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!

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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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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.

 

 

 

 

Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I’m Louis Noel, and I will be your host today.

We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and decision making in scientific and creative fields.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Rowland Pettit. Rowland is a physician scientist with experience in venture capital. He is a resident physician in clinical pathology at Mass General Brigham, a senior associate at Camford Capital, and the Chief Science officer at InformAI, a Houston-based company developing artificial intelligence enabled healthcare tools.

Previously, Rowland was an MD PhD student at Baylor College of Medical and an MBA student at Rice University. I was interested to learn why he earned multiple graduate degrees, so we started our conversation with that before diving into how science is funded. Enjoy listening!

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Louis Noel
You studied biophysics as an undergraduate, then went on to Baylor College of Medicine, where you earned an MD and a PhD in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence. Why did you choose to pursue an advanced degree in business while already pursuing advanced degrees in science and medicine?

Rowland Pettit
Well, thanks, Louis, and thanks for having me on. I mean, this is this is a really great question. And it was one that I debated at the time. I mean, I definitely do believe in the value of formal education, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I have tremendously benefited from having, you know, incredibly smart people. Take the time to frame things and explain things to me. So, you know, the blanket answer is I was just curious, but the formal answer would be, I really wanted to understand the commercialization process. I had, at that point, done a good amount of medical school, and PhD graduate school. And I had seen a lot of interesting innovation potential, both in science and medicine during training, both certainly in med device coming to market, but I didn’t really understand how people thought about bringing those to market, I was certainly getting to see how people were reacting to that, how they were, you know, performing clinical trials to test it, or think about rolling it out with informed consent and bringing it to patients, or otherwise. But I just wanted to understand that. And so that’s what drove me to pursue the MBA during my MD, PhD.

Louis
I’d like to start with a high-level question. Could you briefly explain how research in science, technology, engineering and math gets funded for both public and private sector projects?

Rowland
Louis, I love this question. This is one area that I do think I’ve had a front row seat in order to see all the areas of funding throughout all stages in the process. And there’s several different ways that we could try to think about this.

So, let’s start with what I would consider more blue sky primary research for the sake of expanding human knowledge of the world. And that oftentimes occurs in academia. There’s plenty of big bio-techs and others that are doing great primary science as well as startups. But the way the majority of the world works, I would still think would be in funding in academia, which oftentimes comes in the forms of grants, then, is commercialization stage funding, which is kind of the bridge where you got a partnership between academia and industry, for some sort of commercialization with the two working together, then there’s return on investment models. So this would be kind of debt based financing, where you might get a grant that has some, you know, requirement to pay back the capital plus a little bit of interest.

And then of course, there’s another area that I’m particular interested in, which is venture capital or private equity, where you’re actually going to commercialize a product fully, and sell a piece of a company in order to realize its value.

So starting in academia, this in theory provides one of the avenues for the greatest degree of research freedom, where, you know, academics could do primary research on fundamental problems without having to be focused on some near term milestone of translation of that science or commercialization of that science. This is just science for the sake of science. And is primarily funded through the government. And the way that works is through grants. These are federal grants delivered through individual agencies. So as part of the Congressional Budget, Congress will pass certain amounts of taxpayer funded dollars that can go to the National Institutes of Health NIH, the National Science Foundation, NSF, or defense specific organizations. And based off of where they put money allocations is where those grants can fund research in those areas.

Usually, grants are reviewed three times a year, and it takes almost a year for them to get executed. So this is a long lead time. It is a good amount of money. You know, if you think about the primary grant, an r1 grant, this could be a multimillion-dollar grant to a PI for three to five years, or a certain research initiative. It’s just a pure investment in primary research. And it funds and actually is what drives the research institutes you see today.

Next would be these commercialization stage fundings. There’s a little bit of a bridge between here where we’re still in the world of grants that you don’t have to pay them back, right. They’re still primary investments in science without some sort of debt or equity-based commitment. So, these are what you might know as the STTR SBIR grants. So, these are like technology transfer grants, etc. And so, this is usually where industry and academia have partnered up, usually industry leads these grants. The idea is, you’re saying, hey, you know, there’s some technology that’s worth pursuing and has clear market potential. And so, you pitch the same organizations, this is still taxpayer funded dollars. It’s still the NIH, NSF or others. And you say, hey, we see this technology that maybe is housed in a university based off of their, you know, IP portfolio, and we want to take it to market. So, we’re going to write a grant similar structure, you still have your six-page, you know, research strategy names, but you also add a six-page kind of market commercialization strategy of saying, here’s how we’re going to bring it to market.

And if you win one of these grants, it could be they have like phase one grants, which is really, you know, smaller grants, 250k type grants for prototyping, or initial, kind of proving out your thesis. And then those can enable phase two grants, which would allow you to fully commercialize the product. And this is an exciting Avenue, because it provides really cool opportunities for small startup companies to be able to pay, you know, big academic research institutions to have access to either their technology or some of their researchers on a part time, you know, grant funded basis to commercialize this together. This is not free money, you know, if there’s definitely reporting necessary, and you have to, meet your milestones and do what you said you could do, but there’s no necessary interest on this payment, you don’t have to pay it back.

And then finally, and this is the one everyone likes to talk about, and it’s one that I’m very interested in, like participating in is the world of venture capital and private equity. Right. So this is a very specific mechanism for funding science. It does come with some constraints, right? So the idea here is, okay, you have some product that you think is not just making an incremental change, this is making a substantial change, that can drive serious market return on the order of not just, you know, principal return, but maybe 10 times the principal return, then you would attract venture capital investors to come to the table and be interested in partnering with you on product development.

So, when you partner with a VC firm, what you’re essentially doing is you would say I’m going to take this technology, I’m going to form a company, right? And you’re going to sell a piece of that company, and all of its future revenue potential, etc. As an equity to this institutional investor. For price. This usually comes with maybe that institutional investor taking a board seat on your company, or kind of getting to participate in other ways. But the main idea is that you have engaged in a partnership that will last until you have some liquidation event A K when some other company buys you and buys out their ownership percentage, or you have an initial public offering, and the public kind of buys out the shares of your company.

Louis
That was fascinating. You’re clearly very knowledgeable about this, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about them. Let’s shift from the business side and the finance powering the innovation to the science behind it. And you’ve also been working in this as a physician scientist, you are involved in cutting edge research, and particularly involved with bioinformatics and artificial intelligence. Could you share an overview of those fields and your current work within them?

Rowland
Yeah, absolutely. This is something I’m very passionate about. This is, I think, the cutting edge in terms of what will meaningfully drive change in the life science and biotech ecosystem for the near future. And anybody that interested in a STEM field, I think, has to absolutely take a serious consideration to getting this skill set.

I’ll take a quick aside here, when I was a medical student and was able to join the Ph. D. Do the MD Ph. D training, it was honestly kind of scary at the time, computational biology, bioinformatics. These were like big bad, you know, math and coding-based skills, which I hadn’t really touched in a long time. So it was kind of scary. I had to put a little bit of elbow grease, learn how to code, learn statistics, you know, learn these bioinformatics pipelines, you know, physics-based approaches to understanding protein folding, or whatever. All of that was fascinating and a little bit of an uphill battle. But very exciting and totally worth the time spent. It has enabled me now to sit at the seat of being able to utilize the top technological advances for anything I want.

These are areas that are so exciting and so meaningful in terms of building, meaningful applications for patient care, that if anybody’s interested in science and medicine, I have to encourage it. The thing I’ll put there is that it is more accessible than ever, I have to stress that if you are interested in these fields, you’ve got your own personal tutors, right? I mean, you can go on Chat GBT or Perplexity and just say teach me to code teach me to implement this biostats package, right? You know, anything you’re interested in doing, you got your own personal tutor to where this is a much more accessible field. And I would encourage anybody, even without a math, or physics-based background, like I had to, to learn about it. And of course, you’ll be responsible and need to understand that, but you can learn it in a much easier way.

Louis
I completely agree. I think one of the superpowers of these technologies is not just the you know, science and outcomes it brings, but it is going to empower and democratize this previously higher institution technology to all sorts of people like you mentioned. So, I think that the person perfectly reasonable and, you know, our duty as scientists and engineers to talk about the positive implications that’s gonna have for all sorts of people,

Rowland
I mean, we feel the exact same way. I do view that this is going to be where a lot of the most exciting innovations are currently happening and will happen in the next 10 years for innovation. The basic idea is computational biosciences, those are the areas you need to focus on. It’s really the compute side of understanding how physics, chemistry, biology, applied to health, human disease, agricultural science, you know, etc. So that’s how I would define those fields.

Louis
You clearly have a lot of ideas about this space in your formal education certainly has powered dot. For example, you recently gave a fascinating TED style talk about organ transplant decision making processes. Could you share your process for contemplating ideas and preparing talking points that resonate with diverse audiences?

Rowland
Yeah, sure. And thanks for looking at my LinkedIn and finding that talk. It was one of the projects that I’ve consulted on pretty extensively and one of the ideas that came out of medical school that I pursued and pitched several times and got that STTR kind of commercialization grants for is for improving informatics within transplantation. It’s a very complicated problem that we’ve been working on for several years.

I was invited to give a TED style talk. it wasn’t TED, TED style talk to the kind of the transplantation main conference this past May. And part of that is that they hired a coach to help me prepare this talk which was unbelievable experience. they hired Coach that does all the TED style coaching as well, to help walk me through what that process might look like. I’d love to share here just for anybody that’s trying to prepare a talk.

The first thing was to think about who my audience was, I’ve looked at the technical details of this problem I’ve talked to, you know, just friends and family and neighbors. And so I’ve kind of over the years gotten a sense of what resonates with different people, what are people interested in? Who are you talking to? What do they understand? I truly believe that there’s not that big of a difference in anyone’s intelligence that you’re really talking to. So it’s really just about getting people up to speed, and trying to help them quickly get through the key points of information. So that they can be at the same understanding and then think through rationally what, what might come next.

Second is, you got to start with a story, if you’re going to try to draw somebody in. You want them to relate. So either a personal story about you in this case, I think what I focused on was just trying to understand what my background is, is why I’m particularly interested in the problem of transplant informatics, why I think that could drive incremental change, and why I’m personally invested in it. These would be the pieces of information that should be intentionally thought about and conveyed very simply.

the other thing would be to use analogies, a really good analogy can totally drive your point home. In the case of transplant informatics, we settled on the analogy of Google Maps. So the idea would be saying, hey, you know, we didn’t really know we needed maps, or Google Maps or whatever you want to use. But as soon as we had it on our iPhones, you know, for, you know, people love using it, right? It didn’t stop us from charting out our own course in the head. But it gave us real time, information of what different courses might look like in terms of time to get their traffic problems along the way. And it would be updated in real time, right? If new information came to the table, it could give you a new route that you might not have thought of before, because that might be the most appropriate route, given the different considerations, right. The other piece of information, that analogy that was helpful was that, you know, you still stay in the driver’s seat, Google Maps isn’t driving you there or picking your route, it just is giving you the most update real time information for your consideration in your decision making to get from A to B, right.

This was the analogy that we thought would resonate really well with the clinicians in the room, because they would be able to think, an information dashboard with high quality, granular decision metrics that integrate all the data available would be helpful to understand which organ goes to which recipient, while still keeps them in the driver’s seat and make an ultimate decisions, and provides insight into how those decisions might be made. A really good analogy can really help bring a diverse audience with different, you know, technical backgrounds to the same place in terms of understanding your problem and why you’re interested in it.

So last thing is you got to speak slow, you know, when you’re giving a formal presentation to an audience, it is never a problem to have a pregnant pause. Speak slowly, and to let people think through what you’re going through and what you’re presenting at the table.

Louis
Thanks for sharing, Rowland. Those are certainly tips. I think we all can implement. I certainly will. I really liked the analogy how that can drive home and the Google Maps when was really good. Like when you said that in the talk, I immediately grasped it. And I think that’s an excellent way of helping to have a diverse audience understand the point you’re talking about? You don’t seem to have much trouble with the words coming out. But is there ever a time when you experienced difficulty putting your ideas into words? And is there a structured or creative process you followed to break through writer’s block?

Rowland
Yeah, I think this problem has been solved, again in 2022, which adds up to I’m not gonna lie. Well, I do view that writer’s block, at least for me, in my experience, it’s not so much that I don’t have ideas. The problem is when I write down an idea, and then immediately start to try to edit it, then I forget the next ideas, right?

And so, what I like to do whenever I have to really do anything, write applications to med school, PhD MBA residency applications, when I am thinking about writing a grant, particularly for grant writing, right? Or when I’m trying to do like an investment memo for a company or if I’m trying to think through, you know, friendly, but polite criticisms of companies, right, if you just try to start writing, you’re not gonna like your writing tone, you’re not gonna like your style, you’re gonna be thinking of ways that you could say things more politely or more friendly or more warmly, right? And you’re gonna get stuck.

And so the one liner is like, and this is kind of cheesy, but this is what I do. I put on dictate either on my phone or on my computer. I put on dictate open a Word document. I just close my eyes and I just tried to answer the question, right, to try to write it all out and just kind of word vomit. I don’t care about grammar. I don’t care about structure. I just do it.

And there is a strange way to I just copy that in the Chat GBT and say structure my thoughts right I just literally say structure these thoughts are or edit for grammar edit minimally edit for clarity and content, you know, whatever, whatever it is charged up to you perplexity those are the two that I kind of like Bard is getting good now too. So just copy it in and edit it and then boom, it comes back with your raw output now in some structured way, and sometimes the way they structure it, I like, and I think, okay, that is good.

You know, previously, I relied on friends, family and parents to do this, where I would send people texts and just bother the heck out of them saying like, Hey, can you edit this email? Can you edit this paragraph? You know, I’ve got this grant, you look at this, whatever. And that was high quality feedback. But it took time, right. I could sit there with BB perplexity chat GBT and just edit for hours and just say, iterate, iterate, iterate. And so, that’s what I think is the key to writer’s block. Close your eyes, hit dictate, word vomit, write, and then say structure my thoughts, and then go from there. And then you’ve got stuff on the page, it’s much easier to write when you’ve got stuff on the page, because when you’re editing, you’re not creating new content.

Louis
I love it. I’m personally a huge fan of dictation. I really think there’s a power of dictation that we haven’t unlocked yet, you know, the idea of talking to yourself. I think is very powerful. I wholeheartedly agree.

Rowland
Yeah, the last thing I’d say there is, I think maintaining a healthy and active network is incredibly important. People in social capital is the best thing that you can maintain and should be protected and also intentionally maintained, and every interaction you have with people is kind of building that.

[music]

We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation with Rowland was learning the details of how finance and communication are vital factors to the advancement of science. I was also excited to plan on trying out Rowland’s many tips for improving my communication and writing abilities.

[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.

 

 

 

 

Joanna McDonald
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I’m Joanna McDonald, a Longitude fellow from Rice University, studying music composition. In this podcast series we are exploring the approaching of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and communication in scientific and creative fields. For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Nina Kraus.

Dr. Kraus is a professor and biologist at Northwestern University (https://brainvolts.northwestern.edu/) and in our interview, we talked about her book, “Of Sound Mind”, which she describes as her love letter to sound. We started our conversation off with Dr. Nina Kraus telling me about noise, defining what it is and how it affects us biologically and emotionally. So, without further ado, enjoy listening!

