Evalyn Navarro
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we are bringing innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Evalyn Navarro, a student from University of St Thomas and I will be your host today.

In this series, we are presenting highlights from conversations with professionals, to share examples of what they consider beautiful in their work.

For this episode, our guest is Linda Welzenbach Fries.

She is a science writer, planetary scientist, and curator of planetary materials at Rice University. Her experience in curation started at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History when she was the manager of the meteorites collection. Currently, she is conducting advanced curation research with NASA and the European Space Agency.

Our episode starts with her response to what she considers “beautiful” in her work. Let’s get started.

Linda Welzenbach Fries
I was very much surprised, engaged and enamored the first time I looked through, and it’s not the first time I looked through a microscope, but it was the first time I had observed meteorite chondrules through a microscope.

As part of being a geologist, we work in scales, from the macro scale, observing the geology in situ, out in the field, to collecting samples and then looking at them in hand, at the hand scale, to looking at everything on a microscopic scale. I absolutely adore looking at geologic materials through the microscope.

One of the first books that I acquired when I was a graduate student were a whole bunch of these called Atlas of Rocks and their textures, and it’s basically nothing more than pictures of rocks at the microscopic scale. They were given to me by my uncle, who lovingly supported my geology habit since the age of seven. If you go to my website, you’ll see that, basically, he’s the reason I am a geologist today, and it was mostly because he gave me minerals. And minerals are beautiful. I mean, they have beautiful shapes, they have beautiful colors. You know, the thing that I find beautiful about them definitely comes from that part of my life.

Going back to the beginning here, chondrules in meteorites are unique in the sense that you can’t find anything on Earth like it. Each and every one is different. Each and every one is just really beautiful in the sense that they are colorful. They have unique shape. They have a unique structure. I think part of what makes them not only just visually engaging and beautiful, is understanding of where they come from. So, I think, as a scientist, there’s a kind of a spontaneous reaction. There’s that initial response that is completely sort of instinctive. It’s subjective. It’s the whole eye of the beholder beauty. And then as you gain more and more knowledge, you have a depth of understanding that enhances that beauty. It can become more beautiful, or become beautiful, if it wasn’t originally. I would say looking at rocks that originate from places beyond Earth and the way they are formed, to me, was beautiful on two different levels. One, because they were visually engaging, and two, because I had this knowledge of what they were and where they come from.

Evalyn
For those unfamiliar with chondrules, they are little spherical grains that make up the materials of asteroids which came to Earth as meteorites. Here is how she illustrates them.

Linda
Think of like a kaleidoscope. When you’re looking through a kaleidoscope, you see a lot of symmetry. You see a lot of color, especially the ones that are made from, like chips of glass. And then, of course, the mirrors, the number of mirrors inside of a kaleidoscope, give it a symmetry. And as you rotate the end of the kaleidoscope around, it changes. And so that’s not dissimilar from the kinds of things that we see in the microscope when it comes to planetary materials.

So, meteorites are interesting in that they were for a very, very long time, they were collectible objects because they’re odd. You know, they come from outer space. They’re interesting. When we gained the ability to do things like date rocks, analyze them in very small detail, the science for these planetary materials grew. That was around the late 1960s early 70s, especially associated with the Apollo era, when we were interested in understanding the origin of the Earth and the origin of the Moon. The Smithsonian has had a meteorite collection. Those collections came to the Smithsonian through a variety of means associated with a program that they are involved with called the US Antarctic Meteorite Program. They discovered that Antarctica was kind of a treasure trove of meteorites. And between National Institute of Polar Research in Japan and the National Science Foundation here in the US, along with NASA, they basically went and collected meteorites from Antarctica, starting in the mid to late 70s. The goal there was to better understand the breadth and the diversity of materials from our solar system through this program. Because, you know, meteorites are originally, mostly from the asteroid belt. There are some that come from beyond that, and then certainly some that come from our nearest neighbors, the Moon and Mars, that have been falling over the Earth for a very, very long period of time. Some places preserve them better than other places. Antarctica in particular, preserves them really, really well because it’s very cold and dry. Each piece basically fills in or creates a more complete or coherent picture of what the earliest part of our solar system was like. What was the composition of the solar system? What were the processes that were operating? We can’t find any of that information here on Earth. We have to look outside of that. And meteorites are essentially a very inexpensive delivery of this kind of information. And so, it’s really important for like museums and other programs to preserve as much of this material as possible, because each one is unique. Each one tells a different story, and collectively, together, we can better understand what’s going on.

Evalyn
What is the role of scientific collections in education for future generations?

Linda
I think we can use both the objects, the imagery, and what they’re telling us, obviously, in ways that can open the doors for the next generation to become explorers. I think one of the hardest things that we have to do is tread the line between being super sensationalistic about it and yet be truthful and excited about the science.

I think it’s important to also let them know this is the place to start, and that we want to hand the baton. We want to pass the baton to that next generation. I’m hoping, in the process of conveying the excitement or the beauty of what we’re doing, we’re giving them opportunities to ask new questions, to plan new ways to explore.

Evalyn
So, what does it take for a scientist to work with museums? Here is what she says.

Linda
I think the hardest areas of careers for most people who want to engage in and would love to know how to do it, or engage in it, is working in a museum. Museum is actually an amazing place, because it is the nexus of research, public engagement and essentially art. And it takes a village of scientists, designers, artists and engineers, essentially to create an exhibit that engages the public. And it’s storytelling, which is not an easy thing to do, especially when you’re trying to tell stories to a wide audience.

We’ve been able to start that process at a very small scale in our department. One of our faculties, Cin-Ty Lee, has always wanted to have an exhibit in our department as a way to also kind of balance the more artistic sort of exhibits of minerals that are over in Houston Museum of Natural History, to create a little bit more in-depth content and also make that content sort of more relevant today how geology kind of impacts our everyday life. And it was a great opportunity, because I was able to engage undergraduates and graduate students and even postdocs, and in just a couple months we developed a lot of content, and we’re able to get that printed up. And I have to say, I’ve been quite impressed with the random people that have been wandering into our ground floor area just to see the minerals and read what we have put on the walls.

Our department is evolving, and one of the things that has sort of been targeting in terms of new faculty is, is to enhance or grow our planetary science focus. And as part of that, we’ve just recently hired a meteorite scientist. I was tasked with, and super excited about actually buying a bunch of meteorites that we can use both for education and for display.

Evalyn
Curious about how to become a museum professional? Listen to how she ended up in her first role at the Smithsonian.

