We All See the Same Moon

https://cgallinger.github.io/assets/images/2024-12-13-we-all-see-the-same-moon

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Two weeks ago, my first ever first-author paper was finally published. It was a culmination of four years’ worth of work, but I don’t really want to talk about that here (see here if you’re interested in all the gory, dry, science-y details).

Instead, I want to talk about ——

When a landform on a planet gets discussed enough in the literature, the IAU considers it appropriate to give that feature a formal name. And as part of publishing my paper, I was able to convince the IAU that one of the craters in my study needed such a name.

So here it is: Mirzakhani Crater.

If you aren’t aware of her, Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian-American mathematician, a brilliant and —— ——, and the first woman to ever win the Fields Medal (basically the Nobel Prize of mathematics) back in 2014. Unfortunately, she could not bask long in that achievement, as her life was tragically cut short by cancer in 2017.

There were many reasons I thought this name felt appropriate: for one, there are very few craters on the Moon named after women, and even fewer after women of colour - only three others previously. It’s also a small but striking feature, echoing Mirzakhani’s short stature and dazzling intellect. But most importantly, by proxy, I wanted to honour another woman who profoundly shaped my life as a scientist.

Sara Mazrouei is now a brilliant and multi-talented science communicator and education developer, but before that she was also a member of my lab at the University of Toronto. While my experience there was overwhelmingly positive, over the four years we worked together I witnessed Sara face many challenges—both in our department and in planetary science in general—simply for being a woman of colour. She was an exceptional scientist in addition to her teaching and outreach skills, but was often overlooked because of her background.

The most stark example of this came in 2016, when she was barred from a NASA facility during a summer internship, solely for being born in Iran. (You can listen to her first-hand account of this saga here). Hearing this story as it was happening to her, my naive impression of the universal and collaborative nature of science was utterly shattered; I just couldn’t imagine how they could do this to someone who had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to be there.

In the time since I’ve become increasingly aware of the many more injustices being committed on our fragile, precious planet, many—like in Sara’s case—simply because of where they were born. From the genocide in Gaza, to the (former) rule of terror in Syria, to the massacres in Sudan and Myanmar and Ukraine and Bangladesh, our world has been groaning under the weight of years of oppression, often as a direct consequence of actions in the West. We cannot afford (nor should we be justly allowed) to see these struggles as far-off foreign conflicts with no relation to us. Beyond their inherent

-xoxo gossip grad ☾⋆⁺₊⋆