[music]

Joanna McDonald
I read your book this summer. And as a sound artist, as someone who works with sound all the time thinking about how to shape it, how to tell a story with it, learning about the external and internal processes of how we hear was so interesting. But there was one chapter, particularly chapter 11, where you’re talking about noise and sound inundation and sound pollution. And I wanted to talk to you about noise. So, could you give like a brief summary or description of what noises?

Nina Kraus
Sure, Noise is a huge, under-acknowledged, issue and problem in our lives. Sound is invisible. We often don’t realize that it is such a pervasive and such a huge force. So, for example, as we think about noise, there might be a truck sitting outside your window, and you don’t even know it’s there. And at a certain point, the driver will turn the ignition off. And suddenly you’re aware of the silence. And you often take a breath of relief. Even though you weren’t aware consciously that this noise was going on. It was affecting your body and your biology. And so this is what I think is really important to think about. You asked me to define noise and how I think about it. By now, most people know that very loud sounds can damage our ear. But I’m not talking about that. We know that. I’m assuming that people know that. But I think what people really don’t know is that moderate level sounds really do affect us biologically in all kinds of ways. I think of noise as unwanted sound, often unnecessary sound.

So, if I back up for a minute and think about the biology of sound processing in the brain, and one of the points that I think really comes through or I hope it comes through in my book is how holistic the processing of sound is. When we think about sound processing, it engages multiple biological systems in our body. So our cognitive, what we pay attention to, how we remember, how we think. Sensory. How we process the information from each one of our senses, how we combine the information from our senses, our emotions. Sound is enormously important for engaging us emotionally. Movement. So, our motor system. By definition, sound is movement. It is particles in motion. And we create sound by moving as I’m talking to you now. I have to move the air and create sound. And also, our viscera, our gut. You know, have you ever noticed that your appetite is a little off when you’re in an airplane?

Joanna
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Nina
People thought for a long time, they assumed that the reason for this is that the air is drier. So scientists who like to measure things, and did some very controlled experiments. And what they discovered is, it was the sound that affected our appetite.

Sound has always been an organism’s warning sense. It’s our alarm sense. Sound is our alarm sense. That’s also one of the reasons that sound and memory are so tightly, tightly aligned. Let me stick for a minute to this idea of sound as our alarm sense. Do you sometimes feel stressed? Do you sometimes feel anxious?

Joanna
Sure.

Nina
Well, these are important psychological feelings. And we know that anxiety, and depression are mounting in our world. Again, I’m a biologist so I think of things in terms of biology and biological evidence. I do believe that our noisy world in part is responsible for the feeling of disconnection that we have. You know, in the same way as when that truck turned off as ignition and you relaxed. I think we’ve all experienced sitting in a kitchen and having the refrigerator cycle off or having the air conditioner cycle off. We don’t realize that these sounds are there until they’re gone. Because we don’t realize these things, we need to make a conscious effort to reduce the sounds that we do have control over. You know, do I really need to know, every time my neighbor locks and unlocks their car door? Every time that happens, you know, I have a biological response and it affects my ability to concentrate, and it makes me feel more tense. It’s harder to keep things straight. Because you know, ideas need space, they need quiet, to form and materialize.

Joanna
What you said about ideas needing quiet to formalize is actually a big part of what our podcast series is about. And I’m so glad you mentioned that because I know for me as an artist, as someone who’s creative, I have to have quiet to create or to have a creative flow. So, how important do you think that quiet or silence for contemplation is? Or maybe completing a project or creative project or collaborating, or maybe just like getting work done? Can you talk about that?

Nina
Yeah, with pleasure. I think there’s really something to the idea that quiet and silence can help us but I don’t think of quiet as the absence of sound. You know, because we can be in a backyard or woods, I think I do some of my best thinking outside where I can hear animal scurrying, and the wind blowing, and there are all kinds of sounds. So I think it’s important to think about: what are the sounds that are the most distracting and upsetting?

Joanna
So, it seems like there are sounds that are healthy and sounds like noise that are unhealthy.

Nina
Well, also does the sound have meaning? You know, part of having a sound mind is when we make a lot of sound to meaning connections. Sound to meaning connections are, in fact, tremendously important and many of the sounds that affect us biologically and that get in the way of our ability to sleep and to think our sounds that have very little meaning, like the sound of an engine or a sound that doesn’t have a particular message. It’s often an industrial sound, or a technological sound, or a sound of fluorescent lights, or computers, all of these things have this inherent sound that we don’t realize consciously is there but is affecting us.

But let me get back to your question about really thinking about being creative, and your oral environment. First of all, people really differ. We all have very different brains and our sound minds are really different. I know this is a fact. I measure people’s responses to sound biologically every day in the lab. We’ve done this to 1000s of people. And you know, everyone’s response is different. We all have a different signature. We have made different sound to meaning connections in our lives. So, some people are able to concentrate into work and to be creative in places that another person might find objectively noisy, and that’s just the way it is. But I think that it’s important for us to be introspective and to think about, well, what is it that we need? I know some of the things that I need are like, I need sleep, and sleep is a very, very important part of, I think, the creative process. At least I know for myself, when I sleep well, a lot, or enough, I think better. This may not be true for everyone, but sound and noise can get in the way of a healthy night’s sleep. The fact is that we are primed to make connections with sound, and especially if you are a developing organism, you know, you’re making these connections, you know, children learn to make sound meaning connections very, very quickly.

Also, I know for myself, some of my best ideas come to me, while waking. You know, like, as you kind of go between a dream sleep state, sleeping state and waking up, and one of the things that I really learned during the pandemic, was, you know, I, unless I really need to, I don’t use an alarm clock, because again, who wants to be alarmed awake? Right? And, you know, it turns out that you train your body really well, I wake up more or less the same time every day anyway. But I’ve learned, if I don’t want to deprive myself of that time, as I am just waking up, and there are no other distractions, so it’s quiet for me. And I am in between dreaming and wakefulness, and that’s a time when, when ideas and connections just come to me. So, I’ve learned that and I’ve learned to change my life in a way that enables that.

I started out saying that our hearing system, our hearing brain, and body, you know, this is a huge, interconnected process. Of course, if there is unwanted sound, or meaningless sound, or disruptive sound, alarming sound, that is going to affect not only your appetite, but your ability to think and to remember, and to combine information from your senses, to hear the details and nuances and sound that you may want to as you’re playing back a recording that you have created. You know, all of these things are so very, very important. And I think that the very first step, and I hope that your podcast is a step in this direction, is people need to become aware, they need to realize that this is an issue. You know, I mean, I live in a neighborhood where the lawn machines that go on in the fall in the spring. We can hear when a neighbor’s a block and a half away with their leaf blowers or whatever. It’s not the company’s fault. It’s, you know, it’s us, you know, we pay for these services, and we should not be paying for these services. There are ways of keeping a lawn, however you would like it, in ways that are not so noisy. And people just need to know that it’s an issue, that it’s a problem. And so, becoming aware of this, I think, is something that I hope that your podcast will do.

And I try my very best to pull together information, what we know about other species and how they depend on sound, to do their creative activities. I think most people really want to do the right thing for themselves, for their health, for their ability to think, the ability to create for their environment, but they don’t know. And so you know, having information and biological information about how animals and creatures including plants, and trees, know, vibration, this is this is a very important part of natural life. So being aware of these things is, I think, is a really important first step.

Joanna
Yeah, I love what you’re saying about people wanting to do what’s good for themselves and for their health, but they don’t know how. And I’m kind of curious. My generation, like Gen Z generation, we are an anxious generation, for lots of reasons. I wonder like, how much the sound inundation that we’ve grown up in has also affects that. Could you maybe talk about what might happen or what might be some results physiologically, emotionally, of a generation of like my generation for example, growing up with way more noise than people my age might have grown up like 200 years ago?

Nina
Yeah, I think it’s a real issue. And it’s one where I just kind of feel like, I want to get out in front of the bus that is going to kill your generation with noise, with technology with…Don’t get me wrong, I depend on technology for the work I do, I have huge respect for the medical advances that we have made. But again, it’s a matter of thinking about how we spend our time. So, if I know nothing else, as a biologist, it is that we are what we do. How we spend our time really, really matters. And if we spend all of our time on our electronic devices, for example, we are less connected to each other personally. And there is much more to connection. I mean, you as a composer and a musician, you know that a live performance is a very different experience than a recording.

Joanna
Absolutely.

Nina
So we are depriving ourselves of these live performances with each other. And we also we need to practice. So, your generation isn’t practicing. You’re getting more anxious about even being with people and talking to people, because you don’t have very much practice doing it.

Joanna
That’s so true.

Nina
Talking to each other is tremendously important. And I think that we are depriving ourselves of the development of the biological systems of the whole generation and of the generations moving forward.

Think about this; our technology is stealing our thoughts. If we are in line at the supermarket, or at the airport and so right away, you’re checking your phone, and you know, say, oh, I can get some work done while I’m standing here. And so you’re interacting with this thing. So you have lost what can go on in your mind when you think. You know, what if you just sat there and thought. You know, I mean, these technologies are stealing our thoughts. I could be thinking about this next book I’m working on. Or I could be just looking at the interactions between this and that person next to me. Or I can just be letting, you know, you said before the idea of letting your mind go where it needs to go. So, creating environments for yourself, where you’re letting your mind go. And you’re not letting some technology steal that time and steal your thoughts and steal your privacy in terms of your creative and non-creative ideas. I mean, letting your mind just work.

[music]

Joanna
I hope you enjoyed our conversation about noise. What was helpful for me to learn from our interview was what noise is: noise is sound that is absent from meaning.

I also learned how much noise is connected to the technology we use and how both noise and technology can distract us, stress us, and steal our internal dialogues, all of which are crucial to incubating creative ideas and problem solving.

Dr. Kraus said something I think is important when she mentioned how many aspects of everyday noise we encounter have solutions if enough people first become aware of the noise and hear it, and second, understand its harmful effects. So, I hope this episode can be the start to realizing how much noise is really around you and then what role you might play in reducing unnecessary, unwanted noise in your life, and consequently, in the lives of those around you.

[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.

Suggested articles by Dr. Nina Kraus:

Leaf blowers – A small part of a larger movement Evanston should lead:
https://evanstonroundtable.com/2023/05/17/guest-essay-leaf-blowers-noise-mental-effects/

Keep it Down: The dangers of human created sound:
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/los-angeles-times/20211012/281762747437865

Hearing Too Much in a Noisy World:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hearing-too-much-in-a-noisy-world-11631296563

 

 

 

 

Dominique Dulièpre
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I’m Dominique Dulièpre, Longitude fellow and graduate student at Rice University studying Electrical and Computer Engineering.

We are exploring roles, projects, and approaches of individuals to experimentation and contemplation in scientific and creative fields. For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Peter Denton.

Peter Denton is an associate physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where I interned as an undergraduate. He studies neutrinos; Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles that have mass in the universe. These particles almost never interact with other matter which makes them difficult to detect. Trillions of neutrinos from the sun stream through our body every second, but we can’t feel them.

Join me as I engage in conversation with Peter Denton about the current works toward the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.  Enjoy listening!

[Music]

Peter Denton
After I did my bachelor’s in math and physics at Rice, I did a PhD at Vanderbilt, in physics, focusing on theoretical particle physics. That just means looking at particles, the kind of the smallest things, and then in looking at them in the most extreme environments, to see how, you know, our understanding of them breaks, if it is correct, is it not correct. I studied that at Vanderbilt in Nashville.

So right now, I work at Brookhaven Lab, which is on Long Island, near, near-ish to New York City. There’s a number of programs for undergraduates and graduates, international high school students as well, to come to Brookhaven lab, and I think some of the other labs do this as well. We bring in just a huge number of students each year, at different levels, to engage with scientists, but also with like, the hardware, like the state of the art, you know, whatever machine, to run little, experiments. You give them little projects, and sometimes it is actually contributing to research, but sometimes it’s just getting a feel for what it is, because, a lot of people don’t understand, I find, really kind of the idea of what research is. It sounds like you’ve already gotten this experience a little bit. People kind of understand, like, what a business is, or like, what a doctor or a lawyer or things like that, what do they do, like there’s TV shows about them. So, we all kind of have some vague idea of what these things are, like the research is different from those things. And it’s very hard to understand that without experiencing it. And so even if it’s in kind of a very simple, confined, and you draw a box around a little problem, and you say, Okay, go work on this problem, it still provides the experience and it’s different from doing your math and physics and engineering homework in school, whether in master’s program or in undergrad, or even in high school. Those homework problems, you know, it’s a well-defined problem. There’s a beginning, there’s an end, the answer is probably in the last chapter of your textbook, but in research, there’s no guarantee there is an answer. I just come up with an interesting question. How do I do that? You know, I don’t know. It requires some level of creativity. In fact, I would say that being successful in research is largely creative efforts, very similar to the arts. And then you have to generate a new solution out of, out of the ether, so to speak, see if this works. They obviously have to have the technical skills in terms of math or hardware or whatever, to execute it, and see if it maybe be the homework problem for you, you know, you’ll do it in a day, because the procedure of things are well defined. And so, once you understand there is a solution, and that it is achievable, then that makes things much simpler. But that’s why I think these research programs for students are so essential, even if a person doesn’t become a research scientist, just to have an understanding of what that looks like.

Dominique
I certainly believe that also provides them the benefit of getting first-hand experience. So, they can certainly hit the ground running after graduation. They essentially have the direction, whether research or industry.

Peter
Exactly.

Dominique
Can you tell me a bit about, briefly, your experience at DUNE? And how would you describe your experience at Fermilab?

Peter
The U.S. is building a particle physics experiment. It’s the biggest particle physics experiment in the U.S. called DUNE. There’re also other names like LBNF, which are associated with it, but we can just basically call the whole thing DUNE, like the movie, a novel, but it stands for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, not a desert planet and space. It consists of a number of separate components that are, each of which by themselves would be considered their own experiment in a typical thing.

The primary part is at Fermilab, which is a national lab outside of Chicago, where they have a big accelerator complex. So, they’re used to accelerating particles to very high with low energies, to get a lot of oomph, so they can do a lot of cool stuff. And they have experience with that. And they’re going to have to redesign that in a number of ways. And then they’re also building separately, a very big detector. But typically, the detectors are like in the same place as the accelerators. But for these kinds of experiments, these kinds of neutrino oscillation experiments, you often put the detector like several states away. So, this detector will be in South Dakota, in a former gold mine. So, they dug very deep, they dug out a lot of gold, and then the gold extraction kind of stopped. Of course, they’re looking at that relative to the price of gold and they said, Alright, we’re done with the mine. And basically, as soon as that happened, physicists jumped right in and moved in. And there’ve been experiments, smaller experiments there for years looking for different things because being underground is advantageous for a number of reasons. But now that they’re fully out, they’re prepared to start building huge underground caverns and stick giant detectors in there. The underground caverns are actually mostly done. I think they’re about 90% excavated. I think the target completion date is late January.

There are these two separate parts that compose what is DUNE. Now my role in it is, I would say, somewhat peripheral. I’m a theorist. So, I’m not building things, I am not very good at building things. But I think about things in different ways to put things together in ways that people haven’t thought of before. And so, a lot of that is related to DUNE although some of it is related to other experiments and other physics topics.

Dominique
What exactly are neutrinos?

