Graduate student, Lily Donaldson, recently coordinated a high school outreach event where students from Richmond Hill Highschool (Richmond Hill NY) had a chance to direct science questions to astronauts on the international space station (ISS). NASA flight engineers Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers participated on this ISS Expedition 72 In-Flight Education Event.
Lily Donaldson is working with the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) (with ECSE Professor and LESA Director Robert Karlicek) and the Center for Architectural Science and Ecology (CASE) at RPI in a program to study the role precision pulsed lighting on plant growth. She was recently a summer intern at NASA and coordinates programs like this through her STEM organization that she founded before coming to RPI. This is a great example of both highly interdisciplinary research at RPI and broad collaborations that push the boundaries of outreach and research.
Lily Donaldson received her MS in Lighting from the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at RPI. She was the Miss United States in 2022. She directs a nonprofit called Art Technically that promotes STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and Arts education for disadvantaged students at Title 1 and rural K-12 schools.
