Natalia – International Institute for Astronautical Sciences

Profile

Name	Natalia
Nationality	Costa Rican
Bio	My story begins in a regular town called Tres Ríos located in our capital San José, Costa Rica. I live with my sister and my mom. My dad left us before I was born. As a result, we struggled economically. Since that day, my mom worked hard to give my sister and me everything we needed. She used to bake bread and sell it to our neighbors to get money and pay for her studies to become a school teacher. After she graduated, she began working allowing our family to become economically stable. She became my biggest role model who taught me the importance of hard work. I learned that women are capable to achieve their dreams just like men can. Thus, as a child, I decided I wanted to be a scientist. Even though I did not have a scientific role model in my family to follow, they are the powerful engine that keeps me motivated to achieve my dreams. I became interested in astronomy during elementary school when my teacher defined what a planet is. I began asking questions that my teacher nor my family could answer. I began seeking answers through astronomy literature and began imagining what a career in astronomy would be like. In 2016, I entered college majoring in physics at the University of Costa Rica. I began facing not only academic challenges but also microaggressions from fellow male classmates for being one of the few women in physics. In 2018 I had to make one of the most difficult decisions I had faced so far, which was changing my major from Physics to Computer Systems Engineering at Fidélitas University. This was motivated mainly by mental health and the advice from Viviana Acosta, my mentor at the moment, an amazing Engineer that used to work at Space Telescope Science Insitute. My personal development as an Engineer was amazing. I began to feel passionate about the positive results technology has on society. I believe technology offers solutions to many day-to-day problems and those solutions help people to live better. This is the kind of impact I wanted to make through my career and work. Especially as a Costa Rican living in Costa Rica, I wanted to find a way to feel happy while working with the opportunities offered in my country. I decided to focus on data as I understand data management and analysis help to understand how to make the best decisions to generate high-impact projects. In 2019 I began working as an Intern Data Analyst at McKinsey&Co while kept trying to be in touch with Space-related projects. I founded the first international chapter of the Society of Women in Space Exploration (SWISE). By 2020, I found myself working full-time in McKinsey, finishing my college degree, and running the Costa Rican chapter of SWISE while in a global pandemic. It led me to the biggest burnout of my life. I had no personal time, waking up early in the morning to work straight up late at night with no breaks even for lunch. I felt so unmotivated and depressed I began going to therapy. It was the best decision. It helped me to understand myself, start healing childhood trauma I did not even know I had. I delegated my responsibilities with SWISE and focused on my priorities at the moment: work, college, and learning who I am without all the labels I had grown up with. In 2022, I graduated college with a full-time job as a Data Engineer level II at TradeStation. I felt so grateful and proud of graduating college two days after finishing the theoretical part of my private pilot license. After this, I realized I want to go back to getting involved in space-related projects. That is what I love and understand opportunities exist even though in Costa Rica the field is not as developed as in other countries. My main goal is to find a way to connect my experiences with the existing opportunities at Possum Project to fulfill my dream of using technology to learn about our atmosphere, and outer space, and also create high impact that will help people in ways only science and tech can.
Academic Background	I am currently working as a Data Engineer level II at TradeStation. My role works with the Enterprise Analytics team in the San Jose Office. This team enables better commercial decisions by uncovering actionable insights. The platform combines world-leading intellectual property, prescriptive analytics, and cloud-based tools to enable data to be available for analysis with a different focus. In this job, I have learned how to understand business needs in order to ensure the data provided is of the best quality possible. I began in the company on July 2021 as a Junior Data Engineer, after a year, I got promoted to my current role. In 2022 I graduated as Computer Systems Engineer from Fidélitas University in San José, Costa Rica. From 2019 to 2021, I worked as a Junior Data Analyst at McKinsey and Company. My role worked with McKinsey’s Periscope team in the San Jose Office. This is part of the Marketing & Sales Ventures. This was my first data-related job, I had the opportunity to work with a supportive team that helped me grow in the best way possible. Working at Mckinsey, I re-enforced my interest in the Data Engineer guild. During my time working at McKinsey, I was able to create the Lillian Dombrowsky Mentoring Program. My main goal with it was to help more women to get into technical roles. I always felt passionate about equality and the Lillian Dombrowsky Mentoring program was a way to close the gender disparity in the Costa Rican site. Even after I left the company, this program is still working and they even modified it to also focus on the LGBT+ community. I feel proud that my work left something “alive” even when I am not part of the company as a worker. I began to expose myself to a workplace environment on November 2018. For about a year, I worked as a Site Reliability Engineer student-worker at Intel Costa Rica. I was part of a team that supported a diverse set of software