EOS

The InSight lading spacecraft, which successfully landed on Mars on 26 November 2018, contained a heat flow and physical properties (HP3) package. One component of this was a heating experiment designed to measure the Martian soil’s ability to transport heat. Grott et al. [2021] report on results of this experiment. Although HP3 was designed to be deployed in a vertical configuration below the ground up to 5 meters (16.4 feet) deep via a self-hammering penetrator dubbed the “mole”, a depth of only 30 centimeters was achieved due to issues with the deployment. However, that depth was sufficient to conduct the heating experiment (see image above).

Numerical modeling of the heating data resulted in soil thermal conductivity of 0.039 W/mK. This value is more than a factor of two smaller than determined at the Phoenix Mars mission, the only direct measurement of this quantity prior to InSight (Zent et al., 2010). The presence of cementing agents at Phoenix such as shallow subsurface water ice and perchlorate salts likely explain this difference. Overall, both values show that the Martian soil is a poor thermal conductor.

Comparisons with results from laboratory experiments were established to estimate the soil grain size, suggesting that the overwhelming majority of the soil particles are less than 200 microns or 0.2 mm (just over 1/16 inch) across, corresponding to a fine sand. This is consistent with the surface geology of the landing site, named Homestead hollow, being a depression filled with eolian or wind-blown deposits (Grant et al., 2020; Weitz et al., 2020). The heat flow data also suggested that the porosity values are high (>60%) and the degree of cementation is inferred to be low. This latter inference is a somewhat surprising result since visual observations strongly suggest the presence of a duricrust or partially cemented layer (Golombek et al., 2020; Marteau et al., 2021). The surface of Mars continues to yield mysteries, even when we dig beneath the surface.

Citation: Grott, M., Spohn, T., Knollenberg, J., Krause, C., Hudson, T. L., Piqueux, S., et al. [2021]. Thermal conductivity of the martian soil at the Insight landing site from HP3 active heating experiments. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 126, e2021JE006861. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JE006861

—Germán Martinez, Associate Editor, and Bradley J. Thomson, Editor, JGR: Planets

Geology and other geosciences, physical geography, and environmental sciences remain “disproportionately white” in the United Kingdom and the United States, according to a new study. Addressing reasons for this disparity and increasing minority representation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, the authors argue, are crucial for creating a stronger academic field that is more fully capable of meeting challenges that cross disciplines and policy.

According to the new research, published in Nature Geoscience, geoscience students represent a narrow subset of the population in the United Kingdom. Between 2018 and 2019, just 5.2% of physical geography, 6.9% of environmental science, and 10.4% of geology postgraduate students identified as Black, Asian, or minority ethnic (BAME), even though these groups represent 18.5% of the 18- to 24-year-old population. In the past 5 years, there have been two years when no Black women took up full-time postgraduate research in geology or physical geography programs.

The U.S. panorama doesn’t look better. In the past 40 years, about 85% of people earning doctorates in geosciences have come from white, non-Hispanic backgrounds. According to National Science Foundation data, of the 610 geoscience doctoral degrees awarded to U.S. citizens in 2016, white students received 480 (79%), Asian students 28 (5%), Hispanic or Latino students 27 (4%), Black or African American students 11 (2%), and Native American students 5 (less than 0.1%)

The researchers agree that inequitable access to geoscientific education has one of its roots in how geosciences were historically defined: with colonialism, white supremacy, and resource exploitation. This legacy prevents early-career Black, Asian, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and disabled researchers from identifying with the classic image of a geoscientist.

Natasha Dowey, a lecturer in physical geography at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom and lead author of the study, said that the first step to bridging the inclusion gap is decolonizing early geoscience education by supporting it with history and sociology classes for “telling the whole truth of the subject from different experiences and viewpoints.”

Big Changes Require Diverse Perspectives

To support these perspectives, professors have to understand that students from underrepresented backgrounds can identify with more than one cultural or social identity. Recognizing such intersectional identities will help in “making sure that no student has been left behind,” said Ann-Marie Núñez from the Department of Educational Studies of The Ohio State University. Núñez was not involved in the Nature Geoscience study.

Greater inclusion in geoscience will help communities outside academia, the report authors contend: From studying air, soil, and groundwater pollution to making risk assessments and finding new minerals, Earth and environmental studies have everything to do with addressing the climate crisis. “If we don’t have a diverse workforce working on those problems, how are we going to be genuinely tackling them equitably across all communities?” asked Dowey.