Peter
The neutrino is neutral, so it’s electrically neutral, which means it doesn’t interact, in the same way that electrons interact. Electrons interact with everything. That’s why we can do chemistry, we can build semiconductors. We can manipulate electrons super well and do all kinds of cool stuff with them. Neutrinos, now so much. The neutrino, even though it’s electrically neutral, doesn’t interact very much. In physics, that’s what we think about is how does stuff interact? And exactly how does that happen? How likely is it? And like, what kind of angles and kind of energy do they come in with and go out with and what’s the probability for this to happen or that to happen, whatever. We calculate all this stuff. Now, there’s two other particles I mentioned, like an electron called the muon, and tau. I like to think of them as like the fat or cousins. Electrons are like the skinny little kid or whatever. And then about 200 times heavier is the Muon. And then another factor of, I think about 20 times heavier is the Tau. But at the fundamental level, they’re all kind of the same thing. But it turns out that because their masses are different, they act a little bit differently. So heavier particles can decay into lighter particles, if that’s allowed by certain rules. So, the muon and the tau, they decay fairly readily. So, they’re not stable. So that’s just hanging around. Electrons, obviously, just hanging around because there’s nothing lighter for them to decay to, they’re pretty light on the scheme of things. So, when a neutrino interacts, it will produce either an electron, a muon or a tau and since they look differently, we can measure them in a detector. We build detectors that are designed to say, oh, electron interacts this way. Muon, because it’s heavier, it does something different. And tau also does something different.

Dominique
So, there are multiple sources from which we can detect them. How much information can our detectors at DUNE actually provide in terms of differentiating whether they are coming from Earth resources or stars supernovaing?

Peter
Yeah, yeah. Good. So yeah, exactly. So, there’s a lot of sources of neutrinos. I mentioned nuclear reactors. That’s how the neutrinos were discovered. They’re also produced in the atmosphere, there’s a kind of background radiation raining down on us. It’s not, it’s not great for us, but we get it all the time. This is just part of life. And they’re also produced in the sun quite abundantly. Occasionally, stars run out of fuel, and they explode and turns out that produces a bucket load of neutrinos. And how do you know, you know, when you detect something, first, you have to know it’s a neutrino and not another particle. Right? That’s, that’s, that’s the first problem. And even once you know that, you say, well, where’s it coming from? So, there’s a bunch of different techniques and when you design your experiment, of course you design with these things in mind.

DUNE’s primary goal is actually detecting human made neutrinos. So, from a controlled source. So, what they do is they, they smash particles together at Fermilab near Chicago. And this produces a bunch of a bunch of particles, which eventually produces neutrinos. So that’s basically anything you produce is going to produce neutrinos. So, this is how the source at Fermilab works. It’s just producing a sort of what we call a beam of neutrinos. It’s kind of broad, but it’s most of the neutrinos go in the forward direction, along some axis, which is hopefully going to be pointed correctly at South Dakota. And the thing about this beam is that well, okay, so on your detector, you have some 3D sort of spatial reconstruction, and you can kind of tell where, because you see all the secondary particles going in one direction. So, they’re all going up or down or left to right or whatever, well, you know where Fermilab is. So, they should be going in a way that corresponds to coming from that direction, they should be going west-ish. And that if all of a sudden, particles are going west-ish, you know that the neutrino that you just detected came from Fermilab. Obviously, you have to get the direction exactly right. In addition, the beam is pulsed. So, it shoots neutrinos for a short period of time, and there’s an empty spot. You also have the timing information. So, you know how far away it is how long it takes for them to get there, you count for that, and it’s it has to come in this small-time window here and not in this big-time window here. There’s some duty factor of, where basically, if they come in this big chunk of time, then you know that it’s not a neutrino from Fermilab. So, you combine this information and then you do some statistical things, and you say, we are 99% sure that this is a neutrino from Fermilab. But there’s other things as well.

So, if it comes from a supernova, like you mentioned, those neutrinos tend to be lower energy than those from DUNE aside from Fermilab. You have a different detection strategy in the first place just for how they look in the detector, but also DUNE will see a lot of neutrinos, hundreds to 1000s in a timespan of like two seconds. Well, normally the rate is like, you know, I don’t know, one a day or something like that from Fermilab. It’s very rare. It’s not very often. So, if you’re seeing, you know, a couple of day, or whatever the rate is, and while you’re checking your watch, is there another one going to come today or not, but then you all of a sudden see in like two seconds, you see, like 500 neutrinos, and they’re not coming from the direction of Fermilab. They come from some random direction. They’re lower energy, but they’re all coming from kind of the same direction. Then you think, that must be a transient burst effect. That doesn’t necessarily immediately mean it’s a supernova, but you can combine this with other information and put it together. And if that happens, there’s actually a number of neutrino detectors around the world that will see it. They’ll send out an alert. You can actually sign up for this online. And I recommend anybody does this. It’s called SNEWS. S, n, e, w, s, the Supernova Early Warning System. And you can just sign in, type in your email address. They never send an alert. The last supernova nearby seen was in 1987, there’s not been one since then. We are waiting patiently. It’s been 35 years, we think we’re due, but you know, that’s not how these things work. But then the point is that we’ll get into neutrino information from a supernova, before we get the information via visible light. And that’s because outside the supernova, there’s a bunch of dust until the neutrinos, because they don’t interact very much, when I said they’re little, they just truck right through it, they just come through it at very near the speed of light. But the visible stuff, it kind of bounces around for a while. So, the optical telescopes won’t see it until potentially hours later. So, there’s this like, really small sliver of time, and you need that neutrino information, and you get that you then use triangulation, you then use pointing, use a variety of different things. And so, we’re pretty sure there’s a supernova, you know, near-ish nearby, in that direction, everyone with a telescope and that means you at home with your telescope, or binoculars or your eyeballs should go look in the direction that they say, and see if you see, suddenly a new star appear in the sky. Because that’s, that’s possible. And that has happened before, but now we have the capability to know in advance. That’s never happened before. That would be just an amazing thing. And DUNE will play a big part of that for sure.

Dominique
I like to think of it as you snooze, you lose – the ability to observe.

Peter
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Dominique
Which was the precursor to a black hole in a white dwarf. So, it’s pretty important.

Peter
Yeah, exactly. So, supernova can form a black hole, sometimes, we don’t really know very well how often that happens. It can form a neutron star, which is like a really compact bunch of neutrons and stuff, basically, that’s just super energetic, and doing a bunch of crazy stuff. And seeing these things form, in some sense, would be amazing. I mean, there’s so much, so much to know, and we’d love to be able to get at, but you can never do these kinds of things at the earth. So, we have to use astrophysical environments to do this. And neutrinos play a huge role, provided that you can detect them, and they’re a pain to detect for we’re building bigger and more sophisticated detectors all the time.

Dominique
What are some upcoming milestones or experiments that you’re most looking forward to?

Peter
Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s a couple of things coming up. There’s currently experiments like DUNE. So, DUNE is expected to turn on in the next, let’s say, five-ish years. But there’s experiments that are doing a similar thing right now. One at Fermilab, it’s called NOvA and there’s another one in Japan called T2K. And they’re doing the same thing, but with less precise detectors and less powerful beams. And so, they’re putting out results. They haven’t put out results in a couple of years. So ,I think they’re hopefully due, so I’m crossing my fingers, they’re gonna put up something soon. And they’re measuring stuff, you know, not nearly as well as DUNE will, but we’re still getting information. And they provide indications for what kinds of things to expect at DUNE. Oh, maybe, maybe the numbers are a little bit, you know, maybe the parameters are a little bit more this way so, you know, we should have that in mind. DUNE, measuring the things we want to measure. DUNE will be a little bit easier or a little bit harder. So, I’m hoping that with the next data release from these current, what are called long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, that they will start to migrate towards each other. Do they migrate more towards the one or the other one, you know, how does it work? You know, I don’t know. I mean, this is its research, right? We don’t know how it goes, could go in either way. And I think that’s something that I’m anticipating for some time, and I’m very much hoping that they will come out with something soon.

Dominique
What advice would you give to young scientists aspiring to pursue a career in physics?

Peter
Obviously, you’ve got to do well in your classes. You’ve got to learn differential equations, linear algebra, and so on. Maybe more math, depending on what areas you’re interested in. You have to learn programming. There’s very few physicists who have successful careers without pretty good programming abilities. I am not saying you have to be like a computer scientist and writing your own compilers or whatever. But you know, high performance computing, using supercomputers. This is a standard tool of physics today. You’ve got to learn that stuff. And also getting involved in research by doing some research things as well, there’s a number of opportunities there.

I would say that some of the biggest problems that young scientists have, where things start to go awry, is in and I would say in two kinds of main areas. One is, in having an awareness of what a career in research looks like, it doesn’t look like a career in business or in, you know, other professional careers like law or medicine or whatever. It’s a very different kind of career trajectory. And it’s a little bit different in every field. But you know, just very briefly kind of a standard career trajectory, as you get a bachelors, of course, you go to graduate school, you get a master’s and a PhD that may be together or separate, then you do postdocs. This typically involves moving, quite possibly moving around the world. I’m American, but I did my postdoc in Denmark, because that’s where I got a postdoc. You do one, two, three, some number of those, these are each a couple of years. And then you get a hopefully a, you know, permanent tenure track job. So, there’s some kind of trajectory, there’s some kind of steps that you have to accomplish, and also looks a little bit differently in different countries, in Europe, in different places, it follows a different trajectory. That’s one thing.

The other thing is what are often called like soft skills. Networking, giving talks, writing. You think, Oh, I’m getting into physics, because it doesn’t involve people and sometimes that’s very nice. But that’s, of course not true. In order to be successful, you have to network, you’re just the same as your friends going into finance, or engineering or whatever, you got to go out and meet people and make a good impression. And make sure they remember you. You also have to give talks, this is a big part of the job, you stand in front of a room of 30 people or 100 people or 300 people and tell them about your research. And they’re gonna ask tricky questions, and you got to be able to answer it on the spot. And people who do this, well leave a good impression on the audience. And maybe one of them when it comes time to hire somebody decides to hire you. That definitely happens. Also writing and we write a lot people who can write good papers that are easy to read, it makes a big difference. And people remember those people much better than you know if you struggle with it a little bit. So, you know, I spent time in literature classes in school because I liked it. But I also got a lot of practice writing, and it’s definitely paid off a lot for me. I don’t think you can get by just taking only math and physics and be fine. It is necessary, I would say to have a successful career in particle physics, to be able to write well to stand up and speak in front of people and to network well.

[music]

Dominique
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was how much information neutrinos provide about our universe. Supernovae Early Warning System, SNEWS for short, can inform us on the life and health of the core of our sun before its light makes its way to us. The SNEWS can even inform us of supernovae. In the transition to black holes or neutron star. It can even lead to the examining of the essence of dark matter and dark energy for scientists.

[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.

 

 

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

Hi, I am Louis Noel, a recent graduate from Rice University and Longitude fellow.

Our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope connected us with scientists, engineers, and program managers. Along the way we discovered there are public outreach positions at NASA. We were curious about these roles and what their day-to-day activities entailed, like how they managed communicating complex engineering missions to lay audiences.

I had an opportunity to speak with Peter Sooy, Public Outreach Director at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. It was fascinating to hear about the NASA public events around the world and discovering that Peter was the outreach lead for both the Webb Telescope and the Roman Telescope that is next in line. His interesting insights and engaging stories made this episode a must to include into the JWST series as a Sound Bytes Extra.

We started our conversation with Peter telling me what a typical day looks like for him in his role.

Enjoy listening!

[music]

Peter Sooy
My job is to lead the public outreach for two missions at Goddard. So, it’s the James Webb Space Telescope and the Roman space telescope. On a typical day, I’m finding new events for these telescopes to participate in, to connect with the wider public. So, there’s a lot of planning that goes into that, emailing, planning out events leading up to them and then actually running the event. I was just in Baltimore on Friday, running an event at the library there to celebrate the Webb first anniversary of science. First anniversary was July 12th. I had the event on July 14. I planned it for a few months. We took over this whole three storey library, had five different activities, two talks. The library was great. We talked all about Webb to folks in inner city, downtown Baltimore. It was great.

Louis
That’s fascinating. Sounds like a really rewarding, sort of a lot of work, but ultimately pays off in these sorts of fun events.

Peter
There’s just like a lot of office jobs. I do a lot of emails, a lot of calls, a lot of Zooms, but it is cool to see an event go from start to finish in two months and see the work that goes into it, and then actually have the product of the event at the end. So, it is rewarding in that way. You’re right.

Louis
Great. Well, I’d like you to walk us through your journey to your current position as public outreach lead. What key experiences played a significant role in guiding you to the role?

Peter
So, I’ll start, I’ll go all the way back. I went to the University of Maryland College Park, got a degree in journalism, and I was interested in sports. So, I was like, oh, I’ll do sports writing. My degree is in print journalism, so it tells you how old I am, I guess. And then when I graduated, I went into the Navy, where the Navy needed nuclear submarine officers. I did that for about 18 months. It was not a tremendous fit, but I was able to try my hand at engineering. It didn’t go so well. I didn’t love it. I got out of the Navy. And I got into engineering, again, working in natural gas drilling. I worked in rural Pennsylvania, the mountains of Pennsylvania, drilling for natural gas, again, engineering. I did better this time, but again, wasn’t best fit for me. Then I took a job at NASA Goddard in an administrative role. And then kind of parlayed that into working on the communication side on the outreach side, connecting with the public about NASA, what NASA was up to at Goddard in Maryland. And fast forward, now I work for these two flagship NASA astrophysics missions. It’s kind of the best crossover, where I have a background in writing, about talking about things with the general public. And then I tried my hand, like I said, in engineering, so it’s kind of the best of both worlds where I talk about engineering, but don’t have to actually roll my sleeves up and do the engineering. So, it’s a nice compromise of what I enjoy and what I enjoy talking about. And I’ve really enjoyed sharing the successes and accomplishments of Webb and more recently Roman, with the public.

Louis
Yeah, really looking forward to the Roman Space Telescope. What are the main goals of NASA’s public outreach programs? And how do they align with the broader mission of NASA?

Peter
This is a great question. Simply put, the goal of NASA public outreach is to share and inform the public, share with the public about what NASA is doing. That’s the simplest way. And the broader mission of NASA is, you know, different depending on who you ask, but to explore, to learn, to understand our place in the universe. In some way of saying that, so it kind of fit a little bit hand in glove where a lot of times, the scientists and engineers at NASA are doing this mission of exploring, of developing of getting us into space and outreach is part of the whole communications goal of sharing with the public in a clear and concise manner. What they’re doing is really out of this world, cheesy to say, but out of this world engineering and science, how to explain it and communicate it as broadly as possible to the eighth grade reading level.

Louis
Yeah, that was a great answer to a very broad question. What are other types of communications or outreach programs at NASA? How are they similar and different to your role?

Peter
There’s a whole office of like, general communication, news stories, you put out help run, like our social media presence, like the NASA Goddard, or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram pages, which is a ton of work. There are millions of followers there. So those are some of the communications programs at Goddard. And then a lot of missions have outreach as well. So, it’s a sliding scale, like if a mission is kind of just getting off the ground and just getting started, they really don’t have a robust outreach presence, because they’re just trying to get the mission started.

