Workplace flexibility works for all of us

Workplace flexibility: Not just for women.  I participated in an energized session on this topic at last weekend’s BlogHer Conference, which I hope to write about next week, linking to amazing writers, thinkers, and do-ers in the field of work-life balance, but for now I’ll simply share with you a recent article in Science Online: Scientist Dads Step Up.

Tips for Women in Science [link]

Here’s a link to a blog entry on the U.S. News and World Report website discussing 10 tips for women in STEM fields (contributed by Sara Seager, MIT):

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/professors-guide/2010/08/11/10-tips-for-women-students-in-science-fields.html

Job announcement

Updated August 15

First, the announcement:
The Planetary Science group at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) has a civil service position open through August 24. The candidate will fill a project scientist position for the Lunar Mapping and Modeling project, which is expected to transition in the new budget/focus to the Exploration Mapping and Modeling project for other possible destinations such as Mars and asteroids. The candidate is also expected to bring or build a strong independent scientific research program as part of the MSFC Planetary Science group. Applicants must apply through USAJobs.com – position number MS10D0108. Questions may be directed to Barbara Cohen (Barbara.A.Cohen@nasa.gov; 256-961-7566). See more about us at Planetary Science at MSFC, and more about the Lunar Mapping & Modeling Project in the 2008 LPSC abstract and 2009 LPSC abstract.

Then, the commentary:
I hate to steal WIPS contributor InterPlanetSarah’s thunder, but she scored a civil service position at NASA Goddard and is leaving the Planetary Group at Marshall, so we have an opening. I bet you could ask Sarah about her time here (and I hope she’d tell you nice things). While this position is totally open, we’ll be looking for someone with postdoc experience and ideally, your own grant funding (remember Rachel’s awesome advice), and we’ve had an awesome record of having awesome women here so I hope some of you will consider applying!

Finally, the advice:
Applying for a federal job is way, WAY different than applying for a position at a university or research institute. The federal government uses a single, automated system called USAJobs for every job it has, from judge to accountant to photographer to engineer. Consider it the scantron form of screening applicants (wow, I guess I just dated myself there). Anyway, the way it works is via an automated text-matching routine. Your response is evaluated on how many times it matches a set of keywords. Only after you match some threshold number of them is your application seen by a human. Didn’t match the keywords? Your application is rejected by a computer and nobody will ever see it.

My (non-legal, non-binding, non-representing my employer) advice is to make sure you use all the words in the announcement and job description, and use them exactly. Scientists like to paraphrase, to find synonyms, to not parrot back the same words. But this is what will sink you. Don’t use “spectroscopy” when the job calls for “remote sensing.” Don’t use “geochemistry” when the ad says “petrology.” Best thing is to cut and paste the questions and then answer them, and find ways to use the same words.

The good news is, you can save your resume and cover letter on USAJobs, and come back again. It’s also quite searchable. Good luck!

Tasha Dunn: I teach planetary geology every spring, and I love it!

Tasha Dunn is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography-Geology at Illinois State University.  This is my first conversation with Tasha; she volunteered for this feature just like you can do — and we invite you to do so!  Tasha talked with us about her career, her work, and her favorite part of the day.  Her 2010 publications are listed at the end of the article.

1. What first drew you to space science?

Like many kids, I was fascinated by outer space. I grew up wanting to be an astronaut, so everything I did while I was in school was with that goal in mind. I took advanced math and science classes in high school and decided to major in engineering in college. Many early astronauts had degrees in engineering, including one of my personal role models as a young girl, Judy Resnick, a mission specialist on the space shuttle Challenger’s last mission in 1986. Once I got into college, I realized I didn’t like engineering very much at all. It was just too much advanced math and physics, and that didn’t really interest me.  I needed to find something else that I could study that would still be suitable for a career with NASA, and science was the obvious choice. When I was trying to decide which field of science to pursue, I looked at a couple of geology textbooks and thought that it looked much more interesting than chemistry of physics, so I switched my major to geology. Eventually, I found out that people actually studied geology of planets other than Earth, so it made perfect sense to study planetary geology in graduate school. It really is the perfect fit for me.

2. I’m intrigued by the change you made from remote sensing to meteoritics.  At what stage of your career did you make this transition, and how did it affect your affinity for your research?

When I got to grad school I didn’t have a very good idea of what I wanted to do; I just knew I wanted to study geology of someplace other than Earth. My advisor was involved in research on Mars and on meteorites, so I got to choose between the two.  At the time, Mars seemed more exciting, so I decided to do a remote-sensing based project rather than a petrology-based one.  In the process of completing my master’s degree, I realized that remote sensing by itself was a little too abstract for me; I wanted to spend more time studying real rocks. So, for my Ph.D. I shifted my focus to meteorites. Though I’m very happy with my choice, I’m still glad I did the master’s project that I did.  I gave me a ton of experience using remote sensing, and that’s great because it’s such an important part of planetary geology. In fact, I did some work with VISNIR spectra of ordinary chondrites for part of my dissertation, so I haven’t gotten away from it completely. I think it’s important to be able to use remote sensing data and geochemical/ mineralogical data together effectively.

3. Congratulations on being an Assistant Professor just two years out of graduate school!  What attracted you to Illinois State University?

