Mission Vista teacher to represent California in national NASA Research Program
SAN DIEGO — A Mission Vista High School teacher has been chosen to take part in an exclusive NASA research program, the Vista Unified School District announced.
David Forester, an astronomy, biology and chemistry teacher at Mission Vista High School, has been chosen as one of just eight teachers nationwide to take part in the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP), a year-long astronomy research project.
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“Anyone in the science and astronomy education space can apply to the program; most are classroom teachers from middle or high school, or the community college level,” Forester said in the announcement. “I love multi-disciplinary sciences. Not just the elements and how they interact, but how you tie [the different science fields] all together in complex and interesting ways – where they all blend together in real-world scenarios of what is really going on.”
He is representing California as the only winner chosen from this state.
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In January, the 2024 NITARP project began at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in New Orleans where the teachers met each another and learned their research topics.
Forester said he plans to share this experience through his astronomy class and the wide variety of extra science electives that Mission Vista offers. “I’ll take what I learn about using the archives and software to sift through data and show my students how to do it,” he said.
The NITARP winners were split into two teams of four with each group having a mentor to help guide their research.
The teachers were able to choose two students to work on the project alongside them and their team. They will attend the online meetings and summer intensive, and help present the results at the AAS meeting in January 2025 in Washington, DC.
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“I remember David coming to share the good news about being selected for this project in November, and we were all ecstatic for him,” says Mission Vista High School Principal Jeremy Walden. “His passion for science, and astronomy in particular, is clear to anyone who has seen him teach, and he works hard to instill that same enthusiasm in his students. David, like so many of the teachers at Mission Vista, embodies what it truly means to be a lifelong learner, and I know that students pick up on that.”
For the NITARP project, Forester and his team will be using data from the IPAC archives that have already been pulled down from space satellites. They will learn how to use different software and tools to analyze the data.
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“We want to look at Gaia data about active galactic nuclei (AGNs) that have unusual results you wouldn’t expect, investigate why we’re getting the unusual readings, and then hopefully answer a question we don’t have fully answered yet,” he explained.
The NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP) gives teachers the opportunity to work with professional astronomers for a year-long original research project using NASA’s archives of astronomical data from space and ground-based telescopes.
The team will conduct most of its research remotely except for a three to four day visit to Caltech in Pasadena, California, to meet with the team in-person and work on the data. Participants then present the results of their research at the AAS winter conference.
Visit the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program website for more information and to apply for the program.
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