(music playing and sound of typing)
I'm Jessica Taylor, and I bring NASA science to the public in fun and engaging ways.
Our Earth system is all connected. And for us to understand the complex Earth system,
we have to understand from a global perspective, all the way down to that local perspective --
which is what citizen scientists, volunteers on the ground, can help us with.
Through the My NASA Data project, we are providing NASA's Earth science data directly to the student or to the teacher.
And that's really where the name My NASA Data came from --
because we want NASA's Earth science data to be your Earth science data,
so you can understand what's going on in the environment.
When I'm not working, I'm mostly spending time with my family.
I have two girls that are very active.
We enjoy going to the beach together,
we enjoy swimming together,
and we enjoy dancing together. I used to dance a lot growing up and so it's really fun to be able
to share that hobby with them.
Well, I first became interested in meteorology in particular because a teacher of mine asked me
to do a project on something that I was interested in.
I decided to study lightning.
I loved watching thunderstorms, and I just thought they were beautiful.
In this project, what I learned was that scientists were still learning about how lightning happens,
and I just thought that was really cool that you could get a job learning about things that were of interest to you.
And, to me, that's really kind of the definition of a scientist - is learning about things that are happening in our natural world.
Working for NASA is pretty cool. I'm not gonna lie.
What I'm doing is allowing people to see that they are a part of answers and solutions to the Earth system.
And that everyone can practice being a scientist.
And everyone can have a voice in understanding what's going on with our environment.
(music playing)