Linda
The reason why I became interested in museums from the get-go, and I never assumed that I would become a museum professional. My uncle gave me minerals, so I was a mineral collector, and I had access to local museums. That’s not something that everybody has and I had access to the Smithsonian because I lived in Maryland, in the Maryland, DC area. I went to school assuming that I would just become a professional geologist or maybe even go to graduate school, and I wasn’t sure what the future held, I’ll be honest, and I when I went to graduate school, I happened to be looking through the back of a magazine called Geo Times, and I saw the advertisement basically to work on a brand new exhibit at the Smithsonian, and the due date for the application was, like, two days, and there was a telephone number, and I just cold called the number, and I ended up talking to basically my future boss. And at the end of the conversation, I had basically explained, hey, you know, I’ve always collected minerals. I’ve been to the Smithsonian all my life. You know, this is part of the reason why I’m a geologist today. And I just said this would be the most amazing opportunity for me ever. This is the dream job. And then I got the job. I was just like; I can’t believe this!

Now there are programs out there. More programs for museum curation and museum science now. Every museum is a little bit different, but typically, the chief curators of most collections, regardless of the type of collection, are almost always research scientists, and they may not have any museum experience whatsoever, but they get on the job training. But I think that the profession museum studies, museum curation studies, there’s a lot more in the humanities side of thing than there is on the natural materials side of things, and I’m hoping that maybe through my job at Rice, I can help students see what is available. I can point them in the right direction. I know where a lot of these programs live, what schools provide this kind of training if they’re really interested, hopefully through a little bit of opportunities within our department, they can gain some experience. I’m at present working with Duncan Keller, who is a postdoc who came from Yale University and actually worked in some of the mineralogy exhibit development there to basically have one class, or a couple of classes devoted in exhibit development, text development, concept development, those kinds of things that you don’t normally have the opportunity to get as a student in any program, any science based program.

Evalyn
Does art influence science in the museum exhibits?

Linda
Museums are interesting in that, there is like art, there’s some degree of flexibility, except when it comes to the knowledge that they are trying to convey to the public. The way you convey that knowledge can change over time. The level of that knowledge will change over time based on the education level of the public. You have to reach some median goal. You have to account for things like accessibility and so on and so forth. But the truth of that knowledge has to be verified by experts. There are various ways to make sure that everybody agrees that the knowledge being presented is the correct knowledge. Most scientific museums try not to be anything other than objective, not subjective. Art is a little bit more subjective in my opinion. Eye of the beholder, you know, everybody is going to perceive art in a different way, and that’s okay.

In museums, we’re essentially providing context for the objects that the public is viewing. And you can tell a story about, say, you know, the evolution of humans, or, you know, here are the types of geologic environments that form these particular minerals. These are the processes that produce the kinds of gemstones that we all wear, so that people aren’t just here’s just a random object I think is beautiful, but here’s the reason why it’s beautiful. This is the reason why you like it so much. And sort of give it context to build that depth of understanding to make it even more beautiful.

Evalyn
Thank you, Linda, for sharing your experiences and insights and how you find beauty in your work. It was really interesting to learn more about meteorites and asteroids, and how there’s beauty present all around us.

[music]

Longitude
This podcast is produced by a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Zehra Karakilic
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Zehra, a graduate in Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University in the Netherlands. I will be your host today.

In our new series, we are presenting highlights from short conversations with professionals about what constitutes as beautiful in their line of work. The examples and experiences they share are not only inspiring, but also informative about the interesting projects they work on. So, join us in exploring reflections on beauty – spanning from science and engineering to other fields.

In this episode, our guest is Brandon Dugan, a professor of geosciences at the Colorado Mines University in Denver.  

We heard Dr. Dugan speak on our podcast episode 127 a few months ago when he shared information about his research about freshwater resources discovered under the Atlantic seabed. He returns to share his thoughts on what constitutes as beautiful in his line of work.

As a geoscientist who explores unconventional approaches to solving problems, we start our episode with one the experiences he shares around a peculiar problem that the drilling companies were facing in shallow water.  Let’s get started.

Brandon Dugan
I definitely have used the word beautiful to describe some of the things that I talk about because I study natural systems. I guess there’s just sort of an inherent beauty in nature, but I also love math. And there’s sort of a beauty in equations and trying to explain how things work. And that’s really the linkage for me is sort of this natural beauty and this elegance of being able to explain it with simple mathematics. Those linkages to me, are really amazing and insightful of like trying to understand how something works.

In the mid 1990s, there were some drilling issues where drilling companies were having. They were losing instrumentation very shallow in the seafloor, like 1000 feet of water, and then down 200 feet below the seafloor, they were losing instrument they were seeing quicksand like conditions, and they didn’t know what was happening.

Many major oil companies and drilling companies were plagued by this problem, because it was costing them money and resources and trying to figure out how to access deeper targets that they wanted to. So, they had empirical observations of the problem and the impact that this had on safety and our ability to get resources. And I, with some colleagues of mine, were able to do two things that sort of, in my mind, were beautiful extensions of the project. We were able to extend a physics-based understandings. We were able to write equations to understand why this system behaved the way that it did.

They were creating these small landslides in the ocean and people before didn’t understand how it could have happened. They didn’t understand how they could have gotten the criteria available for failure this shallow. We knew it existed deeper. So, if we went down 5000 feet or 6000 feet, we knew that we had these very high pressures that could lubricate a surface and create a landslide. But then it’s too deep dept to be a landslide. So, with some very simple equations, and thinking about the problem in two dimensions, and three dimensions, we were able to come up with a theoretical explanation for how we got these systems to fail, create landslides. And probably the most beautiful part was that in 2005, we got to go out with new instruments that we helped design and test our physics-based hypothesis with the natural observations, and we were pretty close to correct. And so that was really amazing, because we were able to take apart this natural phenomenon that was causing chaos in the working world, and explain it with pencil and paper, and then merge the two through, you know, million-dollar technology to go out and take samples of the ocean seafloor. So, it was mathematics, coupled with human applications, coupled with direct field evidence, that made us understand how this whole system worked. And now it’s been expanded to other basins around the world and even thinking about how some things like canyons formed on planets like Mars.

Zehra
So, where does Dr. Dugan see the beauty in geosciences?

Brandon
I think, for me, the natural system, the Earth system, rivers, streams, forests, mountains are all beautiful to me sort of from a sort of traditional naturalist standpoint. And in my field, where I see the beauty of being a geoscientist is trying to be able to explain the processes that we observe in nature, to break them down to their simplest pieces and understand sort of at the fundamental level, how are these things behaving. And so really, that’s the elegance and the excitement for me is trying to explain in the most simple terms, how something works, because then we can make it more complicated and still understand it but we have to understand the simple part first. So, for me, the beauty is really explaining things at the ground level of how they work and function, and the interactions between different things. So, I really look at the interaction between sediments and water, and how that creates things like landslides or water resources, or water for plants. And so how do they interact? And so, I go to the most fundamental level; how do water and rocks interact? And then, how can other things use them?

Zehra
Dr. Dugan has been working in this field both as a researcher and a professor for over 20 years. We wondered if his criteria for beauty evolved over time with the different roles he has taken on.

