Sometimes what matters isn’t where you go or how you get there, but who’s by your side. For Dr. Alvin D. Harvey, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s Space Enabled Research Group, that journey has taken him from a rural childhood to the forefront of Indigenous-led space research.

Angélica Noel Lozano-Romines became an aunt at the age of seven. As the youngest of five, Lozano-Romines often took care of her nieces and nephews. That experience solidified what she had always known: that she wanted to support children and their development.

Lozano-Romines grew up in a predominantly BIPOC community in Ardmore, Okla., then moved to a smaller rural area for high school, where only a few students looked like her. This experience gradually led her to assimilate, which resulted in experimenting with blue-colored contacts during her early college years. 

Tackling a double major in computer science and mathematics didn’t faze Fraser McLeod. On the contrary, he graduated from the University of Saskatchewan (USASK) last year with a double honors degree and was recognized as the most distinguished computer science graduate. In his first year at USASK, McLeod was set on a business concentration until he took an introductory computer science course. “It spurred me to completely change my degree,” he says. “Eventually, I was enjoying my math classes so much that I decided to double-major.”