Bryné Hadnott

Bryné smiling in black and white.

I’m the founder of Space Out STEM, a science education consulting practice focused on creating decolonized and anti-racist science curriculum for communities of color. My goal is to invoke art, poetry, people’s history, and all forms of meaningful expression to create a safe space outside of traditional STEM classrooms for BIPOC students. My journey into space science started after I took a remote sensing class at Washington University in St. Louis in 2011. I was astounded by the beauty of the images the Spirit and Opportunity rovers sent back from Mars. So, I switched my intended major from printmaking and drawing to earth and planetary sciences, landed a summer internship at the California Institute of Technology, and wrote a seniors honors thesis on martian lava rocks. In 2014, I started a doctoral program in planetary geology at Cornell University. My research ended up taking me from martian geology to the organic chemistry of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. During the summer of 2015, I worked with scientists in Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Planetary Ices Lab analyzing bubbling vials of liquid methane in a tabletop Titan simulator. It was a thick plastic bag pumped full of dried nitrogen gas. We called it “Titan in a bag” and it was the best. I enjoyed Titan chemistry so much that I decided to transfer to Johns Hopkins and continue my doctoral studies in the PHAZER (Planetary HAZE Research). Ultimately, I decided that getting a Ph.D. was not the right option for me and graduated from Johns Hopkins with my masters in earth and planetary science in 2019. I moved to Seattle and spent a year coding in Python to calibrate satellite images for a geospatial analytics start-up. In 2021, I decided to take a break from the space industry and get back to something I’ve always loved: writing. Currently, I am a freelance science writer for Professor Dave Explains and a contractor with STEMCore Consulting. I’m also a member of the Lab & Research committee for SoundBio, a nonprofit DIY biology lab in Seattle, a co-organizer for #BlackInAstro, and a writer for the AAS Women in Astronomy blog. In my free time, I love to hike in the Cascades or the Olympics, climb all of the things, and bop to West Coast rap.