How today's rising stars got their start

Between the ages of 14 and 17, I was lucky enough to visit several of the biggest observatories in Russia and had the privilege to witness a solar eclipse twice. My school had extra physics and math lessons, and our teachers were truly amazing, so believe me, to many of my schoolmates the decision to go study physics at the university seemed like a no-brainer.

While in high school and during the first few years at Moscow State, I had plenty of astronomy classes, but, looking back, I think the real interest, the desire to do research in astrophysics, came to me much later. With no idea what to focus on, I started by dabbling in cosmology and relativity and ended up writing my first papers on gravitational lensing and microlensing. It is searching for extremely rare microlensing events that got me, in the end, into data mining and “survey slicing.” I am a survey scientist and a galactic archaeologist: I trawl through the data of massive sky surveys for clues to the formation and evolution of our Galaxy.

Today, exploration truly fascinates me. I enter the office every morning to uncover how the universe was put together. And then there’s creativity. No scientist can succeed without imagination, but only in astrophysics is the ability to fantasize about alien worlds a requirement and the skill particularly rewarded.

When I was a teenager, I watched Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos and read the book based on the show. Listening to Sagan telling stories about how science is done and how scientists work, and describing the thrill of scientific discovery, I said to myself, “That's what I want to do.”

At college, I became interested in the origin of life and the possibility of life outside Earth, so I decided to graduate in genetics, and I eventually got my Ph.D. in molecular biology. I thought that a solid background on the functioning of the basic components of life would be advantageous for an astrobiologist. During my master’s, I started learning about water on early Mars, and once you begin working on early Mars environments, it becomes difficult to pay attention to anything else.

Today, the continuous novelty, the constant surprise, and the nonstop amazement make my job exciting. When you see the tracks of the rovers on the martian sand, you realize nobody has been there before, nobody has ever seen that landscape before. We are explorers investigating the last frontier. Every day of journeying brings new surprises. We are exceedingly lucky to live during this time of pioneering investigation of our planetary neighborhood. And we must put together every possible effort to make this golden age of exploration a durable endeavor. It is our responsibility to the next generations.

Since I was little, I've been interested in astronomy and especially stars. Stars have always fascinated me for some reason. It was then that I decided to become an astronomer, so I set out pursuing this career. I had many great mentors along the way, which I am very grateful for. I consider myself very fortunate that my initial passion indeed led me to become a professional astronomer and that my work centers on the oldest stars in the universe. I use these stars to unravel the details of the cosmic evolution of the chemical elements, which happens to nicely combine my long-standing interests in astronomy, nuclear physics, and chemistry.

I love to discover new stars that tell us facts about the very young universe. This means that my job is different every day because we don't know what we are going to find out next. I also love traveling to Chile to observe the stars with the 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes two to three times a year. Discovering things myself at the telescope is very empowering and just an awesome feeling. Based on the subsequent analyses (back at home), it then never gets boring to add more pieces to the puzzle of cosmic chemical evolution of the elements, a series of still ongoing processes that at some point enabled planet formation and the biological evolution on Earth. We just found another exciting old star that will keep life interesting in 2013.

I started out as an aerospace engineering student as a freshman at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Then I switched to mechanical engineering my sophomore year, before settling on physics for my bachelor’s degree. While studying physics, I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and I decided I wanted to study experimental cosmology. So I applied to a bunch of West Coast physics programs, and on a whim, I applied to the University of California, Berkeley, astronomy program. I had never taken an astronomy class in my life, and the first time I looked through a telescope was when I was 21 years old!

To my surprise, I was admitted to the Berkeley graduate program, and I met with Geoff Marcy during my campus visit. After talking with him and reading an article of his in Astronomy magazine (March 2000 issue), I was hooked on exoplanets. I was enamored by the sci-fi aspect of finding other worlds and by the considerable technical challenges involved.

Today, I like being the first human on Earth to know something and then sharing that discovery with other people. When my team finds a new planet, we’re the first humans to know of its existence. I find that discovery process absolutely exhilarating.

My dad tells me that I was always a curious kid, famous for asking the question “Why?” Since I can remember, more than anywhere else, I applied this curiosity to the night sky. I wanted desperately to know what was out there. How big was the Universe? How many stars were there? Is our planet unique? It probably helped that I grew up in a small town in the central part of British Columbia Canada called Quesnel. There was no light pollution, so the night sky was very dark and beautiful.

Through grade school, I fell in love with science and mathematics. Science answered my curiosity through a logical process, and mathematics was an elegant universal language that I could use as a tool. In high school, I was introduced to physics, and it blew my mind. I loved to manipulate equations and especially enjoyed solving a problem that I had never seen before. My grade 11 physics teacher introduced me to astrophysics, and I never turned back. I had found something very rewarding for me personally, and couldn’t believe that I could actually get paid to do it.

Today, I feel that my interest in astronomy still hasn’t piqued. I’ve never thought of my “job” as me going to “work.” I want to tackle new mysteries about the Universe, and spending time solving those problems is a part of who I am.

For my research, I’m very excited to use new technology to see populations of stars that have eluded us in the past. By pushing fainter and deeper with the greatest telescopes that humans have ever built, not only do I get to solve problems, but I also witness new mysteries emerging.

In addition, one of my true fascinations is when I see a young student becoming excited about a scientific problem for the first time. I spend about one day every month doing public outreach. I have collaborations with local schools in Maryland and also enjoy giving public lectures about space science, telescopes, and my research program to large audiences. Many middle school students have never met a scientist before. I can see their eyes light up with curiosity when I speak to them, and its rewarding to know that they may end up following the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in the future.