Initially the faculty attracted me to ISU.  I had a  short interview with two of the geology faculty at GSA in 2008 and had a great meeting with them. In addition to being easy to talk to and enthusiastic about the program, they seemed so happy. That’s not always true in academia!  After doing some of my own research, I discovered that ISU was a good fit for me. I was looking for an academic position at a teaching university where I could continue to pursue my research agenda, and ISU is the perfect balance between the two. In addition, ISU is very supportive of my planetary geology research interests.  It was actually one of the reasons they were interested in hiring me.  Though my primary teaching responsibilities are mineralogy and petrology, I was encouraged to develop my own courses.  So, now I teach planetary geology every spring, and I love it!

4. What are the implications of your latest paper?  That is, how would you explain it to a visiting scientist in three sentences or less?

Oh, that’s a tough question! I always have a hard time summarizing things, but I think I would say something like this:

We know that asteroids experienced heating when they formed, but we still don’t know exactly what conditions they experienced when this occurred. I examined the minerals that are present in ordinary chondrites, which are pieces of certain asteroids, and looked for changes that took place as they experienced this heating. Using the changes in mineral abundances, I discovered that ordinary chondrite parent asteroids experience oxidation as heating progresses.  Because ordinary chondrites come from primitive asteroids, we can use this information to understand the conditions of the early solar system.

Oops, that was more than three sentences!

5. Tell us something else about yourself that has nothing to do with work.

I have three cats, one of which is named after the mineral Albite. The other two don’t have geology-related names, but I love them none the less. One of my favorite parts of the day is coming home to see them waiting for me at the front door. I like to think they are happy to see me, but they’re probably just hungry and know that I will feed them.

Tasha Dunn’s 2010 peer-reviewed papers include:

• Dunn, Tasha L., Timothy J. McCoy, Jessica M. Sunshine, and Harry Y. McSween.  “A coordinated spectral, mineralogical, and compositional study of ordinary chondrites,” Icarus, Volume 208, Issue 2, p. 789-797.
• Dunn, Tasha L., Gordon Cressey, Harry Y. McSween, Jr., Timothy J. McCoy. “Analysis of ordinary chondrites using powder X-ray diffraction: 1. Modal mineral abundances.” Meteoritics and Planetary Science, Volume 45, Issue 1, pp. 123-134.
• Dunn, Tasha L., Harry Y. McSween, Jr., Timothy J. McCoy, and  Gordon Cressey. “Analysis of ordinary chondrites using powder X-ray diffraction: 2. Applications to ordinary chondrite parent-body processes.” Meteoritics and Planetary Science, Volume 45, Issue 1, pp. 135-156.

Thank you, Tasha!  I enjoyed meeting you and hope we run into each other at a conference next year!

If you’d like to be featured as one of our 51 Women in Planetary Science, send in an abstract of a recently published paper and we’ll send you some questions. If you’re a student, send in a question and we’ll forward it to successful women scientists who can answer your questions about career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success.  This feature will run every Tuesday and Friday, as long as we have submissions.

Women on Planetary Science Missions

We here at Women in Planetary Science have a simple question, which you’ll see just under the blog header:

Women make up half the bodies in the solar system. Why not half the scientists?

There is, unfortunately, no simple answer.  There are, of course, amazing researchers and writers looking at the issue across the spectrum of scientists, for the issue is by no means unique to planetary science.  Many of those findings will be directly applicable to our field, and we’ll report them as we see them.  For now, we’re just contributing what we can.  We look at planetary science because this is what we know.  It’s who we are.  It’s the community that we grew up in, that we know best, that we love.  And we are integrated into the field at every level.

But when you step back and look at the major activities of the field, women are not yet present at every level in the numbers that they could be. 

Sure, we see visual representations of this at plenary sessions of conferences (and even our language has reflected this, in the informal references to senior members of the field as greybeards), but now we actually have statistics to help us understand the pipeline of our own profession, and tools to help us understand whether women are really underrepresented in the field, or if the statistics of small numbers (and conference attendees) are distorting our view.

Here are a couple of graphs from a recent paper examining women selected to participate in NASA planetary science missions over the last three decades.  Regular readers have seen this one before:

Let’s look at that last set of bars on the right today.  Of the 243 participating scientists selected directly by NASA over the past three decades, only 20 have been women. 

Is this unusual?  Well, the median age for a participating scientist in the Discovery Program , for example, is 41.   Using (anonymized) membership data from the AAS’ Division of Planetary Science, we learn that 24% of the DPS members in the five-year age bracket that includes age 41 are female.   So a back-of-the-cocktail-napkin estimation shows us that we’d expect the participating scientists selected to include 24% women.

Instead, less than 9% of the participating scientists selected by NASA have been women. 

The number has been increasing over the last decade or two, as you can see in the graph below that shows of the percentage of women selected by NASA as PI, Co-I, or PSP over time.  Only 2% of PSPs selected in the late 1990’s were women (n=1).  In the early part of the ‘aughts, women were 8% of selected PSPs (n=2), and in the last half decade, the number that should correlate most exactly with the 24% number from the membership data, 18% of the PSPs selected have been women.

I hope the upward trend continues.  (The target number is actually 50%, not 24%, if you assume that the most capable and well-suited planetary scientists of both genders stay in the field in equal proportions, but that’s an essay for another day.) 

…

This month’s Scientae carnival asked participants to talk about their goals for the next year, and how far they’ve come since last year.  Our most important goal this year is to meet a target we set at this year’s LPSC Conference:  feature short articles from 51 women working in planetary science before next year’s LPSC.  We’ve published 14 of these posts so far, featuring women in planetary science who study Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, using data from telescopes, spacecraft, and who build missions yet to come.  We have another 37 to go. 

