Karly Pitman: Being a soft money researcher … I have flexibility

Dr. Karly M. Pitman is a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at the Planetary Science Institute.*  She specializes in numerical radiative transfer modeling and laboratory analog studies of mid-UV through far-IR light scattering and extinction by micron-sized particles, dust, and aerosols.  This allows her to work on a wide range of projects; in the past 5 years, she has worked on planetary surfaces and atmospheres (e.g., Mars & Titan), icy satellites (Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Mimas, Enceladus, Europa), asteroids (for Dawn), meteorites, and even interstellar space.  Currently, she manages investigation teams (including one all-female team!) as PI under NASA and NSF, and contracts with JPL’s planetary ices group.

[*PSI headquarters is in Tucson; I am located in CA]

Here are titles for a couple of papers in 2010.

Pitman, Karly M.; Buratti, Bonnie J.; Mosher, Joel A., 2010, Disk-integrated bolometric Bond albedos and rotational light curves of saturnian satellites from Cassini Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, Icarus, Volume 206, Issue 2 (Cassini at Saturn special issue), p. 537-560.

Pitman, K. M.; Dijkstra, C.; Hofmeister, A. M.; Speck, A. K., 2010, Infrared laboratory absorbance spectra of olivine: using classical dispersion analysis to extract peak parameters, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 406, Issue 1, pp. 460-481.
1. When did you first become interested in space science?

I pretty much came out of the womb knowing that I was interested in space science, with “interest” being an understatement: it’s either this or insanity.  My parents say that I announced my intent to become a scientist to them in kindergarten, but I had been seriously considering it for a couple of years beforehand, and by age 8, my obsession with stars and rocks was painfully obvious to anyone who met me.  I recall torturing my poor mother with trips to the library to do my “research” and checking out one particular book on Solar System astronomy so many times that the librarians thought I had destroyed it.  Instead of hanging posters of bands or hot guys on my walls, I slept under photos of the saturnian system and lunar maps.  I combed asteroid lists, looking for names for my first-born.  When Voyager 2 reached Neptune, I was freaking out over the reports of pink snow on Triton and wanted nothing less than ground truth.

Actually connecting to the planetary science community took effort.  In college (Vassar), I double majored in astronomy and geology as planned and had about 4 great advisers at any given time but didn’t have a major professor who specialized in planetary science.  During my junior year, I asked my geology professor for a copy of the AGU directory and sent out cold call e-mails to everyone with a planetary science affiliation for advice on grad schools.  Several people were kind enough to respond; Mike Gaffey (then at RPI), Carle Pieters and Jim Head at Brown, and Adrian Brearley and Rhian Jones at the Institute of Meteoritics wrote back several times with good feedback, provided background on asteroids and meteorites, and generously loaned the samples for my senior thesis work.   

Most of my letters of recommendation for grad school were from astronomers, and that, coupled with advice received from the planetary e-mail campaign, landed me in an interstellar dust group within a computational physics department at Louisiana State University.  My adviser, Geoff Clayton, was open to working with me on a dissertation about light scattering in planetary regolith.  He introduced me to his collaborator, Mike Wolff, who was doing atmospheric radiative transfer work for Mars missions (MARCI, CRISM, MER, etc.).  Mike hired me on planetary grants through the Space Science Institute, set me up with tools of the trade, and helped me to network with other planetary scientists when I began presenting at conferences.  Josh Bandfield and the folks at ASU were the first to really give me exposure to working with Mars mission data, lab, and field spectrometers.  Allan Treiman at LPI provided access to planetary science facilities and meteorite projects closer to home.     

2. How did you choose your first postdoc?

I did two postdocs that overlapped, both negotiated in the same year before I defended.  My first postdoc was at the Dept. of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Wash. U. in St. Louis, doing laboratory astrophysics.  I was hired to work between a mineral physicist (Anne Hofmeister) and an astrophysicist (Angela Speck), acquiring infrared laboratory spectra of interstellar dust analogs and correlating them to observational and radiative transfer model spectra of faraway objects like carbon stars, AGB stars, and planetary nebulae.  In my second postdoc (NASA Postdoctoral Program), I was working with Bonnie Buratti’s research group at JPL on radiative transfer modeling, bringing down incoming spacecraft data, and hyperspectral and photometric analyses of Saturn’s moons from Cassini VIMS.  Cassini was the first mission dataset that I got to work with intimately; there were data deliveries every 16 days during the time I was a postdoc, and it was exciting to be on the front lines and see how Cassini science was improving what we know of the saturnian system.  Especially given that the rules of engagement are different for women than men in science, I was fortunate to have strong female PIs as my postdoc advisers to show me different strategies for moving forward in my career.

3. What led you to join the Planetary Science Institute?

The major reason I joined PSI was so that I could submit proposals in my own name as a full PI with support services to help administer grants received.  Pieces of funding are critical for establishing independence as a researcher and finding permanent employment.  Affiliations through soft money institutes are one way to start proposing more independently and learning about the business side of science. 

Another reason that I joined PSI is that I have a high regard for soft money companies.  In grad school, I worked for a soft money company (SSI) and really enjoyed the working atmosphere.  At soft money companies, every scientist’s success with proposals counts strongly toward infrastructure, so there’s an institutional understanding that science research is vitally important.  The admin staff at both of the soft money places I have worked are good at what they do, and soft money companies are generally small enough that the directors and board of trustees are accessible, the bureaucracy is kept to a minimum, and you get to know your fellow scientists pretty well.  Everyone I’ve met who has been soft money at one point in their career has been very supportive of colleagues and helping younger generations of scientists in their careers.

4. How does being a soft money/remote researcher affect your research life?

As a remote researcher, I visit company headquarters about 1-2 times a year and work out of my house right now to drive down costs to my grants. The most obvious pro is that I have flexibility to schedule my workdays around my science/home life rather than when I can find the best parking space.  Most of the pros to being a soft money and/or remote researcher have already been discussed on this blog, so I’ll try to cover the cons here.  The major con is that library resources can be more limited.  I fill all of the behind-the-scenes roles myself now (IT security, shipping and receiving, maintenance, etc.).  I also consciously think about having enough redundancy in the workplace (safeguarding data and insuring equipment if there’s a house fire, burglary, or massive systems failure).  Isolation from colleagues and not having a “fortress of solitude” can be issues, but remote researchers combat these by doing audio/video telecons, traveling to visit colleagues, attending conferences, or working in coffee shops.  Being entirely soft money means that I’m flying without a net in terms of funding, so proposal brainstorming and preparation consumes a lot of my time.

5. What experience or advice can you share on subcontracting and consulting?

I worked under subcontract and did consulting for about a year and a half when transitioning from postdoc to PI.  Subcontracting and consulting are useful strategies for moving into a different area of research or collaboration, doing pilot studies/developing a new technique, or even doing support work for a mission.  They are also useful strategies for getting around hiring freezes, finding little pieces of FTE or handling funding that comes in at the end of a short-term job, working for groups at different companies, working part-time, or continuing research after retirement age.

Here’s what I learned in the trenches and from various mentors:

First you have to decide whether to contract/consult independently or through an institution.  Having done both, it doesn’t make a difference sciencewise.  There’s a clear advantage to going through a middle-man when it comes to getting paychecks on a predictable schedule, making taxes less of a headache, and becoming eligible for standard benefits packages.  As a free agent, you have more control over your pay rates (thus, greater earning potential).

When you subcontract, all terms (duties, expectations, deadlines) are very formally drafted.  It’s harder for someone to back out on you financially.  Modifications and no-cost extensions to the initial subcontract can extend the lifespan of the collaboration.  Computer accounts and even office space can be assigned to you at the PI’s institution.  But the formal drafting procedure can take weeks or months to start up, and you have to read the fine print.  For example, non-compete or non-disclosure agreements may block you from working for another local company.  In consulting, you and the PI can adjust terms on the fly in response to the science being done.  Consulting agreements can be initiated on a much faster timescale than subcontracts.  There are fewer progress reports to submit but tons of invoices.

The uncertainty of subcontracting and consulting jobs means that you need to be mindful of finances.  Before you set up a gig, have 4 pay rates in mind: the bare minimum salary that you can accept, what you made in your last job, what you’re expected to bring in today, and the salary that people in the next seniority bracket up from you are making.  Don’t announce your minimum rate; walk away from any deal that offers you less.  What you made in your last job is probably the amount that people will offer you; avoid flat funding yourself if possible.  Remember that $1/hour less is $2K less per year.  The salary you want to be making should be used in all of your grant proposals (scaled for inflation in future years).  As an independent contractor or consultant, remember to factor in the costs of insurance, retirement accounts (IRA or SEP), and both sides of employer/employee taxes. 

