NASA speaker comes to the California Oil Museum this Sunday
April 24, 2013
By Peggy Kelly
Santa Paula News
The California Oil Museum is pleased to announce Brian Day and Emily Law will speak at the Museum on Sunday, April 28, at 2 pm.
The California Oil Museum is located at 1001 E. Main Street in Santa Paula. Admission is $4 for adults, $3 for seniors, $1 for students ages 6-17. 5 and under are free. Brian is from NASA and Emily is from JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab). Emily will be bringing some interactive displays to the museum to show during their talk on Sunday. The exhibit, “Let’s Go to the Moon! The Lunar Missions”, will be on display and open to the public.
Brian Day is the Director of Communication and Outreach at the NASA Lunar Science Institute. In this role, he coordinates programs with numerous internal and external partnering organizations, focusing on providing opportunities for students and the public to directly participate in lunar science and exploration.
Brian also currently serves as the Education/Public Outreach Lead for NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission to the Moon, scheduled for launch in 2013. From 2007-2010 he served as the E/PO Lead for NASA’s LCROSS lunar impactor mission which discovered deposits of water ice at the Moon’s South Pole. He has also participated in producing the Education/Public Outreach sections for numerous NASA mission proposals. Brian has played key roles in various NASA Mars Analog Field Studies, providing technical support in the field for webcasts and robotic rover tests in extreme environments here on Earth. In 2007, he flew on the Aurigid-MAC mission to record fragments of comet Kiess entering Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Brian is a frequently-requested speaker at local schools and community organizations. As a member of NASA’s Speakers Bureau, he is sent by NASA to give talks on a wide range of NASA missions and research topics.
Brian has worked as an instructor in San Jose State University’s Internet Business Specialist program, and has taught astronomy through the Metropolitan Education District in San Jose and as part of Project Astro. He is very active in the amateur astronomy community and served as the chairman of the Foothill College Observatory for 16 years. Brian earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of California Los Angeles, a Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems from the University of San Francisco, and a Master’s degree in Astronomy from the University of Western Sydney.
Ms. Emily Law has over twenty years of experience in the research, development and management of complex information systems. Ms. Law has worked for both large and small organizations having served on a diverse set of projects during her career.
Since 1996, Ms. Law has been working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she has provided leadership and management in the architecture, development and operations of highly distributed ground data systems for planetary exploration and earth science. She currently serves as a deputy program manager and development manager to two separate directorates covering data systems in solar system research and earth science.
In 2005, she was the recipient of the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal in recognition of outstanding contributions to the NASA Deep Space Network. She currently leads operations for NASA’s Planetary Data System, NASA’s official archive to manage results from solar system research; and leads development of the Lunar Mapping and Modeling Project data management infrastructure and portal in support of Lunar Exploration activities. Ms. Law has B.S. degrees in Math and Computer Science from Cal State Long Beach and is a graduate of University of Southern California where she holds a M.S. degree in Computer Engineering.