I was always interested in physics but didn’t figure out what I wanted to do with it until halfway through college. I always thought astronomy was interesting but figured that I was about as likely to start a band and become a rock star as I was to land a full-time job as a professional astronomer. Then I spent the summer after my sophomore year working at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is the home of the Hubble Space Telescope and also happened to be right across the street from the physics department at Johns Hopkins University, where I took most of my classes. I loved the summer spent soldering wires together in the building’s basement, surrounded by literally hundreds of astronomers searching for answers to the mysteries of the universe. I enjoyed it so much that I went back again the following summer, and after that I was hooked.

I ended up studying exoplanets almost by accident — I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I arrived at Harvard for graduate school, and one of the older grad students mentioned that there was a newly arrived professor who seemed to have a lot of good ideas and was looking for students. As it turns out, it was very good advice!

I admit day-to-day research can be pretty boring — it’s often a long slog with very little progress to show at the end of the day. As my grad school adviser was fond of saying, “If it was easy, someone would have done it already.” However, there’s always the hope for that “Aha!” moment, where suddenly everything falls into place and the answer to your question is staring you in the face. That’s what I love about my job — that moment when I get to learn something new about the universe. Now that I'm a professor, I also have the privilege of sharing that moment with my students when they come to show me a new result.

I wasn’t one of those kids who had a backyard telescope and spent my nights staring at the sky. I was too busy staring at my computer screen, and, nerd that I was, I avoided fresh air like the plague. Instead, the way I got into astronomy was through physics. As a kid, being a physicist seemed like the closest thing possible to being a wizard, so from an early age that’s what I wanted to do. I started college with an interest in physics and computers, and I knew I wanted to do something that combined those two. I tried several different areas of physics, and I settled on astrophysics because I liked the fact that to be a good astrophysicist, you have to be something of a jack-of-all-trades. A good astrophysicist needs to know some high-energy physics, some nuclear physics, some atomic physics, some condensed matter physics, some non-linear dynamics and chaos — some of everything. I liked that approach, and so I decided in astronomy.

The computers were the key in choosing my specialty within astrophysics. It had always fascinated me that you could build models for the world in a computer, and that by plugging in the laws of physics and turning the crank, you could figure out what would happen. That sent me in the direction of computational astrophysics. I chose to work on star formation and the interstellar medium in part because that is one of the fields where computation is both most needed and most productive. The interstellar medium, the diffuse gas between the stars out of which new stars form, is a wonderfully complex system. It’s ionized, magnetized, irradiated, self-gravitating, turbulent plasma, and with so many processes shaping its evolution, computers are pretty much the only way to go. It’s also a critically important problem. If you ask someone who studies galaxy formation, or the evolution of the heavy elements, or many other areas of astrophysics what the real stumbling block in their field is, they will tell you it’s that we really don’t understand star formation.

My parents encouraged me in science since I was very young. I was drawn into astronomy through seeing Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on a rerun and reading science fiction as a kid. A summer research experience at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California convinced me that I wanted to do astronomy research as a career. I specialized in cosmology during my Ph.D. when a couldn’t-miss opportunity arose to participate in a space mission that has become a cornerstone of modern cosmology: the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Though I have been working primarily in cosmology in the past few years, I have a broad range of research interests in astrophysics.

On the biggest level, cosmologists are asking the most fundamental question: Where did everything in the universe come from? This is a question that humans have asked in different forms since the dawn of civilization, and now in the coming few years, we may finally answer it. This is the ultimate search for our own origins. My research involves confronting confounding and challenging problems on a daily basis because observations have revealed the universe to be a very strange place. My work is far from a solitary enterprise. I enjoy working and building friendships with fantastic colleagues from all over the world.

I went to college firmly determined to become a chemist. By the end of the first semester, I had a few chemistry, physics, and math courses under my belt; but I realized that it was the physics and math aspects of chemistry that always appealed to me. I promptly switched my major to physics after enrolling in an astronomy class, which I found to be an excellent application of physics and math — and much more enjoyable than organic chemistry!

As with most liberal arts colleges, there were few astrophysics research opportunities at Bates College, but fortunately my physics professors were active proponents for the National Science Foundation sponsored Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs in astronomy. I jumped at the opportunities and participated in several REU programs during my undergraduate summers, spending time at extraordinary facilities including Los Alamos Lab, Arecibo Observatory, and the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile.

My first REU program was at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where I studied supernovae. While I had spent significant time in high school working as an intern in at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Cape Cod) chemistry labs, research in astronomy was completely new to me. I was inexperienced but ambitious and eager to learn. The foundation of my research ability was established during that summer REU program, but, given the many subfields within astronomy, I was not yet sure at the time that the study of supernovae was the best fit for me. Several summer programs later, and after studying everything from asteroids to globular clusters, I began research on gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) at Los Alamos and loved it. At that point, evidence was emerging that GRBs were produced in unusual supernova explosions. Thereafter, the fields of gamma-ray bursts and supernovae were married.

As my career was progressing toward graduate school, I found myself in a unique niche with interest/experience in both supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. My Ph.D. thesis at Caltech explored the many facets of the GRB-SN connection. Many of the unanswered questions regarding this connection reside in our basic understanding of supernovae so I have since refocused to studying supernovae in a holistic fashion as a faculty member at Harvard. Full circle.

I grew up a big fan of science fiction, like Star Trek, Robert Heinlein, and more, and the idea of other planets and other civilizations seemed completely natural. Physics was my favorite science class in high school — a big credit goes to my teacher, Mr. Curry — and the combination led to my interests in planetary physics.

Today, I live for the “Eureka!” moments when I finally figure out how to solve a problem or discover something totally new. Then I want to run down the hall to share it with everyone around me.