Subcontracting and consulting improves your negotiation skills.  A key phrase that opens doors to negotiating work is “bridging funds.” This makes it clear that you’re not asking to be a permanent mouth to feed; you’re just looking to pick up some work to tide you over until another grant starts. First steer the conversation to discussing the project itself (find common ground, ask questions and show your enthusiasm for the science being done).  Once you have established that you are on the team, and then broach the topic of money.  The person who offers a figure first is the person who will not make out as well in the negotiation.  Do not perform any work unless you have a real commitment (e.g., you have received funds, or you are a named participant on a proposal with that group).

6. Aside from science, what is important to you?

Strength in general, having a sense of purpose + creative freedom + independence to do my own thing, being able to lead something and be my own boss, balancing discipline and ego with a sense of humor and humility, and not taking my health, good fortune, or loved ones for granted are important.  For current hobbies and interests, designing and sewing my own clothing, dessert production/consumption, dreaming about hand-to-hand combat & someday owning a MP5, volunteering for early career and women in science initiatives, and reading comparative literature are all fairly delightful.

Now that’s a diverse set of interests — thank you, Karly!

Dr. Pitman is being featured here as one of 51 Women in Planetary Science, a series of interviews with successful women scientists on career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success. Questions or suggestions for future interviews can be sent to us directly or to our email list, which all women in planetary science can join!

Vicky Hamilton: There’s no one pathway that’s right for everybody

Dr. Victoria Hamilton is a planetary geologist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO.  Hamilton uses spectroscopy to study the mineralogy and igneous processes/histories of planetary bodies, primarily Mars and Earth, although she also has experience with volcano-tectonic features on Venus. “The main focus of my research,” she explains on her web site, “is understanding the spectral features of minerals and rocks in the visible, near infrared, and thermal infrared portions of the electro-magnetic spectrum and using this knowledge to identify and/or characterize the rocks and minerals on planetary surfaces. These data are useful because we can obtain them without being in contact with the planetary surface; we do this via remote sensing (the collection of data from instruments carried by aircraft or spacecraft). Most of my recent work has focused on analysis of data from ongoing NASA spacecraft missions at Mars.”  One of her most recent publications is an invited review:

Hamilton, V. E. (2010), Thermal infrared (vibrational) spectroscopy of Mg-Fe olivines:  A review and applications to determining the composition of planetary surfaces, Chemie der Erde, 70, 7-33, doi:10.1016/j.chemer.2009.1012.1005.

I interviewed Vicky on 2 March 2010 at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, as part of the Discovery Program Oral History Project and the Women’s Voices Outreach Project.  The following is excerpted from our conversation:

Vicky, how did you first become interested in space science?

I was always intrigued by space science as a child. But I never really thought about a career in science because I was always much, much better at and more comfortable with things like English and social studies and psychology and those kinds of–the softer science, social science kind of things. I didn’t find science until I was a junior in college.  I had taken a geology class to fulfill a science requirement, and the teachers there were like, you’re good at this, you should take another class.  They talked me into minoring in geology. Then I was looking for something to do one summer, and I ended up getting a PGGUR [Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program Undergraduate Research Program] internship at the Jet Propulsion Lab….   I spent six or eight weeks there working with the Magellan team.

I think, probably within the first week, I thought this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.  I’m one of the first dozen people on the planet to see these images of Venus, and this is the coolest thing I’ve ever done.  At the end of the eight weeks, I said, can I stay? … It was a very late decision, but it’s one that’s worked out really well for me and I love it.

It’s exciting to hear that you can still reach people at a later age than many people assume. What were you looking for when you went to graduate school?

I was fortunate that I had people around me at JPL who I could go to for advice. I was able to go to them and say, okay, where are the places I should be looking at?  They said, these are really the top places you want to go, and these are the people you want to think about working with.  They were really good about giving me the pros and cons of all these different places and people.  In the end, I felt like Arizona State was the right fit for me.  It turned out to be a great experience.

 Wonderful.  And then, you finished and you were looking around again.

Yes, I was looking around again.  And there was an added complication at this point in time, because I had met somebody in grad school, as so many of us do.  And so, we were trying–

Where else would you meet him?

Yes, exactly!  Where else would I be at any given time to meet anybody?  And so, we were trying to figure out was there somewhere we could go together, were we going to have to split up for a while and all that. In the end, I had a tough decision between staying where I was and continuing to do postdoctoral work with my grad school advisor, or going to JPL to be with my boyfriend.  Ultimately, I decided that, for a variety of reasons, I really wanted to stay at ASU because I was finishing my dissertation when Mars Global Surveyor arrived at Mars with TES and the data would be coming to ASU.  But it did mean that I had to separate physically from my significant other while he went to JPL to do his postdoc.  And so, we did that for a couple of years, but we always had in the back of our minds that the next step, we wanted to try to solve this two body problem and find a place that would hire both of us.

Did you find a place like that?

We did.  At the time that we started looking, the University of Hawaii was hiring, and we were both offered positions, which we accepted.  [Later,] we recognized that just what we wanted in an employer in the broadest sense of the term was not really compatible with the way things worked in Hawaii.  We ultimately decided that the right decision was for us to leave because we knew that the institution wasn’t going to change and it was going to be pointless to sit there and kind of butt our heads up against something that wasn’t working for us.  Also at the time, my father was also going through some health issues, and we decided that we really wanted to be back on the mainland to be closer to our families.

It was an amicable departure, and we moved to Colorado where we’re both now working for Southwest Research Institute, which is a private, non-profit R&D company.  We’re essentially soft money.  We do get some time, about 20 percent of our time, paid for by the company.  They offer a lot of really good benefits that a lot of people don’t think about.  It’s turned out to be a really liberating environment in that regard because it is run like a business.  It’s run very efficiently.  It’s a company that really does everything it can to help you as a scientist be successful.

What form does that take?  How is it really different being a research scientist at one place versus another?  You now have a lot to compare, for scientists our age.

As a researcher, you always have overhead on the grants that you generate, you’re in theory supposed to be getting services and support for that overhead.  The reality is is that in most places, most universities, you’re not really getting a whole lot other than the lights and the phones.  But, at the company we’re at now, they really do understand.  They operate it as a business, that investing money helps you make money.  So, for example, there are internal research funds available, and the Institute is often willing to contribute money for equipment, if you can make a case that it will augment the company’s capabilities and make it more competitive for research dollars.

That’s unheard of at most universities.

We also have incredibly, incredibly helpful administrative staff.  People at universities tend to be overworked and underpaid, and that makes it hard for them to do everything that’s needed or that they might want to do. But at this company I’m working at, the administrative staff really understand that they’re there to do the things that free us to do our science and write our proposals and generate the money, and their attitude is, you don’t need to photocopy that.  I’ll do it.  I’ll do this.  I’ll do that.  You go write your [proposal]–do your science.

That’s refreshing.

It’s astonishing.  It works like a well-oiled machine.  Everybody gets along great, people are very happy.  There’s vibrant science interaction. Part of the thing about the transition from faculty member to doing this is that I think, like a lot of things, when you go to grad school everybody says, oh, well, a faculty position is the be-all, end-all sort of thing.  But, being a faculty member and teaching is very hard.  It’s very time consuming, especially if you want to do it well.  I didn’t get into this field to teach.  I don’t have a problem with teaching.  I don’t dislike teaching.  It’s just not my thing.  I didn’t mind doing it, but I never felt like I was doing it quite as well as I should.  In a way, I’m kind of glad not to have that pressure because I don’t want to do it badly.  In a way, now, I’m even happier because I spend all of my time–well, not all of my time doing research, but a lot more of my time doing research and not feeling badly that I’m not doing my research or teaching as well as I’d like. 

Right, right.  When you’re pulled in so many directions, it gets very hard.

Yes.  And teaching isn’t for everybody, either.  There are some really bad teachers out there.  We’ve all had them.  And it’s just like, oh man, dude, you should just go do something else because this is not working for anybody. [laughter]

When did you first get involved in NASA missions? 

I literally started first working with spaceflight data as soon as I started doing this internship at JPL with the Magellan team.  I was doing mapping of Venus radar images, looking at volcano-tectonic features on Venus and trying to understand them.  I was working with space flight data, and peripherally around people and meetings having to do with ongoing space flight operations from day one.  Part of that excitement and energy was what got me so excited about this…. the Magellan data came down and you could look at it on computers, but it was still fundamentally something that people made mosaics of and came in with these big giant printouts and slapped them down on tables and people stood over them and looked at them.  That was a very peripheral involvement, and I was nowhere close to being anything like a team member on that.  But, that was the first interaction with a mission team that I had….

