Yari Golden-Castaño first learned about the moon, planets, and space while her grandmother in Mexico, Barbarita, taught her how to read from an encyclopedia. Golden-Castaño had already earned the nickname "little astronaut" among her family because of an astronaut onesie that her mother dressed her in. By third grade, she had read a book stating that one needed to be a teacher, a doctor, or an engineer in order to become an astronaut.
"Something was put in my head as a little kid, and I actually wanted it," says Golden-Castaño. "I didn't think I could be a doctor, and I didn't want to be a teacher. I liked to build things and felt like physics and math came easy to me, so I decided I would become an engineer."
A dream deferred
Although STEM-oriented, Golden-Castaño didn't experience STEM in a hands-on way until eighth grade, when she was selected for the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program. She grew up in a part of Southern California where funding for STEM activities was scarce. Through the GATE program for advanced science students, she saw concepts learned in the classroom come to life.
"Not everyone understands how things work just by reading a textbook. Personally, I need a visualization. Had I not been selected for this program, I wouldn't have known that I could be doing these hands-on activities," she says.
For Golden-Castaño, the GATE program was difficult not because of the STEM concepts covered, but because of the English language barrier. By high school, she was better able to express herself and was excelling in all of her Advanced Placement classes. Yet, when she asked one of her teachers how to become an astronaut, he laughed in her face. "Are you high? What are you taking? You'll never be an engineer or astronaut as a girl," the teacher said. Other teachers shared his sentiment, pushing Golden-Castaño to attend a liberal arts college and suggesting that she study Spanish - in case she changed her mind.
"His response made me feel stupid," Golden-Castaño says. "In that moment, I decided I would stop telling people that I wanted to be an astronaut one day. I would just go to engineering school and focus on getting my degree. I never once thought about getting out of engineering."
Mission to Mars
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in engineering science from Smith College in 2010, Golden-Castaño joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory as a data analyst in a group developing air traffic control systems. At the laboratory, she was surrounded by like-minded individuals who shared her aspiration to journey to space.
"Shortly after I arrived, I heard that NASA had put out a call for astronaut applications, and many of my colleagues were applying," Golden-Castaño says. "That gave me hope and inspired me to open back up about my dream."
In 2013, when the Mars One mission to establish the first human colony on the Red Planet was announced, Golden-Castaño jumped at the chance to obtain a one-way ticket there. By 2015, the 200,000 initial applicants had been whittled down to 100: 50 men and 50 women. On the short list of women was Golden-Castaño's name. (The Mars 100 were eventually supposed to be down-selected to 24 finalists, but the company backing the mission declared bankruptcy in 2019.)
The supportive laboratory community and excitement surrounding the prospect of venturing to Mars formed the perfect combination for Golden-Castaño to share her passion for space. She started giving talks at schools across Boston, and even in Mexico, about her dream to become an astronaut and her path into engineering.
"Having the Mars tag gave me a wider platform to reach out," Golden-Castaño says. "I now had something to share with students. When I saw their reaction - wow, you're one of us, you're a girl, and you didn't stop chasing your dreams when someone told you that you weren't capable - I realized that I had their attention and should do something more than just talk."
Golden-Castaño had engaged in some educational outreach while serving as vice president of Smith College's Society of Women Engineers (SWE) during her senior year. She ran a four-workshop version of SWE's annual Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. Though the event went well, she thought that would be her first and last encounter with educational outreach.
"I was really shy. I didn't want to stand in front of anyone, let alone have them rely on me for information," Golden-Castaño explains.
Upon joining the laboratory, she instead became involved in community outreach, including volunteering at a Boston food pantry, cleaning up the Charles River, and helping local farms prepare their soil for farming. But now that she was a face of the Mars One mission, she felt compelled to get back into educational outreach and tell her story.
Golden-Castaño volunteered at an Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day event run by laboratory colleague Damaris Toepel. Within a few years, Golden-Castaño took over running the event and began noticing that the fifth through eighth grade girls were bored with the content and complaining that they had already done these sorts of workshops.
"Their feedback made me realize that these are girls who have access and opportunity; they are the daughters of our engineers, and attend schools where teachers can afford materials for hands-on demos," Golden-Castaño says.
Poised for blastoff
Disheartened by this realization and remembering her own limited opportunities as a student, Golden-Castaño in May 2017 created a spinoff of this event called Girls Space Day Adventure. With other volunteers, she assembled eight hands-on space-related demonstrations to bring to MIT in collaboration with women in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. To recruit participants, they contacted schools in the Greater Boston area, aiming to reach underserved students (targeting but not limiting to girls) who could easily travel to MIT campus via subway. A coed turnout of around 60 students rotated through the demonstrations. However, recreating that event proved difficult because many of the volunteers subsequently left the laboratory. Small-scale versions of Girls Space Day Adventure have since run onsite and at nearby schools, as the demonstrations were formatted to be presented independently.
In parallel, Golden-Castaño began an external eight-week program for second and third graders, called "Mission to Mars." Each week focuses on a different aspect of what it takes to go to Mars, such as living under the planet's gravity, designing a suitable habitat, and growing vegetables that can flourish in Martian soil. On the last day, the students don an astronaut suit and navigate an obstacle course as they communicate with their "ground control" partner via walkie-talkie.
Supporting Golden-Castaño as these outreach efforts took off was her now-husband, R. Daniel, whom she met through Mars One. He helped her build many of the demonstrations, even before he started working as a contractor in the laboratory's Laser Communications Group .
