While many visionaries look at the night sky and dream of travelling among them, very few actually take steps to grasp these dreams. As a child in Trinidad and Tobago, Dr Camille Wardrop Alleyne was unknowingly building the ladder which would bring her closer to the stars.
“I had a curiosity about the world around me,” she reminisces.
Her parents also encouraged a focus on education. The St Francois Girls alum also attributes her growth to attending an all-girls secondary school.
“That type of environment as a girl really allows you to just know that you could be anything,” she says. “No one there is saying, ‘oh, well, the boys should do math, and the boys should do science, and girls, you go and do home economics’.”
She adds, “We were expected to reach our potential, or be the best we could be. I think all of those ingredients were the foundations for me being successful in my career.”
Dr Alleyne has kept this attitude throughout the illustrious career she crafted in the following years. She left Trinidad and Tobago and pursued her interest in space, designing and developing space and rocket systems – a field where few people looked like her.
“I didn't have women professors that I could look up to,” she recalls. “I had this innate passion and determination about everything I did in life, and so even though I didn't have those kinds of role models around me, it was not going to deter me. I was very focused on accomplishing my dream and my passion.”
This tenacity rocketed her to becoming one of the most-recognised women in aerospace engineering, and one of the few women of colour senior leaders at NASA. She is also the first African American (she has US citizenship) to lead a major human spaceflight programme at the NASA Johnson Space Centre.
In January of this year, after 29 years, Dr Alleyne retired from NASA, but her contribution to technology and innovation is still in orbit. She has been working to ensure opportunities for others in space technology. In 2007, she founded The Brightest Stars Foundation, an organisation which provides mentorship for young women globally, encouraging interest in STEM.
As the featured speaker at the UWI RBL World of Work (WoW) Launch recently, Dr Alleyne was able to inspire students to explore their interests in the field of space technology. WoW is organised by the Department of Careers, Co-curricular and Community Engagement within UWI St Augustine’s Division of Student Services and Development (DSSD). The programme allowed her to speak to girls from various secondary schools. (Editor’s Note: See coverage of The UWI RBL WoW Launch in this issue).
She advises students to make practical career choices: “When you spend all that time and you invest all that money for your higher education, you want to make sure that it's in a field in which you can gain employment opportunities, or create opportunities.”
Dr Alleyne was also a panellist at the recent session of the CAF Innovation Series, hosted by The UWI and the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean. As they discussed “Accelerating Innovation-Based Economies in the Caribbean”, she was impressed with the wide variety of sectors represented in the discourse.
Currently, she is working on her own contributions as CEO and Founder of Arusha Space LLC, where she and her team explore global space solutions, some of which could change the way the Caribbean handles many of its pressing concerns.
“We are focused on using satellite technology or space based technologies for solving problems and for sustainable and socioeconomic development around the world. What that looks like is using satellites to map the earth and analysing the data. We use artificial intelligence and machine learning models to analyse the satellites that could inform us across many different domains.”
She believes that the region could one day have a dedicated satellite. This could help provide complete access to broadband internet, even in rural areas, from a source unaffected by weather conditions. She mentions how valuable satellites would be in agriculture and disaster preparedness. They can also help in the management of oil spills. Arusha Space developed maps for the recent Tobago oil spill.
“The Institute for Marine Affairs has a similar capability,” she explains, “but we are able to bring advanced analytic tools such as machine learning models to processing this satellite data.”
One day, Dr Alleyne hopes that these initiatives could make the Caribbean known for technology and innovation. Noting that the region has a well-deserved reputation for sun and sand, she observes, “But we can also be technologically advanced, and we could also be innovators and inventors.”
She adds, “I would love to see people from outside our region thinking about the Caribbean as technologically advanced and incorporating all these new technologies into our way of life.”