I was incredibly fortunate to have been brought into that environment and to have all these other scientists welcome me into it and be enthusiastic about sharing it.  That was really great.  That was, in fact, a great deal of the reason that I ended up going to ASU, too.  I had heard really wonderful things about Phil Christensen, that he was a really great guy and a great advisor.  I was very excited by the opportunity of going to grad school and now not just knowing about Venus, but also learning something about Mars….  I went there to work on the instrument, the thermal emission spectrometer that was on the Mars Observer mission.  Mars Observer failed to go into orbit just a few weeks after I got there to go to graduate school.  Phil kind of looked across the room at me at one point and said, “So, are you staying?”  And I was like, yes, sure, why not.  I ended up doing a dissertation that was largely laboratory spectroscopy-based.  In hindsight, it turns out to have been a great thing, because I had no idea what I was doing with spectroscopy.  I’d never done anything like it before.  In the end, it turned out that being able to do all that lab work for the Ph.D. set me up really well for the post-doc.

THEMIS, an imaging spectrometer that is onboard [2001 Mars] Odyssey was starting to return data as I was a post-doc.  So, I transitioned to working with that instrument’s dataset.  I would have been a part of the Mars Exploration Rovers team if I’d stayed at ASU.

But you found other things to do.

I found plenty to do.  I’ve been doing laboratory spectroscopy and starting to use that to diversify a little bit into geoarchaeology and marine geology.…  Relatively recently, somebody I had talked to about doing meteorite spectroscopy came to me and said, hey, we’re putting in a mission proposal to go collect a sample from an asteroid and we might want some instruments.  Would you be interested in participating in this?  So now, I’m on this New Frontiers proposal called OSIRIS-REx, and I’m the deputy instrument scientist for a thermal infrared instrument….  So, with any kind of luck, we’ll get selected for flight and I’ll be very busy for the next 10 years.

Wonderful, wonderful.  Well, I have to end with the classic question that you knew I was going to ask.  What would your advice be for people just making the transition from graduate school to post-doc, for instance, or thinking about a permanent career?  Do they have to look just at the university?

I think it’s a good thing to look at. But I think there are a lot of people who go through grad school not knowing what they’re being trained for, and then figuring it out near the end, figuring out you’re being trained to become another faculty member, you’re being trained to write proposals and generate money.  And a lot of people, that’s not really what they got into it thinking they wanted to do, and some of them don’t want to do it.

And so, my real advice would be ask yourself what is it you really like about what you’re doing and what is it you don’t like about what you’re doing, and then try to find a position that enables you to do the parts you like.  It’s okay if you end up deciding, “I don’t want to be a researcher, I don’t want to have to write proposals, I don’t want to have to write papers.”  That’s okay.  I think there’s a stigma, too, associated with either not finishing [a Ph.D.] or with finishing and then leaving.  And I think that’s unfortunate.

Talk to people, find out what other options are out there.  If it’s working at a center like JPL or APL or Marshall or–there’s a lot of places where you don’t necessarily have to be at a university if you’re not interested in teaching.  Or, if you are interested in teaching, there are lots of community colleges that would love to have people who are doing some active research on the side if it turns out that research isn’t what you like about it.  Be open to options;there’s no one pathway that’s right for everybody.

Thanks, Vicky!

Dr. Hamilton is being featured here as one of 51 Women in Planetary Science, a series of interviews with successful women scientists on career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success. Questions or suggestions for future interviews can be sent to us directly or to our email list, which all women in planetary science can join!

Ghislaine Crozaz: On the Apollo samples, Antarctica, and mentoring

Dr. Ghislaine Crozaz is Professor Emerita of Geochemistry in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department of Washington University. Retired, she has now returned to her native Belgium, where she received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees.  She continues to meet and advise students, and, “apart from enjoying the thrill of research, she has most enjoyed training, and interacting with, an exciting group of gifted graduate students whose postgraduate accomplishments are for her a constant source of pleasure.”  (She says it so well on the Washington University web site that for me to paraphrase would surely diminish its impact.)  I first met Ghislaine as a young graduate student, and as I have always been impressed with her mentoring of her own students, I asked her to join us here to speak about her career, her advice for students, and her outlook on mentoring. 

1. What first interested you in space science?

There was no space science when I was growing up! I was good in math and science. I read a lot, not just about science, and often roamed the (empty) Museum of Science. I became particularly interested in radioactivity. In my last year at the University of Brussels, I took a course in Radioactive Methods applied to the Geological Sciences and was offered a job by the teacher, Edgard Picciotto. He had wintered over in Antarctica during the IGY and was pioneering the use of isotopic methods in Antarctic ice. Frustrated by my immediate supervisor who did essentially nothing and took the results of my work to the boss, I asked to be considered as a PhD candidate. From then on, my life was wonderful as I discovered the joy of discovery. I developed the Pb210 dating method and studied fission products in polar snows, this at a time when no women went to Antarctica. The person who really made a scientist out of me was Picciotto. He was a wonderful mentor. From him, I learned to look at all aspects of a problem with a critical mind, which was definitely not a part of the curriculum in european universities at the time, I learned to be rigorous, to take all data into account whether they favor one’s prejudices or not, and foremost I learned to write. He dissected my PhD thesis for both content and style and I never forgot this lesson which I subsequently used with all my graduate students. The transition to space science (actually the study of meteorites) came about because, as part of the PhD requirements in Brussels, I had to come up with an idea for another PhD thesis. I had noticed that, at the time, estimates of the flux of interplanetary dust on earth varied over 9 orders of magnitude and I suggested that the flux could be better estimated using Mn53, induced in space by cosmic rays on the dust, in Antarctic ice. This led me to read most that was known about meteorites in the early 60’s. From then on, the study of extraterrestrial matter became a passion for me.

2. Looking back, what were some of the most memorable moments of your career?

Chronologically, the first “big” event certainly was the arrival and study of the Apollo lunar samples.

This is the Wash U crowd at the time of the Apollo samples. Bob Walker and Ghislaine Crozaz are front row, center.

In the meantime, I had met Bob Walker at a conference on meteorites and he had offered me a postdoctoral position in his laboratory (I was also offered the possibility to be part of the first scientific all women team to Antarctica but they were going to the Dry Valleys where there is no ice and I did not know much about terrestrial rocks as I had been trained as a chemist). In 1969 and part of 1970, I literally worked on lunar samples around the clock, every day and every evening, except for Saturday mornings which were reserved for grocery shopping and apartment cleaning. It was intense but great fun.

Going to Antarctica to search for meteorites was the accomplishment of an old dream which I thought would never be realized as I had changed field. But… in the mid-70s, it became obvious that Antarctica could become a great source of meteorites. Thanks to Bill Cassidy, who led ANSMET for so many years, I participated in two meteorite search expeditions. I truly loved this experience. After the first, Bob Walker whom I had married in the meantime, claimed that there was only one crazy person in the family but he nevertheless joined me for the second experience, this time in the gorgeous Beardmore area. And then there is an infinity of “smaller” moments working with graduate students, seeing them develop and watching their postgraduate accomplishments. In a sense they are the children I never had. As I read the profiles of other women in this series, I realize that many of them have children, certainly a situation that was much more difficult to balance some 40 years ago, particularly as a young teaching professor. But I have absolutely no regrets as I never had an urge to have children of my own.

3. You have mentored many graduate students who have gone on to great success in planetary science, and who remember you as a good mentor. In what ways do you feel a faculty advisor can encourage their students?

There are many ways to encourage students depending on your personality. Personally, I am more like a mother but a demanding one. I am naturally enthusiastic and quick to praise but I don’t shy away from pointing out deficiencies, but in a nice way. I took my graduate students to conferences as soon as financially possible, even in their first year when they had no results to present. I remembered going to my first conference only after completion of my PhD… and I came back feeling I had a bottle of oxygen on my back. I was so excited: a Nobel Prize winner asked me the first question after my presentation, I made contacts that proved useful later, and I even got two postdoc offers. Presenting a paper at a conference is also an opportunity for students to pause and reconsider where their project is heading, and hone their skills to write an abstract and to verbally present the essentials in a logical and convincing way.

4. For many years, you were faculty in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at Washington University, while your husband was faculty in the Physics department there. Would you like to talk about the challenges or rewards of working in the same field as your spouse?

It is true that I started studying extraterrestrial materials with Bob and, therefore, we worked and published together for a few years. This applied to other people like Ernst Zinner as well. But starting in the mid-70s when I became an assistant professor, I had a strong desire to have my own research projects. From then on, there was no joint paper and we never shared graduate students, a fact that was probably not widely recognized in the scientific community. On the other hand, the rewards of sharing my life with Bob were enormous. I feel extremely lucky to have been, for 35 years, the soulmate of this immensely creative person with a passion for science and everything he undertook. He created a lab in which conducting research was always exciting, sometimes exhausting, but always fun. And so was life with him.

5. What would you like to tell young scientists just beginning their career?

For all: Go for what you really want to do (and have fun along the way). Learn to write well, it is indispensable. Be visible. Attend and contribute to scientific meetings. Make contacts. I really enjoyed the collaborations, established mainly at meetings.

For graduate students: Choose carefully your mentor. You will have to work with him/her for a few years. Looking back at my career, I see how much “luck” (for lack of a better word) and chance encounters played. And, finally, do not be afraid to take some risks… sometimes.

