Shirin Zaidi ✨ شيرين زيدي

looking for shipping companies to move our personal goods from the US to denmark and the one i trust the most uses a jpeg in place of a hyperlinked phone number. amazing

"pre-existing conditions" is eugenicist logic, BTW

Sad ant carrying a napsack. I think the ant is inspired by Flik from A Bug's Life but recolored to be brown. The Wayback Machine has this image dating back to 2010 as far as I can tell.

wanting to show my advisors something in my terminal window and having to modify my cutesy kirby-themed background and font color so he doesn't hate it (for accessibility purposes he is not a hater it is not unwarranted)

I've wanted to write this article for years. About my and other's struggles to even survive sometime in #academia. Thank you to the amazing editors at @plosbiology.org that gave me the forum to write this piece. #science

look im just as happy to celebrate zohran’s victory as the next guy but as a south asian shia woman whose family has begged her to go into local politics for a decade now his win is going to be the talking point for my family for years to come

this is actually a horrible race science-y way to wipe your hands clean of the climate injustices happening in the global south bc some people are “built to withstand that kind of heat”. No. That’s climate change. None of us are built for it. It will kill you.

thank you!!

thank you!!

Thank you so much for all your support!! You are one of the many reasons CUNY astro will always have a piece of my heart <3

This work couldn’t have been done without my incredible advisors who stood by patiently as I wobbled my way through learning how to really do research and present it, my professors who gave me the tools to investigate exciting questions about the universe, my countless mentors, & my priceless peers.

Pretty much everyone in my cohort has an identify that was restricted from academia, whether it be their class, race, or gender, or some combination of those identities. The CUNY astrophysics masters program is the most meaningful program I’ve ever been a part of.

Shirin holding her graduation cap with a cross-stitched piece that says, “Free Palestine”, while wearing her graduation gown.

A meme of a wizard that says, “I Lowkey have A Master’s Degree”.

got my ms degree in astrophysics. this is a dream come true — for Shirin in 2015, who started in physics, for Shirin in 2017, who switched to planetary science due to harassment, for Shirin in 2019, who realized she wanted to do nothing but research forever.

my brother, my parents, and my bestie are all flying in for graduation and this is the most excited I’ve been in a minute!! I didn’t get to celebrate my undergrad graduation (2020… oops!) so getting to celebrate my masters in nyc is bringing me so much joy

Happy pride!

totally NOT real but a callback to one of my favorite grimes tweets at elon musk

Because I posted this elsewhere here’s me and a bestie @jakepost.tech during @saavikford.bsky.social class this semester — one of the best classes during my masters!!

Welp, apparently the NASA Postdoctoral Program has eliminated their July application cycle (with the deadline being rolled over into their November cycle). That certainly doesn't bode well.

This is a fave

Finding a Better Way to Distinguish Life from Non-Life The search for life on other worlds needs a way to sift through the chemistry of their atmospheres. If another species observed Earth to search for life, they'd look for

Eyyy my research made Universe Today!

the ultimate goal definitely feels aligned with the privatization and commodification of space — evil, but not novel, especially knowing how much of Musk’s whispers meet Trump’s ears

Trying to reconcile how all positive change had to be incremental, studied in perpetuity & ultimately stalled with ‘how are we gonna pay for that?’ but dismantling everything was done quickly, ham-fistedly & with total disregard for cost of money and lives & no institutional guardrails mattered.

in unrelated news: watching the handmaids tale and thinking about Emily…

And as grad students and hopefuls, we’re also hearing news of others that have made it in having their funding taken away from them. These cuts aren’t just halting a lot of novel science, but completely removing at least a generation of us

this is a nightmare. Telescopes aside, funding woes are so bad that people like me trying to get into phds are facing great difficulty even breaching the acceptance threshold — it’s been exhausting as someone who first applied in 2020!

Here's NASA astrophysics, if I read the president's proposed budget correctly. 🔭

sorry. I stole these from beloved agn nerd Shawn Ray. Catch his talk “Kicking Remnants to the Curb” at Dynamix in Cambridge next week!

she wave on my gravity til I merge

she spin on my jet til I kick

I’ve started doing hot yoga/pilates and one thing I need everyone to know is that the women in these workout sessions will be the only survivors of the climate change apocalypse

thesis: submitted!!!