Brandon
In terms of how my viewpoint has evolved, and how I work with students, they’re still a little bit different. For me, when I was a student, I started my PhD research 27 years ago, I appreciated the beauty of the natural system, but I didn’t really understand the beauty of trying to understand that at its simplest level. I was still used to sort of my undergraduate training and my high school training of always trying to get the answer to something. So, I was always looking for the answer to a problem rather than the understanding of a problem. So, it was a little bit different. The approach that I thought about it, the approach that I do things is different. So now I think about how to understand it. I develop a hypothesis and a test, and I come up with an answer, whether it be correct or incorrect, then I adapt. And so now I’m much more focused on sort of the adaptations that I have to make because that’s part of the understanding for me. Twenty-five years ago, I was more focused on getting an answer and thinking that that would be the end of the process. Now, what I’ve sort of learned is, as I learn small bits and pieces, I do understand something, but I also get to ask other questions, which is more exciting. And so that’s sort of my personal evolution of how I think about things and, and the interplay between things. Now I’m more interested in the new questions I’m going to ask than just getting the answer to the original one. And nine times out of ten, I end up learning something about an item that I didn’t know I was going to discover.

With the students, for me, it’s really trying to have them understand that being wrong is okay. That’s where I find beauty is when they crossed that threshold to, I don’t just need to get the right answer, I need to understand how this works.

And so, I really work with students to try to understand that, trying and doing and succeeding and failing are all valuable. It’s not just about getting the right grade, or the right GPA or something like that. It’s about continually learning and taking what I learned to the next level from each step to step. So, trying to think about how everything builds upon itself.

For me, to go back to the how do I see beauty in this, the beauty in the relationship is when it really clicks with the students. When I see the students stop worrying about getting the right answer and focusing on, I want to learn more. That’s the winning part for me. That’s what keeps me in teaching.

Zehra
Is Dr. Dugan’s appreciation for nature primarily what got him into this field?

Brandon
It was something that I only realized later in my life, I mean, probably part of the way through my PhD. So, after I finished my undergraduate degree, and I was a handful of years into my PhD studies, I realized that I was naturally drawn towards natural systems. So, I started out in a STEM field, I started out but just in mathematics, doing an undergraduate degree in mathematics, and I appreciated mathematics, and I enjoyed it, and I liked applying it to things. But I wasn’t invigorated or stimulated in the beginning just to do math for the sake of doing math. And so, I was trying to find something where I could apply math to a problem that I wanted. And you know, you could be an actuary or an accountant or something like that. And those seemed not too exciting to me. So, I didn’t pursue them. And I just kept looking for the thing. And it was finally when I found Geosciences and that I could apply math to that. But that’s where I ended up. But when I did that, when I was an undergraduate, I had no conscious understanding that that was driven by my upbringing and spending time in nature. Later in my life, I realized that it was this appreciation for nature that sort of drew me and my math background there.

Zehra
Dr. Dugan’s current research is about freshwater resource found under the ocean.

Brandon
Probably the primary project I’m working on right now is trying to understand again, this system that doesn’t make sense at first observation is how this water exists deep, deep beneath the ocean sediments, so you’d expect it to be saltwater, and it’s freshwater.

I’m spending a lot of time right now trying to organize a project for next summer to go out and actually sample some of these waters, so we can have mathematically driven hypotheses about how old the water is, what its composition is. The next year, we want to go out and sample it south of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to try and see how well our understanding of the system is. So, we can make forecasts about how it’ll change over time due to changes in precipitation with climate change, changes in sea level due to climate change. So how is this potential resource going to change over time? And how might it be accessible to people? Right now, we’re in a lot of technical planning stages. We know what we want to do and what we want to measure, so we’re assembling a science party of about 30 scientists who will participate. All geoscientist but some of them studied water chemistry, some of them have studied rock physics, some of them have studied how water and microbes interact with each other, and then organizing the drilling vessel that to go out and do all the sampling and measurements next year.

Zehra
We wondered if there’s anything about his field that may not be visible to others that he wishes they knew more about.

Brandon
I think one is, you know, we live in an era where we have access to so many different fields. And so, I think one thing that’s exciting is, or that I’d like people to know, is to become a scientist, you know, we’re not creating things from scratch anymore. We’re not Newton, we’re not Einstein. And so, it’s really working with scientists across fields where we learn the most.

And so, something that I think is exciting to me is, the geochemistry tells me a lot about these groundwater systems, how old they are, where they were sourced, but I’m not a geochemist. So how do I learn about this? I don’t go learn geochemistry. I go partner with the geochemist. I think one thing about science is that it’s hugely collaborative. And we all have our specialties and our expertise, but we learn the most when we work together across fields. So oftentimes, I talk to students, and they say, well, I want to be a geoscientist, because I want to do this, or I want to be a mechanical engineer, and I may do this. And I, I try to encourage the students to think about how they’re going to talk to people in other disciplines, because that’s where they’re going to be active in the modern world. You know, we don’t just have one job anymore, we’re working across fields. So that’s one way that I thought about that that’s interesting.

The other one is just the excitement of exploration. So, I’m studying these freshwater systems that exist beneath the ocean where you wouldn’t expect to find freshwater. And the reason we know they are there is because somebody accidentally found them looking for something else. Sometimes what we learn in one project can lead to 10, 15, 20 years of other projects. So just because something doesn’t match your original hypothesis, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pursue it farther, or think about it. We can learn from, I don’t want to say our mistakes, but we can learn from unexpected results. And that’s something that is what really motivates me is I want to know and answer the question, a question about how old the freshwater is. And when I do that, I’ll find something about how it affects microbes, and then I’ll get to learn something about microbes. And so, these studies feed into one to another. And so even where I think I’ve made a misstep, we probably still made an advancement.

Zehra
Are there any unrealized projects, something that has been on the back of Dr. Dugan’s mind, perhaps a project that has not materialized yet because of timing not being right yet?

Brandon
Just a few minutes ago, I mentioned the primary project is this water project that we’re working on, but sort of in the background, we do have this other project going on where we’re looking at the role of charcoal in the hydrologic cycle. So, charcoal that’s produced unintentionally, so from forest fires, here in the Mountain West, where I live now. When there’s a big forest fire, the ground changes quite a bit. And that affects how rainfall interacts with the soil, it affects how things grow back. Other people have looked at this sort of intentionally making charcoal and putting it in fields to increase crop fertility and yield rates and things like that. And as a place to store carbon in the in the ground rather than emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And a couple of colleagues in Mine have been toying with these ideas of different ways to track how the carbon moves through the cycle and over what timescales. So, the underlying assumption here is that we put this carbon in the ground, and it stays there as charcoal. But empirically, we know it disappears, either through chemical degradation or physical degradation, or runoff and things like that. And so, we’re trying to understand the processes with some mathematics. But we’re also trying to use some physics to figure out how we can track it during time, so people actually know where it goes when it’s moving. So, we can keep an inventory of a new carbon storehouse.