Mitzy Cortés was selected by the U.K. embassy in Mexico City as an “Ambassador for a Day” to discuss the need for including the perspectives of women from Indigenous communities in the framework of the 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26). Cortés is a Mixteca student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Mexican Indigenous Languages Promotion and Advocacy project.

“Our academic research is fully determined by our life experiences. And we’ve been historically excluded for where we’ve [been] born, the color of our skin, and our gender. There’s no way to save the planet if those oppression systems are not disarticulated.”From Cortés’s perspective, research and decisionmaking on climate change issues are still taken from a privileged-exclusionary perspective. Establishing clean energy projects such as wind farms or hydroelectric plants, for instance, has serious consequences in Native and Indigenous territories, where land dispossession is a familiar practice. Those industries are often accompanied by territorial militarization, she said, which increases violence, especially for women. Including the perspectives of those who have experienced such a situation, she explained, is a necessary practice to find solutions to climate issues that don’t perpetuate violence against women from rural and Indigenous communities.

Dealing with climate change is much more than diminishing carbon emissions, Cortés said. It’s understanding how the climate crisis differently affects all communities around the world, especially those that have been historically marginalized.

“Our academic research is fully determined by our life experiences. And we’ve been historically excluded for where we’ve [been] born, the color of our skin and our gender….There’s no way to save the planet if those oppression systems are not disarticulated,” she concluded.

Academic, Institutional, and Government Reform

To bridge the inclusion gap, not just in geoscience but in STEM in general, much more effort from academia, government, and institutions is needed, said the paper authors.

Starting to change the elitist logic of high-tariff universities’ recruitment processes is a good starting point, explained Christopher Jackson, chair in sustainable geoscience at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and a coauthor of the new study. The tariff classification system describes “a university’s reputation in the international marketplace” on the basis of established entry standards data. High-tariff universities in the United Kingdom include Oxford, Cambridge, and University College London.

“Recruitment processes have nothing to do with smartness. It’s the fact that some grow up in a better socioeconomic circumstance that allows them to get a high grade, that then allows them to get accepted into a specific university.”The admission standards used by high-tariff universities “have nothing to do with smartness,” Jackson said. “It’s the fact that some [applicants] grow up in a better socioeconomic circumstance that allows them to get a high grade, that then allows them to get accepted into a specific university.”

From the government side, many U.S. researchers say it’s necessary to support public minority-serving institutions (MSIs). MSIs enroll 16% of all African American students, 40% of all Hispanic American students, and a rapidly growing number of Asian American students in higher education, according to U.S. Department of the Interior data.

Institutions are also responding. In 2019, AGU started the first geoscience-focused inclusion initiative, the Bridge Program, as part of the Inclusive Graduate Education Network (IGEN). IGEN now has 31 partner institutions all over the United States.

The Bridge Program is focused on giving a second chance to students from underrepresented backgrounds—focusing on their personal stories, passions, and interests in science; mentoring them; and monitoring their academic development to ensure they graduate. These steps are needed to bridge the inclusion gap, said Pranoti Asher, assistant director for grants and education programs at AGU.

Like Cortés, Asher emphasized the importance of recognizing diverse perspectives when addressing the climate crisis and other instances of global change. “That’s what is needed to help future geoscientists to become the broad diverse thinkers that we need to solve all the incoming issues for the next decades,” Asher said.

—Humberto Basilio (@humbertobasilio), Science Writer

In the Peruvian Amazon, deforestation is being driven by illegal gold mining, logging, and clear-cutting for cultivation of crops like palm oil and coca. Between 2001 and 2016, the Peruvian Amazon lost nearly 2 million hectares of forest.

More than one third of the Amazon rain forest falls within the territory of more than 3,000 formally acknowledged Indigenous groups, but the size and inaccessibility of Indigenous Peoples’ territory in the Amazon mean that timely alerts from satellite data can make a big difference in their existing antideforestation patrol efforts. For example, alerts can allow communities to take preventive actions, such as blocking the rivers where loggers entered.

To determine the effectiveness of timely deforestation alerts derived from recent satellite data, Indigenous Peoples in the Peruvian Amazon teamed up with scientists and conservation organizations. They analyzed deforestation rates in Indigenous communities with access to alerts about deforestation in their territory and compared them with rates from groups using other patrol methods.

The findings, published in July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), showed that from 2018 to 2020, there was a notable reduction in tree cover loss among communities with access to satellite data.

