The California Space Grant Consortium, funded by NASA, is designed to create university laboratory experiences for students attending California community colleges to encourage and prepare students in associate program for advanced STEM degrees and increase participation of underrepresented minorities and females in STEM. As a participant, my team and I shared the goal of learning general lab control and data acquisition techniques. Using an Arduino Duemilanove board and LabVIEW software, collectively we built an autonomous Wall­E robot, fully equipped with voice and sensory recognition skills.

As a selected participant in the NASA/ Curriculum Improvements Partnership Award for the Integration of Research Internship which increases the quantity and quality of STEM curricula and the number of underrepresented and underserved students who attain degrees in STEM. I worked with group members on researching atmospheric effects that the hydrogen sulfide has on the local environment in the Coachella Valley. To do so, we constructed, analyzed, and utilized sampling data and flowcharts that depicted how information collected correlated with previous data collected and presented it to the NASA/COD­STEM committee.