19 December 2012 GREAT NEWS TO SHARE! A Dominican teacher in Antarctica/Un Maestro Dominicano en la Antartida!

Para Español hacer click en TRANSLATIONS en el menu de la parte superior Hello! Welcome to my new PolarTREC online journal where you can follow my new adventures as ** 2013-2014 PolarTREC teacher in Antarctica, South Pole**. Between this coming November and February of next year I will be traveling from New York to Los Angeles, Australia and New Zealand on commercial airlines to finally board a C130 Hercules military plane to the station at the South Pole MacMurdo. I'll be staying there for 3 weeks in Antarctica as part of the NeutrinoAn elementary particle with zero charge and zero mass. An electrically neutral particle that is often emitted in the process of radioactive decay of nuclei. Neutrinos are difficult to detect, and their existence was postulated twenty years before the first one was actually discovered in the laboratory. Millions of neutrinos produced by nuclear reactions in the sun pass through your body every second without disturbing any atoms. Project Ice Cube Telescope with Dr. Jim Madsen of the University of Wisconsin, whose team will be studying subatomic particles from space known as Neutrinos. My job is to assist scientists in their fieldwork with their equipment and research tools. What I hope to gain from this experience is to inspire my students from the Maria Teresa Mirabal middle school MS319 and many more students bilingual students, both Latinos and Latinas to pursue careers STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), and bring more diversity to the scientific community. In addition I want to see first hand the effects of climate change in the South Pole, and how can that affect us at a local level, such as the impact on our local weather in light of the Hurricane Sandy natural disaster of last October 2012. Finally, I have been told that I may be the first Dominican teacher ever to visit the South Pole. Well, we will find out together! Please come back as often as you like to check out the journals, and please feel free to post any questions or comments in our Ask the Team Forum section.

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“ You are going to the South Pole, Antarctica” and “three weeks on the Ice”. Those were the words that resonated in my mind last December in 2012 after speaking on the phone with Sarah Crowley from ARCUS, telling me I had been accepted as a PolarTREC Teacher 2013-2014 to join the scientific expedition known as the NEUTRINO ICE CUBE TELESCOPE. ARCUS is the Arctic Research consortium of the United States the organization that runs the incredibly wonderful program After applying in 2011 with no results, I gave it a try and applied again last summer while chaperoning two of my after school NASA/Space club students to Space camp Turkey in the beautiful and ancient city of Izmir. After having spent 3 weeks in 2010 on board the research ship Oscar Dyson with scientists researching for Pollock on the Bering Sea, as part of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) Teacher at Sea program, I knew my next adventure had to be an expedition to the frozen continent of Antarctica, South Pole.

Last October I received an email from ARCUS telling me I was among the 45 finalists, and then on Thanksgiving I got a message on my answering machine telling me that I was one of the last 3 teachers and that the researcher wanted to interview me. The conference call lasted over an hour, with Dr. Jim Madsen, the Ice Cube Project principal researcher from the University of Wisconsin and Janet Warburton from ARCUS in Fairbanks, Alaska. There was good rapport during the interview and I was very confident of the outcome. The first thing I did was to share the news with my students and fellow teachers and administrators at MS319 Maria Teresa Mirabal middle school in Washington Heights, New York City. Family overseas in the Dominican Republic, friends in Turkey, as well as here in New York and my students and fellow teachers from MS319 and from my Children’s Aid Society after school are all very excited about my expedition to the South Pole.