Women and Gender Minorities in Physics and Astronomy (WGMPA)
Partly due to my own experience as gender minority in physics but more increasingly due to the positivity and accomplishments I have seen at events and gatherings geared towards women and gender minorities in STEM, I am passionate about and committed to advocating for for these groups and helping them unapologetically take up space.
See some events I have co-organized for women and gender minorities in STEM at UIUC here.
In 2018, together with a few other graduate students in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Departments of Physics and Astronomy I formed an organizing group for women and gender minorities in both departments. The aim of the group was to provide safe, social spaces for all members of our departments that felt included by these identities and also bring about some professional development and awareness-building events that they could concretely benefit from. In addition to successfully organizing some of those events and collaborating with other student groups on initiatives such as Intersectionality Week, WGMPA also started an off-campus retreat that brings together everyone from first year undergraduates to staff and postdoctoral researchers. As one of the leaders of the group, I coordinated a number of events, advocated for funding with the Department of Physics and organized the retreats while also mentoring younger organizers in creating content and activities for it.