Mixed Race Studies

“A lot of people when they look at me and when I reveal to them that I’m half Korean, they say that they don’t see it at all and think that I’m black. I get a lot of people that say that and they try to impose their own classification of my identity and I embrace both sides.” —Moogega (무지개) Cooper

David Lee Sanders, “Interview with Moogega Cooper,” HalfKorean.com: An online community for mixed-race Koreans, April 10, 2013. http://www.halfkorean.com/?page_id=8947.

Interview with Moogega Cooper

HalfKorean.com: An online community for mixed-race Koreans
2013-04-10

David Lee Sanders

Moogega (무지개) Cooper was a top competitor on season one of TBS’s reality competition show, King of the Nerds. It premiered on TBS in January 2013 and the season just ended in early March 2013.

The King of the Nerds premise: “The series will follow 11 fierce competitors from across the nerd spectrum as they set out to win $100,000 and be crowned the greatest nerd of them all.”

Although she did not win the competition, Moogega did place 5th overall and gained a considerable fan following from her involvement on King of the Nerds.

Her “day job” is as a Planetary Protection Engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA field center. Although the job title may sound a little nerdy, it is quite an interesting and important job in relation to space research and exploration.

We were able to cover some of Moogega’s personal background, her professional career and, of course, discuss her King of the Nerds experience and are pleased to present this interview.

Please note that HalfKorean.com comments/questions are in BOLD.

Background: The Basics on Moogega

Where and when were you born, raised and currently reside?
I was born in 1985 in Southern New Jersey. I was raised there until I was 10 years old. We then all moved to Virginia. Once I finished graduate school in Philadelphia I moved to southern California for my job. I won’t leave southern California at all because I love it here!

How did your parents meet?
They met in Korea. My dad would go there several times to just hang out. He used to be in the military and would go back and forth. He met my mom through mutual friends. I kind of want to get a shirt made that says “Made in Korea” as I was definitely conceived there. They had a small ceremony in Korea and he then brought her back to the United States where they were married in the US…

…Did you grow up around other mixed Koreans or people of mixed heritage?
What was very interesting was that because we were around a lot of military people, there were a lot of mixed heritage people. No one that was mixed exactly like me but I was used to growing up with a rainbow of people.

Did you ever experience any identity issues while growing up?
A lot of people when they look at me and when I reveal to them that I’m half Korean, they say that they don’t see it at all and think that I’m black. I get a lot of people that say that and they try to impose their own classification of my identity and I embrace both sides…

Read the entire interview here.

Moogega Cooper: The JPL’s Space Engineer

LA Weekly
Los Angeles, California
2014-05-14

Sophia Kercher

Somewhere on Mars, the initials of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, J-P-L, are written in Morse code spanning hundreds of meters across the red planet. It’s this kind of detail that thrills JPL scientist Moogega Cooper – especially since JPL, considered NASA’s little brother, accomplished this on the sly.

“Initially, for the robotics missions, we had JPL [stamped] on the wheels so that as it rolls along Mars it would tag Mars: JPL, JPL, JPL. And NASA stepped in and said, ‘No, you can’t do that,’?” Cooper explains. “So JPL said, ‘OK, sure, we’ll take that off.’ And instead they put it in Morse code.”

Cooper, named rainbow or “moo-jee-gae” by her Korean mother and raised by her African-American World War II veteran father, is a human comet of beauty, intelligence and creativity. The scientist graduated from high school at 16, and at 24 earned her Ph.D., then launched her NASA career.

Now 28, she is a planetary protection engineer at JPL. A big part of her job is making sure that NASA doesn’t contaminate other planets with terrestrial microorganisms or any other Earth life, and vice versa – bacteria from, say, Mars, that could potentially harm humans…

Read the entire article here.