The study suggested that governments should provide Indigenous communities greater access to satellite data. “As a policymaker, you want to know: If a monitoring method works on this site, it might work somewhere else,” said Tara Slough, assistant professor of politics at New York University and lead author of the paper.

Training Locals to Monitor Forests Kichwa forest monitors fill out a deforestation report in Sunullacta, Peru. Credit: Melvin Shipa Sihuango/ORPIO/RFUS

In 36 out of 73 participating Indigenous communities, researchers trained local people to use a combination of two smartphone mapping applications (Locus Map and Global Forest Watcher), with monitors receiving monthly deforestation alerts from Peru’s national GeoBosques deforestation-monitoring platform, which uses NASA’s Landsat data. They could then head out with the phone, document the problem area, see what activities were going on, and make a report to the community council.

Wendy Pineda, a project coordinator for Rainforest Foundation US—the rights-based forest protection organization that funded the research project—has been working for more than a decade to bring more high-tech monitoring tools to Indigenous communities.

For this study, each of the noncontrol communities designed its own monitoring plan, tailored to existing and potential threats in its area. For example, a Ticuna community in Buen Jardin de Callaru that was heavily threatened by land invasion from coca farmers was encouraged to send its monitoring data of 7 hectares of deforestation to Peru’s Environmental Prosecutor’s Office. As a result, the invaders left, deforestation halted, and the community is now the beneficiary of a reforestation project.

“Indigenous Peoples have done [forest monitoring] for their entire existence and will continue to do so, only now they can be more decisive, thanks to technology.”“Indigenous Peoples have done [forest monitoring] for their entire existence and will continue to do so, only now they can be more decisive, thanks to technology,” Pineda said. “Satellite imagery and technology…only complemented and enhanced the effectiveness of their plans.”

Jorge Perez is president of the Indigenous People’s Organization of the Eastern Amazon (ORPIO), which has long fought for land rights and preventing deforestation. ORPIO’s member communities participated in the study, and according to Perez, they are the ones who know the territory, know its problems, and feel the impacts of deforestation.

According to Perez, the satellite information aided Indigenous monitors in responding more quickly to sites where illegal deforestation was taking place. More immediate notification also allowed authorities, like the Ministry of Environment and the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office, to build the case against those engaged in illegal activity.

“Communities are experiencing the positive impacts of the intervention, so many continued to monitor even when funding ended and the pandemic began,” Pineda said.

Empirical Evidence

Ane Alencar, director of science for the Amazon Environmental Research Institute who wasn’t involved in the PNAS study, said empirical evidence of deforestation reduction helps generate strong arguments and ideas for policymakers.“Communities are experiencing the positive impacts of the intervention, so many continued to monitor even when funding ended and the pandemic began.”

“In this case, the availability of real-time information on deforestation…seemed to end up empowering the communities to do peer enforcement,” Alencar said. Consistency is key, she warned: Over time, the effect of community empowerment may fade away if offenders perceive that there are no consequences.

One criticism of the PNAS paper is that none of the authors are from Peru, raising the specter of colonial science, in which local collaborators contribute to a major paper in a prestigious journal published by scientists from the Global North but don’t receive the academic benefits of being named as authors.

“I think it is very important to engage local actors or experts in scientific studies, since they are aware of the context and they are able to redirect and enrich any discussion or conclusion, while avoiding any possibility of misinterpretation of the results,” Alencar said.

Back in the Peruvian Amazon, Perez said he wants more climate funding, including a recent commitment from Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States, to arrive directly to Indigenous communities to help them to continue to defend their territory.

“Even if funds run out, we are able to continue to use this knowledge,” he said.

—Andrew J. Wight (@ligaze), Science Writer

Much like the oceans, the atmosphere on Earth oscillates on a global scale. The so-called atmosphere tides depend on the Sun’s heat and gravity, as well as the pull of the Moon and Earth’s own rotation. In the troposphere, scientists have identified a regular tide, which they call DW1, that has a 24-hour period and a zonal wave number of 1. Zonal wave number refers to the number of troughs and peaks that can be observed simultaneously in a wave as it circles the entire globe, meaning in this case that there is only one of each.

Researchers have known for several decades that DW1 exists in large part because of heating related to tropospheric water vapor, which then propagates up into the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. During the 2015 El Niño, scientists saw an anomalously large enhancement of DW1.

In a new study, Kogure and Liu sought to explain the cause of that enhancement by investigating two potential drivers. First, they looked at the effect of enhanced tropospheric tidal heating caused by El Niño. However, the team reported the 2015 El Niño event had increased heating by 0.4 milliwatt per kilogram, which equates to only an extra 5%. In turn, the team says, 5% more tropospheric heating could explain only 7% of the thermal tide enhancement.