Step one is to have the plan for what you’re going to build, what it’s going to study how it’s going to get into space. And then once that’s kind of established, and there’s a good schedule, and everything’s moving along, then you can say, oh, we want the public to learn about this, let’s get a outreach team organized. A lot of times, there’s not a dedicated person whose full-time job is to work on outreach for this mission. Like I said, I work pretty much half on Roman half on Webb. So, these two really large missions have half of me. A lot of times, there’s like an average person that does like handle all Heliophysics, like everything about the sun, everything about the moon. So that’s a lot of different missions under their portfolio, and they come up with outreach plans to support those missions as best they can.

Louis
I see, yeah, that’s something I wouldn’t have expected.

Peter
It’s nice to meet people and talk to them, and them be friendly and open and receptive to what NASA is up to. So, it’s kind of like a morale booster for me. And it lets me know that this it’s being well received.

Louis
Yeah. And I think it’s especially important for children or young adults, because these are the people that are going to be inspired to work on, hopefully this next generation of science. When you’re designing these outreach programs, do you generally try to skew any of the content or language towards a younger audience? Or do you? Is it for the adult population?

Peter
If I have a specific event, as I’m planning the presence, I will keep in mind the audience. So I’m trying to think off the top of my head, just saying in general, I’ve been on Webb for five years now. And one of the initiatives that I’ve kind of bulked up, if you will, is Webb going to dark sky events at national parks. National parks around the country are in different locations, which is what we try to do. It’s doesn’t cost money to go for us. It’s, you know, another government entity, so it’s welcoming to us, and it gets a lot of people. So that’s where we’ll go and when I go to these events, I’m typically aiming towards elementary schoolers, so young kids, and then their family that’s there will also learn from it. And a lot of the times that’s what I aim the talking points at. We have really extensive talking points for all our missions that kind of cover every topic that could come up. So, in a media interview with a large network, you could have a complicated question and some of the talking points will cover that and all the way down to just top level. If you have 20 seconds to talk to an eight-year-old, what are you going to hit on? We try to share that information so people can be ready when they do their outreach, but the style of how you interact with somebody is kind of different for everybody. Like I said, I have a journalism background. So, I kind of just try to do like the lead of a story like who, what, when, where, why is what I try to tell people. But I schedule engineers and scientists to work the outreach as well. I always tell them like talk what you know. So, if you’re building this telescope, talk to a kid about what you’re working on? How do you build something for space? Make it something you’re passionate about.

Louis
Interesting. Sounds like you have engineers and scientists that help staff these. Could you tell me a little bit about maybe some of the materials that you bring to some of these programs?

Peter
We have kind of like the go to popular materials that we create. So it’s like, stickers like decals, what it’s called, like a sticker, a bookmark, a poster, and a lithograph. And most of these, most of these have information on the back of them. It’s like an eye-catching sticker. But on the back of it, it says, you know, Webb is a joint mission with 14 countries and 29 states. It teaches you something and then it gives you something you want to take home. Like if you just give someone an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper, they might not want to keep it or show it off or tell their buddy about it. And each one of these products has different amounts of information. The litho is the one that’s like the deeper dive where it’s a sheet of paper with four paragraphs about the mission. So, if someone’s really interested, they can read and then at the bottom, it has our website, or social media just so they can keep diving deeper and deeper. So those are kind of like the usual suspects of materials to create for missions to share what they’re up to, why they matter, what their goals are. But a lot of times, we can get creative as well once we have kind of the basics handled.

Some of the cool things we’ve done with Webb, because Webb has been around and fully established, like we came up with paper models that we can share with people so they could print at home to make their own Webb. A lot of times Webb, it’s so big, it had to fold it into its rocket and then in space it deployed. So, the analogy, it’s like origami, so we worked with the origami master to make the primary mirror so you can fold it to make this primary mirror that looks pretty cool. You have to have a certain amount [talent]… I tried to make it. It doesn’t look as good as the origami masters. But it’s like if someone out there is really into origami, it’s kind of like the cool crossing of art and engineering and technology. We try to share our material to bring in new audiences, bringing new people that might not have normally or off the bat be interested in it. But then they see that connection. They’re like, oh, wow, I want to learn more about this.

Louis
Definitely. That sounds really effective. And like a perfect example of a way that an outreach initiative is successful. Can you discuss any upcoming projects or missions that you’re particularly excited to share with the public? Maybe, you know, JWST is at the one year, but Nancy Grace has yet to launch.

Peter
Yeah, so the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is sure, that’s 100%. That’s kind of the next big thing. So Webb is doing incredible work. I’m excited to introduce people to Roman. Most people I meet at events will just have not heard of Roman yet, which is fine. It’s hard. There’s like I said, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. At NASA. It’s hard to keep up with all the missions. But yeah, Roman is being built currently at Goddard. And it’s going to launch by May 2027. And it’s going to have a lot of similarities to Webb, but a lot of differences that will complement each other to further astrophysics and our understanding of the universe. So, it’ll be at the same orbit as Webb. So, it’s going to be a million miles away orbiting the Sun at L2 as the orbit is called. A similar wavelength. It’ll be near infrared, where Webb is near and mid infrared. So similar wavelength, same orbit. But where Webb and Hubble look at a very narrow field of view look very deep, Roman is going to have a field of view that’s between 100 to 200 times wider than Hubble and Webb. So, it’s gonna look very wide, and at the same resolution as Hubble, so it will be able to, to map the universe like we never had before, in a way that would take, you know, Hubble and Webb 1000s of years to take all those images and stick stitch them together. So, it’s a, you know, fisheye lens on the universe to learn more about dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets. Roman will help us see more rogue Earth’s than we ever would have been able to if we use ground-based observatories. Those are exoplanets that are more close to Earth size, so there might be chances to find some signs of life there.

Louis
That’s so cool. What advice would you give to someone interested in a career in science and engineering communications? Maybe particularly in space and astronomy?

Peter
Sure, I get this question a ton because it is rather an interesting job. I would say if they’re younger, to try anyway they can to get their foot in the door. So, it’d be an internship or talking to people in that career just to learn as much knowledge as they can, and then try to do it. So, the practical thing I always tell people is that if you’re looking for jobs, try and major in something that will help you get there. So, science, technology, but if you want to work in communications, journalism, communications, public relations, are all good ideas, and then taking internships throughout college. And then once you get out, you really have to look. This little tidbit I tell people is that a lot of the workforce at the federal government are contractors, so it’s not civil servants. It’s about like 30% 25% are civil servants, the rest are contractors. So, you have to kind of dig and find where the communications contracts are and apply and get your foot in the door and apply, apply, apply. It’s not a straight path. It’s not an easy quest. You just have to keep plugging away.

Louis
That’s great advice. What’s something surprising and unexpected that you’ve experienced as a public outreach lead?

Peter
I’ve definitely been surprised. The interest in space kind of goes beyond languages. So, like, I’ve had the chance to work events where it’s an international audience of kids and they don’t speak English, but they still enjoy. And they connect with the content, so much so that it is very surprising.

Like I connected with a classroom outside Venice, Italy. These kids were in first grade, so they’re still learning. They don’t really know much English. They all drew pictures about what Webb saw and they were learning in their school about Webb. And I just connected with the teacher. And as luck would have it, one of our scientists is Italian. He talked to them and just seeing the kids light up and hearing like, oh, this guy is like us who speaks Italian, he works on this incredible mission. It kind of like you could see the connections in their eyes like, oh, wow, this is something I could do. It’s not NASA is, you know, unattainable thing that no Italian has ever worked at. It’s like, no, I could do this if I really want to do it. So that was a recent one that just warmed my heart to see these kids just they sat there and they were really locked in. And they loved hearing about Webb in Italian. So that was a good one.

And a funny one that I’ll end on is you never know who you’ll meet at these conferences, like I assume, and it’s a good assumption that you’ll run into, like scientists, engineers at these science and engineering conferences. But one of my first events for Webb, I was at a Space Research Conference in Pasadena, California so just outside LA. And this guy walks up. I told my coworker, oh, that looks like Billy Zane, the guy from Titanic. And he walked up, and his dad said Billy Zane and I was like, oh, it is Billy Zane. I was just like, hey, like, what are you doing here?  He owns some small company and he’s interested in tech, and he lives in Pasadena. So, he’s like, oh, I saw it was here so I bought a badge and I came. Tell me about your mission. And he was just really interested in space stuff. He took us to lunch. We hung out with him for an afternoon. Yeah, it was just surprising connection that came out of nowhere.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

Also, we are getting ready to release a library exhibit to accompany this series. Any campus library can have access to our slides for display. Check out our website Longitude.site for more details soon.

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.

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of scientists for helping us understand our universe better.

I am Zehra, a student at Tilburg University pursing a degree in neuroscience.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Jeyhan Kartaltepe from Rochester Institute of Technology, where she is an associate professor of Physics and Astronomy.

Jeyhan studies the distant universe, and she also conducts research on how galaxies first form and evolve over time using telescopes on the ground and in space. Furthermore, she is a leading member in several large collaborative multiwavelength surveys, including COSMOS.

Her COSMOS-Webb project team received one of the first grants to study the initial images from the James Webb Telescope, so I wanted to speak with her about her work and the unexpected findings she has encountered.

We started our conversation with her pathway to astronomy. Enjoy listening!

(music)

Jeyhan Kartaltepe
I always liked astronomy, even when I was a little kid, because I partly liked the weird stuff. I always liked learning about space and I would ask my dad, you know, random questions about planets and other things. So, I think it was always fun for me and interesting and so far, removed from what we do and see, on a day to day basis. It seemed for me a natural direction to go in, to read and learn more about. So, it seemed natural to start to study in school. And then of course in school, you see the kinds of jobs that people around you do. They’re teaching classes and they are professors. And it seemed like that would be a fun job to do.

My work is all observational. So, it’s all done using data using telescopes. I’ve been involved with projects involving Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope and other telescopes. And so, JWST is kind of a natural extension. It’s something that the whole community has looked forward to for many, many years, and through its development and all the delays and just kind of the exciting next step in terms of having capabilities that we haven’t had before. And so being able to study things we haven’t been able to study before.

Zehra
I find it really fascinating to see what we can actually find out about the galaxy and about space, and that there’s actually just more than beyond our little world.

Jeyhan
Yeah. And it’s hard to believe we can learn about things that are so far away, or about the beginning of the universe. It sounds like science fiction, right? So, it’s one of the fun things to talk about, when teaching a class, like how do we actually learn about these things that are so far away that we can’t actually touch but what can we learn from their light?

Zehra
Could you maybe explain in a few sentences, the mechanism that makes up the telescope like the JWST?

Jeyhan
The most important part of a telescope is the mirror. So JWST has a large, about 6.5 meter in diameter mirror. It’s segmented. So, it was put together in pieces to make it easier to assemble, fold up and put on a spacecraft to launch so it’s a bit unusual that way. It also has a secondary mirror. So, there’s a big mirror, and then there’s a smaller mirror that, you know, the light reflects off the big mirror and then on the smaller mirror and then gets sent down to the cameras.

The other most important piece of a telescope is the cameras. You have to collect that light, somehow. The different cameras have different functions. They can collect data at different parts of the spectrum. JWST is optimized for the infrared part of the spectrum, but the infrared is a pretty wide range. And so, there’s instruments that are suited for the near infrared, so closer to the visible part of the spectrum that we see. And there’s others that are designed to work in the mid-infrared. And then there’s some that take images that just take pictures. And there’s others that take spectra.

Zehra
Yeah, so I also wanted to know a bit more how the whole infrared observing works.

Jeyhan
There’s a lot of reasons why the infrared is really important for astronomy, especially for what I do, it’s really important because our universe is expanding. So that means everything’s moving away from everything else. So, it has a motion. And anytime something moves, the light that it emits, is actually moved to a different part of the spectrum. So, for galaxies in the very distant universe, the light that they would emit in the visible part of the spectrum that we would see is actually moved all the way to the infrared. So, we need the infrared to be able to see their sort of normal, the invisible light that we see.

There’s also a lot of processes that emit in the infrared. One of the biggest is dust. Dust seems like it wouldn’t be important but it’s very important in space. Dust is particles in space that eventually form planets. And so, things like wanting to study planets or planet formation around stars, you need to be able to see that in the infrared dust in galaxies, regions that are forming new stars. You can see that in the infrared.

Zehra
That’s really interesting to hear about all of this. I wanted to ask also just generally, how this whole concept started with your project, and how long would you say it took to develop it?

Jeyhan
I guess there’s a long answer and a short answer. So, this project that we’re leading, it’s called COSMOS-Webb, it’s observing a portion of the sky, that’s known as the cosmos field. And it’s something that I’ve worked on this particular field of the sky for almost all of my career. I started in graduate school when the first Hubble data of this area was taken. And so, over the years, you know, people have taken more and more data, because ideally, you’d like to have data across the entire spectrum to study all kinds of different objects and all kinds of different physical processes. When there was a call for proposals for JWST this was kind of a natural extension, like, Hey, we should really have the infrared data here too, because that would be fabulous but it took a while to work on it. Because of COVID, everything got delayed, which in a way sort of helped because it gave us more time to work on the proposals, to kind of hash out what we wanted to do. We had meetings like this one on Zoom every week, where we kind of talked about different ideas and different strategies, and what could we do if we did it this way or that way. And so, it really did take a long time to flesh out what we wanted to do. I think we were, in a way, kind of lucky to have that extra time to put it all together.

Zehra
It sounds such a complex project, what does your work environment look like? Like with who do you work with? Other astronomers, or maybe engineers?

Jeyhan
We have collaborators that are all over the world. So, we’ve been using zoom for many years, before it even became popular. A lot of people based in Europe, a lot of people based in the US, quite a few in Japan. Those are kind of the main places, and that includes people like me, or faculty that includes students. There’s a lot of graduate students that are involved, that includes postdocs. So, it’s a pretty broad range of people but for the most part, all scientists.

Zehra
What would you say is a typical day at your work? Like, how would you describe it?

Jeyhan
I guess it depends. Generally, my time is kind of split between teaching, which is kind of 20 – 30% of my time, something like that. Doing other universities support work, being on committees, evaluating student applications, you know, those kinds of things. And then about half of my time is devoted to research, but my research is really split into my own research where we’re working on things and working with my students. And so, I have a group of students and postdocs here that all have their own projects. And so, a good chunk of my time is spent working with them and meeting with them and talking through things. And ideally, when I have some focus time, and it’s spent writing, or programming. Those are kind of the two sides of things, you know, analyzing the data, which involves us a lot of coding and making plots and things like that. And then writing. Either writing the papers or writing proposals to obtain other data or obtain funding, things like that. So, you know, 90% of my day is in front of the computer.

Zehra
Do you also have like a student team that’s like helping out with the project?

Jeyhan
Yeah, I have several students here working with me on different projects. A couple of them are working on the COSMOS data and I have a couple of postdocs as well that are working on it.

Zehra
It’s really nice. I think it’s so important as a student to gain some research experience, which is quite hard sometimes. Especially working on such a big project and I think it’s probably very valuable in general.

Jeyhan
And it’s, it’s perfect timing for students right now. Because this is all new and exciting. So, I think it’s potentially grabbing the interest of students that might do something else, but then they see this cool thing and like, Oh, I could work on that. So hopefully fun for them.

Zehra
Could you also speak about so when you look at the universe through like a space telescope, how is it different than, I don’t know, like the telescopes on Earth? How is it more advanced? Or what would you say are the main differences or the similarities maybe also?