How do we decide who to feature?  Well, because we love NASA missions, we seeded the project by inviting several women working on missions to be featured.  At the same time, we opened it up to the community, asking all women in planetary science to send us an abstract from their latest peer-reviewed paper and agree to answer a few questions about their career.  We’ve featured some amazing women already, and we’re not even halfway through the year.

Rachel Klima: Having your own funding opens a lot of doors

Rachel Klima attended one of NASA’s first Early Career Workshops at LPSC many years ago. She participated in the discussions, and her interest made an impression on me. Years later, I heard that she was a team member on the Moon Mineralogy Mapper led by Carle Pieters, so I asked her to sit down with me at the 2009 LPSC and talk about the experience.

Were you a good student in high school?

Yes.  Well, I was a good student, maybe underachieved a little bit relative to what I could have been doing, because I could do well without getting too stressed out. 

That’s often a problem for gifted students.

I was frustrated because I could walk into an exam in math class and get 100 percent and all of the bonus questions right–I didn’t want to do all of the homework that was just repeating what I could already do.  I got in a lot of trouble for not doing homework.  Before taking calculus, math made me angry because when I’d ask why something was what it was, like in geometry, “Why is the area of a cone this?” they’d say, “Just because it is.  Just memorize it.”   Taking calculus was a huge turning point for me, because I thought, “Well, this explains everything.”  Since third grade I’d been asking why formulas were what they were, and no one would give me an answer. I wanted the real answer, not “Because the book says it is.”  And so, I loved calculus.  I was completely crazy about calculus.  And that was possibly a turning point in science as well, because I had been frustrated with both math and science, and then just completely fell back in love with them. (I loved science as a kid.)

When did you make the decision to go to grad school?

After undergrad, I took a job for three years doing environmental work….  After a while I decided that if I’m going to do science, I really want to do it.  I don’t want to settle for a job that’s available that may have a little bit of science in it.  I might as well just dive in and try to find a real place to do real science….  Taking time off to work turned out to be really good because I really, really wanted to be back in school.  I feel like there are a lot of people that come into grad school now who just think it’s what they are supposed to do.  In fact, I think there have been some posts on the blog about making sure you know why you’re in grad school and that you really want to be there.  It was something about “Why get a Ph.D.?”  I think sometimes people just think that’s what they’re supposed to do.  If you’re good in school and you’re bright, sometimes you just go through without stopping to think whether it even what you really want to do.  You don’t always take the time to pause….   I really was excited about it and really wanted to be in school again.

After completing her master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Klima worked for Carle Pieters as a doctoral student.

She invited me to come join their group for a Ph.D.  And so, I came out to Brown.  For me, coming back after being out of school, I don’t think I could have worked for someone with a different advising style.  She has a very good grasp of what students need, on a case-by-case basis.  She’s not just one type of advisor.  She doesn’t micromanage, but she knows–when someone needs a little push, she knows how to give a little push.  So, she’s a really good advisor in that respect, and she, speaking of respect, gives you a lot of respect. 

Sounds like you got just the right match for your mentoring style.

Right, absolutely.  So, that was really fortunate.  I was interested in more mission work and more diversity than just Mars, and I found out that she was on the Dawn science team.  I was following the drama around the Dawn mission (cancellations and reinstatements) and really, really wanted to get involved.  It turned out that the project that I ended up working on was very well tailored to Dawn, because I’ve worked with synthetic pyroxenes, a huge suite of a hundred of them, and that’s the most optically dominant mineral when you look at spectra of Vesta.  It was a very good match for the research that I was doing.  

So, I started out working on Dawn, and then the announcement came through about that there was an opportunity in India, and Carle was going to propose to that and then propose to the missions of opportunity through NASA.  It was so exciting to watch her go through it, because she–I mean, I don’t know how long she’d been talking to people at JPL about their instrument, but I think she knew there was this amazing spectrometer that she wanted to fly somewhere, somehow, and she just made it happen.  It was amazing.  I was so happy when everything fell into place.

Have you entered the world of looking to propose grants yet?

I applied to GSRP [the Graduate Student Research Program, now the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship] my first year, and then the next year Carle said, you know, “Your project, I think, is involved enough, and it fits into PG&G [NASA’s Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program] well enough that you could probably propose to that.  So, why don’t we just write a regular proposal?  Worst case, we at least get feedback on what the reviewers think of the project.”

To PG&G?  That’s gutsy.

I wrote a full proposal, as Co-I, because I couldn’t be PI.  But, I wrote the whole thing, and Carle was PI, I’m Co-I, and Darby Dyar as a collaborator.  Melissa Lane also collaborated with us because she’s doing TES measurements of the pyroxenes.  I went to the Early Career Workshop and took crazy notes about everything, wrote a proposal, and we got funded.  That’s why I have the funding for the post-doc at Brown….  Having your own funding opens a lot of doors.

I actually really love writing proposals….  I feel like it focuses your mind on specifically what your project needs to be, how you need to do it, and what you need to produce ultimately from it.  So, I print up my little timeline of what I said I was going to do for the grant, and look at it and say, okay, I’m on track with this and this and this, and it really keeps me focused, especially in a post-doc like this where I’m working for myself, essentially, because I’m 75 percent funded or something.  I mean, I would have been 100 percent funded, but they [PG&G] didn’t have quite enough money for what we wrote into it.   [PG&G partially funded the grant, as with many grants in that program in that era].

If an undergraduate or an early graduate student came and talked to you and said, “My goal is to work on missions, what should I be doing now to prepare?” what would you say?

I would say look at where those missions are being run out of, look at who’s on the teams and who you can work with. It seems like the quickest foot in the door is to work with someone who’s on the science team. Even if they don’t have funding for that specifically, if you can go and be a grad student to them, or a post-doc to them, they will involve you in it pretty quickly.