The timing hasn’t been right for different funding calls. We’ve put in some projects to net federal funding agencies and gotten some money to study it. We’ve had some industry sponsor interest, but every time we’re just about ready to get sponsored with an industry partner, they reshuffle or change or something like that. And they say, Oh, not this year, but maybe next year. And so, it’s something that we keep sort of incrementally doing a little bit of work, kind of on shoestring budget in the background waiting for the right, right time. But it’s a way to sort of maximize how much plant growth you get how much carbon you store in the ground without using fertilizers and things like that. And again, it’s another project that sort of started from an accident in Brazil. This just happened natural. There were natural fires and then there were these very fertile soils and people are like Oh, this is interesting. Can we do it intentionally? And we can do it intentionally but we’re not as good as nature, which is sort of interesting that we can’t quite figure out how nature did it so well.

Zehra
It seems there is freedom in science to create and develop projects, and for exploring funding opportunities. Whereas in the arts, projects may develop in various directions with a different sort of freedom. We wondered if the established scientific methods are what keeps scientific explorations moving forward.

Brandon
I would say, I would actually kind of flip it on the other side and I’d say we don’t give scientists enough freedom. So, if you look at a curriculum for an undergraduate in a science field, or an engineering field, it’s very rigorous. Like, probably 100 or so of the 125 credits that they have to take are totally prescribed, and they have to take them in this order, and this order, and this order, and this order and this order, because there are methods. You have to learn differential calculus before you can learn the integral calculus, and you know, there’s a sequence that things have to go. But then we get to this problem that I was mentioning earlier, or my version of a problem, where people get really focused on the answer, because everything’s just been way too structured. And then when you start to get to upper undergraduate level, or graduate levels type, then you have this opportunity to be more creative and presenting things because you’re working on more open-ended problems. Maybe it’s research, maybe it’s a new project for an employer or something like that, you have to think outside the box. How am I going to do this study? How am I going to present these results, and I want to present them this way, whether it be a PowerPoint presentation, or a journal presentation, you have to think about how you lay things out. And many of our STEM students aren’t getting this until their fourth year of college or their graduate education. And so, we end up with these, sort of very, I don’t want to say, sort of uninspiring presentations, where they’re just very, like I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this. And that’s true. That’s exactly what they did. And so oftentimes, I’m telling students, well, you don’t have to tell them exactly the order you did them in, tell them the story of what you learned. And so, it’s sort of breaking this mold of A, B, C, D and E. And it’s, you know, you might want to tell them A, J, C, Q, because it tells a better story if you do it that way. And so, I think we’ve probably confined our STEM students too much to follow a method and sort of, we’re teaching them sort of creativity and exploration later, which is a little bit ironic, because probably most science started with exploration and trying to understand something, and then we kind of close that down and then open it back up later in their careers.

The other thing that we’re doing a lot more of in education at college level, but I think also at the high school level that’s helping our students is more open-ended questions. So rather than just a calculus problem that has an answer, sort of a question that has multiple answers, and it is sort of how you think to get there. So, students get comfort with uncertainty, because once they get a job, they’re gonna be dealing with uncertainty every day. I guess, you know, pure artists side, they get focused the same way we get focused, but for different reasons. My brother’s a graphic designer, he’s always what’s the next contract? It’s a very different routine for him because he’s a subcontractor. So, it’s one company to another company, he’s always jumping around and has to be very versatile and adaptable. And many of us in STEM fields, you know, we kind of get in our rut, and we can sit there. And so, we probably do better on both sides and sort of giving a little more structure to the traditional artists, let’s say and a little less structure and more freedom to the science, engineering students.

Zehra
Dr. Dugan has a cool style of talking about his projects. Listen to how he developed his communication skills, which started first with his interest in reading.

Brandon
I did read a lot. I still read a lot. It kind of goes in cycles, but I’ll read historical novels for a while, autobiographies for a while, and then you know, popcorn fiction for a while so it’s kind of all over the board. I read many different things. I also think a lot of it just came from my training as a PhD student. My advisor really focused on communication and making sure that you can explain things to any audience. So, I often, you know, reflect who is my audience? And how can I say things?

I have one committee member when I was a PhD student at Penn State, who told me that, I should be able to use the same slide deck and present it to a group of kindergarteners and they should be able to enjoy it, depending on how I present it. And I should be able to show the same slides to a bunch of PhDs in my field and explain it differently and they should enjoy it. And I should be able to show it to, you know, people who didn’t go to university and are practicing professionals or something like that. And they can see the same images, but how I describe them. And so, they all learn the same thing, but from different words. And so, I’ve just always sort of practice telling my story. And now I’ve been doing this for quite a few years. So, it gets better. I learn every year I every time I give a talk or a presentation or an interview. I reflect on it, what could I have done better? How can I improve? How can I be more effective with my science now? I know what I can do technically and so now I focus a lot more on communication and how can I communicate it better.

Zehra
I believe a nice remark that Doctor Dougan mentioned is how multidisciplinary work can be intellectually beneficial because it can help explore the same topic from different viewpoints while finding new approaches that could possibly lead to advancements of the same project.

[music]

Longitude
This podcast is produced by a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Maria Rodriguez
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, my name is Maria Rodriguez. I’m a Longitude fellow and a graduate student at Rice University studying Geology. We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and communication in scientific and creative fields.
For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Graham Peers. Dr. Peers is a professor of biology at Colorado State University, where he studies effects of photosynthesis on plants, algae, and cyanobacteria.
We start a conversation on how he found himself in the amazing world of biology. Enjoy listening…

[music]

Maria
If you could tell us about your journey into the field of biology and what initially sparked your interest, and then led you to specialize into studying photosynthesis.

Graham Peers
So, I think it depends on who you ask. I thought my travels here were a little random. And I just kind of picked up interesting things as I go along. But if you asked my mom, she’ll say that when I was a little kid, I was like walking around picking up algae on the beach and messing around with things that I called the green slimes, like, you know, in in lakes and things like that all the time. So, she thinks I always had a predilection towards being interested in algae and photosynthesis and green things the whole time. But, you know, I think I came about it in in a kind of a slow way. I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to do and science initially, and because I wasn’t too sure, I was looking for things that were more kind of like general where I didn’t just have to specialize in biology or chemistry or something like that. And so, I got attracted to the oceanography program at the University of British Columbia, which is where I did my undergraduate. And yeah, it was interesting, because you know, for the first three years, you basically just took a little spattering of biology courses. And in my case, I chose biological oceanography. So, a lot of biology courses, you know, some geology, some chemistry, some physics, I think it was really cool. It just gave me a different perspective on things from my friends who took like just marine biology or just botany or something like that. I kind of stayed in the oceanography realm through my PhD. And then I kind of found that I was more interested with the individual organisms and more interested in how they actually got by living just on light and CO2 and inorganic nutrients. And so, I started to read more and more about that in my spare time. And I’ve just started to get absolutely fascinated by photosynthesis. I think it’s the most utterly amazing thing that happens on Earth. Literally, making something out of nothing is just fantastic to me. And learning about the complexity of how plants versus algae versus cyanobacteria do it is something that still totally fascinates me.

