I'm Dr. Lynnae Quick and I study volcanoes on the planets and moons in
our solar system. One of my biggest inspirations was Dr. Beth Brown and she
was an astrophysicist here at NASA. To see an African American woman succeeding
in science in a field where there aren't many minorities and aren't many
women, was inspiring to me. I really was not a big science geek until high school.
I took a biology course my freshman year in high school and had an excellent
teacher. And that's when I decided that science was cool. Then by my junior
year of high school, I took an earth science course, and one of the units that
we cover it was astronomy. I became hooked on space. I thought it was very
cool that someone could make a career out of studying outer space. The coolest
thing about being where I am has to be being one of the first people to see new
pictures of the surfaces of a planet, or a moon, or an asteroid that a spacecraft
has sent back, and that no one else has seen. And we see all of these cool features. We
have to put our heads together and figure out how these features formed. One
of my hobbies is writing, and I like to write creatively. So being able to
have that skill helps me to paint a very nice picture of what's happening on the
surfaces of other planets and moons. When I want to talk to other people, or when I
want to write about it, creative writing helps that. For me, the largest impact
that I could make though would be to broaden people's perception of what a
scientist is and what a scientist looks like. If my presence and my work has that
type of impact I feel like I've done my job and I've been a part of something,
something that's significant.