So, it’s all about mentoring.

Yes. You’ve got to find the right person for it. And once you do, and you show that you can contribute to it, then hopefully the rest of the science team appreciates it and wants to bring you on board in your own right.

Rachel is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland.  She currently has a paper in review and a paper soon to be submitted which we will feature upon its release.  If we may feature your new first author paper or your work on a NASA mission, contact Women in Planetary Science and let us know!

Amy Simon Miller: You have to advocate for yourself

Dr. Amy Simon Miller is the Chief of the Planetary Systems Laboratory, Solar System Exploration Division (693.0) at Goddard Space Flight Center.  As such, she is a scientist and a manager of other scientists who study the planets.  This is similar to being a department chair at a university.  Her latest publication is:

Simon-Miller, A & P. Gierasch 2010. On the Long-Term Variability of Jupiter’s Winds and Brightness as Observed from Hubble.  Icarus, in press.

Amy, tell me a little bit about how you first became interested in space science.

Well, it’s interesting.  As a kid, I was always interested in what I thought were the standard kid things.  I liked rocks; I liked dinosaurs, archeology, planets, space.  I had a wide range of those sorts of interests.  Only recently did I find out that’s actually not that common, particularly for girls.  I always thought all little kids like that stuff – apparently not.  But I was always interested in those areas.  Even at a young age, I wanted to go into something science-related.  And so, I was kind of torn between being a veterinarian, studying archeology or space and all these interesting things.  And then, Sally Ride came along and was the first American woman astronaut on the shuttle, and that was it.  If she could be the first American woman in space, I was going to be the first woman on Mars.

Did that influence your choice of where to go to college?

It did, actually.  When I looked at where I was going to go to college, I only looked at places that had astronomy, space science sorts of departments.  I actually initially went to the Air Force Academy to do space operations.  I was an academic recruit…. But I was really not happy there, and I actually ended up switching to my second choice college, which was Florida Tech, right next to the Kennedy Space Center.

For graduate school, you went to New Mexico State to work with Reta Beebe.  When did you begin doing research?

Immediately.  As a matter of fact, that was part of the incentive.  Their package to entice me to go there versus somewhere else was that I could work the summer between undergraduate and graduate school.  So, I went straight to work with her.  That was 1993, and it turns out it was shortly after Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered.  I had wanted to work on Mars, initially. Reta immediately dragged me out to Tucson for a pre-impact meeting where they discussed how this comet was coming back around and going to hit Jupiter the next summer.  She had me working on the Hubble Wide field Planetary Camera I data, which was really distorted by the optics problem as part of this pre-impact study.  After that, I never went back.  It was always Jupiter and the Giant Planets.

When it came time for you to leave to finish up, were you looking at post-docs?

We had been working on the Galileo mission at that point, and I was really involved with the crowd at Cornell quite a bit, particularly Dr. Peter Gierasch who is a leader in planetary atmosphere studies.  And so, I ended up helping write a grant to NASA to fund my post-doc position at Cornell.

So now you’ve been at several universities and you come to a NASA Center.  How is it different doing research at a NASA Center as opposed to doing research at a university?

The interesting thing is that [working at a NASA Center] has really evolved over the last 10 years, I would say.  The environment now is very different than when I joined.  Today, they make sure that new people come in and have what they call a buddy who shows them how to navigate the system.  I’m a supervisor now, so people come to me when they have their questions, too.  But also, all my newest hires, we have career mentors.  So, we try to make sure that people have as much support as they can, and we also have groups for the new hires.  They’re automatically part of this forum, so that they get a little more navigation and support.  It’s not so much sink or swim, especially with full cost accounting in place where they had to write their own grants to fund their research.  You can’t spend all your time trying to figure out how to do your timecard.  You have more pressing things to do, so in many ways Centers are more similar to a soft-money institution.

What’s the real benefit to going to a NASA Center as opposed to a soft money institution?

The benefit as I see it is that you have more of a direct line into the missions.  If you went to a university, you generally only have your summertime to do research and it’s harder to stay day to day involved in a mission.  Soft money institutions–it depends which one.  Some of them are very involved in missions now, too.  I think the lines have gotten a lot blurrier.

Clearly, you’ve accomplished a lot at a young age.

Yes, but you have to look for those opportunities and you have to advocate for yourself.  Way too many people sit back assuming our world is a meritocracy, and it is not.  If you’re not your own salesperson–and that’s something that Reta [Beebe] really instilled–nobody else is going to necessarily think of you.  You need to make sure you’re putting yourself out there.  —If you get asked to serve on a committee, think about if you have the time, but if you have the time, do it, and do it 100 percent.  Don’t just be a name on the committee, because then, other people who are on the committee see you, they’re know you’re hard working, they know what you stand for and it makes a huge difference.

Does it matter whether it’s a NASA working group or whether it’s a Decadal Survey opportunity?  I know you’re the vice-chair currently for the Planetary Science Decadal Survey.  Does it matter in terms of visibility?

I don’t think so.  My initial committee services were small, and in some cases, outside of planetary, for example, the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy for the AAS [American Astronomical Society].  That’s outside of planetary, but I already knew some astronomers.  Now I know quite a few more and they know me.  So, some of the service groups can actually be very valuable for being known across the field or across different fields, as well.  The DPS [American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Science] Committee – that’s across our entire field.  So, things like that actually do make a difference, and you’ll find that over time you’ll be invited to join higher profile committees, as well.

Amy, thank you very much for speaking with us!