After hosting Girls Space Day Adventure and Mission to Mars, Golden-Castaño had an idea to make outreach more self-sustaining over the long term by having demonstrations ready for volunteers to deploy at different schools. From that idea, the Girls' Innovation Research Laboratory ( G.I.R.L. ) was born at Lincoln Laboratory in 2019. The program sought to create standalone hands-on workshops on diverse STEM topics, encourage disadvantaged girls to take part (though events are coed), and support women or any laboratory staff members willing to volunteer as STEM role models.
"The goals of G.I.R.L. are to inspire girls to innovate technologies that serve our communities and empower them with the skills, knowledge, resources, and confidence to pursue STEM. For me, another goal is to give women the confidence to volunteer and learn a topic that they may be unfamiliar with, and then go teach it," says Golden-Castaño, who had to step outside her own comfort zone to do just that.
A vast space
Since its inception, G.I.R.L. has hosted about 50 workshops and reached more than 300 students. Staff from the laboratory's Communications and Community Outreach Office have established relationships with several Greater Boston area schools; organizations including Brookview House, Girls Inc., Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and House of Hope; and events such as Science on State Street and the Christa McAuliffe Center STEM Week Open House. G.I.R.L. provides the resources and materials volunteers need for their demonstrations.
"We have a reservoir of smart women at the lab, and they have knowledge that can be shared. Volunteers can propose demonstrations on topics of their choosing and independently take them to schools or organizations. We now have a full 'menu' of demonstrations that we can run at any time. Having kids access these hands-on activities that I didn't get to experience outside of the GATE program is inspiring."
Workshops have spanned diverse fields, including programming, mechanical and electrical engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, optics, forensics, planetary science, and chemistry. One workshop, on Scratch programming with a Makey Makey Board (controller board), teaches students how to assemble a circuit and program a musical instrument to play when they touch keys on the board. In an artificial intelligence-themed workshop , students play an AI-or-not guessing game and sort items such as candies to mimic how a decision-tree algorithm works. A workshop covering cybersecurity and internet safety teaches students to see the risks of putting personal information online, decrypt messages, physically pick locks, and understand internet protocols. In a workshop on the basics of light, students assemble light-emitting diode (LED) color-mixing crystals and then use light-diffraction glasses to observe how light splits into different colors at various angles.
More recently, G.I.R.L. launched a workshop on chemical reactions, in which students make their own color reactions and learn about chemiluminescence. The latest workshop focused on mechanics, with students assembling a mechanical arm out of cardboard by tracing a hand template and using string to move the fingers through a mechanism similar to a puppeteer controlling a marionette's limbs. Students also attached a strip of LED onto the back of the arm; Golden-Castaño wrote code to make the light change color depending on which finger is curled.
For Golden-Castaño, one of the most fulfilling parts of G.I.R.L. is capturing the attention of students, especially those who initially seem disinterested.
"I've arrived in many classrooms where the kids are being disrespectful and talking over us," Golden-Castaño says. "Then, we start the demo, and even the loudest kid is now attentive and asking relevant questions. Watching them engage with the program is rewarding."
To keep this momentum going, all G.I.R.L. workshops send students home with follow-up links or materials providing additional learning resources. The volunteers also share their academic and career journeys so that students can envision a path forward.
"One important lesson I've learned is that kids don't want to hear you've known from the beginning what you want to be when you grow up and everything has worked out for you," Golden-Castaño says. "For many students, G.I.R.L. represents their first hands-on experience with STEM or the first time they are hearing they can do STEM. So, I'm always honest with them. I tell them that I didn't have straight As, and it's not too late for them to start today."
Besides the lack of exposure to STEM, some G.I.R.L. participants face a language barrier, which Golden-Castaño knows all too well. Fluent in conversational Spanish but lacking a technical vocabulary in that language, she has been trying on the fly to translate lessons delivered in English into Spanish. Earlier this year, she prepared ahead of time a presentation in Spanish for a chemistry workshop.
To infinity and beyond
Five years in, the G.I.R.L. program is still going strong, having withstood the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, which necessitated running the workshops virtually and shipping materials like pre-made kits to classrooms.
"We have a system that works overall," she says. "But we're at a point where I'd like to see another burst of participation from a new set of volunteers coming up with new demonstrations."
Noting the diverse work ongoing at the laboratory across its R&D areas , Golden-Castaño has several future workshop topics in mind: smart fabrics, biochemistry for threat identification, underwater laser communication, rapid prototyping, technology solutions for climate change, and safety with AI. The possibilities are endless.
Golden-Castaño, in collaboration with the group that led the Girls Space Day Adventure on MIT campus, also has an app idea for matching volunteers to classrooms in a more automated, targeted way. The app would feature profiles of volunteers - stating their STEM background, demonstrations they lead, and scheduling availability - that teachers could scroll through to determine who complements their classroom curriculum. For example, a teacher of an environmental science class may request the volunteer leading a weather station workshop.
"G.I.R.L. has been a really good journey. Thank you to everyone who made it all possible. I'm grateful to have the support of the many volunteers, instructors, my group leaders, and the Outreach Office," says Golden-Castaño, now part of the laboratory's Systems Engineering Group , where she focuses on the assembly, integration, and testing of laser communication systems.
While keeping an eye out for the next opportunity to pursue her dream of becoming an astronaut, Golden-Castaño considers her work at the laboratory as foundational for future space exploration: "I'm working on technology that could enable future human missions to space."