Jeyhan
The big difference of going to space versus being on the ground is to not have the atmosphere in the way. So, Earth’s atmosphere causes a lot of problems for observing. I mean, we need it so it’s great that we have it, but you know, if it’s cloudy, it’s cloudy. You can’t do anything about that the light is blocked. The atmosphere is very turbulent, right. There’s always stuff moving around. So that impacts how well you can see things because it kind of bounces light, you know, through the atmosphere on its way to the detector. So, by going to space, you can have much more detailed images and much more sensitive images. So, you can look at things that are much fainter, that you couldn’t see otherwise. And it’s especially true in the infrared because our atmosphere emits a lot in the infrared. And so, it, kind of, can block out certain parts of the spectrum, just because it’s already really bright there. So, you can’t see things that are faint behind it. So that’s really the biggest thing. Of course, the negative is that it’s expensive to put anything in space. And it’s difficult. So, you know, putting a big telescope is just technologically challenging. To get everything, kind of like JWST had to fold up, you know, to fit in the spacecraft, whereas on the ground, you can build bigger things, and it’s a little bit easier.

The other thing about going to space is temperature. Things can be kept really, really cold, which is again, important for the infrared. Things that are warm, emit light in the infrared, right, that’s how like infrared goggles and stuff work by looking at heat. So, you need to be away from Earth’s heat source to be able to do much in the infrared.

Zehra
Could you also talk about the COSMOS-Webb survey and what your whole role there is or your position?

Jeyhan
I’m one of the PI’s. I have a collaborator, Caitlin Casey, who’s at UT Austin, who’s the other PI, so we’re leading the survey together and the goal of this survey is to cover a relatively large area of the sky.

So, there’s kind of two different ways people go about surveys of galaxies. You can either look at one part of the sky, just take like one image, but sit there for a really long time so that you can collect more and more light, like a really long exposure and look at really faint things. So, then you don’t cover a large area, that’s a small area, but you look really faint.

The other strategy is to not expose for as long, so not to look as faint, but then to kind of map out a larger area. So instead, you’re covering many more galaxies, but more of the brighter ones and less of the fainter ones. In reality, people do both. The COSMOS-Webb survey is sort of that wide area. So, it’s wider than any of the surveys that are going to be done. Which means the huge benefit of that is statistics in some way. So, we’re going to observe, you know, hundreds of 1000s of galaxies, rather than, you know, 10,000, or something like that, like other surveys might have. And that also allows us to study sort of large-scale effects, large scale environments. So, if it matters, you know, whether something is really isolated, or whether something lives in a really dense environment, it’s like comparing things that happen in cities versus things that happened out in the suburbs, or in the rural area, you need kind of like a wide map really to be able to, to cover everything to see how things change.

Zehra
So how do you determine, like, the specific focus with the area, like, which wide range of the galaxies to pick?

Jeyhan
The area we picked is an area of the sky that people have studied for a long time. So, we already had data from other telescopes. So, you already have information in other parts of the spectrum. That’s really useful. So, you don’t have to go back and try to collect that after the fact. We want to study areas that are relatively free of like nearby stars, and things that are gonna get in the way. There’s gonna be stars everywhere but there’s certain parts of the sky where all you see your stars and certain parts that are more empty. And so, you have to choose an area that’s a bit more empty. It’s also in a part of the sky that we can observe from the ground from both hemispheres. You know, there are some parts of the sky you only see from the north or only from the south, this field is kind of on the equator. So, you can see it from anywhere, which is good for using other telescopes.

Zehra
Could you talk about if you already have some findings, such as achieved with the COSMOS-Webb survey, or how you think this could improve our current knowledge about the previously done studies, maybe?

Jeyhan
So, the biggest thing that we are trying to do is study the very, very early universe. So, the most distant galaxies. We just got a big chunk of data at the end of April that we’re kind of analyzing right now. But we already have sort of candidate objects that are very distant. And so, we want to study not only how many of them there are and what their properties are, but how they’re spatially distributed. If they’re kind of grouped together, or if they’re more kind of spread out. And so that’s, I think, something unique we’ll be able to do, we’ll be able to have so many of them. The other thing, that’s a huge benefit there is that if anything is really rare, you know, like, it’s extremely bright. And there might only be, you know, one and a certain patch of the sky, we’re more likely to find those rare things, because we’re covering a large area.

Zehra
And also because it’s different from the previously done studies and like different telescopes?

Jeyhan
Right, exactly. So, we can see things that are much fainter, and therefore, much further away. We can also see things in more detail. So, you know, from Hubble, sort of the extreme things that were found that are very distant, they’re just tiny little smudges, you know, like, you can’t see any detail there. You just like, oh, there’s something there. It’s like a tiny dot. But now we can see structure. And that tells us more information about what’s happening in the galaxies.

Zehra
Like generally, with your whole work and research, have you encountered something that was really surprising or maybe unexpected?

Jeyhan
I guess there’s a few things that have been surprising. One is that so far, people have been finding more galaxies at these great distances than was expected. Like we all made predictions. Because we hadn’t seen them yet. And there’s theoretical predictions for what there might be. And so far, it seems like we’re seeing more things than people predicted, which is kind of fun, because that gives us more to work with. And it’s it was kind of unexpected. And now people are trying to figure out why that is. And so that kind of goes back to the theorists to figure out, you know, what is different about the universe, that there’s more things. So that’s been one surprise.

I guess another surprise, you know, from other surveys I’ve been working with is that there’s a lot of active black holes in these galaxies, like more and more of them than we might have. And maybe we should have known that, I don’t know. But to find so many of them, it’s been kind of exciting. So, it’s been an interesting thing that I think we weren’t really expecting to spend so much time on but it’s been popping up.

Zehra
What would you say is your expectation of the coming years when it comes to this field?

Jeyhan
We’re gonna learn so much. It’s still been less than a year since we started getting data. And there’s already been so much work, and so many papers, and so many discoveries. And it’s like, we only just scratching the surface. So, it’s going to be really exciting to see what comes out.

Zehra
Since you started working for JWST, what would you say was the most exciting thing that you were looking forward to in the beginning and what would you say is it now? Or how did that change their expectation, or your motivation also?

Jeyhan
I think we all kind of had an idea of what to expect based on simulations and what things would look like, but seeing the reality was just kind of mind blowing. Right? And the fact that everything worked. You know, just whenever you have such a big project, so many moving parts, so many things could go wrong, I think, of course, we all hoped nothing catastrophic would go wrong, but little things, little things can go wrong, like, oh, this particular thing doesn’t work, or oh, this instrument is not as sensitive as we thought it would be. But everything was so smooth and went so well. And that just almost never happened. So that was a huge shock.

Zehra
That was a lot of hard work and also good luck, I guess.

Jeyhan
Yeah. And, and because of the delays, the delays helped. Because you test something, it doesn’t work, you’re like, okay, we’re not gonna launch. Well, it doesn’t work, we need to keep testing and fix all the things. So that’s a good thing about the process, even though it made it take longer.

Zehra
So basically, there was like an extra six months to improve on the things and make it work better than I guess.

Jeyhan
And then of course, seeing the data was pretty amazing. Especially the spectra I think most people see images in pictures, and that I think people can relate to that. Spectra don’t mean anything to most people in the public. But, you know, for the scientists looking at spectra, that’s where you’re seeing, like the real physical information, and you can actually see your signatures of the different elements that you’re observing. And, and that’s really cool. And so, like when they did that big press event last summer, and they showed all the different things, they showed a spectrum of a galaxy, it was really far away. So, it’s just a bunch of lines. It probably looked really boring but that was the thing that kind of made me go, oh my God, that looks so cool. Because it’s still crazy to me that we can see that kind of detail at these at these crazy distances.

I think the biggest thing, to me is just the amount of awe and wonder about the universe that a telescope like this conveys. And I think that’s important for all of humanity, right? Even if you don’t know all the details about the science or how things work, just to see like the incredible wonders that are in our universe that we can actually learn about is like one of the biggest achievements of humanity, I think.

(music)

Zehra
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site. We would love to hear from you.

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

 

 

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

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of people from various organizations that brought it to fruition. JWST or Webb, is a space observatory that is a million miles from earth, giving us a new look at the universe.

I am Louis Noel, a recent graduate of the master of engineering management and leadership program from Rice University.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Alison Nordt, director of space science and instrumentation at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.

I was interested in the new innovations and the partnerships that made the Webb telescope a success.

Enjoy listening!

[music]

Alison Nordt
There are four instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope. And since it’s an international project, some of those instruments are actually from the international partners. There are two from the European Space Agency and one from the Canadian Space Agency. And, and the one that I worked on called the Near Infrared Camera is the one US instrument. It’s also the primary Near Infrared Imager on the observatory, and kind of serves two purposes, not just as a science instrument, but it’s also serves as the wavefront sensor, which means it does the sensing for how the images are coming from the telescope and how they’re, for lack of a better term, how are they messed up? Because the James Webb Telescope has 18 segments in its primary mirror. So, there are 18 segments that are all adjustable on orbit, and you have to change the shape of them, and their position and orientations, to get it to act like a perfect mirror after it unfolds in space and then cools down to cryogenic temperatures. So that sensing of how to correct the primary mirror is all done was in NIRcam, so if NIRCam doesn’t work or if it didn’t work, it does now, but if it hadn’t worked, then the James Webb telescope would not have worked.

Louis
Yeah, that’s quite the mechanisms and actuation problem for all 18 segments moving. I remember that was a very pivotal part of the launch when it was in orbit and then had to adjust it to make sure we got everything in focus and working. Let’s step a bit down on the in terms of technical level just for this next question. Um, could you describe how an infrared camera is different than other cameras? And why that may be important to James Webb Space Telescope?

Alison
Oh, absolutely. Okay. So, the light that our eyes can see, it’s just in the visible spectrum. And that’s a very small portion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. That includes X-rays, and microwaves, and all of these different types of electromagnetic radiation. The infrared spectrum is just a bit longer than red. So, the ultraviolet is a bit shorter than blue. And the infrared is a bit longer than red. Everything at the observatory starts with the science. You know, why are we doing what we’re doing? Why are we looking in the infrared starts with the science?

The science goals for the Webb telescope are to look at the very first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. And these galaxies formed a long time ago, you know, approximately 13.7 billion years ago. So how do we look back in time like that? Well, the light takes a long time to get to us because the universe is expanding. And of course, we’ve learned over the last several decades that not only is it expanding, but it’s accelerating in its expansion, which means that the objects that are very far away from us are traveling away from us and accelerating in their speed. So, if we want to look back in time and see these very first galaxies, we’re looking a long time away at objects that are moving far away from us. Well, light is shifted similar to sound. When you hear a train go by, you know, you hear the Doppler effect, in motion where the train is at a higher pitch when it’s coming toward you and then a lower pitch is it’s going away from you. The same thing happens with light that happens with sound. So, if we’re looking at an object that’s coming toward us, it looks bluer than it actually is. And if you’re looking at an object that is moving away from you, is looks redder than it actually is. But if it’s moving really, really fast away from you, then the light can be shifted into a very different spectrum than it originally. So, these galaxies started with light that our eyes can see even blue light. And as it evolved over time, and is now moving so far away from us, that lights all been stretched out by the effective the speed of the light, and it stretched into the infrared. So, we need to look at these longer wavelengths that are stretched out. So that’s what drives the need for an infrared camera. And it enables us also to see within a nebula, the property of infrared light is that it can detect heat. And so, if we’re looking for how are stars galaxies born, there’s a big cloud like a nebula of gas and dust that the visible light can’t get through. But infrared light detects heat. It can see through that and see to the birthplace of the stars. What’s different about an infrared camera it can detect those longer wavelengths that the detectors are optimized to see infrared light as opposed to visible light, or even ultraviolet, there are certain detectors that can see ultraviolet light or see infrared light. But infrared light, again, is a detection of heat. So, if you’re building a telescope to detect heat, you have to make it really cold or the heat will blind it effectively. So, our instrument operates at 37 Kelvin, or 37 degrees above absolute zero. So that enables us to be very sensitive to the faint infrared light that’s coming from infant galaxies billions of years ago.

Louis
And that detection at such a low temperature, I understand that was partly what made that possible is the large sunshield. Is that correct? And was that something you worked on?

Alison
I did not work on that. There were many, many people who worked on all aspects of Webb. But yes, one of the unique features of Webb is that it is passively cooled. Most of it. There is one cryocooler, but I’ll talk about that in a minute. But most of the observatory is cooled down to a roughly 40 Kelvin, due to this giant sunshield this the size of a tennis court, and it has five layers in it. And they separate these layers so that there is a vacuum or a space between them. So you don’t get conduction through those layers. And they basically shield the light from the earth, the Sun and the Moon at the same time, which dictates where we are.  The Webb telescope is a million miles from Earth. And it’s away from the Sun in the opposite direction of the Sun at a unique orbital point called L2 or Lagrange point 2 where it can orbit this point, and use this giant sunshield to block the heat of the Sun, the Earth and the Moon. And so that allows the telescope to cool down to roughly 37 – 40 Kelvin and keep us very cold. So yes, that sunshield enables us to do that but that I did not work on that I just worked on the instrument, the camera. But there’s lots of people worked on all different aspects of Webb.

Louis
Speaking of which, it’s a very complex and large project spanning multiple countries and continents and organizations. Do you know how many people were involved in the JWST project? And maybe how many of those were from Lockheed Martin?

Alison
There’s been estimates that roughly 20,000 people have worked on Webb, which is a large number of people but it took a huge team to do that. At Lockheed Martin, there were about 130 to 150 people over the course of the time. We never had that many at one point working on it, but remember, we worked on it for quite a long time and supported it. We basically worked on it from the time we first proposed it until we delivered it was just over 10 years. The project started in 2002. It launched in 2021. So, a lot of that time was at higher levels of testing. We weren’t working on the camera for 20 years but there was a lot of different layers of testing. And so, some aspects of the program had to start earlier than others. But over that time, they had something like 20,000 people work on it. And these are people from all over the world. I mean, there’s people from Europe, from Canada, from the United States from even French Guiana where the rocket launched from, so several continents of people working on the telescope.

Louis
So cool. And was there ever a point in the project where they needed to put a lot more personnel on it? Like, you know, it wasn’t maybe like a team of, you know, 20 to 40 at Lockheed Martin then did it ever ramp up? Like a particularly, you know, critical moment, or one where you needed a lot of personnel?

Alison
Yeah, the most number of people that were working on, it was probably during testing of all of the components and starting integration. Because we had a lot of different assemblies that would have to come together to be put into the camera. NIRCam had over 130 optics, and each optic needed to be individually tested and then assembled with its next higher level of assembly and, and tested again and tested again, and make sure that everything works at every level. Again, everything has to be tested at cryogenic temperatures. So, it takes a lot of work to do that all the electronics boards were going through testing. You are trying to do a lot of testing in parallel. That’s what adds up to a lot of people to get that done.

Louis
I see, that’s very interesting. So, what was your approach to problems or maintaining motivation on this long-term project? And was that approach similar to that of your team members?

