Keanna Jardine

Keanna smiling in front of a flowering bush.

Keanna Jardine was born in the small country of Guyana where she lived until the age of 10. As a young child she was always fascinated with space but saw no way of living that dream coming from a third world country. When she moved to the United States, she saw her window of opportunity. She attended Adelphi University in New York where she resided and studied Physics. While at Adelphi, she interned at the Aviation Museum in the planetarium where she developed a planetarium show on black holes. After attending Adelphi University, she applied for the APS Bridge Program where she was selected as a 2016 Bridge Fellow to attend the University of Central Florida to pursue her Masters Degree in Physics with a concentration in Planetary Science. She earned her Masters Degree in 2018 with her thesis called “Asteroid Surfaces:The Importance Of Cohesive Forces”. She continued on to the PhD program and in 2019 she was selected as a NASA FINESST recipient to further her research in Dust Cohesion on Asteroid Surfaces. In 2020, she was highlighted by the University of Central Florida for Women’s History Month for her achievements. In addition she has been interviewed for the Brains On Podcast,and featured in Nature Magazine. Outside of her academic prowess, She has always been an activists and has partaken in activism since her high school days up until college where she was apart of the Levermore Global Scholars Program which contributed to her knowledge of worldly issues and fueled her fire on humanitarian issues. Through this program she was able to attend conferences at the United Nations to address and add to the conversation on issues going on globally. Keanna keeps involved with outreach of her own when she returns home to New York by inspiring the inner city youth to pursue higher education and to pursue Astronomy/Physics. In addition, when her time permits she partakes in outreach at UCF. #AstroGuyanese #caribbeaninAstro #AstroCaribbean