If you’d like to be featured as one of our 51 Women in Planetary Science, send in an abstract of a recently published paper and we’ll send you some questions. If you’re a student, send in a question and we’ll forward it to successful women scientists who can answer your questions about career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success.  This feature will run every Tuesday and Friday, as long as we have submissions.

Amy Barr on Soft Money, Proposals, and Caffeine

Amy Barr made quite an impact at the 2010 LPSC with her talk, “Origin of the Ganymede/Callisto Dichotomy by Impacts During An Outer Solar System Late Heavy Bombardment,” and the paper of the same name, published in Nature Geoscience the day of her talk.  Barr, a Senior Research Scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, agreed to talk to us about her recent paper, career path, job hunting, and good advice for students.  But first, the abstract of her most recent paper:

Barr, Amy C., and Robin M. Canup, “Origin of the Ganymede/Callisto Dichotomy by Impacts During An Outer Solar System Late Heavy Bombardment” Nature Geoscience 3, 164 – 167 (2010)

Jupiter’s large moons Ganymede and Callisto are similar in size and composition. However, Ganymede has a tectonically evolved surface and a large rock/metal core, whereas Callisto’s surface shows no sign of resurfacing and the separation of ice and rock in its interior seems incomplete. These differences have been difficult to explain. Here we present geophysical models of impact-induced core formation to show that the Ganymede–Callisto dichotomy can be explained through differences in the energy received during a brief period of frequent planetary impacts about 700 million years after planet formation, termed the late heavy bombardment. We propose that during the late heavy bombardment, impacts would have been sufficiently energetic on Ganymede to lead to a complete separation of rock and ice, but not on Callisto. In our model, a dichotomy between Ganymede and Callisto that is consistent with observations is created if the planetesimal disk that supplied the cometary impactors during the late heavy bombardment is about 5–30 times the mass of the Earth. Our findings are consistent with estimates of a disk about 20 times the mass of the Earth as used in dynamical models that recreate the present-day architecture of the outer solar system and the lunar late heavy bombardment.

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

I became interested in space science at about the age of 11 or 12 when I decided that I wanted to become an astronaut.  By the time I reached high school, I realized that the science side of things interested me more.  Then, I was lucky enough to attend Caltech as an undergraduate, which gave me a very strong foundation for future research.

2. Who encouraged you along the way?

Looking back, there were a few key moments where people reached out a hand to pull me up.  The first was in 1990 or 1991, when I wrote a letter to Jill Tarter at the SETI Institute asking if there was a way that kids like me could become involved in research there.  She put me to work testing elementary- and middle-school curriculum that SETI was developing as part of their E/PO activities.

Throughout my middle- and high-school years, I spent 1-2 afternoons a week at SETI, working with a professor from Evergreen State named Dave Milne.  He gave me all sorts of fantastically weird assignments.  At one point I was growing plants in fish aquaria on the roof of our house.   Each aquarium was wrapped in a different number of layers of cheesecloth to simulate low-light growth conditions appropriate for other planets.  In SETI’s old space at 2035 Landings Drive, I had a desk in a huge office shared with, among other folks, Seth Shostak.  Seth used to play really terrible pranks on me.  One day he told me, “Sadly, Dave isn’t here to meet with you — he has been eaten from the waist down by lab rats.”  (Dave was just out getting coffee.)  What a way to spend one’s teen years!  I was so incredibly lucky.

The second key moment was in my freshman year at Caltech, when I was looking for an advisor for a summer undergraduate research fellowship (SURF).  My housemates David Tytell and Matt Tiscareno (now a planetary scientist at Cornell) suggested that I approach David Stevenson.  Dave sent me to the library to read about Ganymede & Callisto, and steered me toward a project related to the Ganymede/Callisto dichotomy.  I spent the entire summer sitting in my dorm room writing code to evaluate heat transfer by solid-state convection in the interior of a large icy satellite.  By the end of the 10 week project, I was completely hooked on theoretical planetary geophysics.  One thing I really like about our Nature Geoscience paper is that it gives me a feeling of closure on my freshman SURF project.  What a relief!

My Ph.D. thesis advisor Bob Pappalardo taught me how to function as a real scientist.  Bob patiently taught me how to write successful grant proposals, give good conference talks, and build a political network in the field.  I am so grateful to Bob for the thousands of hours he spent editing my work and forcing me to shake hands with Big Scary Important People (Bill McKinnon) at conferences.  Bob taught me how to survive on soft money. Without the skills that Bob taught me, I would never have survived in the field beyond my PhD.  

The final key moment was when I made the decision to come to SwRI, which I’ll discuss in the next response.

3. Why did you choose to work at SwRI?  What makes your position different from an academic position? 

I came to SwRI in 2006 because I was ready for a fresh challenge.  There weren’t any icy satellite geophysics people here.  In that respect, I was on my own.  And the folks who seemed excited about my work me were all planet-formation people, which was totally baffling to me at the time.

When I came to interview to be a postdoc with Robin Canup, we had four days to write a grant proposal so that there would be enough money to support my new position.  The first question she asked me was, “So… What is it that you do exactly?”  It was like we were standing on opposite sides of a canyon waving at each other, and had four days to build a bridge across.  We ended up writing a proposal task that turned into the paper we published in Icarus  in 2008 about the accretion of Callisto.   (We look back at this now and laugh, but at the time it was pretty scary!)

At SwRI, we are 100% soft money.  We don’t teach.  Most people here do not mentor graduate students.  Some people have postdocs.  It is quite different from an academic environment where teaching and mentoring and personal preference may play a role in shaping your research agenda. Here, your research agenda is shaped by which of your grants get funded. 