Alison
Well, yeah. I think that a lot of team members had a lot of motivation to get this done. What drove us was getting, you know, this mission accomplished. You know, the science in the end. But you know, there are some long days when things don’t go well. A lot of the things that we had to develop for NIRCam for Webb as a whole, were new. That hadn’t been done before, hadn’t been applied this way. So not just new technologies that had to be developed, but better ways of doing things that have never been done before. I mean, manufacturing of optics, for instance, you think, oh well, optics had been manufactured since Galileo was grinding lenses. For sure, but if you’re going to do them in orders of magnitude more precisely than has ever been done before, you have to develop new processes. You have to figure out ways to do this at 37 Kelvin. And then the end mission to accomplish this world class observatory that is better than any observatory has ever been built before. So that’s just motivation to work on such a great project that can change the fundamental understanding of the universe. That’s a lot of motivation.

Louis
Yeah, but when it boils down to it, that is quite an impactful sort of overarching mission. So, one question we always like to ask is, did you experience anything surprising that you did not expect while working on this project?

Alison
About every day! You know, you think, oh well, it’s the same but different, we’ll just do it again. And then it’s not. You know, there’s lots of challenges and you go into test, and you put something together the way that, you know, a textbook could tell you the best it could be done, and you find out that’s not good enough. And then you have to do an order of magnitude better. So yeah, sometimes things are surprising. And sometimes they surprise you in a good way. Even if you’re the only one that thinks that it can be done and accomplished, there is a lot of people are telling you it can’t. And then you sometimes get pleasantly surprised and go see, it worked the way I planned. Occasionally that happens. But you know, this is the process of invention and discoveries.

Louis
How did partnerships with NASA, ESA, and the CSA or other organizations influenced decision making and project timelines? And more broadly, I guess, what would what do you consider best practices for long term collaborations with multiple organizations?

Alison
Okay, yeah, a couple of different parts of that question. The instruments were individually split up into different contributions from different countries. So, they were separate. Until we all got together at the same time, at the end, when we delivered our instruments, what the European Space Agency was doing didn’t really affect what we were doing or what Canada was doing. We’re kind of working in parallel, so we were not affecting each other on a daily basis. There were some decisions made early by NASA that said, originally, we were going to have Canadian contributions inside of NIRCam, and we were going to work with the Europeans and the NASA management said, you know, I think that that’s a recipe for possible delays. Because we have a lot of restrictions in spaceflight. We were at that point, governed by the ITAR rules. And a lot has gone under the Department of Commerce now that the Department of State has rules on International Traffic and Arms Regulations. So, a lot of spaceflight hardware falls under those rules. And so it makes it a bit more challenging to share information internationally. And so, NASA decided that NIRCam would be an all US instrument, and that we wouldn’t have to get contributions from Canada or Europe, which, for better or for worse, it simplified interfaces but we didn’t. We kind of worked in parallel separately.

So as for best practices on a large mission like this, I think it’s, you know, check your egos at the door, and work for the mission together. You know, an example of this was when we when we got to finally put all of the instruments together into what’s called the integrated science instrument module. So, it’s the structure that holds all the science instruments, and now we’re, we are literally millimeters from each other when we put our instruments in, and there’s not a lot of extra space in there and put us all into one structure. And then we had to go to test that structure. Go to the vibration test. And it’s the first time that that the different teams were all in the same room. The test was executed at NASA. So we had the NASA team there that was executing the test, and we had the NIRCam team there from Lockheed, and the US team. And then we had the Europeans from the MIRI and NIRSpec teams. We had the Canadians there from for their instrument, FTS NIRISS. And we are all literally sitting shoulder to shoulder at different consoles watching the data coming in from those tests. And you’re looking at all of the different channels from the accelerometers that are all over the instruments. And of course, first you look at your own results, for your instrument, but then you’ve got access to everybody else’s results. And so, you are kind of cross checking each other and, and if anybody had any sort of anomaly, we were all kind of rolling up our sleeves and getting together. There wasn’t any finger pointing. There wasn’t any “Hahaha, we’re done and we’re gonna go out to eat, you guys solve your problem and stay till midnight.” Everybody was working together in that environment. And that kind of collaboration, I think is essential for a project like this. We saw it at different levels of testing. You know, it’s really refreshing environment to be in.

Louis
Yeah, that’s really fun you know. Sometimes you have to compartmentalize when dealing with things like ITAR but it engineering really shines, I think when you get in that teamwork setting, and you get to collaborate and build something amazing, which you clearly have done. How do you think James Webb Space Telescope is changing the way we see the universe?

Alison
Have you looked at any of the pictures yet? Take a look at some of the images and the descriptions of them. And some of them are absolutely gorgeous. And some of them may just be a smudge of light and yet we learn more from that smudge of light than you could ever imagine. What’s been most exciting is seeing really the deep fields looking at the very early galaxies. And I was talking to one of the scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute last week, and she’s looking at galaxies, and looking at very, very old galaxies and trying to compare them to newer galaxies and seeing if you can understand what’s going on in in a very old galaxy, by comparing it to something maybe a little bit closer and you get more light from and understand better, but making the Galaxy comparisons of what was a galaxy looking like that was formed, you know, 13.5 billion years ago. And one of the big shocks that came out recently was that some of those very early galaxies are extremely massive, and very mature. And that wasn’t the hypothesis. The hypothesis was that those galaxies would be much smaller than maybe short lived, they wouldn’t look like this. Why? We don’t know. You know, I’m now relying on the scientists and the astrophysicist to tell me what they’re learning from these pictures but they’re gonna fundamentally change what we know about the evolution of the universe, which I think is mind blowing. And it’s, it’s answering the questions of, you know, what makes us human.

As an advanced society to really ask and probe science questions to understand our world or universe or nature, we’re really fundamentally changing human knowledge for the future. Go fast forward 500 years, and what are the people 500 years from now going to think about what happened in the year, you know, 2020, or, you know, 2000s. I think that what we’re learning with Webb will be as profound as anything that is going on anywhere in our world right now. And I think it will be remembered and looked back as a great accomplishment, even 500 years from now.

Louis
I agree, it really is remarkable. And I think the work that you and many other people have been putting into this is really given a lot of hope and inspiration for a lot of people out there, you know, looking up to the stars, like there’s more to see. And there’s certainly a lot more science to be done. So we’re looking forward to it. Are you working on anything fun right now that you’re excited about?

Alison
Absolutely. I mean, Webb was fantastic to build and now the scientists are getting their time to use it, but I think what’s really exciting now is what’s next. And we’re working on formulating the Habitable Worlds Observatory. And if I look, you know, over the past 30 years, we’ve discovered all of these exoplanets, but the ones that we’ve been able to see are very large planets, Jupiter size or greater, large distances from their central star. And their central star is usually not as bright. We’re trying to build an observatory that can observe an Earth like planet around a sunlight star at about a one au kind of distance and get it spectrum and see what kind of characterize those planets. I mean, if you go back in human history, how many times have people looked up even a caveman and wondered whether there’s another world like ours out there, and we’ve never seen it and within our lifetime we might be able to. And so, we’re working on those technologies right now. And that’s what’s really exciting.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

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

 

 

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

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of organizations and the people.

I am Ali Kazmaz, a student at Rice University pursuing a degree in architecture.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Mei-Li Hey from Northrop Grumman.

Mei-Li is a mechanical design engineer who worked on the James Webb project. I wanted to speak to her about her role as a test engineer intern when she first started at Northrop Grumman and how this led to her working on the project full-time, and also to understand the collaborations of different engineers that brought their projects to fruition.

We began our conversation with her telling us about the internship first. Enjoy listening!

(music)

Mei-Li Hey
I started as an intern the summer of 2016. I didn’t know what role I was going to play, let alone the program. I think I really lucked out with getting put on James Webb. Test engineers, they’re in charge of reading the drawings, and then writing procedures that will help the technicians who are the ones actually performing the work in, you know, exactly how they’re going to do it. I mean, these procedures, say down to like, take this nut, and this bolt and this washer, put them together to attach these two pieces, right? So, test engineers write those directions.

Ali
Sort of like Lego prescriptions. Very specific.

Mei-Li
Yes, exactly. Right. Test engineers are the ones who are doing the authoring. So, they do a lot of technical writing. And I thought that was cool. But as I was doing it, I liked the drawings. When I was reading the drawings, I was like, who’s making these drawings, because that seems like fun. They’re the ones who actually have some freedom, and they have some, you know, creative outlet, I guess, and how they’re going to design this whole thing. I was able to meet one of the managers of the mechanical design engineers, said, Hey, I’m a test engineer. But I would love to learn a little bit more about your group. And he was the manager of mechanical ground systems engineering. So, I spent the last maybe couple of weeks at my internship, learning just a little bit about that. And so, then when I got hired full-time, they knew that I liked the design aspect better so they put me straight into design engineering, where then I had a whole another world to learn. And it takes a little bit longer to learn that design part, but I like it a lot better.

Ali
When you were an intern, they were working on the Webb, and when you got hired, they were still working on the Webb, right?

Mei-Li
Yeah, absolutely. So, Webb was a very long program. We started, by we, I would say the company started proposing Webb in 1996. And my company officially won Webb in 2001. The original launch date was 2011. And we were exactly 10 years late. We doubled schedule. So, I did not join until like I said, 2016 was my internship. And then 2017 is when I started full-time. And so, I was on the program full time for the last 25% of the program, only. There were a few people on the program that had been there for the entirety of their career, they’d been there for 25 years, working on just this program. But for the most part, people’s lives change, and you have people cycle through I think, on average, this program’s retention was much better than most because it was a very exciting program. I joined at the very tail end.

Ali
You said, you were very interested in the creative process and how they were actually making the drawings instead of like the assembly of them. Could you maybe talk about how you merge this creativity, science and engineering?

Mei-Li
Sure, yeah. I think that design engineering is really the best way to do that. You do need to lean on creative skills, but you also need to have very strong quantitative skills to do the engineering portion of it. But I guess another unique part of joining the program when I did was that at this point, we were pretty much only addressing things that had gone wrong. So unplanned events. Like we had lots of parts that didn’t fit or things that broke, and we needed to go fix and they weren’t in the plan to go do these things. So, you needed to come up with pretty creative solutions. I mean, like one example is the bus of the James Webb.

There’s three main sub-assemblies for the Webb. And you mentioned one of them. It’s the sunshield. I feel like that’s the most iconic, just because it’s giant and shiny, and there’s nothing like it. And then of course, there’s the telescope part, which is the shiny gold mirrored telescope. And then under the sunshield on the other side of the sunshield is the least exciting subsystems called the bus and it’s just the big box that has all of the electrical components inside it. It’s really what runs the entire telescope is this big box. It’s called the bus.

There’s a ton of electrical components inside and one of them broke very late in the game. And we had to basically pull off the panels of the bus, taking apart the cube. So, taking up off one side of the cube, and going in there to try and fix the electrical component that broke. But obviously, none of that work is planned. So, figuring out how you’re going to take apart something that was never meant to be taken apart, and then put it back together, it takes a whole lot of creativity and equipment. And we needed to end up making a slew of pieces of equipment to take off this panel. And like access is really small. So, we had to make specialized tools that’s going to go in and reach and just fix this little component, come out and like thread the needle through these things, right. So that’s where creativity comes in. Because you have to think outside of the box. The only solutions that are going to work are going to be ones that are outside the box. But I mean, luckily, it’s not just you, it’s going to be you along with a bunch of other engineers, and you will stand on the floor and look at the problem. You have to come up with a solution, or plans.

Ali
How does that collaborative process work, like when working with a bunch of people that have different ideas of how to solve this, you know, how does that work?

Mei-Li
Yeah, it’s sometimes difficult, and especially in those very, very tense moments, it can get heated because like something just broke. So, tensions are already high. I think that what was very cool about the James Webb is that everybody who was working on it, we all had a shared mission, we want to get this thing off the ground. And I think that, you know, that is a very united feeling. Everybody’s doing what they’re doing or saying what they’re saying, because they have the same goal in mind. So, kind of have to keep that in mind if you start disagreeing on something. But the engineering process helps a lot, if you follow it.

You have systems engineers that will help you define requirements. Requirements are a very big deal. And, you know, if you say, well, this electrical component broke, you’ll have somebody that says, well, like, what do you mean, it broke? Like, what doesn’t work about it? And you have to then go to the requirements about what working means, is it meeting a certain threshold and meeting a certain requirement? So similar if like, okay, it breaks, it’s not meeting a certain requirement so how do you go and fix that requirement? And so, some people might offer a solution? You know, I might have an idea and say, well, I think, you know, I think we should rip apart the bus and take off this part and replace it with a brand-new part. Somebody else might say, well, okay, we don’t need a new part. We just need to fix this one piece, and then it meets the requirements again. Okay, well, technically, they’re right. As long as the requirements are met, you move on.

I think like the process to come to a solution is defining your requirements, brainstorming ideas, and then choosing the path of least resistance. Those are the three steps, I would say. And then everybody understands that that’s the engineering process. So, there could be debate about details and everything, but you define your requirements, you brainstorm ideas, and then you choose the path of least resistance.

Ali
And those three things that you said, are all engineers on the team, focusing on all three aspects, or I think you’ve said, some of them focus on defining the criteria, and some of them focus on solving problems, right.

Mei-Li
They’re all involved. You need many different disciplines to be involved in this decision-making process but each one has their responsibility or their expertise I should say. Like systems engineers, they’re experts in requirements definition. So, they’ll be giving a lot of input when we’re defining requirements. And then when we’re brainstorming solutions, design engineers are the ones who are really good at that. Their expertise is design. So, as we’re brainstorming or roughly designing different solutions, they’re heavily involved, but of course, they can only do that with the input of a test engineer who understands in depth, what the procedure is going to look like. Because I’ve made a made a wonderful tool that’s really really cool, you know, robot arm that’s going to go in and grab the piece, but the test engineer is the one with the information like, well, no, because we need to do steps A, B and C first. They’re more looking at it and like its sequential order and your robot arm won’t fit. Because C hasn’t been done yet when you’re trying to use the arm. So, like, I don’t think that any of these problems could be solved with just one discipline. It’s a collaborative effort, certainly. And I think, depending on what the problem is, and what phase you’re at, there’s going to be people who are, you know, have more responsibility to get things moving or less, but it’s, you know, it’s only going to occur successfully if you have participation of all disciplines there.

Ali
So, did you sort of figure out that you wanted to be more on the design side, as you were interning or did you have sort of an idea before that as well, that you’re wanting to be more on the design side of engineering?

Mei-Li
I think I had a little bit of an idea before, but being a test engineer, and then seeing what design engineers actually did verified it, for sure. So yeah, I mean, when I was in high school, I loved art. And I was a sculptor. And if I didn’t go into engineering, in college, I was gonna go into fine arts. So, I knew I really liked the artistic side of, you know, I had a, I like exercising the creative part of my brain as well. And so, a lot of what I focused on in college had to do with design, engineering, also. And I liked that. It’s a very good bridge for somebody who enjoys being creative, and especially sculpting you know, that I love ceramics. And that was my outlet in high school and in college. And so, design engineering is like computer animated sculpting. A lot of the times you’re just using software to help you make something instead of clay.

Ali
Could we talk about why the sunshield was essential for the James Webb telescope? And were you involved more in the sunshield design or more in the bus? And solving that problem that you described with the bus?

Mei-Li
Yeah, so even within design engineering, there are different types. So, the design of the sunshield was done by flight design engineers. They are experts in designing the parts that go to space. I was a mechanical grounds systems designer. When something needed to be tested, or integrated, or even something goes wrong, and they need special tools, you know, robot arms or whatever, you know, to fix the problem. That’s what I designed. So I’m not designing the stuff that actually goes to space. I’m designing all like a slew of equipment that’s needed in the integration and test. So, like, in terms of the sun shield, I had heavy involvement, but not from like designing, you know, the design of the sun shield happened in the early 2000s. So, I was like, 10, you know,

Ali
Has this technology evolved from then, or don’t they change anything since 2000?