Thank you, Ghislaine!

Dr. Crozaz is being featured here as one of 51 Women in Planetary Science, a series of interviews with successful women scientists on career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success. Questions or suggestions for future interviews can be sent to us directly or to our email list, which all women in planetary science can join!

Welcome, AGU Blogosphere!

Everyone’s favorite professional society for geophysics has taken a BIG STEP into the blogosphere this week, expanding their blog offerings to feature seven independently written blogs written by a rather diverse set of members of the community, in addition to their three AGU-written blogs, The Plainspoken Scientist, Geospace, and Meetings. 

Let’s give a great big warm welcome to the AGU Blogosphere, by leaving comments over at their blogs!  The bloggers moving to the AGU blogosphere and their direct links are:

• The Martian Chronicles;
• Dan’s Wild, Wild Science Journal;
• The Landslide Blog;
• Magna Cum Laude;
• Mountain Beltway;
• Outdoor Science; and
• Terra Central.

Congratulations on your launch, AGU Blogosphere!

Darby Dyar on being a good scientific citizen and managing work time

A million years ago, when I was a brand-new graduate student and still wet behind the ears, I saw a notice on the bulletin board at LPSC inviting women at the conference to meetup in an attendee’s hotel room after the poster session.  I was way too intimidated to go as a new graduate student in an all-male research group, but I’ve thought about it since then, and wondered how things may have been different had I gone and seen women doing the balancing act — and succeeding.

By happy coincidence, Dr. Darby Dyar, one of the organizers of that meetup, with Dr. Andrea Koziol, was nominated to be a featured woman in planetary science on this site, and she has graciously agreed.  In this post, she tells us about her early career, and shares some really good advice.

When did you first become interested in space science?

I grew up in Indiana in the 60’s, so becoming any kind of scientist was not something I even imagined because I never knew a woman scientist.  I graduated from high school having taken only 9^th-grade biology, and was convinced I’d never need science again.  I did gain two useful things from high school, however.  They had a grant to teach computer programming, a then-unheard of endeavor, and I learned the basic fundamentals of programming. I also took a very strong series of math courses culminating in calculus, in which, by my senior year, I was the only girl.  I learned a lot from that experience about survival skills in an all-male class, which came in handy later.

But I ended up at Wellesley, which is an all-women’s liberal arts college, where I decided to major in art history.  Somewhere in my sophomore year my advisor gently reminded me that I needed to fulfill a science course.  I asked around to find out which one was the easiest, and reluctantly enrolled in Geology 101.  The first day of class I slunk into the lecture hall and planted myself in the back row with a disinterested expression.  This rapidly changed when a woman walked in and gave a knock-your-eyes-out great lecture full of slides of cool geology and succinct explanations. That professor, Meg Thompson, eventually became a good friend and inspiration.  So I took another geology course, and another, and ended up with a double-major.  I had to take a year of physics and chemistry courses during my senior year, which nearly killed me because I’d never even met those subjects before, but my geology faculty tutored me through when I needed help.

My life as a planetary scientist began in the middle of my senior year when I was looking for a job to bring in a little extra money. One of my Wellesley profs steered me to Roger Burns at MIT, who was looking for someone who could do lab work (on lunar samples!) and computer programming.  This went so well that Roger talked me into applying to MIT for graduate school (I had originally planned to pursue structural geology), and NASA supplied funding for a cool Ph.D. project involving cooling rates of lunar glasses, so I became a geochemist instead of an art historian!

Ironically, when I left MIT, I also left planetary science behind.  In an act of incredible generosity, Roger sat me down and said, effectively, that he didn’t want to compete with me going forward (who was he kidding?, I thought).  So we decided that henceforth he would focus only on extraterrestrial applications of Mössbauer spectroscopy, and I would do terrestrial samples only.  We respected this unusual arrangement and often sent potential users to each other over the ensuing years.  In hindsight, my time as a terrestrial geologist served me very well: I taught field camp, worked in the southwest and the northeast, worked with engineers to develop some new technologies for mineral analysis, and ended up understanding a lot of fundamental processes that have great application to problems in planetary science.  After Roger died suddenly from cancer, I came back to the field with fresh eyes.

 What were/are your career goals?  How are you fulfilling them?

My original goal was to find work that I was passionate about, that supported me financially, in a place where I wanted to be, surrounded by people I liked.  It took me many years to get there, but I finally think I’m achieved that goal.  Intellectually, I continue to be driven to explore the fundamental relationships between mineralogy, spectroscopy, and geology on terrestrial planets.  I am happy to be at a place in my career and life that allows me to work on big problems with the luxury of taking my time to figure things out and look at the science problems holistically – this is one of the best things about having an academic job.  I would rather write one excellent paper that addresses an entire problem than several papers that answer only parts of a problem.

I also find myself working towards a different, less self-absorbed goal. Although I love my research, I truly find that my greatest joy comes from helping others succeed. Looking back at my career so far, I realize that my most important accomplishments have not been books, proposals, or papers, but people whose lives I have touched, including my own two children. So I now spend a lot of time and effort working to make things better and easier for others to become scientists, especially women. 

When I started graduate school, there were no women faculty in my department, and only a handful of women graduate students.  Though times have changed somewhat, I feel frustrated that women still obtain graduate degrees and tenure in greatly diminished numbers relative to men, and the leadership in science teams and other aspects of planetary science is still predominantly male.  Every year I show my students a photo of the science team for the Mars Exploration Rovers and ask them “what’s wrong with this picture?” to encourage them to think about how to change the gender balance in this discipline. I was motivated to write my mineralogy textbook by the realization that I’d never seen a science textbook written by a woman at anything but an introductory level – what kind of message does that send?  I aspire to work on a planetary mission because I want people to see that a woman can mix wellness checkups, exam grading, soccer carpools, thesis defenses, and dinner-making with telecons, ops planning, and instrument calibrations (though not always perfectly, and hopefully not all at the same time!). I believe that one of the most important outcomes of planetary science is that every mission gets the general public excited about exploration and science, and that will ultimately lead to creating more scientists, including women.

It’s important to also add that being an educator is not an entirely an altruistic undertaking! One of the best parts of my job has been experiencing life vicariously through the lives of my former students. They’ve traveled the world in the Peace Corps, worked on Mars, Mercury, and lunar missions, pursued science journalism, film-making, space law, and fiction writing, to name a few.  It’s a privilege to have been part of all these lives… 

What role has mentoring played in your work life?

I had wonderful mentors at Wellesley College, including my art professors who encouraged me to pursue both an avocation and a profession.  I was closely supported by Roger Burns and Charles Guidotti, both dear friends and great sources of support and both lost too soon to cancer.  George Rossman is always there for me to give scientific advice.  Jerry Delaney of Rutgers University has been a long-term source of support; he single-handedly dragged me back out of terrestrial geology and into planetary science after Roger Burns died. 

I have often wished for women mentors as I’ve progressed through my career but they are few and far between.  My generation of women scientists has had to make it up as we go along!  I have a weekly breakfast with my friends Tekla Harms and Sheila Seaman, both geologists and colleagues in the Pioneer Valley here; we mix pancakes and talk of aging parents with laughter over our careers and our colleagues, and it’s immensely helpful.  Perhaps obviously, the fact that I had no women mentors has inspired me to mentor and improve the lot of others.

Tell us about the life of a researcher at a large university like the University of Oregon, vs. the life of a researcher at a college like Mount Holyoke.  Are the institutional priorities or expectations very different?  How does it affect your science?

When I started teaching in Oregon in 1987, the Chair explained to me that my emphasis should be on research, grant-writing, and graduate education; teaching and undergraduate students were to be lower on my scale of priorities.  I was never very comfortable with this situation.  One of my students once looked at my 16-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week life as a scientist and said “Darby, I respect you, but I really don’t want to be like you.”  This really shook me up, and I resolved to make some changes in my life.

In contrast, Mount Holyoke is a wonderful place for me. My job here is explicitly about education, and doing research is a way to serve that mission by informing and inspiring my teaching and also by training the next generation of a scientifically-literate public. The College values me most for my teaching, which helps put proposal success in perspective – I will still have a paycheck if all federal funding goes away tomorrow! The College provides resources like computers, technical and machine shop support, and administrative assistance – and even pays for one trip per year to a conference. I benefit from close proximity to colleagues in all the science departments, and thus have tremendous intellectual resources to help me when I pursue interdisciplinary questions.  The downside is that my teaching load is considerably higher than at a research university, and my responsibilities to students and institutional committees are great.  Luckily, my collaborators know to expect slow responses during the 26 weeks of the year when I’m teaching. I often can’t act on ideas as rapidly as I would like, I can’t write papers fast enough, and I have to turn down opportunities (invited talks, review panels, etc.) too often. But I have a steady supply of incredibly bright, highly-motivated undergraduates who work in my lab; after two or three years with them, they stack up against any grad student I ever had. And, now that I have tenure, I have a job for life, near my husband’s job. 