Working on soft money is, for me, an exhilarating experience, but, of course, a soft money job is not for everyone. 

To survive on soft money, you must be quick to respond to new results and new scientific priorities at NASA and NSF.  You must be able to build collaborations with folks in other sub-disciplines.  You must be willing to say “yes” more often than “no.”  You must be organized and good at time management.  It helps if you are also a Type-A person who drinks a lot of caffeine.

4. What do you enjoy most about your job?

Our building is a very special place.  There’s a kind of intellectual energy that crackles in the air. Creative stress radiates from the walls.  You can feel it pushing on you when you’re sitting at your desk.  My husband, a physicist, says that he feels it every time he comes to visit the office.

5. What advice would you give an undergraduate or graduate student in planetary science?

No matter what your position, it’s important to behave as though you are one step above where you really are.  For example, if you are an undergraduate, you should be doing research and publishing papers with your advisor as though you were in grad school. As a graduate student, you should function as a post-doc by taking control of your research direction and by writing fellowship and grant applications, etc.  Time and time again, I have seen that people who follow this model rise to the top of the field. 

6.  What advice do you have for job hunting?

In my experience it takes about 18 months to get a job after your Ph.D.  The last year to year and a half of the Ph.D. is the time to be job hunting.  Six months before your defense is too late!  Also, you will need multiple offers to guarantee that one of them will work out.  This is where political connections, networking, and shaking hands with Big Scary Important People at conferences are key. 

A lot of people ask me how I got my first post-doc job with Bill McKinnon at Washington University in St. Louis.  Bill was not known for hiring postdocs, and I wasn’t sure he would be willing to hire me.  I approached Bill about 1 year before I was ready to defend, and asked him if I could work with him. 

He said yes, but that it would be great if we could write a grant to make the position really financially secure.  Bill and I ended up writing a NASA Outer Planets Research grant to extend my thesis work and move it in new directions.  We won the grant and I ended up working with the exact person I wanted to work with, doing exactly what I wanted to do.  Also, it helped focus my research efforts — when I showed up on Day 1, I knew exactly where to get started.

Admittedly, this may not work for everyone, and it’s kind of a gutsy thing to do.   If you are in grad school and you dream of working with a Big Scary Important Person in the field, this is an approach you might try.

Thanks, Amy!   

If you’d like to be featured as one of our 51 Women in Planetary Science, send in an abstract of a recently published paper and we’ll send you some questions. If you’re a student, send in a question and we’ll forward it to successful women scientists who can answer your questions about career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success.  This feature will run every Tuesday and Friday, as long as we have submissions.

Bonnie Buratti on Cassini, CRAF, and M3

Bonnie Buratti is a Principal Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Manager of the Asteroids, Comets and Satellites Group.  Bonnie has been an active researcher at JPL since she received her Ph.D. in 1983, working on CRAF, Cassini, New Horizons, and the Moon Mineralogy Mapper on Chandraayan-1.  I sat down with Bonnie at JPL last August to learn about M3; we also talked about the experience of working on other missions or instruments that don’t ultimately fly and how a person or group recovers after such a setback.  Bonnie has a strong publication record and an impressive history of service; her latest paper appeared in the April issue of Icarus.

B.J. Buratti, J.M. Bauer, M.D. Hicks, J.A. Mosher, G. Filacchione, T. Momary, K.H. Baines, R.H. Brown, R.N. Clark and P.D. Nicholson. “Cassini spectra and photometry 0.25-5.1 microm of the small inner satellites of Saturn.”  Icarus, Volume 206, Issue 2, p. 524-536, April 2010.

The nominal tour of the Cassini mission enabled the first spectra and solar phase curves of the small inner satellites of Saturn. We present spectra from the Visual Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) and the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) that span the 0.25-5.1 μm spectral range. The composition of Atlas, Pandora, Janus, Epimetheus, Calypso, and Telesto is primarily water ice, with a small amount (˜5%) of contaminant, which most likely consists of hydrocarbons. The optical properties of the “shepherd” satellites and the coorbitals are tied to the A-ring, while those of the Tethys Lagrangians are tied to the E-ring of Saturn. The color of the satellites becomes progressively bluer with distance from Saturn, presumably from the increased influence of the E-ring; Telesto is as blue as Enceladus. Janus and Epimetheus have very similar spectra, although the latter appears to have a thicker coating of ring material. For at least four of the satellites, we find evidence for the spectral line at 0.68 μm that Vilas et al. attributed to hydrated iron minerals on Iapetus and Hyperion. However, it is difficult to produce a spectral mixing model that includes this component. We find no evidence for CO₂ on any of the small satellites. There was a sufficient excursion in solar phase angle to create solar phase curves for Janus and Telesto. They bear a close similarity to the solar phase curves of the medium-sized inner icy satellites. Preliminary spectral modeling suggests that the contaminant on these bodies is not the same as the exogenously placed low-albedo material on Iapetus, but is rather a native material. The lack of CO₂ on the small inner satellites also suggests that their low-albedo material is distinct from that on Iapetus, Phoebe, and Hyperion.

1. What first drew you to the field of space science?

I always liked to build things, experiment, and explore. As a child I always wanted to know how things worked, and I was hungry for knowledge about the cosmos. Space is pretty much the exploration of everything, so it seemed to be the best field for someone who wanted to explore. The wonder never stops.

