Sasha Samochina on Solving Problems with Art, VR, and Software

In this episode, Sasha Samochina shares her journey connecting art, VR, and science together -- to her trio of roles at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). She illustrates why she is “thankful for [her] boldness” in interning and pushing into each new job and new technology. The Field Museum in Chicago became an opportunity to connect art, science, computing, and social storytelling. By the end, you’ll see the arc that returned to her desire as a young student to be a teacher and librarian but on an inter/planetary scale. Guest: Sasha Samochina Deputy Manager of the Ops Lab, Project Lead for ProtoSpace, and the Technical Group Supervisor for the User Interface Development Group (397M) at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Sasha Samochina (sam-ocean-uh) is an Emmy award-winning creative technologist. She joined the team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) after working in New York in the fields of video and web development and in Chicago, where she was a Media Producer at The Field Museum of Natural History. After dreaming up content for JPL’s Communications department, she began to explore the world of 360 videos and XR. Through Sasha’s visualization skills, she pioneered the very first 360° video release on social media for NASA. She is currently the Deputy Manager of the Ops Lab, Project Lead for ProtoSpace, and the Technical Group Supervisor for the User Interface Development Group (397M) at JPL. Sasha dedicated herself to helping create software that incorporates innovative forms of visualization that aid scientists, engineers, and astronauts in transforming their workflow, and she leverages that same experiential technology to educate and inspire the public to engage in STEAM. She loves all things digital, animal, sound-emitting, cosmic, and views the world through XR-colored glasses. Mentioned Links: Sasha’s overall work: CloudSasha - https://www.cloudsasha.com Reach out: Twitter: @cloudsasha - https://twitter.com/cloudsasha IG: @Cloudsasha - https://www.instagram.com/cloudsasha YouTube - von Karman lecture - https://youtu.be/Xv_9C5Mms4w NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL): https://jpl.nasa.gov Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NASAJPL Twitter: https://twitter.com/NASAJPL YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/JPLnews IG: https://www.instagram.com/nasajpl Access Mars: https://accessmars.withgoogle.com Protospace: https://www.cloudsasha.com/#/protospace NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov Field Museum of Natural History: https://www.fieldmuseum.org Hololens: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens Katie Stack Morgan at JPL: https://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/StackMorgan Cassini’s Grand Finale: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/17628/cassinis-grand-finale “Reach Across the Stars” AR app on Female Space & Science Heroes for smartphones from the Smithsonian Institute: