Founder and Director Dr. Aomawa Shields' Newly Published Inside Higher Ed Article: “Claiming a Louder Life: Part I” Now Available

Rising Stargirls founder and director Dr. Aomawa Shields’ newly published Inside Higher Ed article, “Claiming a Louder Life: Part I,” is now available. The article discusses the treatment of Black students further along the academic pipeline, at the college level in departments of physics and astronomy. The work we are doing at Rising Stargirls is aimed at addressing these issues much earlier in the development of girls of color.

Founder and Director Dr. Aomawa Shields Featured in Adler Planetarium Online Exhibit “Life on Other Worlds”

Rising Stargirls founder and director Dr. Aomawa Shields is featured in Adler Planetarium’s Online Exhibit “Life on Other Worlds.” An exhibit which is about the search for life and covers astrobiology/SETI on Earth, in the solar system, and outside the solar system, Dr. Shields’ exoplanet climate work is included in this exhibit. 

The Rising Stargirls COVID-19 Virtual Teaching Handbook is now available!

The Rising Stargirls COVID-19 Virtual Teaching and Activity Handbook is here! This is the Zoom-Adapted version of the original Rising Stargirls Teaching and Activity Handbook. The activities used in Rising Stargirls workshops, plus educator resources and best practices for utilizing this virtual teaching handbook through Zoom are provided in this manual. We intend for this manual to be used alongside the original Rising Stargirls Handbook when creating virtual workshops. Download it for free and use it in your virtual classrooms and informal learning environments anywhere in the world!

Workshop News Update!

In the past months we have hosted two online workshops to train educators on how to incorporate Rising Stargirls activities into their curricula. 


These webinars were a resounding success! Between our Fall and Winter workshop we had 67 interested educators of which nearly half were able to attend the selected dates. We had educators from all over the country as well as all over the world (Europe, Middle East, South Asia, and South America)! Responses to the educator training workshops have been overwhelmingly positive and we have had 13 educators already express interest in participating in future workshops.

Please stay tuned for future announcements to register for our Summer webinar in 2020!

Founder and Director Dr. Aomawa Shields Featured in “Changing the Equation: 50+ US Black Women in STEM”

“Rising Stargirls” founder and director Dr. Aomawa Shields is featured in award-winning author Tonya Bolden’s book, Changing the Equation: 50+ US Black Women in STEM. A book that features groundbreaking black women who are pioneering STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields throughout the United States.