EDI and Physics Outreach
EDI and Outreach
In addition to research, I am also deeply committed to science outreach and promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion within academia. I have previously worked on decolonising the physics curriculum, volunteered with LEAPS and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh’s Doors Open Days, led student focus groups as the School’s EDI representative, and contributed to an archival project celebrating the contributions of women in astronomy on which I gave the Start of the Year Seminar for the EDI committee at the School of Physics (2025), amongst other initiatives.
Here I include a few examples and deliverables from the work I have done over the past few years at Edinburgh as an undergradute.
Women in Astronomy
I undertook an archival project at the Royal Observatory (end of my third year in summer 2024) for which I received the University of Edinburgh Career Development Scholarship. The aim was to provide a comprehensive record of the role and contributions from women staff at the observatory (and Scotland in general). I focused on the history of british women astronomers, narrowing down to the developmen of women in astronomy particularly in edinburgh, as well as the presnet (current work place environment) and future (the plans for the EDI committee and WiSTEM network on site). It’s one of my most favourite projects that I have done as I got to talk to people about their experience, get a lot of insight into how different things are back then (the how much progress we have made!) and motivates me 10x harder to continue on the path of these women :)
Here is a sample of some of the work I did (The Present section has been taken out due to internal information and confidentiality), includes a sample peek into some of the history at the royal observatory. I plan on updating it to include some pictures from my time working at the library :
https://www.mishitakhurana.com/s/WomenAstronomy.pdf
Image on the right is from one of the ROE Bulletins describing the year of ‘women in science’ due to the record number of women staff employed at the observatory. With all of them (!) in the picture photographed.
POHA Academy
Poha academy is a non-profit at the University of Edinburgh that aims at providing educational resources to women who have otherwise lost access to higher education due to external factors such as living in areas of conflict.
As a voluntary course instructor, I am currently working on educational materials formulating a course on ‘Fundamental Cosmology’ covering topics such as the expanding universe, inflation, big bang nucleosynthesis, dark matter and dark energy.
In the future, I aim to work on additional courses such as ‘History of Women in Astronomy’, based on my summer project and focus on specific topics within cosmology, such as Structure Formation Within the Universe.
On the right is a picture (its the best quality I could find!!!) of the Edinburgh Seven, who were a trailblazing group of women who, in the late 1860s, became the first female students to attend a British university fighting significant institutional resistance as they pursued medical degrees at the University of Edinburgh and paved the way for women in medicine.
Unfortunately, women’s fight to gain education continues even today just in different forms. I am committeed to doing my part in changing the landscape.
Here is the link to what I am currently working on (needs to be updated!)
Decolonisation in Physics
This work was part of an on-campus internship at the end of my second year with the EDI committee at the School of Physics. The awareness around decolonisation has increased but there is still quite a lot of work to be done. I wanted to focus on the barriers that academics might face in implementing decolonisation and feedback on how they believe the process can be made smoother. I consulted with and interviewed academics in the School of Physics, as well as other Schools within the College of Science and Engineering that had already started some of this work.
I also interviewed academics in other colleges (such as Social Sciences) that had done more work within this sector.
A second aspect of my work was focusing on students and how they feel about decolonisation in addition to academics. I created internal guidance docuemnts on feedback from academics on decolonisation as well as guidelines for conducting student focus groups. I also continued my work past summer by running student focus groups (alongside another intern with the EDI committee) on themes such as student experience, neurodiversity, bullying and harrassment, decolonisation, widening participation and others!
On the left is a picture from summer 2023 alongside the EDI committee members around the beginning of my internship!