Navigating Mentorship and Networking as a Young-Professional
Are you a young professional? Are you looking for a mentor? Do you want tips and successful strategies to network with industry professionals/leaders? This is the session for you! Gitika will be providing every young professional insider advice and tips she has garnered through her past experiences in mentorship and networking! Starting from the 8th-grade and through much trial and error, Gitika has found successful strategies to foster incredible mentor-mentee relations and reach out to role models she looks up to -- all through social media. Join this session to learn about her journey and to directly ask her questions in navigating your own aerospace journey!
Gitika Gorthi is the Founder and CEO of IgnitedThinkers, a non-profit organization she founded in the 8th-grade to spread space education and her love for aerospace to all students (www.ignitedthinkers.org). Gitika is a freshman at Columbia University in the College of Engineering and Applied Science as a C. Prescott Davis Scholar. Gitika is an aspiring aerospace physician, medical researcher, and astronaut.
Through IgnitedThinkers, Gitika is working towards breaking the glass ceiling for minorities in the aerospace industry, incorporating more hands-on research space science-based activities into elementary education curriculums, and igniting the passions of all students by providing them the opportunity to explore and create. IgnitedThinkers' mission and vision statement are simple: to ignite, inform, and inspire students across the world.
Previously, Gitika conducted medical research at the Baylor College of Medicine Space Medicine Center, researched wind turbines at the University of Central Florida at Raghavan Research Group, and worked with professor Dr. Prasanta Pal from Brown University to develop telemedicine technology. Additionally, Gitika is a former NASA Ames Research Center GeneLab intern.
Currently, Gitika is a student researcher at Columbia Medical School Center for Radiological Research and an intern at the Kuo Lab in Columbia Medical School’s Research Center researching ataxia and tremor. Furthermore, Gitika is a member of the NASA GeneLab Animal Analysis Working Group doing bioinformatics data analysis. Gitika is also an incoming student researcher at Harvard Medical School’s Harvard Summer Research Program in Kidney Medicine.
Gitika is climbing towards her goal of going into aerospace medicine research. Gitika is extremely excited about the new understanding studying humans in space will bring to treat diseases here on Earth and the medical technological advancements that will occur on Earth with the greater utilization of telemedicine for deep-space exploration missions. Most recently, Gitika was named one of the Top 100 Women in Aerospace and Aviation Professionals to Follow on LinkedIn in 2022. The future of aerospace is exciting, and Gitika is working to make it a more diverse and equitable environment for everyone.