The other 93% comes from a reduction in dissipation in the atmosphere. As soon as DW1 begins to propagate, it also begins to dissipate as the air it’s pushing into drags against it, which is part of the natural life cycle of the tide. However, during the 2015 El Niño, wind impacts on the thermal tide were greatly reduced, causing less dissipation and a net enhancement of DW1. Specifically, the researchers suggest that quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) in the lower stratosphere can account for the reduced dissipation by suppressing the vertical wavelength and wind shear in the northward direction. The QBO explains how equatorial zonal winds shift from easterlies to westerlies in the stratosphere roughly every 2 years. The 2015 El Niño corresponded to an eastward QBO phase, which the researchers say created the favorable conditions for the enhanced thermal tide. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JA029342, 2021)

—David Shultz, Science Writer

Atmospheric circulation carries vast quantities of dust from the Sahara westwards, over the Atlantic Ocean and toward the Caribbean. van der Does et al. (2021) report a unique time series of Saharan dust transport, sampled directly from the atmosphere by surface buoys, and dust deposition, sampled by subsurface sediment traps at two depths along a transect in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean. In particular, this study has revealed important insights in the effects of long-range transport and (dry and wet) deposition of mineral dust on the grain-size distributions and deposition fluxes. It is shown that large differences in dust characteristics exist between transport and deposition, while rain deposits more and coarser dust. The reported unique dust deposition database will be very useful to the global climate modeling community and others.

Citation: van der Does, M., Brummer, G.-J. A., Korte, L. F., & Stuut, J.-B. W. [2021]. Seasonality in Saharan dust across the Atlantic Ocean: From atmospheric transport to seafloor deposition. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 126, e2021JD034614. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JD034614

—Ping Yang, Editor, JGR: Atmospheres

For the first time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report includes a chapter on extreme weather and climate.

Chapter 11 of the 4,000-page Working Group I Sixth Assessment Report explains the connection between rising global temperatures and recent extreme weather events such as heat waves, heavy precipitation, floods, droughts, and storms. Extreme events are increasingly likely and intense because of fossil fuel emissions warming the planet.The 2018 May–August heat waves and droughts would not have happened without human-induced climate change.

The report does not contain studies published after 31 January of this year, so it does not assess recent events, including the floods in central Europe and China or wildfires in the Mediterranean and western United States. But it points out events of several years ago, like the 2018 May–August heat waves and droughts that swept across the Northern Hemisphere and melted roads, wilted crops, and killed thousands of people. The events would not have happened without human-induced climate change.

“Using sports terms, one could say that the atmosphere has been exposed to doping,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which sponsors the IPCC report with the United Nations.

The previous IPCC assessment, in 2013, concluded that human influences had been detected in changes of some climate extremes. Now, that’s an “established fact,” according to the report released 9 August.

Scientific advancements in the past decade made the difference in being able to assess the relationship between climate change and extreme weather. Researchers have a better physical understanding of Earth’s processes than ever before. Scientists have better access to different types of climate models and better data sets. Even a relatively benign sounding improvement—a finer horizontal resolution in computer models that simulate extreme events—bolstered scientists’ grasp on extreme weather.

The explosive growth in the field of attribution science gave the report’s authors many more studies to pull from, too. Attribution science started in earnest as recently as 2004, with a breakthrough study in Nature on a heat wave in Europe. Since then, the field has taken off. Just a week after the end of a record-breaking heat wave in the western United States, a World Weather Attribution study found that climate change made the heat wave 150 times more likely and increased peak temperature by 2°C.

Unlike individual studies, the IPCC report combines the results of 14,000 published references to paint a picture of global change. It found profound and extensive changes to the planet’s extreme weather patterns.Heat extremes are increasing across more than 80% of the world’s land regions.

Heat extremes are increasing across more than 80% of the world’s land regions. The area of land affected by droughts has been growing.

The atmosphere is now holding more moisture, and increased precipitation has caused more flash floods and surface water floods. Weather systems like atmospheric rivers and tropical cyclones now carry more water. Peak wind speeds in tropical cyclones have increased.

Weather conditions contributing to wildfires are now more probable in some regions, and compound flooding—when a storm surge couples with extreme rainfall and river flow­—has grown more common.