Maria
That’s awesome. That’s really amazing! Are you as fascinated with moss as I am? Because anytime I go hiking, I just go, and I touch all the beautiful soft moss.

Graham
Yeah, moss are super cool! I have friends who work on photosynthesis in moss, but I personally never got into it. They grow a little too slowly for my taste. I am kind of an impatient scientist so I like to try and find things out fast.

Maria
Oh, what would grow faster? Cyanobacteria or just like plants itself?

Graham
Oh, yeah. Cyanobacteria. The plants that a lot of people use for Molecular Biology of photosynthesis, one of them is related to like mustard greens. It’s called the Arabidopsis, and it can go through a full life cycle in less than two months.

Maria
Oh, wow. Very quick.

Graham
Yeah, you planted it immediately germinates and then within a month that flowers and then you can collect the seeds again, and keep going.

Maria
Wow, that is very fast. Can you summarize the project you’re working on in lay terms regarding space biology and lunar agricultural research and share its potential significance?

Graham
Yeah, so we’ve got two projects right now that we work on associated to thinking about plants and space. The first one is partnership with a private company that builds instruments that measure gases and the composition of the air in real time. It turns out, you know, other than just making oxygen and consuming CO2, plants also are interacting with the atmosphere in all sorts of ways. And they also make a hormone. We think about things in hormones in humans as being things like testosterone or estrogen, and they’re in our bloodstream. But it turns out there are plant hormones that are gases, as well. And so, if you’re a plant and you can’t move around, how is it that you can communicate with your neighbors? It turns out that they make this gas called ethylene. And ethylene, if you look it up really quickly, you’ll see that ethylene is like a gas that most people have familiarity with, but never knew what it was. And it’s the thing that makes bananas ripen quickly. So, bananas are throwing off all this ethylene, all the time. And if you put a green banana, and next to a really ripe banana, that ripe banana is making ethylene, and it will signal the green banana to start ripening really quickly. And it turns out, plants make this also all the time when they’re stressed out. And so, what we’re trying to do or what NASA wants us to do is can we develop this instrumentation so that folks on the International Space Station or people on spacecraft or even on the moon, don’t have to be continuously watching their plants? So instead of saying, Okay, going every day watering them trying to figure out what their physiology is, can we be continuously measuring things like the amount of ethylene in the air, and when it reaches a certain point, we could say, oh, there’s something wrong with the plants. Let’s go check on them see what’s wrong, right, because an astronaut has a lot of things to do every day, and gardening? Well, you know, it’s important to eat, you know, it’s something that if they don’t have to spend a lot of their time looking at their plants, that could be better for them. So that’s the first project that we’re working on. And that one’s been really fun. The instrument works, we know we can measure ethylene. But now we’re going to see if we can actually measure when plants get stressed.

The second project that we’re working on right now is trying to figure out if we can improve the growth of plants on lunar soil or lunar regolith, so it’s not really soil because soil here on earth has a lot of organic constituents, dead plants, worm poop, you know, all that kind of stuff. But on the lunar surface, because there’s never been any life on the moon, it’s completely inorganic. It’s just ground rock pretty much. And the chemical composition of that rock or this regolith is very different from what we see on Earth. So even though there’s a little bit of shared geologic history between the Moon and Earth, the metal composition of the regolith, and the rocks on the moon are very different from what we see in the ground up rocks that we see on Earth. And so, it turns out that there are metals, particularly this metal called chromium, which is quite abundant on the Moon, and we don’t see very much of it naturally on Earth. So, our idea that we had when we were comparing the makeup of rocks on the moon and rocks on the earth were, okay, we think that one of the reasons that plants don’t grow well on lunar regolith, is because of the really high concentrations of chromium, because chromium is super toxic. So basically, our proposal was like, Okay, we think it’s issues with chromium. So how can we try to remove the chromium from the regolith such that plants would want to grow on it again. And we came up with an idea of using a cyanobacteria that is very insensitive to the chromium. So, at concentrations of chromium where you get poison for plants, the cyanobacteria don’t care. They can grow on them. They can take up that chromium. They don’t really mind. So, what this ends up being is a kind of a bio accumulation study. Can we get the cyanobacteria to grow on the regolith, suck up the chromium, and then use the regolith that’s been cured of chromium now and grow plants on?

Maria
Wow, that’s super interesting. Have you all tried experiments that plants do grow on this lunar regolith, it but they’re just like really stressed out? Or do they just not grow at all?

Graham
Yeah, so here’s the deal. This is the this is the kicker. Because it’s so hard to get that lunar regolith, you know, it’s not just at your corner store, you’ve got to go a fair distance to get that. So there really hadn’t been very many experiments done on the genuine thing, the actual article, but NASA scientists working with private companies tried to develop fake regolith or what’s called Regolith Simulant. And, and plants will grow on that simulant. You know, they’re not the happiest. You have to give them a little bit more nutrients, literally, you can just give them a little bit of a miracle grow, and that’ll help. You know, they grow okay, not great. There are a lot of people have been working on that, but finally NASA said, Okay, we’re going to release a little bit of the real stuff. Okay, and we’re gonna take a little bit and I’m talking, you know, the amount of regolith would be amount of the amount of dirt that you can like, put on your little fingernail. So, you know, they were growing plants, that mustard I told you about earlier, they were growing that. They germinated the seeds on the actual regolith, and the plants hated it. They’re like, Nope, we don’t like this at all. They were extremely stressed. They didn’t reach the end of their lifecycle. That made everyone’s kind of ears perk up, because we said, okay, there’s a difference between the real stuff and what we’ve been trying to use for the last 20 years to imitate growing plants on the moon. What we found was one of the major differences between the actual regolith and what we see in the simulant is that chromium. So, believe it or not, we only found that out, scientists only published that, last year. So, this is a pretty new finding. So, of course, NASA really wants to make sure that we can try and fix that.

Maria
Super interesting. Wow. And so just from my understanding of plants, just from what you had mentioned, when they are stressed in this type of environment, similar to your first project, do they emit that ethylene?

Graham
Yeah, you know what, there have been some studies on other plants and different metals that show that these plant stress hormones are produced during metal toxicity. I will be totally honest with you. I’ve never thought of combining the two projects until you mentioned it. That’s awesome.

Maria
Just to see if they’re stressed out. Yeah, I wasn’t sure.

Graham
Yeah, we have a whole bunch of other ways of measuring plant stress. So like a doctor might measure your blood pressure, right? And say, Okay, well, your blood pressure is really high, your heart is racing, you’ve got this. And then you also have this stress hormone called cortisol. Right? So, a doctor can measure all those things and say you’re stressed. We have different techniques for measuring stress in plants. That’s actually looking at light emission from plants. So, we think about plants actually using light for photosynthesis, but it turns out, they also emit really low amounts of almost infrared light. And the amount of that light that gets produced gets increased when they get stressed. So that’s how we kind of independent measure stress in the lab. Yeah.

