is fantastic.
Are you doing some tracking as the years go by in the future of undergraduates are in the program. Whether this help them to get into Graduate School and careers?
Getting some feedback from them, then super quickly.
Is there a chance of propagating this also?
To planetary at NASA, doing a planetary pathfinders program.
That's another field that desperately needs something like this.
Yeah. So to answer the second one very quickly, I've not thought about that.
I I would need my my people from planetary to help me out on that one.
And so maybe maybe somebody from planetarium, the exoplanets.
I think I see Amber in the back. Yeah, so maybe we'll have to talk about that and see how we can kind of clone this for others.
But to address kind of the first question, yeah. So we are tracking.
We actually had a high school student try to sign up last year.
Who's been following the program?
Who's been kind of seeking some advice from our our workshop and things, and it helped him get into University of Iowa, where he's now an Astro major and now he's in the program.
So we're seeing kind of the matriculation, but one metric we are tracking very quickly in 2025 is members of the program. If they have signed up for NASA internships, yes or no. And if they have, did you get it?
And where did you see if you saw it in our program and you got into a NASA internship? That's a win.
And so that's what we're trying to track, yeah.
All right.
Thank you very much again