Cranston's Renee Gamba, Director of the Museum of Natural History and Cormack Planetarium in Providence, has recently returned from her latest space exploration experience, the Expedition Educator Crew Year in Space program.

Gamba is one of just 36 educators to be chosen nationwide to be part of six regional Space Exploration Expedition Crews made up of six kindergarten through grade 12 teachers from across the country. According to a recent press release, the teams are modeled after the cross-cultural collaboration among the expedition crews aboard the International Space Station.Gamba and the rest of the chosen educators participated in the Space Exploration Educators' Conference February 9-11, with hundreds of other educators from around the world, but prior to the conference participated in special training sessions and worked together to create educational programs which they would then bring back to their classrooms, their students and their staff.

"I have always been very involved with NASA, and they are very supportive of our work here," said Gamba. "I have an entire room dedicated to Mars at the museum right now and we have collaborated with the Rhode Island School of Design on several of our displays, incorporating their art and design into the space exhibits. Our museum here is a natural fit because we have the planetarium right on site. I also get a great deal of support from Brown and URI and from the Rhode Island Space Grant."

Gamba, originally graduating as a Finance major in college, has been with the museum for almost 17 years and has been the museum's director for the past 10 years, connecting art, science, engineering, math and space education with museum visitors. She also works as an Outreach Coordinator/Teacher for the Krupowicz Planetarium at the Gaudet School in Middletown, providing science education to the students there, and is working with the Woonsocket Public Schools and NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center to offer teachers professional development opportunities there as well.

In the past, she has taken advantage of many opportunities to travel and learn about space, studying astronomy at Bryce Canyon, learning about jet propulsion in California, visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the Space Center in Houston, which houses the visitor center for mission control for the Johnson Space Center.

In order to complete her application for the program, Gamba had to submit several letters of recommendation and submitted a photo montage that spoke to the things that she has instituted at the museum and with her community outreach and afterschool programming, as well as the connections to the new science standards.

"Being an informal educator in this capacity versus being a classroom teacher was something that I think helped me to be selected," Gamba said. She received a scholarship for the program, which included three days of tours and professional development, and the opportunity to hear from scientists, astronauts and artists.

"My goal is to bring back what I have learned to the students and to our educators here at the museum as well, rather than making it so abstract," she said. "This gives me the opportunity to work with other educators around the country, bring it back here and expand it."

With the digital world being as it is today, Gamba is pleased with the many hands-on opportunities she has been able to bring to her museum visitors, including having actual moon rocks on display.

"Having real things to show them makes such an impact," she said.

The Year in Space program is a new one, and over the coming year, Gamba and her team must create an action plan and describe a co-curricular unit that will be used to educate students.

"We will take our museum resources and other things from other teachers and create a professional development plan, and next year we will present and share," said Gamba. "The professional development will help to develop and inspire our exhibits here and influence how we can create partnerships in our community."

When she thinks back to her earliest love for science, space and math, she can trace it back to her days in the Cranston Public Schools, where she attended Garden City School, Western Hills and Cranston High School West.

"I can remember all of my science teachers, all of the science projects we did, they really inspired me to love math and science from an early age," she said. "If I can do that, if I can get kids excited about science so that they return year after year and so they learn that there is so much you can do with math and science, even if you're not an astronomer or an astronaut, then I have achieved success; that is my biggest achievement. Kids think they can't do science, but it's so much more than that, so much bigger and my goal is to make it multidisciplinary for my students so that they see that they can do it."