Aamir Asadi

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Having a growth mindset is a really big thing for me, and it was something that the EcoLogik Institute fostered in me. Also getting to meet so many amazing scientists, particularly Black women scientists, at such a young age and having that mentorship. I know more living, breathing women in science than I do any other gender presentation in science.

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The EcoLogik Institute gave me a belief in myself—that I could be a scientist—that there was no skin color, background, gender, or ability that prevented me from being a scientist, that I was a scientist simply because I was curious about the world around me.

Being able to walk into a computer science or engineering or mathematical models class and be more times than not the only Black person in that room, and especially the only Black queer person in that room, and walk in like I own the place. I know that there is literally nothing anyone could tell me that would make me question whether or not I'm allowed to be there. Having so many amazing people believing in me helped me believe in myself.

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I always had a passion for science and for technology. But growing up in a low-income family and growing up Black, growing up trans, it was really difficult to find spaces that saw me as a future scientist and places that made me feel like I belonged in the STEM field.

I became the first youth apprentice at Cabrillo National monument after attending the EcoLogik Institute’s summer camp in 2018. I loved it so much that I just wanted to get involved. Sam invited me back as an apprentice to work under her and get a behind-the-scenes scoop at the kind of science that we do at the park.

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And that's how the Conservation and Environmental Stewardship Apprenticeship Program (CESAP) was born. It’s for girls and folks of marginalized gender identities from ages 13 to 18. And it gives them hands-on skills with the kinds of scientific work that we do at the park and the kinds of scientific communication that we do. So in 2019, we had one CESAP apprentice, which was myself, and now we have 40, plus a wait list.

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My capstone project is building a machine learning model that can categorize the different species that we see in our trail cameras in order to expedite the data processing. Because one issue that we've had is having to manually go through these videos—it is really important for us to be able to comb through it more efficiently.

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I'm also creating a workshop for the EcoLogik Institute  so that the youth within the EcoLogik Institute can learn how to do this themselves.

I'm choosing the four most common mammals that we see here. So, you have gray foxes, skunks, feral cats, and raccoons. And a lot of them have very similar body shapes.

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If we're taking too long to recognize a problem, we might be too late to solve it. So the quicker we can get at identifying problems and coming up with creative solutions to them, especially when it comes to habitat loss, invasive species or climate change—the faster that we can fix those problems and save the world around us.