Lynne Zielinski

Lynne F. Zielinski is a recently retired physics. space science, and astronomy teacher of 32 years at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Illinois. She is currently a member of the National Space Society’s Board of Directors and is their Vice President of Public Affairs. She began chairing the Education and Outreach committee in 2006. Since 2009, she has managed the oral presentations, poster sessions, awards presentations, and student education track for the NSS/NASA Ames Space Settlement Design Competition at the NSS International Space Development Conference. Last year she hosted over 260 students from around the world at this conference. Ms. Zielinski has been engaging students in NASA programs since 1987, overseeing more than 60 nationally placed and NASA Center winners. In addition, she is a ‘Stars At Yerkes’ educator providing professional development workshops and student outreach programs for Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin since 2010. The Glenbrook Aerospace Development Get-away Experiment Team (GADGET), a student-run organization founded by Zielinski, has flown six active and more than 200 passive experiments on six Space Shuttle missions, nine experiments on sub-orbital NASA rockets, five NASA drop-tower experiments, a NASA C-9 and two Zero-G aircraft reduced gravity experiments, and experiments on three NASA high-altitude balloon flights. GADGET has also collaborated on NASA experiments with students in Israel, Portugal and Morocco. Ms. Zielinski and her GADGET students have conducted educational outreach for K-12 students and teachers in three states, and at state and national teacher workshops, NASA centers, and professional conferences. Ms. Zielinski's creative and passionate commitment to science education is demonstrated through a wide range of efforts including authorship of student experiment results in NASA journals, contributions to NSIP (NASA Student Involvement Program) resource guides, chapter sets in physical science textbooks, and designing educational websites and activities for national astronomy programs. Ms. Zielinski has also worked at NASA Johnson Space Center in the Space Station Training Division (1990-91) and at the University of California, Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory (2000-01) where she helped launch a NASA rocket into the aurora and created astronomy and space science education curricula. Ms. Zielinski has done scientific research in collaboration with scientists and astronomers in topics that include CIV winds in active galactic nuclei, electrostatic particle interactions in microgravity, dust disks around variable stars, and the f950-60 rectification of lunar topography by Gerard Kuiper and his graduate students.