Natural sciences museum hosts STEM Career Showcase for students with disabilities Tuesday

The event is free, but registration is required. You can pre-register online.

The event is designed for students with disabilities in grades six through twelve who are performing at or near grade level. It gives them a chance to meet role models with disabilities who have thriving careers in STEM (that's Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields and provides a better understanding of the many professional possibilities available to them and the inspiration to pursue STEM careers, according to a news release.

What's planned? Here are the day's events, according to the news release.

Caroline Solomon, faculty chair at Gallaudet University and winner of the 2013 Distinguished Faculty Award, will deliver the keynote address. In addition to being an accomplished professor of biology, she also is an adjunct at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and serves on masters and doctoral committees for research on increasing participation of people who are deaf or hard of hearing in STEM and estuarine science.

A panel of STEM role models with a diversity of disabilities including vision loss, dyscalculia, athetoid cerebral palsy, and depression will follow the keynote and include: moderator Jeff Wissel, co-Lead of Fidelity’s Office of Customer Accessibility; Susanna Harris, a Ph.D. candidate in microbiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Tia Holmes, a computer science major at UNC-Chapel Hill; and Katherine Hunt, manager of Sunset Beach’s Ingram Planetarium.

An Opportunity Fair follows the program and provides students and their chaperones a chance to learn about, and talk to representatives on, several different agencies that work with students with disabilities that are interested in STEM fields. Plus, breakout sessions are offered to give students a chance to interact in small groups or one-on-one settings with the panelists, moderator and keynote speaker.