Best of CASE District VII Award
 

Institution: Stanford University

Title of entry: Among the Stars

About this entry: Stanford counts among its alumnae three astronauts with fascinating individual career stories and research. It also happens that they are all members of NASA's Artemis team—which makes each of them a candidate to be the first woman on the moon. When we undertook this story, we debated our timing. After all, the crew that will land on the moon has not yet been selected. We could have waited and done a story on a single astronaut—if the woman selected was one of ours. But we knew STANFORD readers would have pride in the work that all of these women are doing, and we didn't want to pass up a great storytelling opportunity. We decided that the best approach would be to tell each woman's story in a mini-profile, and then package them together as a celebration of alumnae in space, as well as potential historymakers. During our reporting window, one of the alums, Jessica Watkins, was on the International Space Station. Our writer Tracie White contacted NASA to see if we could have any communication with her. They offered a chance to do an interview live from the ISS. Naturally, we jumped on it. The result is a package of three mini-profiles and the only video interview we've done that involved a backflip in zero gravity! Readers were immensely proud to learn about these women, and an Instagram reels portion of the video interview was viewed more than 41,000 times on the Stanford Alumni Instagram account.