When I tell me people that I fly around the world with NASA for my job, I’m often asked how I landed that gig. People are surprised that you can even do that sort of thing for work – so was I! My job is actually to research particulate matter in the atmosphere and how it affects climate and air quality.
My research has also involved working at the large hadron collider at CERN (a huge underground particle accelerator in France/Switzerland), measuring the atmosphere at a high alpine research station on top of a Swiss mountain, countless hours working on scientific instruments in the lab and countless more in my office analyzing data and writing papers. I’ll try and detail here some of the important steps in my education and career that brought me here.
I didn’t dream of being a scientist when I was a child, and it took until my last year of my undergrad degree to start persuing studying climate in particular. I studied physics as an undergrad; not because I thought it would lead to particular job, not even because it was my best subject at school (I always found physics quite hard, and history or languages would probably have been a more natural fit), but just because I had a desire to understand it.
I took on a number of summer internships while I studied, the first of which was as a software engineer. I had never coded before in my life and was very intimidated at the interview. All the other candidates were young men who knew multiple programming languages and had numerous computer skills from setting up computer games as teenagers, back when I’d been spending my time running around on a farm and probably didn’t even have a working email address. When I got the job I was explicitly told that the company had surprised themselves in hiring me – I clearly had the least experience of anyone who had applied. They said that being a good software engineer and working well on their team had far more to do with how fast you can learn and your enthusiasm to pick it up than with whatever you knew before. I was both grateful for and encouraged by the experience. I spent the summer throwing myself into a brave new world of coding. Were it not for this experience I wonder whether I’d now be doing what I’m doing. Both because learning to code and to enjoy it was very important for subsequent research experience, and because it gave me the confidence to rely on my ability to learn things and work hard to get where I wanted to go.
The following two summers I took research internships, one on nuclear physics in my university department, and one at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, working on the particles accelerators that led to the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I fell in love with the exciting, international research atmosphere at CERN, and it was here that I first started really considering a career in research. I also formed firm friendships, many of which are still close today, and dispelled my misconceptions that I wouldn’t fit in with scientific community or that scientists were anything like the boring, socially awkward stereotypes I’d absorbed from popular culture.
I did a dual specialization for my masters in particle physics (the fundamental particles that make up atoms etc., not the atmospheric sort I study now) and atmospheric/oceanic physics, and understood that I’m most strongly motivated by scientific problems with a clear link to improving human lives. My imagination was also caught by he very tangible problems of atmospheric/oceanic physics. I remember revising for my exams by lying on a bench staring up the clouds moving across the sky picturing the equations that governed all the processes I was witnessing, and realizing I didn’t want to stop thinking about them once the exam was over. I started looking for opportunities to do a PhD in climate science.
My PhD brought me into the fascinating world of atmospheric aerosols, small liquid or solid drops in the air, that scatter sunlight and are the seeds on which clouds form. I joined a research group in Frankfurt, Germany, which also brought me back to CERN, where they were working on the aptly named CLOUD experiment. They had recently built a state-of-the-art chamber there to study these aerosols and their effect on climate. I spent 3 years between Germany and Switzerland measuring aerosols in this chamber, and understanding the ways in which they could form from different gases in the atmosphere.
The CLOUD chamber, with a grad student for scale
Having got to grips with aerosols in our amazingly well-controlled, simulated environment, I wanted to study them in their natural habitat. As I started looking for post-doc opportunities, I heard about the upcoming Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom), where a collaboration of scientists were planning to fly around the world on a NASA plane measuring gases and particles in the most remote corners of the atmosphere. I’d learned during my PhD how may places around the world we didn’t know what was going on with atmospheric aerosols at the small sizes at which I studied them, because we simply didn’t have the measurements. It made it difficult to test if the results from our chamber studies could be applied globally, and to see if our models of the atmosphere were accurate. This ATom project seemed like the perfect solution, I could hardly imagine a more scientifically necessary or personally exciting experiment.
The team planning to measure aerosols on this mission were based in the US at NOAA and the University of Colorado, in Boulder. I applied and got a position to work with them as a post-doc. I wrote like crazy to finish my dissertation in time and flew out to Colorado to begin the work I do now, understanding where particles in the remote atmosphere come from, and how they affect our climate.