Maria
Very interesting. Very cool.

Graham
All the plants outside are glowing. You just can’t see it.

Maria
They’re glowing with infrared light. Wow.

Graham
Yeah, they’re fluorescent red during the day. Yeah. If you have the right instruments, you can measure that.

Maria
Can I ask how did you come to be involved with this project?

Graham
Yes. So, the first one, I was invited by the company and another person who has worked with the company before. They were looking for someone who had more expertise in photosynthesis, so they contacted me. This other project, the Chromium project, is working with a scientist at the NASA Ames lab, A-M-E-S. And I worked with the scientist there during his PhD. We worked together on algae on things that were completely unrelated to what we’re going to be working on for this chromium project. We enjoyed working together and we were trying to find different projects to work together on and this idea cropped up. And so, we decided to put it forward and we’re lucky enough to get it funded.

Maria
Real cool. Your research involves a multidisciplinary approach sounds like, and it combines genetics, physiology, plant biology. So how do you navigate the intersections between these different fields? And what have been some of the key insights gained from this inter disciplinary collaboration?

Graham
Yeah, yeah. How do you navigate it? Oh, man, I don’t know if I have a good blueprint for that, you know. I’ve always enjoyed thinking about different aspects of science. I don’t like to be siloed or just focus on one thing. And I think that came out of that oceanography degree that I told you about earlier, where I took a lot of different things. I like learning about a whole bunch of different things too. You know, I’m not the best at math, I will fully admit that. And so eventually, I kind of reach a point where I have difficulties and often at that point, if it’s something that I’m really interested in, and I think could be a powerful tool, I’ll try and find a collaborator to help with. Because everybody can’t be an expert in everything. It’s just not possible. And so, when I reach the kind of limits of my abilities, then I asked for other people’s help and I’ve never had any problem doing that, in my career, at least. And so, what happens then is that, you know, as you start to interact with people that don’t have a similar background to you, you start to learn additional things and new doors of knowledge open up to you. So, you start to poke around in a different area. Because I think most of us, you know, most active level scientists are still very curious, right? We, we like to find out new things still, even if they weren’t in our previous understanding of how the world worked. And so, I try to take advantage of that as I go along, and combine new things I, I try to look at what’s new in different fields. So, I actually read like the medical literature sometimes just to find out, Oh, what are people doing in this world that maybe I could learn something from, to apply to plants even? I think it’s important to be very open minded to that. And it can be frustrating, right? Because people use different terminologies or you know, you’re unfamiliar with certain methodologies. But if you have a little bit of patience with yourself, you can expand into those regions and start to learn more. Yeah, and so, the intersectionality, you know, it can be a challenge, but it’s also really exciting. It’s important to find new folks to work with who you enjoy working with and can learn from, and that’s really how you push the field forward.

Maria
I definitely agree. Coming from a geology background, I completely agree with that. Because geology is one of the most like interdisciplinary type of fields. We work with all types of geosciences, like climate scientists, soil scientists, like in our department here. Yeah, our field is super collaborative and just coming from that oceanography background, I could see that for sure.

Graham
Oh, yeah. I tell most of my students who are interested in studying evolution and microbes, I say, one of the most important things you could take is a geology course. Because the biological world, when we think about it, working on our life spans, the exertions that are exerted on the biological world are on geologic timescales, and understand how we got to life on earth as it is right now without understanding geology.

Maria
Awesome. So, you mentioned students, of course, and I know you’re not teaching this semester, but what do you find most rewarding about working with students, and do you have a favorite class you teach?

Graham
Can I start with my favorite class?

Maria
Yes.

Graham
Okay, so I actually just started a new class that I gave last semester for the first time. It’s an upper-level seminar and it’s all about death.

Maria
Okay!

Graham
Yeah, so I think as biologists, we spend all of our time teaching things about life. How life comes about, about reproduction, and we really don’t teach or think much about the end of life. And that’s one constant of all life forms, all life forms die at some point. And so, the concept behind the course was to remove ourselves from the human experience. So, I didn’t want to think about humans. I didn’t want to think about the metaphysical aspects, you know, of why are we here, etc, but instead to look at how other forms of life experience death. Just to expand, so really, you’re still thinking about biology, right? But you’re, you’re approaching it from a different angle and thinking about the diversity. So, for instance, we read scientific manuscripts and looked at data about organisms. This one organism in particular, there is a jellyfish that is immortal. Any as it gets towards the end of its adult lifecycle, it turns back into a juvenile again. And it goes back and forth. And they’ve done this cycle hundreds of times. So why? how does that happen? That completely is unusual, right? That changes our thinking about life cycles, etc. Another thing we learned about is some of the molecular biology associated with really long-lived trees, things like Gingko trees, or Giant Sequoias and things like that. Those organisms live for so long. And they don’t have the markers of aging that we see in animal systems and other plant systems. They’re just not doing the same thing as everything else like that. And they’re not related to each other. They’re very distantly related to one another, like Ginkgo’s and Sequoias are different groups of plants entirely. And they have all these relatives that can’t do it, but somehow, they’ve gotten to a position where they can have extremely long 1000s of year lifespans. How does that happen? So, there’s two examples of kind of how we think about things differently. So, it’s fascinating. It’s really intriguing to me. And the students, I think, really kind of get a broad idea of the diversity of what’s out there. Much more so than just taking a botany and zoology course. So that’s my favorite course right now.

Maria
So, for my own edification, which jellyfish is this, that is, quote, unquote, immortal that Phoenix’s into its new life?

Graham
Yeah, oh, I can’t remember the species name right now, it doesn’t really have a popular name. It’s very rare. I would have to look up and send it to you. I don’t have it at my immediate recall.

Maria
I’ll keep a lookout. Oh, my gosh, wow.

Graham
Yeah, it’s super cool.

Maria
Yeah, for that first part, what do you find the most rewarding about working with students?

Graham
Yeah. So, the best part about working with students is honestly seeing students become independent and they’re their own thinkers. It is, by far the most amazing thing. Just to put this into perspective, I have two of my most memorable students when I first became a professor here, these two students, they’re both in one class of mine, they both are applying for and getting interviews for professorships this year. And that is the most rewarding thing, I think that I’ve ever experienced as an instructor. To see people go from learning about science, practicing with science, to being experts in their field and wonderful teachers on their own, it’s just phenomenal. And so that’s the really, the most rewarding thing is to see a student, you know, essentially struggle a little bit with new information, struggle with how their worldviews change, but gain their own tools, they had their own experiences, to be able to say, I can do this, like, I am able now to take new information, put it into perspective, and go in a new direction with it.

