April 24, 2023
PSD’s April spotlight is Galen Tsongas, Event Administrator for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and KICP. Galen joined the PSD on February 1, 2023, to plan, organize, and execute events within KICP and A&A.
I grew up performing in a drag/Grand Guignol theater in San Francisco (once in NYC) between the ages of 13-21, and up came of age in a miasma of countercultural circles: from the punk scene, to drag, to the beats. I took this diverse background, centered in inclusion and human-centered approaches to life, and lived in the Ecuadorian Amazon after high school and joined the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa after finishing my BA at UC Berkeley. Both experiences centered on cultural exchange and sustainable agriculture. Most recently, I finished my MA in International Relations (at UChicago) where I conducted fieldwork in Ecuador on the Indigenous social movements with the Kichwa community I lived in in 2012, and decolonizing approaches to scholarship. I’m working on publishing that while working on a book of my own poetry!