2. Tell me a little bit about CRAF.

CRAF, the comet rendezvous asteroid flyby mission, was [to be] the first close look at a comet.  As you know, the U.S did not send a mission to Comet Halley during its apparition in 1986. That was kind of a disappointment to American scientists.  But then, it was followed by the selection of what we would now call a flagship mission.  They didn’t call it that back then, but the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby (CRAF) was supposed to be a double to Cassini – basically to be a parallel path, we’d create two spacecraft.  It got selected.  I was selected for the imaging team, which was just great.  Joe Veverka was the team leader and it was kind of tooling along and it got cut. . . It was kind of silly because it was really the economy of scale where you get not two for the price of one, but maybe two for the price of one and a half where you had this Mariner Mark spacecraft that was being built at JPL, and everything — everybody was selected, all the science had been through peer review.

3. When you’re a scientist funded to work on these kinds of missions, and all of a sudden, something is canceled, do you immediately have to go out and find something else to do?

Usually, you have a lot of irons in the fire.  You have a lot of sources of funding.  This is one reason why you have to keep a lot of sources of funding, because if something dries up, then you have something you do.  JPL does tend to rise to the occasion, though, of finding funding when something gets cancelled.

4. On M3, as on most missions, the science team is pulled together from across the country.  Was there anything in particular that Carle did to bring the team together before observations?

She did a lot.  We did have telecons every other week.  Now, it’s every week now that we have data.  She had team meetings about three times a year, three to four times a year.  Of course, the team is hand picked.  It’s people that she knows she can work with, that play well with others.  Everybody had a role.  Everybody had things to do.  So, it was fairly disciplined, quite frankly, the team in keeping on track and on message.  And of course, she’s a very dynamic leader.  She’s very good.  As in any team, issues arise.  People get upset because maybe they weren’t assigned the thing they wanted to do.  And she comes in right away and deals with those things openly and in the beginning.

5. Now, you’ve worked on big missions, little missions, everything in between.  In your experience, as a Co-I on these missions, what makes for a good PI?

I think making sure that everybody on the team has a role and that everyone has a piece of the pie.  You have to make sure that everyone has something that they can do that they feel valuable.  I think, sometimes, a lot of the conflicts I’ve seen on teams, it’s over turf or they’re competing on different projects.  So, I think it’s important to have that out in the open, and then maybe have two people that sub projects or different parts of the same project and just make sure that everybody’s able to get credit for some part of the work, because as scientists, we do have to do that in order to keep on top.  We have to first author publications and all that sort of thing.

There are always going to be scientific disagreements.  I mean, that’s what drives science.  It’s okay to be wrong as long as it’s not fraudulent or based on fudging the data– as long as it’s an honest idea that’s out there.  So, I think it’s okay — you have to realize that it’s okay for two team members to have different opinions about a piece of data.  I mean, that’s what propels them and other people to go and look and then eventually get to the truth.  So, conflict is good in science, that kind of friendly [conflict], as long as it doesn’t get personal.

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

My family is very important to me. My three grown sons and my spouse are the main focus of my life. To live responsibly and with compassion, to be a good citizen of the world is important to me, as it should be to everyone. I also have a lot of mundane hobbies like reading, hiking, cooking, and gardening.

If you’d like to be featured as one of our 51 Women in Planetary Science, send in an abstract of a recently published (peer-reviewed) paper and we’ll send you several questions. If you’re a student, send in a question and we’ll forward it to successful women scientists who can answer your questions about career choices, sequencing, publishing, review panels, and other tips for success.  This feature will run every Tuesday and Friday for as long as we have submissions.

Women in Planetary Science: Meet Fran Bagenal

Fran Bagenal is professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields.

This is the intro paragraph from  Comparative Planetary Environments, F. Bagenal, in Heliophysics: Plasma Physics of the Local Cosmos, C.J. Schrijver, G.L. Siscoe (eds), Cambridge University Press, pp 360-398, 2009.

The nature of the interaction between a planetary object and the surrounding plasma depends on the properties of both the object and the plasma flow in which it is embedded. A planet with a significant internal magnetic field forms a magnetosphere that extends the planet’s influence beyond its surface or cloud tops. A planetary object without a significant internal dynamo can interact with any surrounding plasma via currents induced in an electrically conducting ionosphere. All the solar system planets are embedded in the wind that streams radially away from the Sun. The flow speed of the solar wind exceeds the speed of the fastest wave mode that can propagate in the interplanetary plasma. The interaction of the supersonic solar wind with a planetary magnetic field (either generated by an internal dynamo or induced externally) produces a bow shock upstream of the planet. Objects such as the Earth’s Moon that have no appreciable atmosphere and a low-conductivity surface have minimal electrodynamic interaction with the surrounding plasma and just absorb the impinging solar wind with no upstream shock. Interactions between planetary satellites and magnetospheric plasmas are as varied as the moons themselves: Ganymede’s significant dynamo produces a mini-magnetosphere within the giant magnetosphere of Jupiter; the electrodynamic interactions of magnetospheric plasma flowing past the atmospheres of volcanically active Io (Jupiter) and Enceladus (Saturn) generate substantial currents and supply more plasma to the system; moons without significant atmospheres (e.g. Callisto at Jupiter) absorb the impinging plasma. The flow within magnetospheres tends to be subsonic, so that none of these varied interactions forms a shock upstream of the moon.

