Sara Gasca is a NOAA Ernest F. Hollings Scholar, NASA LEAP intern, geoscientist-in-training, and first-generation college student pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Geology through Santiago Canyon College, where she maintains a 3.89 GPA. Her academic and research interests span paleoclimatology, hydrology, and planetary geology, with hands-on experience gained through internships with the EarthScope Consortium, California State University, Fullerton, and NASA.

Sara’s research includes analyzing Mojave Desert sediment cores to reconstruct past climate environments and developing Python-based workflows to quantify relationships between large-scale climate indices and streamflow variability across the United States.

Within NASA’s L’SPACE program, Sara serves as a Planetary Geology Science Mentor, providing technical guidance and leadership development to student teams in the Mission Concept Academy. She advises on science traceability matrices, mission architecture, subsystem design, and planetary surface operations. Previously, she served as a Project Manager, Planetary Geologist, and Outreach Officer in the Mission Concept Academy, leading an interdisciplinary team through NASA’s mission design lifecycle to a successful Preliminary Design Review. She will soon begin an internship where she will visualize and analyse space weather data from NOAA satellite missions within the joint NASA-NOAA Space Weather Observations (SWO) Office, with a focus on the Space Weather Follow-On L1 (SWFO-L1) Mission.

Beyond L’SPACE, Sara contributes to science outreach and public service as a volunteer Social Media Content Creator for the National Park Service and a Map Editor for the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Map Corps. She is deeply committed to broadening participation in the geosciences and aims to pursue graduate studies in geology, with long-term interests extending from Earth systems to the Planetary Sciences. Her guiding mission is to break cycles of adversity and demonstrate that one’s background does not limit their potential in STEM.