In terms of research success, I have found that reviewers base their judgments on my proposals and papers and my capabilities as a scientist rather than on the perceived research prestige of the institution where I teach. However, I work very hard to make sure I am as productive as my colleagues at other types of institutions, so there’s no question that I will accomplish the proposal goals I set out.  About 2/3 of my peer-reviewed papers have been published in the last 1/3 of my career since coming to Mount Holyoke (and having children, which has forced me to become more efficient with time management). I do sometimes envy my colleagues who can attend research talks regularly, and just walk down the hall to have interesting discussions about planetary science, but I spend a lot of time with collaborators by email and the telephone, which helps. As communications have changed, the opportunities to do science outside of traditional venues are changing fast too (witness the success of the Planetary Science Institute model), which I applaud heartily.  Much of my best writing is done in my home office, watching the seasons change as the wild turkeys stroll by outside.  So I’m very grateful for the balance and flexibility that being at Mount Holyoke brings to my life and my career.

You have mentored many younger scientists, who do speak highly of your words.  What do you wish you’d been told as a postdoc or graduate student?

Let me begin by noting that some of these items ARE things I was told as a graduate student…

Become (if you aren’t already) a well-rounded human being, with authentic and supportive relationships with family and friends.  Cultivate and prioritize having hobbies and a life outside your profession that includes things you do to take care of yourself and others. Of all the things I learned from working with Roger Burns, this lesson was the most important.

It’s OK to put priorities relating to your personal life ahead of those of your professional life – as long as you realize that there will be consequences (sometimes heartbreaking!). The hardest thing I ever did was to quit my job on the verge of tenure to relocate 300 miles away so I could live full-time in the same town as my husband and kids (then aged 1 and 3 years). But it was an easy and obvious decision that I will never regret.

You’re never too young to spend time mentoring others to help them become scientists.  These gestures will end up coming back to you in unexpected and wonderful ways.

Another thing I learned from Roger Burns: treat everyone the same.  Although he was a senior professor at MIT, Roger interacted with everyone from the janitor to his students to his colleagues with respect, caring, and humility. He was always a gentleman, and he had high standards for professionalism.

Be a good scientific citizen.  For every paper you submit, agree to review two others.  For every proposal, review four.  Organize a conference (once in your career).  Become an associate editor for a journal, and serve until you’ve handled more papers than you think you’ll ever write.  Lead a committee in your professional society. Serve on review panels when asked, and when possible.  Learn from all these experiences! Do all these things at times in your career when your other commitments are fewer, so that when life gets busier, you’ll still feel that you’ve done your share.

Persistence matters.  I was 44 years old when I finally got tenure, after teaching for 17 years…

Never collaborate with people you don’t like, or who can’t accept you for what you are.

Training yourself to be an expert in a single technique can be risky because it can lead to becoming a “one-trick pony.” Try not to overspecialize. It’s far better to build a reputation as someone who asks interesting scientific questions and then teaches herself the techniques needed to answer those questions in creative, original, and integrative ways.

Build your work in planetary science on a firm foundation of terrestrial geology and/or extrasolar astronomy.  If you want a job in academia, this is a necessity for finding and keeping a job. Diversify your funding sources among NASA, Research Corporation, DOE, and NSF.

When it comes to balancing all the competing demands of a busy life, someone once told me to “throw money at the problem.”  I know a woman who not only pays someone to clean her house, but also hires a cook to come three days a week to make dinner so she can spend time with her kids in those critical few hours after daycare ends.  Hire a student to drive carpools for you when possible.  Your sanity is worth the financial cost.

Learn to be flexible and always be prepared.  Adapt your career to your situation in life, and manage your work time wisely so as to maximize your family time.  Save up some extra data when you’re pregnant so you’ll have something to write up after your baby is born.  Deliver your kids to day care the minute it opens, and pick them up at closing time so you can get the most work done while they are otherwise happily engaged, and can then devote time exclusively to them when you are home.  Always have with you a paper or proposal to review when you’re waiting in line to pick up your kids. Set aside a less-urgent project to do on the days when you’re home with a sick child. Do your grading at the kitchen table next to your kids while they are doing their homework (misery loves company!). Bring your laptop so you can work while your elderly parents doze in the nursing home and still be there when they wake up again.

Finally, accept the fact that you really can’t do it all to perfection. This isn’t easy.  Decide what’s most important in your life, and set your priorities to reflect those decisions. There are many times when my life is simply out of control, but I’ve learned to have faith in the way I’ve ordered my priorities and just stick to working down my list, starting with what’s most important. Learn when to strive for perfection and when an 80% effort is good enough. Plan for chaos: don’t let things like abstracts, proposal reviews or presentations wait until the last minute, because that invites disaster. Pay a little more and buy refundable/changeable plane tickets (or fly Southwest!). Always have a back-up plan.

Thank you, Darby! 

Dr. Dyar is being featured here as one of 51 Women in Planetary Science, a series of interviews with successful women scientists on career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success. Questions or suggestions for future interviews can be sent to us directly or to our email list, which all women in planetary science can join!

2010 DPS Women in Astronomy and Planetary Science Lunch

Thanks to those who were able to attend or showed interest in attending the 2010 DPS Women in Astronomy and Planetary Science Lunch.  I am sending out some notes from the meeting (below) and the powerpoints are available here: http://awis.wustl.edu/data/DPS_Womens_Lunch_Report_2010.pdf

Please pass these on to colleagues (male or female) who might be interested in any of the contents.  I wasn’t able to catch all of the announcements that were made, so if I missed yours and you would like me to add it to the list for a future posting of these notes, please let me know.

Sincerely,
~Kelsi Singer

 1.  Amy Simon Miller: Highlights from the Women in Astronomy and Space Science conference.
-> History of this conference (see powerpoint)
-> Pasadena Recommendations
          We should encourage our institutions to endorse this.  (it is not a binding contract!)
-> Reminder that everyone needs to be proactive about nominating/suggesting/voting for deserving women for awards, invited speakers, etc.

2.  Announcements from the Community

a. If you are experiencing harassment, please consider contacting a senior person who can help you.  You can also submit an anonymous post (as has happened a few times recently on various women in science blogs and list serves) if you don’t feel comfortable contacting someone directly. This helps provide proof that there are still problems out there that need to be fixed.

b. Good resources:

• Women in Planetary Science blog –  https://womeninplanetaryscience.wordpress.com/
• Women in Astronomy blog –  http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/
• AAS Women’s Newsletter  (note, you do not have to be an AAS member to get on this e-mail list) –   http://lists.aas.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aaswlist
• DPS Professional Development Committee –  http://dps.aas.org/development/
• CSWA, Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy –  http://www.aas.org/cswa/
• AWIS, the Association of Women in Science –  http://www.awis.org  (benefits of being a member: access to MentorNet, fellowships, free webinars on professional development topics like networking and negotiating)
• MentorNet –  mentornet.net  (check it out, this is a great program if your institution subscribes or you are an AWIS member)
• NPP, the NASA Postdoctoral Program – http://nasa.orau.org/postdoc/  (note, you need to apply for these ~1 year in advance of the time you would like to start)
• AAPF, the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowships – http://nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5291

c. The Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) is soliciting proposals for 4-8 Study Programs to be carried out during the 2011 calendar year. Study program proposals are solicited in the areas of space engineering, planetary science, remote sensing and earth system science, and astronomy and physics from space. Team up with a Caltech faculty member and a JPL researcher to apply. KISS has also released a Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship call. See http://kiss.caltech.edu/ for more details

3.  Rachel Mastrapa reported on the new Professional Development Committee in the DPS.

-> See powerpoint
-> If you have suggestions of programs you would like to see please contact Rachel.

Monday minute (Friday edition)

Some quick announcements today — and we’ll be back on Monday with 51 Women in Planetary Science articles featuring Darby Dyar, Ghislaine Crozaz, and Faith Vilas throughout the week, as well as a summation of activities at the AAS DPS meeting brought to you by Kelsi. 

1. The USA Science and Engineering Festival is finally here!  And by “here,” I mean in over FIFTY CITIES this weekend.  If you’re in Washington, D.C., head on down to the National Mall for more than 1500 fun, hands-on activities and over 75 stage shows for all ages.  Free, no registration required.  10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. October 23 & 24.

2.  Other D.C. science fun this weekend includes safe trick-or-treating and spooky science experiments at Udvar-Hazy on Saturday, 23 October 2010, and the Maryland Science Center member night on Sunday, 24 October 2010, which encourages members to arrive in “science themed costumes.”  Science themed costumes?  That is full of the awesome.

