Jacki Long

I am a Master's Student at the University of South Florida's College of Marine Science where I use satellite images to better understand our planet. My love of marine science really took off after attending two summers at Sea Camp in the Florida Keys where I received my SCUBA diving certificate. Before college I began reading a lot of books on modern physics and decided to earn my B.S. from Florida State University in Physical Science. When I was in my undergraduate studies there were only a handful of females pursuing Physics which I found tragic. Physics is not all just numbers and cold-hearted mathematics, it is studying everything from the quantum level to the astronomically large to better understand the big question, "Why are we here?". I would like to contribute to helping women pursue interests in the STEM fields and hopefully continue this into their career.

"I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale."
-Marie Curie

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”


― Richard P. Feynman