Girls in STEM Days

Nurit Katz, a lifelong resident of the San Fernando Valley, is an educator and sustainability professional who cares deeply about creating a sustainable, resilient, and healthy region for all Angelenos.

Ms. Katz has served in a number of public sector and non-profit advisory capacities including on the LA 100 Advisory Group, Los Angeles County Climate Vulnerability Assessment Technical Advisory Committee and the Resilient Infrastructure Working Group for Resilient LA. She currently serves on the Biodiversity Expert Council for the City of Los Angeles, and the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Areas Steering Committee. 

As Chief Sustainability Officer for UCLA, Nurit Katz led the development of the university’s first comprehensive sustainability plan and fosters collaboration across the leading public university to advance sustainability through education, research, operations, and community partnerships. For six years Ms. Katz also served as Executive Officer for Facilities Management. Nurit has over 15 years of teaching experience and is an Instructor for the UCLA Extension Sustainability Certificate Program. She has also taught for the UCLA Institute of Environment and Sustainability and prior to UCLA worked in environmental and outdoor education.

Ms. Katz holds an MBA and a Masters in Public Policy from the UCLA, and a BA in Environmental Education from Humboldt State University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA and is a Trainee in the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) Innovation at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (INFEWS) program.

Nurit enjoys wildlife photography and urban ecology research and serves as the Outreach Coordinator for the Los Angeles Raptor Study, a community science-based study of nesting raptors, supported by Friends of Griffith Park.

Kay Lai (they/them) is a Museum Educator at NHMLA and La Brea Tar Pits. Before coming to the museum, they taught STEM in LA and Orange County elementary schools through engineering, programming, and environmental science. They hope to inspire curiosity in guests to find wonder in all things, no matter how big or small!

As a preparator, Erika Durazo conserves Mesozoic fossils and participates in fieldwork. She enjoys sharing her expertise with volunteers, students, and the general public. As one of the first students to participate in an NSF-funded internship called Proyecto Dinosaurios, she is passionate about mentoring future students within the program.

Emily Patellos is a Graduate Student-in-Residence in the Dinosaur Institute, conducting paleontological research in support of the institute's programs in addition to fulfilling her doctorate degree at the University of Southern California. Her research interests consist of dermal plates in dinosaurs and fossil crocodiles, and what factors influence the evolution of these elements' morphologies.

Becca Prater (she/her) is a Museum Educator at the La Brea Tar Pits and NHMLA. She studied wildlife ecology in Oklahoma and then moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to explore all of California’s beautiful ecosystems. She loves hiking, talking about bears, and finding the best chai lattes.

Juliet Hook first started her journey at the museum volunteering in front of the dueling dinosaurs in highschool. After graduating from UC Davis with a Bachelor’s of Science in Evolutionary Anthropology, Juliet Hook began her career with this museum on a grant funded project to curate vertebrate fossils (over 19,000 years old) from Gypsum Cave, Nevada. While working at the museum part-time, she also stewarded the meteorite collection and gallery at UCLA. As she’s continued in her role as a fossil librarian, she’s had the opportunity to work with extinct bone crushing dogs, giant ground sloths, jetting ammonites, and even cannibalistic snails. She’s passionate about making the 7 million specimens she manages as accessible as possible and continues to learn something new about the field, our dedicated community, and these unique specimens every day.

Kayce Bell completed a B.S. and M.S. in Biology at Idaho State University and Ph.D. in Biology at the University of New Mexico. Throughout her career she has studied diversity and biogeography of mammals and their parasites. Her master's research was on genetic diversity and relationships between two desert dwelling ground squirrels, the Mohave ground squirrel and round-tailed ground squirrel. Between her M.S. and Ph.D., she worked at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on a chipmunk research project studying the relationships among chipmunk species and hybridization between species. For her dissertation work she used genetic data to compare genetic relationships and distributions of chipmunks and their parasitic lice and roundworms. Kayce completed a Peter Buck post-doctoral fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History, where she worked on the genomic diversity of the roundworms that infect chipmunks. She is continuing to investigate chipmunk and parasite diversity, while expanding her research to include urban mammals and their parasites.

Wendy, also known as DJ Wenluv, is an open format DJ, sound healer, anthropologist, and community organizer based in Los Angeles, CA. Previously a b-girl, her background is deeply rooted in hip hop music. Other genres include R&B, soul, funk, disco, breaks, reggae, and more. She is also a Beat Junkies Institute of Sound alumni. She has her MA in anthropology with a specialty in archaeology and has done published fieldwork research in the Philippines, Belize, and the California Great Basin.