3. And a totally random but interesting blog post of the week from Mayim Bialik, who you’ve probably seen on TV on the Big Bang Theory (or, okay, Blossom).  Not usually the type of fare we link up here, but this line caught my eye as she was discussing pumping on the job recently:

I earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA just before I got pregnant with our second son. But my husband and I decided that a lifestyle of me being a research professor would not allow us to parent the way we wanted to.

What kind of a world do we live in, where Ph.D.s in neuroscience feel that they can’t go into research because they can’t devote full-time-plus to their work for their entire 40-year career?

I know that this is a hot-button issue, particularly for so many of us who have sacrificed career advancement, family, or life goals, redefining success along the way to “having it all.”  It’s just fascinating to me that prospective work-life balance issues can openly drive someone with a Ph.D. in neuroscience back to acting.

Have a great weekend – thanks for listening!

Catherine Neish: Exercise your communication skills

Dr. Catherine Neish is a postdoctoral fellow at the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins University (APL).  Catherine was one of the very first women to nominate someone for this feature; I turned the tables on her and asked her to tell us about herself!  The questions and answers from our online interview follow, but first, her publications so far in 2010:

• C.D. Neish, A. Somogyi, and M.A. Smith (2010) Titan’s primoridal soup: Formation of amino acids via low temperature hydrolysis of tholins. Astrobiology 10, 337-347.
• C.D. Neish, R.D. Lorenz, R.L. Kirk, and L.C. Wye (2010) Radarclinometry of the sand seas of Africa’s Namibia and Saturn’s moon Titan. Icarus 208, 385-394.
• D.B.J. Bussey, J.A. McGovern, P.D. Spudis, C.D. Neish, H. Noda, Y. Ishihara, and S-A. Sorensen (2010) Illumination conditions of the south pole of the Moon derived using Kaguya topography. Icarus 208, 558-564.

1. When did you first become interested in space science?

I have been interested in space science since childhood, and was a voracious reader of all types of science fiction, including all of Arthur C. Clarke’s novels.  However, I did not become seriously interested in a career in the field until high school (prior to that, I wanted to play oboe in a Broadway pit band).  In grade ten, I competed in a space settlement competition sponsored by NASA Ames, and my “Space Station Terra Nova” won first prize in my age category.  That gave me an opportunity to visit the NASA center, and experience the bustle surrounding the landing of Pathfinder on Mars.  Two years later, I won an essay contest sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency, and attended the International Space School in Houston, staying with astronaut Chris Hadfield and his family during my time in Houston.

By then, I was hooked, and decided to major in astronomy as an undergraduate.  Fascinated by the movie and the novel Contact, I applied for a summer research internship at Arecibo Observatory.  There, I had my first taste of planetary science, working with Ellen Howell and Mike Nolan researching asteroids with radar.  I was fascinated with radar – it was the first “active” astronomy I had ever seen.  You could tweak the buttons and knobs and learn different things about the asteroids, instead of simply collecting what they reflected from the Sun. During that summer, Ellen told me about her alma mater, the University of Arizona, and its strong planetary science program.  I applied to their graduate program several months later, and the rest is history!

2. You have worked at two outstanding research institutions, with what I would guess are very different cultures.  How is working at a lab like APL different from a university?

The culture at APL is very different from the culture at LPL, and I think there are pros and cons to each type of institution.  When I first arrived at APL, I was struck by the structure built into the institution.  You need badges to enter the buildings, you need to complete security training, fill out public release forms, screen visitors, etc.  You can’t simply invite someone to stop by your office, say, like I was able to at Arizona.  Pure research scientists represent a relatively small proportion of the employees at APL, so we don’t necessarily fit into the mold of a typical worker here (though I know our group supervisor, Louise Prockter, tries to shield us from many of these “annoyances”).  On the other hand, you are surrounded by people doing cutting edge spacecraft development and operations, and the excitement surrounding active spacecraft missions returning new data.  And there are structures in place that are very beneficial – support for writing proposals, scheduled evaluations to get feedback on your performance, etc. that I didn’t have at Arizona.

The other big difference is the lack of students.  There are no classes to teach, and few undergraduate and graduate interns to work with.  This, of course, frees one to do more research and spacecraft operations, but hinders cross-generational discussions somewhat.  Along those lines, I have seen less cross-departmental collaborations here at APL than I did at Arizona.  However, that might be a function of the work that I do here, and the fact that much of the work at APL is classified. But really, the most important thing is that in both institutions I am/was surrounded by a diverse group of smart and active planetary scientists, which is great for forming new collaborations and coming up with new ideas.

3. How did you become involved with the Chandrayaan-1 and LRO Mini-RF science teams?

Though I have only been involved with the Chandrayaan-1 and LRO science teams for a year and a half, this story actually starts five years ago.  As a second year graduate student, I started working with Ralph Lorenz, who was a Cassini RADAR team member.  As a result, a large portion of my PhD dissertation focused on radar observations of planetary surfaces, in particular Titan, but also the Earth and Venus.  Several months before I was scheduled to graduate, I received a mass e-mail sent by Andy Rivkin (another LPL alum) to grads@lpl, advertising a new postdoc position at APL, working with radar data from the Moon.  Though I knew very little about the Moon at that time, I hoped my radar experience would be attractive to the team.  Luckily, it was, and I started working there several months later.

I guess the moral of this story is twofold:  (1) It is important to network, and the people you meet through your graduate work are probably some of the most important parts of that network, and (2) postdoctoral positions can be a good way to stretch you expertise beyond what you completed during your PhD.  By learning to work with lunar data, I’m opening myself up to new research projects, new collaborations, and new funding sources that I wouldn’t have working with Titan data alone.

4. Tell us about LunGradCon.

LunGradCon is a new scientific meeting for graduate students and early postdocs studying lunar science, with a particular focus on the core research areas of the NASA Lunar Science Institute (who has supported and funded the conference).  LunGradCon is based on the highly successful AbGradCon, which was started in 2003 and has been supported by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.  (I personally have attended four AbGradCons, including the first international meeting, held this year in Sweden.) The aim of LunGradCon is to give young lunar researchers the opportunity to present and discuss their scientific research in an environment of their peers.  Giving scientific presentations is a key skill for any scientist, but at large conferences, many graduate students are not given the opportunity to present orally.  And even when they are given the opportunity, it can be an intimidating experience, given the presence of older, more established researchers in attendance.  LunGradCon gives young scientists the chance to practice their communication skills in a low-stress environment.  It also exposes them to the broad range of lunar science being done by their peers, encouraging new collaborations with new friends and colleagues.  Developing a wide network of colleagues is another very important aspect of career development, so we arranged for group lunches and mixers to encourage interaction between participants.

I got involved in LunGradCon when I was contacted by Andrew Poppe, a graduate student at the University of Colorado, with whom I had attended the JPL Planetary Science Summer School.  He and another graduate student, Addy Dove  (and later Amy Fagan), had come up with the idea for LunGradCon, and wondered if I would like to help organize the meeting, given my past experience with AbGradCon.  We worked together organizing the meeting, through telecons and meet-ups at LPSC. LunGradCon was held at NASA Ames, two days prior to the NASA Lunar Science Forum, and about twenty-five graduate students and early postdocs attended.  The feedback was extremely positive, so we’re hoping that this workshop will continue at future NLSI meetings, supported by upcoming graduate students.

5. What advice would you offer to students considering a career in planetary science?

Planetary science is a very broad field, with work ranging from laboratory analysis to computer modeling to remote sensing (and so on), on topics ranging from geology to astrobiology to chemistry to atmospheric physics (and so on). My advice for students considering a career in planetary science would be to “try out” as many of these sub-fields as possible, through high school and undergraduate internships, and later, graduate course work and training, to determine what it is that really excites them about planetary science.  Then, find a graduate program that can support that interest, or (if you’re still undecided) gives you the flexibility to try out new fields.  You’ll be the most successful if you really love what it is you’re doing.

My other advice would be exercise your communication skills whenever you get a chance, skills such as writing, public speaking, and working in teams. These are things that are often not explicitly taught in school, but I would argue represent half of your work as a scientist.  You can find ways to practice these skills outside the classroom by getting involved in student government, participating in public outreach, writing for a newspaper or a blog, and so on.  In my own case, I spent many years as a member of the graduate and professional student council at the University of Arizona, learning how to articulate the needs of students to the university administration, and negotiate solutions to those needs. 

Thanks, Catherine! 

Dr. Neish is being featured here as one of 51 Women in Planetary Science, a series of interviews with successful women scientists on career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success. Questions or suggestions for future interviews can be sent to us directly or to our email list, which all women in planetary science can join!