Mei-Li
That’s a really good point. And that was like an electrical problem that I mentioned earlier. That happened because of software obsolescence. Because, you know, we were 10 years late in launching. So the parts that were in there were good, but it had been a long time. And so, you know, the, yes, we designed something that’s the first of its kind, and it’s brand new, but it’s not really brand new, it’s 20 years old, at the rate in which technology changes. The design of the sunshield was still, you know, was done 20 years ago, but nobody’s ever done anything like it, so it was still brand new, and the first of its kind.

When I joined, they had just finished putting it together. They had just finished, like actually fabricating it and so now it was time to test. There was a ton of mechanical ground systems, pieces that went into the testing of it. So, when we’re testing the sunshield to be able to operate in space, obviously, we want it to operate in zero G, but here there’s gravity. So how are we going to do that to make sure it works? Well, we have to design a slew of zero gravity simulators and weight off-loaders, things like that. And that’s what my team designed. So, I designed one zero gravity simulator for the deployment of the telescope upwards. Like there’s one point and the deployment sequence if you like, I know that there’s a YouTube video online where you can watch the entire James Webb. First it comes down, right and then the sunshield spreads out. And then, at one point that telescope starts moving upwards into its final position. That test, we needed it to like create a zero gravity simulator to offload the weight of the telescope. And that thing on top, I helped design. So, that’s an example of the sort of work that we do.

But if you’re interested in like the design of flight hardware, the stuff that actually goes to space, that’s a whole another design position. They have different sets of requirements. Their process to design, something that goes to space is much more rigorous, because it’s going to space, it’s less rapid. A lot of the designs I do are very rapid. And the design flight design engineers, it’s as much it’s a slower process, because they have to be very meticulous, you know, every single design decision.

Ali
What’s the new project that you guys are working on?

Mei-Li
There’s so much going on at Northrop all the time, but I am manager of cryocooler manufacturing. Basically, what it is, is just it works the same way a refrigerator does, fancy space refrigerator. And the point of having a cryocooler is to cool down all of the electronic components. James Webb has the most sophisticated cryocooler ever made. It really is an impressive piece of technology. What it does is it keeps all of the electronic components very, very cold so that if you have anything like Infrared, or X rays, or anything that’s trying to pick up light waves, you need to be able to keep everything very cold so that the sensors and the cameras on the telescope that read heat, or light can pick up, you know, the faint signals of those.

We fabricate cryocoolers here and then we include them in some of our own vertical integration. We also sell them to other companies like Lockheed and Raytheon. Other companies who also make satellites and might need a cryocooler.

Ali
How does the technology benefit the Webb and all these satellites?

Mei-Li
It makes the infrared and X ray possible. So, since Webb is an infrared telescope, without the cryocooler, these images wouldn’t be possible. What would happen is the electronics would be too hot and then that would mean that the infrared pictures that the telescope is taking, it wouldn’t be able to take those. Instead, it would just be muddled by the heat signatures coming from the electronic components.

Ali
How would you describe the infrared technology? What’s the advantage that it offers, compared to what they have on the Hubble?

Mei-Li
Sure, yeah. Visible light is what the Hubble takes pictures of. When you just take a picture of visible light, you can only see what is there right now, whereas infrared light, I mean, think of it like heat graph. You might have seen like in movies, sometimes when they have like cops that are looking into rooms, but you can see through doors, because you’re looking for a heat signature sort of thing. And it’s basically like the Webb has a camera so we can see through clouds. We can see through dust. We can see through rocks, meteors. We can see through all of that to see the infrared that’s many, many, many, many more miles away. Similarly, if I if I put my hand down on my desk here, and then I pick up my hand, if I looked at that spot on my desk with an infrared light, my handprint would still be there, right? Because heat has transferred from my hand to the desk. So visible light, it would just be a blank spot on my desk, but infrared light, it would say Oh, well, like there’s a hand that was here, right? Because there’s heat there. That was transferred from my hands to the desk.

Similarly, what we think happened with the Big Bang, and the first light is that those stars, galaxies, they don’t exist anymore. What happened with the Big Bang, that doesn’t exist anymore. But if we point the Webb towards that place where that did happen, there should be a heat signature from when it occurred because it was an event of universal size, right? So, like the biggest heat signature ever. And so there should be some remnants of that. So, the James Webb’s, part of its mission was to see if we see what we expect to see, to prove that the Big Bang actually did happen. If we don’t see that the heat signature that we expect to see, then maybe something else happened. We have found some images that suggest that that the Big Bang happened far before when we thought it happened. The universe is a lot older than we think it is. And so, I don’t think anything officially has been released yet like no new theories, but it’s not what we expected.

(music)

Ali
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

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

 

 

 

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

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of people from various organizations that brought it to fruition.

I am Keegan Leibrock, a student at Rice University pursing degrees in economics and political science.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Matthew Greenhouse, an infrared astronomer from NASA. He has been working on the Webb telescope since 1997.

Prior to 1997, Dr. Greenhouse worked for the Smithsonian as an astrophysicist. We began our conversation about his work there and what it was like transitioning into working at NASA.

Please enjoy listening!

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Matthew Greenhouse
I’ll give you a little bit of my background. I got my undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona in Tucson. My undergraduate degree was in geology. I became a geologist. And then I decided that I wanted to go into planetary geology and then shortly after that, I decided I wanted to just go into astrophysics. And so, I went off to the University of Wyoming to get my PhD in astrophysics. I went to Wyoming because at the time, they had just built what was the world’s largest infrared telescope. They needed people to help build instrumentation and things like that. So, I thought it was a good place for me to go, and it turned out to be.

The first job that one gets after getting a PhD, it’s called a postdoctoral fellowship, or postdoc. And I did my postdoc at Smithsonian in Washington, where the primary project that I worked on was a European Space Agency project called the Infrared Space Observatory. Then, in 1996, I moved to Goddard Space Flight Center, because I’m the kind of astronomer that builds things and Goddard was just a better venue or place to be for building things than Smithsonian. In 1997, I joined the Webb mission, and I’ve been on that mission, ever since. It’s turned out to be my whole career.

Keegan
Honing in on the Webb Space Telescope, what sort of discoveries have been made using this new telescope? To me, it seems like new discoveries are being made every day, the capabilities are obviously immense. So, like, what is the processing like for these new discoveries?

Matthew
Well, Webb mission is just getting started. We’re a little over a year into the science mission. But as you say, every other day, there’s a there’s a discovery with the Webb. The Webb is giving humanity its first high-definition view of the infrared universe. So, it’s not a surprise that we’re having so many discoveries so quickly.  Much of it comes from the Webb’s ability to see fine detail like the Hubble Space Telescope does, and the Webb’s ability to detect incredibly faint light from the early universe and do all this in the infrared part of the spectrum. So, the Webb is showing us our first look at the first galaxies. A lot of surprises there. It’s enabling us to measure the chemistry in exoplanet atmospheres and all kinds of objects, revealing some phenomena that have never been seen before. It’s very exciting.

One of the things that seem unique about the Webb mission that we haven’t seen in the past, is the extent to which all the exciting results from the Webb, show up on social media and are all over the world within days, if not hours. So, the Webb is I think the first mission of its kind to fly in the era of social media. And so, it’s enabling all of humanity, really, not just not just the people in the US and Europe to share in the excitement of the web mission. I think it’s wonderful.

Keegan
And with that, can you explain how the Webb Space Telescope is sort of different from past telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s like the infrared capabilities and like being able to see new things that were previously not available.

Matthew
Sure. The Webb is designed to operate in the infrared part of the spectrum and that is what is most different about it from some of our other observatories. Hubble operates in the ultraviolet, visible part of the spectrum. Chandra operates in the X-ray part of the spectrum. One observes different phenomenon in these different parts of the spectrum.

Everything we know about the universe outside our solar system comes to us transmitted in starlight. What modern astronomers do primarily is extract physics information from starlight. And so, to get all the information about the universe, we need all the star light. And so that requires that we put telescopes in space because much of the light is blocked by our atmosphere. And it also requires that we build a number of different observatories that can operate concurrently with each one focused on a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum of light. Because one needs different types of equipment and methods to observe in different parts of the spectrum. So, we require several different observatories.

We built the Webb as an infrared telescope, in order to see the light from the very first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. Galaxies emit most of their light in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. But as that light travels to us, through the expanding space of the universe, for these primeval galaxies, the wavelength of the light is stretched into the infrared by the expansion of space. So, to observe it today, we have to build an infrared telescope. And that comes with all kinds of technical problems and unique challenges but it’s one of the things that sets the Webb most apart from, say, the Hubble. The Hubble cannot see the first galaxies, because it doesn’t have sufficient infrared capability. Also, its primary mirror is too small to be able to detect the faint light from those first galaxies.

Keegan
What is the role of NASA and sort of coordinating different partnerships with other organizations as well as like funding for Webb Space Telescope projects?

Matthew
Well, the Webb project was much too large a project for NASA to do by itself. So, it was a partnership with the European Space Agency and also the Canadian Space Agency. You know, we had to invite those agencies to be partners, and then we had to negotiate those partnerships.

Keegan
And with that, what sort of ongoing projects are there currently, regarding the telescope? And I was also curious, like how use of the telescope may be divided, because I’m sure a lot of different astronomers want to use it.

Matthew
How does it all work? Well, once a year, NASA solicits observing proposals. Proposals on where to point the telescope, from the worldwide astronomical community. Not anyone can submit such a proposal. Then the proposals are peer reviewed. They’re reviewed by other astronomers in a double-blind fashion. Then a subset of all those proposals are selected to be uploaded to the Webb telescope. That’s how it works. So, after each one of those proposal cycles, we have about a year’s worth of observing projects queued up.

Keegan
So is that a pretty competitive procedure? Are there people who maybe don’t get to go through their projects for some time?

Matthew
Yeah, it’s an enormously competitive procedure. Each proposal is typically authored by a large team of astronomers. It’s very competitive but it’s also very fair. The double-blind aspect makes it possible for very young astronomers and basically anyone with a good idea to get that idea evaluated on a level playing field.

Keegan
Awesome, and what does your day-to-day work look like with regard to the Webb Space Telescope and other NASA projects? I’m sure you have all sorts of things going on.

Matthew
Right now, my focus is actually on missions that are in development now that haven’t flown yet. So, my Webb work is basically finished. It’s up and flying and working great. So, we have occasional anomaly resolutions and things like that but my focus is on very much on what comes next in the infrared.

Keegan
Yeah, and building on infrared I know you discussed this earlier but what specifically can the Webb telescope offer into the origins of life into the universe that previous telescopes couldn’t? I know you said, they can see further into the origins?

Matthew
Yeah, when I was a graduate student, there were no planets known outside our solar system. Today, we’ve identified more than five thousand, with the implication that all stars have planets. I mean, most astronomers would agree that all stars have planets with very few exceptions. And that gives us the implication that there are billions of habitable worlds in our galaxy. We don’t know that they’re inhabited but we know that they’re habitable. And we have learned how to search for life on them by studying the chemistry of their atmospheres. With missions like the Webb and even Hubble, we have developed techniques for doing spectroscopy on exoplanet atmospheres. Spectroscopy is a process by which we spread light out into its component colors, with special optics to allow us to see the emission and absorption of light by individual atoms and molecules in the atmospheres of these exoplanets. And what we’re looking for is chemistry that would be indicative of life. Chemistry that would be hard to explain with a biotic processes alone. And this is really just getting underway at NASA. The search for life is no longer a stuff of science fiction, it is very much a major objective of NASA Space Science. And we’re well into it now. So, the Webb will be the first major strategic mission to really work on this hard, and many more will follow.

Keegan
Sure, and with that, how do you think how else do you think the telescope will continue to shape the field of astronomy moving forward?

Matthew
It’s raising lots of questions about how galaxies form and evolve. It’s going to show us star formation in our own galaxy in detail that we’ve never seen before. It’s shown us unusual phenomena that we’ve never seen before. We have seen how, in one particular example, a late type star is seen to periodically emit pulses of dust formation that have produced an incredible display of a concentric rings of emission around the star. The Webb is just a fantastic machine, one that we’ve never had anything like it before. Whenever we take an image with the Webb, the background of the image is in effect, a deep field image like the Hubble deep field image. So the data is just incredibly rich. The system’s working perfectly. And we’re all very excited. And it should be just continuous excitement for as long as the Webb lasts.

Keegan
How long is the lifecycle typically of a telescope like this? Obviously, there has never been one like the Webb Space Telescope, but do you anticipate that 20 years down the line, maybe 30 years, there’ll be an even bigger telescope developed?

Matthew
Well, there definitely will be. The formal engineering life of the Webb is five years. But the consumables on board are, we have apparently 20 years of fuel. And that doesn’t mean the Webb will last 20 years, but it can last that long. If it doesn’t last that long, it won’t be due to lack of propellant. So, we’ll have to wait and see. Hubble of course, has lasted way, way, way beyond this design life, but by virtue of servicing. The Webb cannot be serviced the way Hubble was. The astronauts can’t go to the Sun-Earth L2 point where the Webb resides. We built lots and lots of redundancy into the Webb adjustability and we’ve designed it for graceful degradation. So, we’re very optimistic that it’s going to last a long, long time.

Now, the successor mission to the Webb, the one that NASA will launch right after it, in 2027, is called the Roman Space Telescope. It’s a completely different machine that’s designed primarily to study dark energy. But one of the things on board the Roman Space Telescope is a technology development instrument that will prove out the technology that we need to observe Earth like exoplanets. And ahead of the true successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is something called the Habitable Worlds Observer, the National Academy of Sciences last year gave NASA permission to go off and work on this Habitable Worlds Observer mission as their highest priority for the next mission, and it will be an optical UV telescope, like Hubble, only of size similar to the Webb. That’ll be the next thing up after the Romans Space Telescope, in the very large category of things. It should really, really be able to make a way on exoplanets as small as the Earth and really extend the Hubble UV optical science into the future.

Keegan
So are these projects deep into development? Are they being made? Are they in the approval process?

Matthew
Well, on the Roman Space Telescope is close to launch. So, it’s very much being built now. The Habitable Worlds Observatory is just starting in the planning process, and it will launch most likely toward the end of the 2030s.

Keegan
And as one final question, what advice you would have for those students seeking a career in astrophysics or related fields?

Matthew
Oh, well, that’s easy. If you want to work, well, first of all, the people that work in this field come from all walks of life, from all backgrounds. And a great way to… to work in this field, go to college, study whatever you love. But if that happens to include science, engineering, and math, then working in this aspect of aerospace is a very, very realistic career objective. You don’t need to be anyone special. You don’t have to have any special genius. You just need to be willing to work hard and be enthusiastic about it. And one way to test the waters is to do an internship at NASA. NASA has internships for every level from a high school to senior faculty. And if you’d like to work on data from missions like the Webb, but you don’t want to become a scientist, you can do that, too. NASA has a program called Citizen Science. And if you go to the Citizen Science website, there are all kinds of projects that you can get involved with just by being an interested person. And that’s another way to sort of see what it’s like and rub elbows with the folks who do this for a living.

