With a 40-pound backpack on her back, Puerto Rican educator Karla López Calderón walks several miles each week along the Trinity River Trails in Fort Worth, Texas, near where she currently resides. This is how she prepares for the month she will spend in the Arctic collaborating with scientists investigating the impact of climate change on the North Pole.
López Calderón reported that she will begin her Arctic expedition tomorrow, after being selected to be part of Polar STEAM, a program that facilitates collaboration among educators, artists, writers, and scientific researchers, with the aim of expanding knowledge of the polar regions. The initiative is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and facilitated by Oregon State University.
"My expedition will be from June 17 to July 18. I will be at the Toolik station (located in northern Alaska), which is only for researchers," detailed López Calderón. "From there, we will travel further north, crossing the Arctic Circle, and we will reach where the sensors are to collect the data. These will be 12 and 13-hour days collecting data and samples and processing everything in the laboratory."
The route to the sensors includes helicopter and walking sections, with backpacks loaded with specialized equipment. That's why she has been training.
During her month in the Arctic, she will collaborate with researchers from the University of Michigan, led by Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Rose M. Cory, who investigates the carbon cycle to understand the processes that control greenhouse gas emissions from soils, streams, and lakes.
"I am the only Hispanic there," she said about the team she will be working with. "They told me they are super excited to have someone who speaks Spanish."
Once her work in the Arctic is complete, López Calderón hopes to use the knowledge acquired there to create a curriculum on climate change, in English and Spanish, for school-aged children and youth. "It will be visible on the Polar STEAM website. It will be free, and anyone in the world will be able to access it, thus reaching people with limited resources and from other countries," she highlighted.
"It was a very rigorous and competitive process"
It was precisely the lack of a curriculum in Spanish on climate change that motivated the Puerto Rican educator to join the program.
López Calderón works as an Associate Vice President of Programs at Girls Inc., a non-profit organization in Tarrant County, Texas, that serves girls from elementary to high school through school and community programs, summer camps, weekend events, and mentoring. She reported that most of the girls served are low-income, and 60% are of Hispanic or Latin American origin.
At Girls Inc., López Calderón leads STEM initiatives (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), which includes designing and offering workshops on these subjects in schools and at the organization's facilities.
She recounted that she learned about Polar STEAM by chance when she was searching online for a climate change curriculum in Spanish and couldn't find one, but she came across information about the initiative and became interested. "If there isn't a climate change curriculum in Spanish, I can learn about the topic with them and create it myself, so I applied and submitted an essay with my proposal to create a curriculum in English and Spanish," López Calderón related.
Several months and interviews later, she was accepted into the program. "It was a very rigorous and competitive process because thousands of educators applied," López Calderón stated.
From Bayamón to the Arctic
Born and raised in Bayamón, López Calderón developed her interest in science and medicine from childhood. "My mom would buy me dolls, and I would play doctor, taking their temperature and putting bandages on them," she recalled. "And when I took chemistry for the first time in eighth grade at Colegio de la Salle, science fascinated me, and I said, 'This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.'"
She completed a Bachelor's degree in General Sciences at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, and a Doctorate in Medicine at the Medical Sciences Campus of the same institution. Later, she was accepted for a psychiatry residency at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas.
After working for several years in institutions providing direct service to psychiatric patients, including a psychiatric emergency room for children and adolescents, she felt a desire to help these populations through prevention. "Self-esteem problems and a lack of purpose and support are things that cannot be fixed with medication," she noted.
That desire led her to become an educator and work for Girls Inc., whose mission is to equip girls with the confidence, skills, and support they need to achieve their goals. As part of that work, López Calderón seeks not only for girls to learn science but also to be motivated to pursue careers in STEM.
For the Puerto Rican, it is vital that more and more women and people from racial or ethnic minorities integrate into STEM disciplines. "In fields like medicine and science, most are men, most are white. In these spaces, extremely important things are discussed, problems that affect us all are debated, and our voices must be there," expressed López Calderón.