Stamford Teacher Receives 2020 Women of Innovation Award

Information via Stamford Public Schools

STAMFORD, CT — Stamford Public Schools announces that the Connecticut Technology Council (CTC) and Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology (CCAT) has named Stamford High School teacher Susan Dougherty a 2020 Women of Innovation in the category of Secondary Academic Innovation & Leadership.

Dougherty is one of only 12 Connecticut women recognized for their accomplishments in the field of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by the organizations, which announced the winners during a digital awards ceremony earlier this month, according to a news release.

Dougherty has more than 28 years of experience in teaching, including chemistry, physics, Earth and Space Science, and math. To excite her students about the subjects of math and science, she utilizes experiential learning, including various NASA programs, where she brings missions into her classroom. This year, Dougherty mentored an all-girls team of Stamford seniors as they compete in NASA's Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science (SPOCS), a national competition to design a robot to hold an experiment that SpaceX will send to the International Space Station (ISS).

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Last year, a team of Stamford High students won NASA’s Student Spaceflight Experiment Program, Mission 14. Their experiment focuses on cancer research and was supposed to launch in June but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The student experiment is now scheduled for a March 2021 launch on a Space X Falcon Rocket to the ISS.

In an effort to engage those students who are more interested in the environment than in space, Doughtery worked with NASA Langley so SHS students took ozone readings and entered them into the database that NASA uses for research. A team of female students entered the GLOBE Science Symposium with this research and won the New England/Mid Atlantic Research Symposium and Peer Review awards in 2017 and 2019.

This summer, she worked with the Office of Student Engagement at NASA with three goals for educators: to obtain and understand NASA missions and research, to highlight the value of STEM, and to identify valuable opportunities to enhance teaching and learning.

"My number one criterion is to find opportunities that get away from the textbook and do things that are more authentic, and research-based," Dougherty said in a news release.

Looking to the future, her students will participate in the Artemis Program, which is scheduled to land the first woman on the moon by 2024. The students will be a part of the NextGen App development challenge, creating a topographical map of the moon’s south pole. They will be designing an app that may be selected as the GPS application for the astronauts.

The 2020 Women of Innovation winners in 10 categories were selected from 50 finalists, drawn from 150 women who were nominated earlier this year. Women of Innovation are nominated by their peers, coworkers and mentors, and are selected based on their professional experience, history of innovation, ability to think creatively and solve problems, and demonstration of leadership.

Further information about Women of Innovation, including videos featuring winners and finalists, can be found here.