Divison of Planetary Science & NASA Present Proposal Writing Workshop

Last week, many in our community attended the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division of Planetary Science in Pasadena, CA.  If you weren’t able to attend, check out The Planetary Society and Astronomy.com for some great coverage of the sessions.  Emily Lakdawalla wrote about several science sessions at The Planetary Society blog and spoke at Sunday’s Career Panel.  Liz Kruesi covered the sessions for Astronomy.com.  In addition, the newly-formed DPS Professional Development Committee held an Early Career Workshop the day before the conference began.  We invite you to send in posts recapping the workshop and/or the conference sessions; the first one appears today, courtesy NASA’s Program Scientist for the Europa Jupiter System Mission, Mars Exploration Rover, and Cassini.  You also know him as the Early Career Fellowship Discipline Scientist: Curt Niebur.

The DPS Professional Development Committee invited me to conduct the Planetary Science Division’s Proposal Writing Workshop as part of the day-long Early Career Workshop held at the DPS conference last week.  This proposal workshop is based on the cumulative experience of a handful of current and former Discipline Scientists who have managed a variety of R&A programs at NASA HQ.  It presents a lot of specific insights on the elements of successful (and unsuccessful) proposals and how the review process works, and I encourage you to attend the workshop at LPSC this year so you can hear about them.  In the meantime, I’ll offer the philosophical meanderings below and hope that you fund them useful:

• There is a money tree, but you have to dutifully tend to its needs.  The funding you need is out there, but you need to work to make it yours.  Do your research: read the Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences opportunity each year and study the program descriptions, pick apart the Guidebook for Proposers, and learn the stats and nuances of the programs to which you plan to submit proposals. Develop the skills you need: serve on review panels, attend workshops, start writing proposals.  Your research publications don’t effortlessly fall out of the sky, and you shouldn’t expect your funding to either. 
• It’s not personal, it’s a proposal.  A good (or bad) proposal is a reflection of your ability as a proposal writer, not a reflection of your ability as a scientist.  Please don’t equate the two!  All of you have dedicated years (or decades) to developing your skills as a scientist, but I doubt you have spent the same amount of time on your proposal writing skills.  After all, none of us became scientists because of our passion for proposal writing. 
• Get moving now.  Whether you are a graduate student or a postdoc, you need to start working now.  Ask your advisors to see their proposals and reviews.  Volunteer to serve on review panels.  Form research collaborations.  Attend workshops.  Network.  The best way to learn how to write proposals is to actually write proposals.  Be realistic: it is unlikely that your first (or second) proposal will be selected.  But it is only failure if you refuse to learn anything from the experience.  Take charge of your career: decide where you want to go, develop the skills you need to get there, and get moving!

Thanks, Curt! 

In Memoriam: Frank Stadermann

Today we mourn a colleague, Dr. Frank Stadermann, who was well-known to many of us and beloved by the woman we featured on Tuesday, his wife Dr. Christine Floss.   As his memorial service proceeds today, we also mourn from afar.  The following writeup was sent publicly over the LPI list on 10/7/2010: 

It is with deep sadness that we share the news of the passing of two our esteemed colleagues.  Frank Stadermann passed away on October 4, 2010, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 48 years old. A senior research scientist in physics, member of the Laboratory for Space Sciences, and director of the NanoSIMS and Auger laboratories at Washington University in St. Louis, Stadermann received an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Heidelberg for his work on 40Ar-39Ar dating of lunar rocks from the Fra Mauro region. After a two-year research visit to Washington University, he obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1991 with a dissertation on SIMS isotopic and trace element measurements of interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), which included the discovery of widespread nitrogen isotopic variations in IDPs. As a post-doc at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik in Heidelberg he studied micrometeoroid impacts on satellite surfaces to evaluate the relative contributions of cosmic particles and man-made debris in low-Earth orbit. He continued this line of research after transferring to the Darmstadt University of Technology, where he was in charge of establishing a new SIMS laboratory for material science with an ims5f instrument. Other work at that time included particle analysis with electron microprobe and SIMS, and development and application of two- and three-dimensional SIMS imaging techniques for material and space science applications. He re-joined Washington University in 1996 to participate in development, fund-raising, and the eventual purchase of the very first NanoSIMS, a newly designed high-resolution and high-sensitivity type of ion microprobe.

Stadermann developed techniques for NanoSIMS measurements in TEM sections, which allowed for the first time correlated mineralogical and isotopic studies on a submicrometer scale. This work led to the first direct isotopic measurement of “presolar grains within presolar grains” (200-nanometer TiC crystals embedded in low-density supernova graphite spheres). He also discovered the first presolar corundum and SiC grains in IDPs. He served as a sample advisor for the Stardust mission, and the analysis of cometary particles was an important focus of his research. His analyses during the preliminary examination of dust particles from Comet Wild-2 returned by the Stardust space probe led to the discovery of a presolar grain among the returned cometary samples. Stadermann’s wife, Christine Floss, a research associate professor of physics at Washington University, often collaborated with him.

Frank will be missed.

Tanya Harrison: Being proactive helps you stand out from the crowd

Tanya Harrison is an Assistant Staff Scientist at Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS).  Her main job duties are targeting the Context Camera (CTX) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), working with Mars Color Imager (MARCI) data, and writing MARCI weather reports. She is a member of the science team for both instruments and a science team collaborator on the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover.  Harrison also does education and public outreach in concert with organizations including Expanding Your Horizons, Girl Scouts, The Mars Society, and The National Space Society. 

 

1. What first interested you in space science?

I’ve been interested in space science for almost as long as I can remember. I grew up watching the various Star Trek series (Next Gen started when I was 2), and the idea of studying stars and planets grew from there. Every clear night I would be outside staring at the sky—often without a jacket, much to the annoyance of my parents. As I got older though, I can remember two specific things that bolstered that interest even more. The first was the Mars Pathfinder mission. Seeing photos of Sojourner on the surface of Mars was just fascinating to me. The second was NASA’s Mars Millennium Project (after seeing a commercial for it during Star Trek: Voyager), where kids were asked to design a colony on Mars in the year 2030. I completely immersed myself in that project, learning everything I could about Mars, and I knew for certain at that point that I wanted a career in planetary science.

2. What drew you to MSSS?

I had been familiar with MSSS from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) days when I was in junior high. Mike Malin and Ken Edgett were almost like celebrities in my young mind because I saw their names and faces popping up all over the place with all of the discoveries being made with the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) aboard MGS. I’d always known that the professor path was never for me, as I love the hands-on technical side of things, and so when I finished my master’s degree I had the internal struggle of whether to continue on to a Ph.D. or go into the working world. MSSS just so happened to be hiring right at the time I graduated, and so even though I had been accepted to two Ph.D. programs, I turned down those offers to come to MSSS. I don’t regret that decision at all. Working at MSSS has been such an amazing experience. 

MSSS is a very unique place in that we both build and operate cameras for NASA missions, and we also do science. My primary duty is to target the Context Camera (CTX) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which means I get to pick what the camera takes pictures of in a given week, and then I analyze those pictures from the standpoint of a geologist. It’s a fantastic opportunity. There aren’t many people in the world who get paid to take pictures of Mars every day! It’s also unique in that I get to look at the entire planet every day, whereas in a pure research position people often focus on a single location or a single type of landform (i.e. volcanoes). I’ve looked at every image taken by CTX, covering about 63% of Mars at 6 m/pixel, so that gives you a whole new perspective on Mars that you wouldn’t necessarily get elsewhere.  

3. What’s the weather on Mars this week?  What can we learn from studying it over time?

Right now it’s approaching the end of northern summer/southern winter on Mars, which is a pretty active time when it comes to the weather. There’s a lot of dust storm activity along the seasonal south polar cap edge as the temperature decreases and frost is deposited on the surface. For the past few weeks there have been a lot of water ice clouds over the equatorial regions due to the sublimation of the seasonal northern polar cap in summer, but these clouds are decreasing as the water is being redistributed to the seasonal south polar cap.

 

Thanks to the combined efforts of the MOC wide-angle on MGS and now the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) aboard MRO, we’ve been monitoring martian weather on a daily basis here at MSSS via daily global mosaics of the planet for the past 6+ Mars years (mid-March 1999 through today). From this effort, we’ve learned that the weather on Mars is pretty repetitive each year, so we can predict with relatively good accuracy at this point what the weather will be like down to the period of a week or two. This information is very important in the future landing site selection process—you don’t want to land somewhere prone to massive dust storms every year. It’s also useful for orbital missions like MRO, so that we can plan around the weather when choosing what places to take images of on the surface (sometimes CTX images of dust activity can look really amazing, but most of the time the dust just gets in the way and makes the image quality very poor).

4. Tell us about your education and public outreach work.

Before coming to MSSS, I did a lot of public outreach work with The Mars Society and National Space Society in my hometown of Seattle. At MSSS, I’ve participated in the Expanding Your Horizons program, which holds summer workshops for girls in junior high and high school to encourage them to look at careers in the sciences. We’ve also done job shadowing with high school girls from the Girl Scouts. Over half of the science operations staff at MSSS are women, including both the CTX targeting lead and our operations lead, which is a really good environment for young girls to see since it breaks the male-dominated stereotype. However, with the current state of science education in the U.S., I think it’s important to reach out to all students, and not just women. I like to point out to kids though that there are a lot of other space-related career options, some that are not what would normally come to mind (i.e. computer science, medical science, food science) and some that are not science-based (i.e. artists, pilots, technical writers, administrative positions), to demonstrate that there are a number of options available to them if they are interested in space.   

