Allison Gasparini

About

Staring up at the stars, which are particularly luminous above my rural hometown in upstate New York, I once pointed up at a familiar constellation. “Look, it’s O’Brien’s Belt,” I reported to my family. A beat. Then laughter. “Allison... it’s Orion’s Belt.” Okay, so maybe I’d misheard a term or two when educators brought an inflatable planetarium to our elementary school, though I’d loved crawling inside the dome and marveling at the illuminated constellations. Lesson learned, I continued scanning the starry skies on nighttime strolls and through the equations of college astrophysics courses. We are here to explore the universe and grow from what we discover. When I tell science stories, I feel I am on an adventure, pointing up at the stars, offering an open invitation for everyone to stargaze alongside me. School-year internships: NASA Ames Research Center, Monterey Herald, Stanford News Service Summer internship: NASA Ames Research Center