A Newsletter for Friends and Alumni of the University of Washington
Student Spotlight

When LaTasha Taylor makes outreach visits to inner city schools to encourage young women and minorities to consider careers in science and engineering, she tells listeners to think outside the box, to “forget the box, remove the box. There is no box on your life.”

The first African American woman in the UW Department of Astronautics and Aeronautics Engineering graduate program, Taylor feels a grave responsibility to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. “My vision is of replenishing these fields with the bright young minds of women, minorities, everybody,” she says. “That’s what drives me.”

On June 20, after completing her first year of graduate studies in the UW’s internationally acclaimed astrobiology program, Taylor heads to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where she will be working in the robotics lab with a team of researchers designing the next generation of the Mars rover. It will be a chance to apply some of her UW research, which involves a robotic fish that might swim through the oceans of extreme environments to gather evidence of life beyond Earth.

For Taylor, the melding of biology and engineering into a whole new interdisciplinary concentration — astrobiotechnology — yields exciting possibilities: “You can think beyond your engineering and think beyond your biology and bring those two together,” she says. “To work on both sides has been a joy for me because it enhances my research so much. I don’t have to wait for results to come back from a biologist, I can do it myself.”

For somebody who likes to think outside the box, that’s a good, though challenging, place to be.
“I’m grateful for the opportunity to be here and to pave the way,” she says. “It’s a lot more pressure when you’re blazing the trail; but if not me, then who?”

For more information on supporting UW graduate students, visit www.grad.washington.edu/supporting/default.htm.

Return to June 2005 Campaign Newsletter