AMANI GARVIN

• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2018

• Columbia University, Physics, '19

• Host Institution: Ball Aerospace

• Mentor: Charlie Bolden

Amani Garvin is an aspiring astronaut from East Orange, New Jersey. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Columbia University in 2019. At Columbia, she worked as an astrophysicist researching black holes, dark matter, and gravitational waves. Amani now works at Ball Aerospace as a Detector Test Engineer, where she works on remote sensing and Earth science projects.

Her passion for physics was born out of her family's love of the stars. Inspired by her grandfather's stories and Kerry James Marshall's art, Amani was determined to find her own medium to interact with the stars. Determined to be an astronaut, she began studying physics at Columbia University in 2015. 

In her first year, she did research at NuSTAR, analyzing stellar clusters. She then began detector fabrication and simulation modeling for the GAPS experiment, an indirect dark matter detector. She also worked at the LIGO lab at CalTech researching the optical properties of Silicon for use in future gravitational wave detectors. As a Brooke Owens Fellow, she worked at Ball Aerospace with their detector engineering group and took part in the BIRST program.

Outside of the lab, Amani is obsessed with being able to communicate her passion for space with the world around her. She has written projects on black holes and black femininity and served as the president of RoboGals at Columbia where she taught engineering to young girls. Amani believes that any scientist or engineer should be well connected and constantly in dialogue with the community around them. She is the President of The 2020 View, a science education company envisioning our future on Earth and beyond.