Elizabeth MacDonald leads Winter Field School

Elizabeth MacDonald, heliophysicist and EC50 Class of 2025 honoree, founded and leads the participatory science project Aurorasaurus, which allows people around the world to help contribute community reports of aurora using their smartphones to improve predictions and understanding of the Northern and Southern Lights.

In January 2025, Elizabeth, in collaboration with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, hosted a pilot week-long Heliophysics Winter Field School (WFS), marking a culminating experience in the Heliophysics Big Year for ten primarily undergraduate participants. The students came from a broad range of different schools across the lower 48 and largely STEM backgrounds – they had participated in ASP’s NASA-funded Eclipse Ambassadors program and led eclipse events in their local communities. 

The week-long Winter Field School provided hands-on exposure to careers and fieldwork in heliophysics, rocket science, outreach, and citizen science, featuring a broad range of expert-led sessions and immersive learning experiences at locations like Poker Flat Rocket Range and the Museum of the North, as well as aurora viewing and data collection excursions.

Participants engaged directly in citizen science data collection using various instruments and contributed to the Aurorasaurus citizen science project. Interactive career panels also supported students in exploring and preparing for future opportunities in the field. At the end of the week students presented essays about their experiences and epiphanies to each other and community back home.

Excerpts from these sharings can be found on the Aurorasaurus blog. The NASA highlight on the program can be found here.

Elizabeth reflects, “A Winter Field School for undergraduates is quite unheard of in my field which is not typically introduced in college or in the field. We based our program on a much longer environmental field program that was not based in the Arctic, so we were very pleasantly surprised by how well this worked on a shorter timeframe and in the adverse conditions of winter in Alaska. In fact, the students embraced being field scientists and thrived together under the Lights — many expressed they could see themselves continuing on in grad school in the North or in heliophysics. Given the success of this pilot we would love to have opportunities to continue offering such programming to inspire and impact other groups.”

Learn more about Elizabeth MacDonald, EC50 Class of 2025, and the rest of the members of the EC50 here.