“It is indisputable that human activities have caused and are causing climate change. But what’s new in this report is that we now have a much more advanced understanding of the connections between the emissions that were released under the rise in global surface temperature and the change to weather and the climate that we are seeing around the world,” said Panmao Zhai, cochair of the latest IPCC report.

What the Future Will Bring

The planet has warmed 1.1°C since the 1850s. The IPCC report estimates that global temperatures will surpass 1.5°C by the 2030s and that we are currently heading toward a 2°C or 3°C warming overall.

In a 2°C warmer world, precipitation and drought events that previously happened once every 10 years will be approximately twice as likely to occur. For extreme heat, once-in-a-decade events will be 5 times more likely.At 4°C, 50% of all land will be affected by droughts.

The effects would be even more severe for 4°C warming, which is possible if fossil fuel emissions increase over the next century instead of tapering off. At 4°C warmer, 50% of all land will be affected by droughts. The frequency of 10-year precipitation events would double, and the occurrence of 50-year events would triple.

Jonathan London, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, studies the effects of drought on health and equity in California. He said the drought has far-reaching consequences: Low-income workers in agricultural or outdoor jobs lose employment when less water is allocated to farms. Home wells go dry. The state’s Central Valley already has poor air quality, and droughts make it worse as dust blows off dry fields.

“Every fraction of a degree [of warming] matters for human health,” said Mona Sarfaty, executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, a coalition of medical societies representing more than half of all U.S. doctors. “America’s doctors are already seeing the health toll of climate change.”

Although scientific understanding has made significant progress, researchers aren’t sure how to determine the likelihood of extreme events that have tremendous societal consequences but are very unusual—like Hurricane Harvey in the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2017, Tropical Cyclone Idai in Mozambique in 2019, and bushfires in Australia in 2019–2020. The data for low-probability, high-impact events are so sparse that the report gave the scientific understanding of these events a “low confidence” rating. Still, the authors warned that these events would become more likely as the climate enters a new normal, especially in a 4°C warmer world.

It is “extremely important” that these factors be considered for risk management, said IPCC Working Group I cochair Valérie Masson-Delmotte. Only half of WMO’s 193 member countries have early-warning weather systems, an important tool for saving lives and property during extreme events.

“We still have a chance to stop the negative climate trend during the middle of the century,” said WMO’s Taalas, “especially by limiting the use of fossil fuels and by stopping deforestation.”

—Jenessa Duncombe (@jrdscience), Staff Writer

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. 本文是Eos文章的授权翻译。

上新世晚期，北极海冰开始迅速扩张。新形成的冰造成了海平面、反照率、热盐环流以及许多其他因素的变化，这些因素至今仍在推动着地球的气候变化。但对科学家来说，拼凑出导致冰层迅速膨胀的原因一直是一个艰巨的目标。

现在，马严等人的一项新研究表明，海洋扩张的时间与277万年前西伯利亚额尔齐斯河的形成相吻合。此前的研究表明，额尔齐斯河曾经是一系列内陆河流，流入中国西北部准噶尔盆地的一个大型古湖泊。但在某个时刻，盆地破裂，额尔齐斯河开始向北流向大海。

通过分析氖-21和铝-26/铍-10的同位素，研究人员确定了这一关键事件发生的时间。像这样的同位素可以用来确定岩石和沉积物样本的年代，因为它们在本质上是宇宙成因的，衰变速度不同，这意味着如果样本在表面暴露在宇宙射线下，同位素就会产生。然后，如果样本被掩埋，不同的核素将以不同的速度衰变，这将有助于了解样本与宇宙射线隔离了多长时间。利用这项技术，科学家们重建了准噶尔盆地的大部分地质历史，并揭示了西伯利亚-北极河流系统开始向北冰洋供应淡水的时间。

由额尔齐斯河提供的新水在位于西伯利亚以西的喀拉海中形成了大约9米厚的淡水层。科学家们表示，淡水的突然涌入会破坏水的垂直稳定性，并加强垂直环流的分层。这些变化加在一起，在北极产生了更多的海冰，这些海冰又产生了一系列基于反照率的反馈，造成了更冷的温度和更多的冰。研究结果显示，即便是单一的淡水输入，也会对海冰的形成和整个地球的气候产生难以置信的影响。(Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL093217, 2021)

-科学作家David Shultz

This translation was made by Wiley. 本文翻译由Wiley提供。

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Ashlee Wilkins realized that she might not want to be an academic researcher before she started graduate school.

