From star to stars: Astrophysicist Aomawa Shields traces her journey from acting to astronomy

As a scientist studying exoplanets, Aomawa Shields, Ph.D., has spent her career searching for life on other planets. I think needs to be accounted for in these departments when we're thinking about everything from how we approach setting up the support structures, to how we talk to the students when they are in our classes, whether they're struggling or not — having that awareness that they are carrying a load that is an invisible load to the eye, but it's extremely weighty to the soul. "It's a very real possibility that the life that we see out there is something that may not be able to talk to us. It's ethane and methane, so if there's anything swimming around in there, it would be life as we absolutely do not know it." It's for people who have always had a dream that they never pursued, or they pursued it for a while and then they had to do something else because they had to support their families or because it didn't seem practical or, for whatever reason, life happened and they abandoned that dream and they think it's too late.