(music)

Keegan
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

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

 

 

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

I am Angela Xie, a student at Rice University pursing a degree in Architecture.

Jessica Shi
I am Jessica Shi, also an Architecture student from Rice University.

Together we had the opportunity to speak with Hugh Broughton from Hugh Broughton Architects of London for this episode.

Angela
We were curious about the architecture and challenges of building research stations in Antarctica. There are over 70 research stations from 29 different nations. The British Halley VI station stood out to us because of its unique colorful and modular style.

Jessica
Hugh Broughton Architects developed this station, as well as many other stations in the polar regions.

Their work in Antarctica started when the Hugh Broughton Architects won a competition to redesign the Halley station of the British Antarctic Survey.

We started by asking Mr. Broughton about the competition, what was expected from the participants, and the key considerations they had to take into account when designing for such a special environment.

Enjoy listening!

[music]

Hugh Broughton
The competition was run by the Royal Institute of British Architects. That was open to all architects and designers from around the world. It was launched in 2004 so quite a long time ago now. At the time of the launch, they put forward a proposal as to what kind of team they were looking for. And they said that they were looking for a large architectural practice with multidisciplinary experience who had lots of experience of working in extreme and remote locations and who was also very knowledgeable on principles of sustainability. And I remember there was an interview on National Radio In the UK, and the President of the RIBA and then head of the British Antarctic Survey were on the radio. And they were setting out all these criteria. And I was listening to it and I thought, Oh, my goodness, I can’t do a single one of those things. But they said that that morning, they were going to launch the competition and show some films about Antarctica. And I thought, that sounds really nice so I’m gonna go along and listen. And so, I went along and listened. And when I was there, I met an engineer, who I’d worked with before, and he said, oh, let’s team up. They had a really large company with offices all across the world. And it just happened that it was like the kind of combination that the British Antarctic Survey were looking for, large engineering practice who could bring lots of kind of global knowledge. And at that stage, young, younger and more innovative, but small-scale architectural practice, who would bring new ideas to the idea of living in Antarctica.

Angela
So, how much did you know about the environment in Antarctica at that time?

Hugh
So, when we started, I mean, you know, you can have some kind of appreciation of the cold, but many of the features of the site were pretty much unknown to us at the time. So, for example, at Halley Research Station, the temperature never goes below freezing. If they get windblown snow or even snow through precipitation, the snow level rises and rises, and it never melts. In addition, because it’s down on the coast, they get very high winds, because cold air drops from the main Antarctic Plateau, down towards the sea. And as it drops, it picks up in speed. So, you get these very high winds called Katabatic winds. Then the other kind of key feature of working at Halley is that it’s actually not on land. It’s on a floating ice. So, it’s where the ice is flowed off the main continent and is supported on the ocean. So, the site is moving all the time, because the ice is constantly flowing out to sea. Those three features in themselves were not something I’d ever come across before. So, we kind of like had to learn from scratch, all about the Antarctic environment and the extremes of weather. And then not only was there the climate, but there was also the remoteness. Halley is 14 days sailing from the nearest mainland port, either at Cape Town in South Africa or in the Falkland Islands. And also, it’s dark, for three months of the year, 105 days of the year, the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon. So there’s a big psychological stress for people working there. So, you know, we were finding out a lot about climate challenges, geographical challenges, logistics challenges, psychological challenges.

Jessica
That’s very interesting. And with that in mind, would you like to share about kind of the idea exploration process of your team? It’s always like the most interesting process and the architecture developments.

Hugh
Yeah, sure. So, one of the key principles of the project was that it needed to be able to be easily built in Antarctica, and also easily relocated. Because as I mentioned, the site is on a floating ice shelf and the ice is constantly flowing, a bit like water, but flowing out to sea. So, the site is quite dynamic. And at two extremes of the ice shelf, in one, it’s grounded on a rocky outcrop, and at the other, it’s grounded to the main Antarctic continent. That introduces stresses in the ice shelf. So, every now and then, giant cracks appear and large iceberg shear off.

There had been five versions of Halley research station built, and each one of them had been lost when the ice shelf had carved off as a giant iceberg. So, one of the key requirements of our brief was that we should design a building, which could be relocatable. So, if there was ever a risk of it disappearing on an iceberg, we will be able to move it in land to a safer location. So very Early on, in fact, we therefore came up with this concept of a repeating building module, which was elevated up on giant legs, and then supported on skis. So that it was modular so that it could be easily constructed. That modular so it could be small enough that it could be relocated, and then raised up on skis so that as the wind blows underneath, it stops snow from drifting around the buildings, and then supported on skis so that the modules could be towed each in turn, further inland. Those kind of three core concepts of modularity, elevation, and ski based structures sort of underpins the whole kind of design process.

And then we went through looking at all the sort of programmatic requirements. And planning those around the modules to come up with the ultimate sort of module size, which we worked out was around 1600 square feet. And within that, we could fit eight bedrooms, and then either some bathrooms or storage, and then everything kind of flowed from there. Then we started looking at labs, and we started looking at places for producing water and power and other operational areas, and everything kind of fitted rather neatly within the 1600 square foot modules. That became the kind of base building block of the whole kind of project. And the only time we needed to vary it was when we were looking at the design for the main living spaces. And for there, we needed dining space for the whole crew. And that could be up to 60 or 70 people in the summers. We needed to have dining space for them, we needed to have social space, place for them to watch TV, a whole sort of range of different recreational and sort of just like living type spaces. And for those, we couldn’t fit those into a standard module, we needed something quite a bit bigger. So for them, we invented a special double height, much larger module of around three and a half to 4000 square feet. So quite a bit bigger.

Angela
That’s very interesting. It has like, have a science fiction look. So, is the form of it or like the look driven mostly by this functional need and this need of being in this harsh environment? Or is there anything else that inspired the design?

Hugh
Obviously, the functional requirements come first. So, the ability to withstand the rising snow level, to be relocated, that drives the elevation and the ski bases. And the size, you know, of the building or the weight of the building became also important because they had to be pulled by bulldozers into a new site. And then we did when modeling and snow modeling to reduce the amount of snow drift that would build up around the buildings. But inevitably, there’s a kind of moment when you’re also developing the outside appearance. Yes, so we did look quite a bit at some of the kind of buildings in Star Wars for a few ideas and forms of inspiration.

Jessica
As we know, Antarctica is like such a harsh environment, but yet, many nations have built research stations there. And you have worked with the British, the Spanish, the Australian and the New Zealand teams. So why do you think is it so important to build like research bases and Antarctica?

Hugh
Well, a lot of the sort of systems which govern the Earth’s climate originate in the Antarctic. So, because of the kind of extremes of cold temperature, it sets up air currents that then drive marine currents that then determine how cold air and cold water moves around the planet. So, the weather systems that exist in the Antarctic, are central to weather systems, which exist all over the planet. So, understanding how they operate, and what the impact of climate change is on those systems is really important for understanding how the world is going to change as a result of climate change, and what we need to do in order to prevent some of those changes happening. So that’s why the research there is so important.

I mean, there is also a geopolitical angle to it as well. You know, everybody wants to be in Antarctica because everybody wants to understand what’s going to happen. Nobody wants to miss out on the knowledge of what’s going to happen. So, you know, that’s another reason why there are so many stations there. But I think, you know, the underlying reason for people being there is to understand, the sort of global Earth atmospheric systems, which are driving climate change.

Angela
That’s very interesting. So, talking about climate change, is there any considerations in the process of design that takes into consideration the impact on the environment in Antarctica?

Hugh
For sure, yeah. So obviously, in large part parts of Antarctica, the temperatures are rising. And in fact, on, I think it was on King George Island around two years ago, their maximum ever temperature in the Antarctic 18.5 degrees Celsius. So, you know, that’s the kind of temperature you’d expect in a very temperate kind of zone, not in the coldest place on Earth. So temperatures definitely around the Antarctic Peninsula in particular, are rising. And as a result, the kind of weather that’s taking place there is changing. So, you know, rain, for example, is now not uncommon in the Antarctic, whereas 50 years ago, it was almost unheard of. So, buildings need to be watertight, where previously they needed to be snow tight, or frost tight, but now they need to accommodate water running over the surface. Wind speeds are also changing in some places increasing, so they need to be more robust to deal with increased wind speeds. And then there’s also the risk of both sea level dropping, and also sea level rising. So now, whenever we’re looking at any of the coastal sites, we always work with the National Meteorological Office to try and gain some understanding of the behavior of sea level, to see whether the building is sitting in a safe enough position to account for 100 years of sea level rise, for example. So yeah, because it’s right at the kind of forefront, you know, of climate change in a way in the Antarctic, the changes are most severely felt in the Antarctic and the Arctic, it has a big impact on the way that the buildings are designed.

Jessica
Yeah, that is like a very thoughtful process of how to make the building actually, like resilient and adaptable to the changing conditions over time. And yeah,

Angela
I’m also kind of curious, so you mentioned earlier that you’re collaborating with an engineering company. Can you talk a little bit about how you cooperate with them?

Hugh
When we’re designing Antarctic research stations, it’s the engineering and the architecture are like totally hand in hand because you are so reliant on the engineering systems for your survival. So, whether that’s the robustness of the structure to withstand high wind speed, or whether it’s the resilience of the power generation systems to ensure that you’ve always got electricity. Because if you lose the electrical supply, then you probably will lose your ability to heat the building, and also your ability to produce water and treat sewage. So, making sure that we’ve got robustness in engineering systems that we’ve got redundancy in the engineering systems, and that we’ve got sufficient space to be able to adequately maintain them is really key to the whole successful operation of one of these research stations. So, you have to work very closely with the engineers to provide them with enough space to make sure you understand how all the systems work to in order to be able to design around those. So, and at the same time, you know, the more they work on these projects, the more they also have ideas about what is necessary to provide good space to support people’s physical and psychological wellbeing, whether that’s light, air quality, acoustic isolation, all the all these things, so there’s a lot of specialism that comes into the design process.

Jessica
With that, I’m just curious if there’s any surprising findings or like experiences during the development of the project?

Hugh
I guess there probably are, you know, just like you find what’s the thing that annoys people the most when they’re living in an Antarctic Station and you imagine it’s going to be the wind or the cold or something like that. And it isn’t. It’s people closing doors. They actually find the interruption to their sleep if somebody closing the door, and it just slams them, and they can hear it all the way down the corridor drives people completely mad. So, it’s kind of interesting, you know, just discovering that, actually, it’s very sort of normal human reactions to the environment, which drive people the most crazy. It’s not actually the cold or the wind, or the isolation. They come pretty well prepared for that. They’ve thought about it pretty hard. And then they get there and find it’s the normal things in life that still drive them crazy.

Angela
That’s very interesting. So during the process of design, did you get to work with some of the researchers that actually will live in this research station? Or do you just get to meet with them a little bit after you built the project?

Hugh
No, no, there’s the engagement with the people who live and work there. It is a really key part of the design process and we will do that right from the beginning, even before we come up with initial ideas, to find out what their requirements are, what are the things that make living in Antarctica positive experience, what are the negative experiences and so on, so that we can try to address as many of those in the design as we can. And you know, a key part of that is also visiting the sites of the existing stations to see them in operation, and taking lessons learned from those site visits and applying them to the designs of the new buildings.

Angela
Can you also tell us a little bit about how Halley ended up appearing in the movie “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?”

Hugh
Yeah, sure. So, so I don’t know if you’ve ever read that story. But the kind of basic premise of the story is that Bernadette is an architect who is kind of lost her way in life. And she is no longer inspired by the profession of architecture, or indeed, inspired by life as a whole. So, she decides to go on a tourist trip to Antarctica. When she’s there, she meets people who are running an Antarctic research station. And she tells them, she’s an architect, and they say, oh, we’ve got a big challenge, because we need to redesign our research station, please, can you help us? And so she rediscovers her kind of mojo by designing a research station on the back of her trip, her sort of tourist trip to Antarctica. So, as a result, the producers of the film got in touch with us and said, is there any way we could use your drawings and pretend that they were done by Cate Blanchett, who was the star of the movie? And so, we said, Yeah, fine. So, Cate Blanchett pretends to draw some sketches and they are actually the sketches that we did Halley VI.

Angela
That’s so interesting.

Jessica
As we also know, Hugh Broughton Architects also have a lot of beautiful projects on like art and culture, like heritage, commercial, education. And we’re kind of wondering if there’s like any lessons or takeaways, words, that’s like in harsh environments that could also be like applied on to like the mainstream architectural designs?

Hugh
Well, obviously, nowadays, there’s a strong environmental angle, which is always important in all projects. And I think some of these Antarctic projects are working at the sort of forefront of environmental sustainability. So, we try and cut down water usage, power usage, increase levels of air tightness, and insulation. So those are always good lessons to take to any project. But I think the main, sort of two areas are a concern for the occupants. So, you have to design very much around the requirements and the needs of the occupants. Now when we work on any project, we always really major in on engaging with those people who are going to use the projects to understand what their requirements are, so that we don’t end up with something that looks great on day one, but we end up with something that looks great for years and years afterwards.

And then the other area is just making sure that you understand how all the components fit together in terms of the construction, because when you’re designing in the Antarctic, if something goes wrong in terms of the construction, there’s very little opportunity to set it right, because there’s no hardware stores around the corner or anything like that. So, you’ve really got to test and prove that everything’s going to work well. And I think that same kind of attention to detail is what we bring also to the heritage projects.

But at the end of the day, they are kind of different. They are different areas. And they probably reflect different interests that we have within the practice. I guess that kind of concern for the individual and the end user is definitely a common theme between both project types and something which interests us a lot.

Angela
Can you tell us a little bit about what led you into the field of architecture?

Hugh
I don’t know. I guess it was just a little haphazard thing. I just used to enjoy drawing and then I discovered, oh that’s what architects are supposed to do, a lot of drawing. So, it seems like a fun career to get involved with. Then transpires that there are a lot of times that you don’t do drawing, you do drawing for a bit, and then you spend a lot of time just trying to make the projects actually happen.

Jessica
What would be some advices that you would give to like young architects or designers who was interested in working in like, either harsh environments or very specific fields?

Hugh
Yeah, ask every single question. Never be afraid to ask a foolish question, because there is no such thing. And always, when you think of an idea, try and think about what the reverse idea might be. So, try to turn everything around 180 degrees at least once, and to make sure that you’ve come up with the best solution.

Angela
Do you have any other really fun moments to share in your experience of working in Halley station and architecture in general?

Hugh
You know, it is a pretty unusual place to find yourself working as an architect. I never thought as an architect that in, in my job, I would end up you know, sitting amidst colonies of penguins, or watching whales out in the ocean, or visiting some of the incredible places that we’ve had to visit along the process of making these buildings. But I think that’s one of the great things about architecture, is that every now and then it takes you to really unusual places that you suddenly have to totally absorb yourself in and find out all about, and then you know everything about it. And then before you know it, you’re off to some other area of investigation to find out about it. So, it’s pretty varied like that. You know, that’s one of the great excitements of the profession.

Jessica
Yeah, I totally agree. Like one of the most amazing parts of architecture, it’s like, it has infinite possibilities. And it is exposing you to all sorts of different things that will amaze you.

Hugh
Never, never forget that the limits of a concept is only the limit of your own ideas. Just think of as many different ideas as you can and try them all out. There’ll never be a silly one.

[music]

Jessica
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