5. What would you like to share with undergraduate or graduate students on the site?

If you’re an undergrad, don’t just select the places you apply to graduate school based on the name or prestige. Think about what specific area of planetary science interests you, and then look for papers on that topic to see who’s working on it. Check the websites of those people and get in touch with them ahead of time if you think you’d be interested in working with them. Since you’re going to dedicate a few years to working with that person, it’s good to get a feel for them ahead of time to see if they are indeed someone you’d want to work with.

Plus, it’s helpful if they already know who you are when your application comes across their desk. Every Master’s and Ph.D. program I was accepted into were at universities where I had been in touch with the professors I wanted to work with for quite some time before actually applying. 

 

Don’t be afraid to get in contact with professors, students, or even working professionals in the field that you’re interested in. It’s never too early to make those connections that might come in handy later on as far as applying to graduate school, applying for jobs, or looking for people to collaborate with on research projects. Being proactive also shows initiative and helps you stand out from the crowd. 

Thank you, Tanya!

Tanya Harrison is being featured here as one of 51 Women in Planetary Science, a series of interviews with successful women scientists on career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success.  Questions or suggestions for future interviews can be sent to us directly or to our email list, which all women in planetary science can join!

Christine Floss: There are many definitions of success

Dr. Christine Floss is Research Associate Professor in the Physics Department at Washington University.  Dr. Floss trained as a geochemist there in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and, after five years working in Germany, returned to make Washington University and the McDonnell Center her research home. 

Dr. Floss studies meteorites and presolar grains, returned samples from the Stardust mission, Antarctic micrometeorites, and interplanetary dust to better understand the origin and evolution of the early solar nebula.  One of her recent publications is:

Floss C. and Stadermann F. J. (2009) Auger Nanoprobe analysis of presolar ferromagnesian silicate grains from primitive CR chondrites QUE 99177 and MET 00426. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 73, 2415-2440.

Dr. Floss graciously (and quickly!) answered my questions over email.

1. When did you first become interested in space science?

I actually came to space science rather late.  I was not particularly interested in science when I was a kid and for a long time I thought I wanted to be a librarian when I grew up.  By the time I got to college that idea had fallen by the wayside, but I really had no idea what I wanted to do.  I was attending Purdue University and majoring in German language and literature, mostly because my family is originally from Germany, but was also taking various different classes to try to find something I wanted make into a career (an accounting class quickly convinced me that business was not it!).  It took me almost the full four years, but I finally found it when I took an introductory geology class to fulfill a basic science requirement.  I was hooked from the start, thanks in large part to a wonderful TA for the class who had incredible enthusiasm for all those rocks and minerals.  Since very few of the classes I was taking as a language major could be applied to a science degree, I actually finished my B.A. in German and then essentially started over in the geosciences. 

Part of the way through this process I transferred to Indiana University, a move that turned out to have a big impact on my future.  I had not been there long before Abhijit Basu, a professor I knew only slightly, stopped me in the halls one day and said, “If you ever think you might be interested in working on some of the moon rocks, come and see me.”  It was a casual invitation that he probably made to many students, but it completely changed the course of my scientific career.  Like so many others of my generation, I vividly remembered the Apollo landings and was fascinated by the thought that man had walked on the moon.  But somehow it had never before occurred to me that all those rocks collected by the astronauts were available for research, or that one could make a career out of studying extraterrestrial materials.  I ended up doing a senior thesis with Basue on the Apollo 16 regolith samples and decided that I wanted to pursue the space sciences in graduate school.  By this time I was married and had just had my second child, so I was looking for a school with some flexibility that could accommodate a student who also had a family to raise.  Washington University was recommended by Dave and Marilyn Lindstrom and, indeed, my visit to the campus and especially to the ‘4^th floor’ which at the time seemed to have more canine than human inhabitants, confirmed for me that this was the place for me.  To her credit, my future advisor, Ghislaine Crozaz, never expressed the slightest doubt that I could handle the demands of family and graduate school. 

For my PhD thesis I continued working on Apollo 16 samples, but also branched out into meteorite studies.  Over the years much of my work has involved the study of achondrites and chondrites, how they originated and what they can tell us about the origin of the solar system.  More recently my research has focused on the study of presolar grains and what we can learn from them about the formation and evolution of the stars and our galaxy.

2. After your Ph.D., your first job was as a research scientist at Max-Planck-Institut f. Kernphysik.  What took you to Heidelberg?  How did you find working in Germany different from working in the United States?

It’s probably not the politically correct thing to say, but I went to Heidelberg mostly for personal reasons.  My first marriage had ended while I was a graduate student and I had met my current husband, Frank Stadermann, while he was at Washington University for two years (he got his PhD in Germany, but did most of the work for his thesis in St. Louis with Bob Walker).  I was fortunate in that I was offered a position by Ahmed El Goresy to do experimental work to understand condensation and evaporation processes relevant to CAI formation. 

It’s difficult to name concrete differences between working in Germany and working in the US.  Day-to-day work at the MPI Kernphysik was not really that different from my experiences at Washington University.  Probably the biggest difference I noted in my five years there again relates to family issues.  I had somehow naively assumed that childcare possibilities in Germany would be, if not better than in the US, at least equal to what is available here.  However, after my husband and I had our daughter, I found out that while Germany has extensive benefits for mothers (and even fathers) trying to raise a family, those benefits are almost exclusively directed toward the idea that mothers stay home with their babies or young children.  There were very few options for parents looking for daycare so that both parents could work.  We spent the first year alternating our work schedules so that one of us could always be home with our daughter, before we finally found a woman running a babysitting service out of her home. 

3. You’ve now worked at Washington University for nearly 15 years.  What do you most enjoy about working at the McDonnell Center for Space Sciences?

One of the best aspects to working here is the interdisciplinary nature of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.  The Mac Center consists of scientists from both the Physics Department and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, as well as colleagues from Chemistry and Engineering.  The opportunity to interact closely with members of different departments is important in the space sciences, where the problems that we address typically span traditional scientific disciplines.  For example, my current work on presolar silicate grains involves as much mineralogy (using compositional and structural information to understand the grain formation in circumstellar outflows) as it does astrophysics (using isotopic data to constrain stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis). 

The freedom to pursue my own research interests is another positive aspect to working in academia.  My husband and I are both completely supported by soft money and, while this does have its downside in terms of financial security, it also provides us with the opportunity to control our own research programs and follow those scientific questions we find most interesting. 

4. What balance do you find between work, life, and family?

One of the best aspects to working together with my spouse is being able to completely share the work that I love with the person who is most important to me in life.  Because of this there is no real division between my work life and my private life, but rather there is an ebb and flow to life that sometimes focuses more on work issues and other times moves more toward our private interests.  We both enjoy many of the same leisure activities, but we don’t feel any need to artificially control personal time versus work time; we are as likely to find ourselves discussing some scientific problem in the middle of a Saturday hike as we are to talk about a family scheduling issue in the middle of the workday. 

Balancing work with children is more difficult and there have certainly been trade-offs over the years.  Some decisions have felt like failures, such as when I quit field camp after two days, realizing that I was not going to be able to manage six weeks away from my 18-month-old after all, and had to settle for a B.A. rather than B.S. in geology.  But there have been highlights as well, most notably having my two oldest daughters with me when I defended my PhD thesis and going out to celebrate with them afterwards (there are probably not too many other people out there who had their thesis defense party at Chuckie Cheese!).  For the most part we have tried to reserve evenings and weekends for family activities, and we have made it a priority to be present for school or other extracurricular activities.  Family vacations have also played a big role in providing an opportunity for everyone to come together and spend time with one another.

5. Do you have any words of advice for others facing the two-body problem with a spouse also in planetary science, or for early career scientists in general?

I have been very fortunate that I’ve never really had to deal with the two-body problem.  After we were in Germany for five years, my husband and I were invited to come back to Washington University to work with our former advisors, Ghislaine Crozaz and Bob Walker, and we have been here ever since.  So I don’t really have any experiences or advice that I can pass on. 

More generally, it’s a cliché, but I can only say: find something that you love to do.  And don’t be afraid to follow a non-traditional path; there are many definitions of success and in the end it doesn’t matter if your route is more convoluted than the norm or it takes you longer to get there.

Thank you, Christine!

Dr. Floss is being featured here as one of 51 Women in Planetary Science, a series of interviews with successful women scientists on career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success.  Questions or suggestions for future interviews can be sent to us directly or to our email list, which all women in planetary science can join!