Astra Burke Email & Phone Number

In my internship with NW, a French energy transition company recently expanded into Texas, I analyzed land across all of Texas in order to determine if it would be suitable as the site of an energy battery storage system (JBox®) or Electric Vehicle charging station (IECharge®). I qualified hundreds of sites with an eye for detail, ensuring the sites were near electric utilities and did not lie in flood planes or in geographically inaccessible locations. Additionally, I honed in my project workflow ability as I synthesized data for each battery storage project into Airtable, a robust project management software.

I assist Dr. Tao Sun in general research protocol around the lab, specifically focusing on running Mass Spectroscopy experiments on sediment, tissue, and even meteorites.

As my residential college's internal vice president, I organized college committee assignments by reviewing leadership applications from 40+ students as well as proposals for new committees.I attended weekly college meetings, along with periodic Executive meetings with the college president and executive staff of Hanszen college.

I worked alongside Dr. Ash in her NASA grant proposal studying methane transport in the Guaymas basin. My role consisted of searching for applicable literature and data as well as newer papers published regarding biochemical modeling and transport, as well as attending weekly meetings for idea generation and discussing how we would implement this data into a MATLAB code. This code in particular sought to model reactive transport models in the basin using differential equations and matrices.

As an Orientation week advisor, I underwent a series of training modules the summer before orientation week pertaining to effective problem solving, diversity, mental health, and inclusivity. This training culminated in orientation week itself, in which I along with my co-advisors introduced new students to Rice university and our residential college, Hanszen. As an Orientation Week advisor, I aided students in the transition to college both socially and academically by helping plan schedules to best fit students' needs, as well as to help solve difficult interpersonal issues. After Orientation Week, I continually checked in on my group in order to make sure their journey through freshman year was proceeding smoothly and to offer any advice they needed.

As a new member of Dr. Siebach's lab, I cross-referenced and extracted chemical data from mineralogical databases into an Excel file with 200+ minerals as baseline testing file for the in-development MIST algorithm on the Perseverance rover. Additionally, I attended weekly lab meetingsto discuss progress in group members’ research as well as to discuss brand new Perseverance images from the surface of Mars.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States

As the winner of a $3,000 grant from the National Center for Women & Information Technology, I used the money to run a STEM summer camp targeted towards low income 2nd-5th grade girls. The months before the camp I budgeted technology and craft materials and created daily schedules for hands-on computer science and tech activities. I communicated to various organizations and specifically women working in STEM to have one speaker a day to talk to the girls about their job.I, along with a couple of co-counselors, educated girls daily through interactive, cross-curriculum lessons ranging from high tech fashion to space travel.See more here: https://www.gps.edu/news-detail?pk=1263467

Bachelor'S Degree, Earth, Environmental, And Planetary Sciences

Education record