[music]

Maria
We hope you enjoyed hearing about the interesting facets of photosynthetic biology and the innovative ideas that come out of biological research. If you are as curious as I was about the immortal jelly fish Dr. Peers mentioned, it turns out, it is called Turritopsis dohrnii, a very small animal about 4.5 millimetres wide and tall, making it smaller than the average fingernail!

[music]

To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Emory Mckenzie
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Emory Mckenzie, I will be your host today. I recently completed my masters in Geosciences at Rice University and now working for Chevron to discover energy resources.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Brandon Dugan Professor of Geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines. I was curious about Brandon’s research on unconventional freshwater resources that discovered under the Atlantic seabed. I wanted to know more about how he develops such fascinating research.

Join me in a conversation about his approach to science, mentoring, and writing papers and what led him to this project. Enjoy listening!

[music]

Brandon Dugan
I was always fascinated with science and engineering and started out just as a math major. Maybe on the on the creativity side and the brain of an 18-year-old, it seemed kind of boring to me. I was good at math but doing math for math’s sake didn’t really encourage me or excite me or anything like that. So, I just started looking through a physical paper catalog at the time in the 1990s, you know, what majors used math to do other things. And I found the geological engineering program. It seemed to engage my math and science brain, but also my desire to work with nature and see things. So unbeknownst to me, I sort of saw early creativity of trying to take natural processes and explain them with math and physics. I started out and completed my degree in geological engineering and during that time, I was fortunate enough to do two internships at Oak Ridge National Lab. And so, in the middle of taking my classes where everything had an answer that was perfect to three decimal places in my engineering curriculum, I started measuring things in the earth during these internships. I realized that the Earth was much more complex than a number that I looked at in the book. And so, I really got interested in how the Earth changed and how well we can understand that. I started thinking about water processes and sort of it was going back to my youth, I spent a lot of time outside in nature playing in water, and I saw that, hey, I could still do my science and engineering and look at water. I just saw the complexity of Earth and the elegance of math and how we could work together to explain problems. Pursued that on my PhD more on the geo side, on the earth side of things, and on the engineering side. And I’ve continued that career just chasing problems that I want to find an explanation to. I might not find an answer, but I can at least provide some insight to how something works.

Emory
You were more into geomechanics and like slope stability on the seafloor, and now you’re in the freshwater resources. How do we get to that transition?

Brandon
Great. So yeah, as you mentioned, Emory, for my PhD, I worked on geomechanics. So how sediments in this case, not rocks are things that were softer than real rocks, kind of like modeling clay, how they break apart and form landslides in the ocean on these really low angle slopes, almost flat slopes. We did a lot of work, both with elegant math and field studies, just like I talked about and how I got there of trying to understand this. And in doing so I was just looking back at a lot of historical literature. What do we know about these continental shelf environments near the coastline. And I found these, this dataset from the 1970s, where the US Geological Survey had found freshwater beneath the ocean on the continental shelf. They weren’t looking for freshwater, they were actually trying to do a minerals assessment along the margin of the United States in the 1970s. And so, they wrote about it, but it wasn’t their primary objective. So, they didn’t really try to explain it. And so, it was geographically proximal to where I was studying submarine landslides. And it was just another problem or phenomenon that was interesting to me. Why would you find freshwater beneath a big body of saltwater the biggest body of saltwater on Earth? And so, I started trying to explain that, again, similarly, trying to understand, theoretically, how could this water be there in the perfect world? How could we explain water being 50 kilometers offshore, and 200 meters below this below the seafloor being fresh enough that you could drink came up with some predictions. And since then, we’ve been trying to collect data to improve and revise those predictions about how that water got there. How much water is there? And what that water might be used for?

Emory
Could you speak to like how collaboration helps the creative process for you? Like, how is their expertise fueling your motivation for studies?

Brandon
I think part of it, it sort of starts with my career starting out in engineering and going to geosciences. I’ve been able to work on both sides of that field and see that what a geologist knows and can work with an engineer to solve a problem. So, when it comes to things like, I need to look at solute transport, how salts moving around. I understand the basic physics of that problem but to really understand what we need to measure and how we need to measure it, I need to talk to somebody who thinks about that problem intimately and they can share their information with me, and I can share my information with them. The sum is greater than the individual parts kind of thing. For me, it’s always bringing in new knowledge. We pay a lot of money, we put a lot of time into collecting data, let’s get everything we can out of it. So, if somebody can contribute to the puzzle, let’s think about how they think about that science. And then I might think about it differently based on their perspective, just like you might think about it differently from your perspective based on your training if you’re a pure engineer and as a pure geologist, and we’re studying the same problem.

Emory
When you bring students in to come work with you, is it best to have a kind of geomechanics background a freshwater resources background, or engineering?

Brandon
I guess for students who are coming to work with me, I probably view two things that are probably less discipline specific than that first is really important. So, one is a passion about whatever problem they’re working on. So, if I have a student who is really interested in geomechanics, that’ll get me excited about geomechanics and we can learn together. I have a student who’s really interested in freshwater resources, and they have a project they want to attack that that will excite me, and we’ll work together. And that’s again, going back to collaboration and teamwork, you can feed off each other’s enthusiasm. So, I don’t really have a preference, it’s more of their perspective of why they want to do this and what their end goals are, whether it be to go work for a government agency, to go work in an engineering consulting firm, you know, as long as they show that passion and that enthusiasm to me, that’s what I’d like. And then underlying that, I like to see strong math and physics backgrounds, because whether it be in the modeling that I do numerically, there’s a lot of math and physics behind that, or even the field work that we do, there’s a lot of math and physics underlying that. And so, if they have that underlying knowledge, I feel like I can mentor them, and help them learn the discipline-specific things, whether it be electrical resistivity surveys, or triaxial stress experiments, or groundwater flow, I feel like I can add that subject expertise on top of the fundamentals.

Emory
So those students who come in, they want to work on a certain problem. Let’s say they want to branch out how do you influence them, or motivate them to branch out of their comfort zone and study a different problem and learn a new discipline?

Brandon
I try to let students develop their own thought process. So, I will help them with questions. I will rarely tell them what they have to do. And if I see things that are peripherally related to what they’re doing, I might point them in the direction say, oh, have you ever thought about this, or when constructing their thesis committees or things like that, I tried to make sure that we have a well-rounded group of people. So, they’re getting feedback from people who are not the same expertise as me.

I just returned from the American Geophysical Union Conference last week in San Francisco. It has a whole range of geophysical problems. And so, when I’m there with students and mentoring them, I tell them to go explore things that they’re just curious about, maybe it might not be their primary area of interest but there’s 20,000 wonderful scientists there. Let’s go hear what some other people have to say. Maybe they’re talking about water on Mars. So, it’s related to water at some level, but it’s on a different planet. So, I try to encourage students to think of their skill set and how it can be applied to other disciplines, because their creativity, their interests will change over time, we might get new datasets that will change over time, we might discover old datasets that will make us think about something differently. So I always like to encourage students that it’s their approach to thinking about a problem, which is which is what’s going to get them success, not just picking I want to do this problem, because it’s exciting right now in the news, or it’s a buzz trending on some social media, you know, they should do what interests them and try to find creative problems that excite them.