Q&A

1.      What first inspired you to study space science?

I was an Apollo kid. As a teenager in rural England I stayed up through the middle of the night to watch the Apollo astronauts walk on the Moon. Every week I watched the BBC “Horizons” documentaries that showed the current scientific ideas – I was most interested in plate tectonics and space exploration. My elder brother was studying at nearby Cambridge University and invited me to a talk that was being given by Carl Sagan. He talked about Mariner 9 exploration of Mars, showed the images (fuzzy compared with recent),  and what impressed me was the way he addressed the questioning from the (rather stuffy) Cambridge academics with honest discussion of the science and intellectual challenges. I studied physics/geophysics at Lancaster University, thinking about a career as an exploration geophysicist but keeping an eye on the US space program. I did not know what to do for graduate studies so I put off the decision by applying to spend a year studying in the US. I ended up at MIT and took a summer job working with the Voyager Plasma Science team, just as the two Voyagers were launched. So, the choice was obvious to stay and work on data from Voyager at Jupiter. I wrote a thesis on the exciting new data obtained when Voyager flew through the Io plasma torus – presenting my first AGU presentation at a Voyager special session chaired by Carl Sagan.

2.      Where did you postdoc, and for how long?

Amusingly, I got my first job offer via a conversation in a woman’s room. At the 1981 Magnetospheres of the Outer Planets meeting my thesis work was being shown by several speakers and during a break a senior woman scientist asked me what I planned to do next. I said I was thinking of going back to England. She went back to the meeting and at the next break a British scientist she was sitting next to offered me a job. After a year finishing up work at MIT (and a trip to climb mountains in Peru) I started a post-doc at Imperial College in London. I spent 5 years at IC – getting a fellowship to support later years. This was at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s slashing of funds for academic research – things did not look too good for staying in Britain. And there was very little planetary research in the UK.

3.      How did you choose your current institution?

It became clear to me that I wanted to return to the US – mostly for the opportunities for space research but also because I realized I felt more comfortable in the american academic system. I was on vacation in Boulder (visiting a British climber who was living there – now my husband of 20 years) and, while I was in town, gave a talk at NCAR. I was urged to apply to their visiting scientist program. Just as I was wrapping up things in London to start my NCAR visiting position, I got an email from Voyager colleagues in Boulder saying that the University of Colorado was looking for faculty, particularly underrepresented minorities, in the physical sciences. Faculty positions are rare – and while some might question taking such a position – I realized that it was an opportunity and it would be up to me to do the best with it. And, besides, as a climber and skier, Boulder was clearly the place I wanted to live. I was given tenure 4 years later and have been on the faculty at CU for 21 years.

4.      Do you have any advice for students and postdocs just starting their career in space science?

It’s a great job!  And there are all sorts of jobs – mission design, mission operations, data analysis, modeling. You need to think about what you like doing most – is it digging through the data to find the nugget you know is there? Is it developing a model and seeing the science evolving in progressively complex plots? Is it discussing with a team how to implement a set of measurements? Yes, grades are important. Yes, publications are important. But also, contrary to common misconception, getting on with people is also important – perhaps as important as solving big equations. Talk with a range of people about what it takes to succeed in different types of jobs.

5.      Have you been involved in missions?  What are some of the challenges and rewards?

Yes – the best part of my job – Voyager, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno – usually on the science team as a plasma scientist. The rewards are, without question, are seeing the new data coming in. The challenges are the long stages it takes to get there – advocating the mission, proposing, designing, building, launching, getting out to the planet – and then, finally, the data come in. For Jupiter missions the process takes about 10-15 years. We started working on a mission to Pluto in 1989 – 26 years before New Horizons is due to fly past Pluto.

6.      Have your students been involved as well?

Of course. Graduate students are directly involved in analyzing or modeling mission data. It is harder for undergraduates to be involved because they usually do not have sufficient programming experience. But we now have programming courses and I have begun employing undergraduates.

7.      Do you have a favorite class you like to teach and why?

Hummmm….. I have just started a sabbatical so I am feeling a bit burnt out on teaching. But I expect I will bounce back by next fall. The best classes are the smaller classes for majors in planetary science – when students keep asking great questions and we discuss the latest data coming in from a planetary mission.

Thanks for these great answers Fran!

What’s your reaction?

A provocative article appeared in The Washington Post on Sunday morning:  Tenure track for women often isn’t easily maneuvered. 

We’ve talked about this as a problem for several years now, and shared tips for tenure-track faculty.  Should we talk about it more?  Is this still a problem in our field?  If you’re navigating the tenure track, or mentoring someone who is, what are you doing to cope?  What do you advise colleagues to do?

If you’re willing to share your reaction to this article, send it to us via email at susanniebur@nieburconsulting.com or leave a comment below.  We’ll round up the answers on Wednesday and publish them here without names or institutions attached.

Statistics

As a woman in planetary science, I find the news of Natalie Batalha‘s promotion to Deputy Science Team Director of the Kepler mission really exciting.  I’m of course happy when anyone I know is promoted, but I’ve only met Natalie once, so I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I was so psyched about her promotion. 

Then I remembered.  The statistics of women on missions are still so low that even small changes like a single woman’s promotion change the picture. 

When Linda Spilker was recently promoted to Cassini Project Scientist (PS) and Amanda Hendrix took her place as Cassini Deputy Project Scientist (DPS), I had the same reaction.  I was overjoyed when Louise Prockter was named in mid-2009 as Deputy Project Scientist on MESSENGER, even though she replaced Deborah Domingue.  These changes, few though they may be, mean that the statistics in the following figure (from a paper discussing the historical representation of women on NASA planetary science mission teams) are becoming ever-so-slightly outdated. 

In my opinion, that is a welcome change.

Source:  Niebur, S. M. (2009) Women and Mission Leadership. Space Policy 26, November 2009, pp. 257-263.