“I am a product full of the Carnegie Science Center’s influence. It started with the Buhl. I gravitated toward the space stuff and it drove my curiosity.” – Anthony Vareha, NASA spacewalk flight director
We’re all explorers at heart, and our greatest learnings happen when we experience them together. Thanks to you, your four Carnegie Museums inspire exploration of all kinds, every day, through the lenses of art, science, and the natural world.
At Carnegie Science Center, countless young people catch the space bug while seated together in Buhl Planetarium. For Monroeville native Anthony Vareha, a spacewalk flight director for NASA, that bug grew to become a lifelong quest to serve planet Earth through space exploration. Last year, Vareha shared his love of science and space with regional students at the Science Center’s SciTech Days, a hands-on career exploration program. “I am a product full of the Carnegie Science Center’s influence,” says Vareha, who graduated from Gateway High School. “It started with the Buhl. I gravitated toward the space stuff and it drove my curiosity.”
Michelle King is a longtime educator who has worked with Carnegie Museum of Art on the Empowered Educator Series, which aims to give teachers, administrators, counselors, and other educators the tools to explore issues of race and equity in the classroom. King says it really matters that this forward-thinking program lives at the museum, where teachers can come back to exhibits to have all kinds of important discussions with their students. “Carnegie Museum of Art has its history, a weight, a gravitas. So, having conversations around race and equity—it’s like, OK, we’re getting serious about talking about things.”
At Carnegie Museum of Natural History, educators and scientists are using their voices to help communities navigate the effects of climate change. Last year they inaugurated the Climate and Rural Systems Partnership (CRSP) to take the discussion to rural communities. The museum plans to build a network of educators, scientists, and community leaders all over western Pennsylvania that can serve as a resource for rural communities coming to grips with the consequences of a warming planet. “We all have to be part of the solution,” says Laurie Giarratani, the museum’s director of education.
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