platforms such as ServiceNow, Genesys, and SCOM. ServiceNow is a platform that allows users to submit their technical problems involving HR, finances, or other organizations through a ticket system. My main responsibility was making sure ServiceNow performed well, to ensure a successful experience for every client who needed to update the assets of the company into the system and to support the SLAs. SLAs are the limited time a task has in order to be completed. This allows the user to keep track of how much time they spend on their work. This job taught me about the different kinds of workflow a program can have. If I had to make a change to the code in order to fix an issue, I had to think about every possible way my change could break something else in order to solve the problem before it happened. This job developed my problem-solving and critical thinking skills, which I know are useful skills to use in any STEM-related project. Spending a year solving different issues from the clients using a tool I did not create made me realize how adaptable I can be when assigned different tasks. Also, in 2021, I began studying to become a pilot at Instituto de Formación Aeronaútica (IFA) as a second career. I always felt interested in being able to operate an aerospace system because I find it exciting to work with machines that change history. I grew up looking up to Dr. Franklin Chang Diaz, the first Costa Rican to travel to space. I used to follow up on his work in my free time and saw how he was progressing on the creation of the motor fueled by plasma called VASIMIR. The impact of Dr. Franklin Chang’s project amazed me. I understand I feel inspired by him to create my own path. Learning to pilot an aircraft was something I really wanted to do. In 2022 I finished the theory part, and I am currently working on my flight hours.
Professional Interests	I love to generate a positive impact when I can, and for this, I try to develop my leadership skills. Therefore, on April 2019, I founded the Costa Rican chapter of the Society of Women in Space Exploration (SWISE). SWISE Costa Rica is the first international chapter created to promote diversity and inclusion in space-related fields. The goal was to provide students with the tools to create their own careers while empowering and promoting Central American contributions to STEM fields worldwide. Through SWISE Costa Rica, I have organized talks and forums centered on gender equality such as “Ticas en el espacio.” and also Science Communication and Public Outreach with the “NASA JPL speaks to Costa Rica” webinar series during the Covid-19 quarantine. I wanted the Costa Rican chapter to be guidance and support for students, especially women. I was the president of the chapter until December 2020. My responsibilities included organizing recurring meetings while developing partnerships with local institutions. In 2020, I created a program called “Las niñas tambien podemos ser ingenieras”. The program was focused on little girls between 12 and 17 years old in Limon, a province located on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. This program would teach robotics to these girls and prepare them for national competitions. Limon is a province that has been left out due to racial and economic matters, giving these girls a chance to get involved with STEM was really inspiring. My goal is to help develop more STEM opportunities in Costa Rica. Creating SWISE in Costa Rica was a challenge. I had to learn how to deal with miscommunication and different types of people. I have grown as a leader and as a professional. The skills I have developed through SWISE have prepared me to understand people in the working environment. Every person who is part of SWISE has an important role, and understanding every person’s strengths helped to ensure it fulfilled its purpose. Working with people from different backgrounds is a big challenge I have confronted before. Starting on June 2017 until August 2017, I was a summer student at Space Telescope Science Institute working with Dr. Harry Ferguson and Joseph Long. Our project was creating a simulated image database that would help in the development of a galaxy deblending code. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) located in Chile was expected to start operations in 2020. The images it would take from the sky were mixing clusters of nearby galaxies and showing them as one dot. The deblending code was intended to separate data of each galaxy to be analyzed. I used snapshots of the Illustris simulation to create unresolved 2D images to test the pipeline code. In the end, I presented a ten-minute-long presentation about our research findings to an audience of academics. Through my experience, I learned how to start and end a project, while expanding my programming skills. My goal is to contribute to solving a problem for the better of science and society in general. I also learned the importance of developing new skills and applying your unique way of thinking in different projects. I am very interested in the spaceflight branch as it relates to my academic background. I want to participate in worldwide change by making sure new technologies are used in the best way possible. The main problem in my career was overcoming fears and imposter syndrome, challenges that are very common in STEM-related careers. I began designing a way to solve this problem through the development of SWISE. My next steps involve finding a way to use my experiences to help in the Space industry. I believe that a data engineer gives the collected data the use it was gathered for. I want to combine my previous experiences and become a successful professional by combining my background and my passion. This way I can create more opportunities for future generations in Costa Rica while growing as a professional. I know being part of the Possum program will help me to achieve this goal.
Certifications	Open University Student