Dr Jessica Gaskin (MS, CWRU Astronomy, ’98)

NASA scientist and CWRU alumna Dr Jessica Gaskin recently won NASA’s Early Career Achievement Medal for her work in developing X-ray telescopes to study the Sun, stars, and galaxies. But back when she was a graduate student in the CWRU Astronomy Department, she learned a valuable lesson from her mentor, Professor Earle Luck: you gotta break things to make progress in science. It’s a lesson that serves her well: “It’s part of the learning process,” she writes. “You have to make mistakes. You have to break things. That’s how we learn.”

Read more about Jessica’s work in the article “Learned Fearlessness“, published in the latest issue of CWRU’s “think” magazine.