Emory
I’m glad you mentioned the conference because conference is where you get a lot of ideas. There’s so many people studying so many different sciences that you might hear one word that like piques your interest in talking, it’s like, this is something that I want to study now.

Brandon
Yep.

Emory
I love geosciences. Because it’s always a linkage between two sciences, now especially, you have to incorporate many disciplines to kind of understand a problem. Have there been any big discoveries in freshwater resources within the past, say 20 years?

Brandon
Yeah, so I’ve collaborated with Chloe Gustafson at Columbia University, her PhD advisor, Kerry Key at Columbia University, and another colleague of ours, Rob Evans, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the 2000s, really developed how we could use electrical techniques in marine environments to image where we see pieces of the earth that are more resistive or less resistive. And that has allowed us to basically make 2D pictures of where we think freshwater and saltwater interacting beneath the ocean without actually sampling them. So, it gives us targets to drill if we want to understand the age of those waters, and when they were emplaced, or geometries to think about, where, is water flowing in really thin lenses or is it in big, blocky bodies. And so, they overcame some pretty interesting technological concepts to be able to do these electrical surveys in the ocean because the ocean is full of saltwater. So, you put current in it, and it just wants to short circuit and go right through the saltwater. And so, they were trying to basically set and current into the more resistive layer. They figured that out and it’s now helped how well we can constrain where freshwater might be in the offshore environment without actually having to drill the well like they did in the 70s. Of course, we have to work with well data to get the true rock properties and fluid properties. But the two work together to get sort of fine scale features and then map them out more regionally with the geophysical data.

Now we can look at precise locations where we might want to drill and sample the waters to find out if they’re 10,000 years old or 100,000 years old, or 100 years old, which might tell us something about how quickly they’re recharging. Are they recharging over human timescales, something like a modern aquifer that we use to get a lot of drinking water and agricultural water from or is it something that’s a relic from in a previous climate state when sea level was lower, and glaciers were larger, or something like that.

Emory
When you’re writing a paper, so how do you kind of get creative, let’s say in the discussion section of a paper?

Brandon
I guess I’ll talk about my writing process in general. Two things that I do when I start writing is, first one is, I think about the figures I want to present. What is the data and information that I want to show? Doesn’t have to be the perfect figures. They can be hand sketches, but the first thing I want to show. I’m looking offshore in New England. I need a map. I need to tell them where we’re working. We’re gonna show them some seismic data. So, I’m gonna have to have a picture of some seismic data. I’m gonna have a groundwater model so I’m gonna have to have, you know, some of these things. So, I look at the picture and that sort of tells, that gives me the overall flow of the paper that I want. And then what works best for me is just to write, so it’s just brain dumps. I don’t try to edit. I don’t try to do anything. And I just, I just write, and I write, and I write, and I write, and then I go back and sort of rearrange things to align with the order of those pictures. And then when it gets to, sort of the main part of your question, where’s the sort of creativity and the integration come in? I go back to what motivated me about this. The introduction of my paper is going to say, what motivated this study in freshwater resources. I’m just really curious as to why do we have freshwater offshore. We predict that there might be as much as 300 years of freshwater available to New York City offshore, even if it’s not renewable or recharged today. That’s pretty amazing to me that there’s that much freshwater beneath the ocean. And so, when I’m thinking about the discussion, I’m trying to think about, you know, what’s my original, simple prediction based on theory. How was that refined from the data that I collected? Just like you mentioned. And then how do I weave these things together to sort of say, how much of that original motivation have I addressed. Yes, we’re confident the waters there, we have uncertainty about how much because we have uncertainty in this data quantity. If we change our model by this much, here’s, here’s where we get with uncertainty. And so, I think about a lot about how do I put uncertainty on it. Or another way to think about is like, how can I put confidence on my work? And it’s by pulling all these things together, being honest to the data. An observation is an observation. You have to explain it to your audience, whether it aligns with your original hypothesis or not. It’s usually my experience, the ones that don’t align with the original hypothesis are the ones that require the most creative thought, not to explain them, but to understand them so you can explain them. Why didn’t this match? There’s a reason for it. It can be because I didn’t understand the system, it could be because we took a sample the wrong way. All of these things are valuable. So, I go back and think about what was my motivation, have I used my evidence to support that we’ve made some advancement there, and also motivate future science.

So, when I’m talking to my graduate students, or early career researchers and colleagues, I tell them that any great science project will answer one question and ask six or seven more good questions. And to me that’s success. It may feel like you’re not making a lot of progress, because you keep asking more questions. But that’s actually one of the parts where a lot of us, myself included struggle when it comes to science, because you’re trying to address this one question. And then two new ones pop up and you want to address those. But at some point, you have to say no, I need to stop and just answer this first question and save the other ones for later. And so when do I call a project done? Well, it’s probably never done, but I know when to stop and restart and share the information with the community.

Emory
It’s the beauty of science. Once you know one thing, we need to know three more.

Brandon
Yes, exactly. You’d asked or mentioned sort of like how I deal with like roadblocks at the beginning in things like if I have roadblocks when I’m writing, when I’m thinking about new projects. For me, it’s really, I love my work. I love what I do. I’ve been doing it for 20 plus years, it’s evolved from different aspects of mechanics to freshwater, but breaks are important. And so for me, it’s being outside in nature, whether it be hiking or walking. I like to spend time out in nature. I used to do a lot of running, now I do a lot of hiking and camping. Even simple things as I commute to and from work most ways, I park in the farthest place that I can of a parking lot, so I get some extra time outside. To me, it’s that fresh air and recycling of it, let’s my mind sort of let go of everything. Forget about it. And then a couple hours later, the next morning, pick it up. So, for me it’s just physical and mental detachment from the workstation as much as I love the workstation.

Emory
I greatly appreciate your time and all the insight.

Brandon
Thank you.

Emory
I’m kind of interested in freshwater resources now!

Brandon
Yeah, it’s really cool what we’re doing. So, we think the one in New England is driven by the last age of glaciation. We have glaciers there 10,000 years ago, but we’re also looking at some in New Zealand where there weren’t glaciers 10,000 years ago. So, some of these looks like they are sort of active today and some look like they’re probably relic. Sometimes you find the most curious things when you’re not looking for them and nobody was looking for freshwater and beneath the ocean and that’s what they found.

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Emory
We hope you enjoyed our episode. I’m constantly fascinated with our ability to find natural resources that contribute to the well-being of society. Brandon’s approach to research showed me that exploring past discoveries, then applying new knowledge can lead to developing great science and solving problems.

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