Wilkins was an intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the summers before and after her senior undergraduate year at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. She was working with the deputy project scientist of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission just before its launch in late 2009, and that same scientist was already planning for the telescope’s postmission life, named NEOWISE. It gave Wilkins the chance to see the final stages before a mission launches as well as the first stages as a new idea takes hold.

“I was learning a lot about…prioritizing the right time to do what kind of mission, or how you decide on big-picture science questions and fitting missions into a larger strategy,” Wilkins said. “That was just really exciting to me.”

The desire to learn about mission planning influenced her decision to attend graduate school at the University of Maryland (UMD) in College Park, not far from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, where Wilkins worked for a time. In addition to her graduate research about exoplanets, she helped start and lead an initiative called GRAD-MAP, which connects UMD graduate students with undergraduates from minority-serving institutions in the mid-Atlantic region. The program “continued this evolution of my interest in how we do the science, and who gets to do the science, and the strategy for science, and not just the actual research itself.”

Wilkins’s shift toward a policy focus was ushered along with her election to student government in graduate school. “As a graduate student there are a lot of opportunities to get involved at very high levels of the university,” she said. Moreover, living so close to the nation’s capital offered her the chance to attend hearings and see science policy in action. After graduate school, she became the John Bahcall Public Policy Fellow at the American Astronomical Society, which is “specifically designed to take a Ph.D. scientist and provide them with the opportunity to learn…about the world of science and space policy.”

“I was lucky in the timing because it was in my second year of the fellowship when the Democrats took the House in 2018,” she said. The results of the election meant that the former minority party would soon be hiring staff for the committees they would run, and it just so happened that a position opened up in the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. “I had the experience of the fellowship behind me—and I had interacted with the person who was my future boss through my work as the Bahcall Fellow.”

Out of 35 or so staffers in the majority office of the House Science Committee, Wilkins is one of three who focus on space topics. You can follow Wilkins on Twitter (@ashleeeeew) and the subcommittee for updates on science and space policy.

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@AstroKimCartier), Staff Writer

Rebecca Charbonneau is a Cuban American historian who recently earned a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge researching the history and philosophy of science. She is also a Gates Scholar who has studied, among other things, settler and colonialist science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and Soviet and Cold War rocket and space science.

Before she earned her master of science from the University of Oxford, however, Charbonneau was an astronomy major at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. After leaving Mount Holyoke for personal reasons, she ended up at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., to be near family. There Charbonneau double majored in art history and critical media and cultural studies (“like sociology, but with applied elements”) and double minored in sexuality, women’s, and gender studies and English.

Charbonneau said that having a varied undergraduate background in liberal arts is something she brought to her graduate studies of science: “A lot of the contemporary challenges that exist in the sciences, especially the space sciences today, have historical roots.”

“Scientific fields tend to take objectivity for granted,” she said, explaining that “[scientists] often don’t realize how they have inherited a lot of their ways of thinking.” Charbonneau has continued to unpack these ways of thinking with stops at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Whipple Library at Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science, as well as at NASA’s History Office. Since last fall, she has been at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as their historian-in-residence.

“I was incredibly intimidated when I started entering spaces like Oxford, Cambridge, NASA,” Charbonneau said. “There are pieces of dust in there that are older than me and have seen more of history that I have even studied.… I think that we build up these places as larger than life, and that prevents us from seeing how we belong in those places.… If I had managed to learn that earlier, I might have gotten to the place that I am more quickly.”

Charbonneau identified two mentors who helped her overcome some initial intimidation. “Two people from Rollins were incredibly influential to me: Kim Dennis and Mackenzie Moon Ryan. Having women professors and academic role models was really valuable in helping me see that I could attain this. And this was especially valuable because my field of history of science, especially history of physics and astronomy, is really male dominated.”

Her identity as a Cuban American helped contextualize Charbonneau’s academic interests. In particular, she is interested in “giving voices to people in history who haven’t had their voices acknowledged. I mean communities that have been affected by colonialism, but I also mean people who have not been able to enter the historical record for a variety of reasons.”

“I’m actually really proud of the work I’ve done in Russia, for example. Because of the Putin administration’s crackdown on access to records, it’s really, really hard to do history of Soviet science. And because of that, there’s this image that there weren’t a lot of contributions from the Soviet astronomers, the Russian astronomers. Part of what I’ve done is a lot of oral history interviews where I’ve gone over and I’ve spoken to people and tried to record their stories. It’s really a beautiful thing for me to be able to preserve these people’s voices.”

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Camilo Garzón

Ashley Lindalía Walker’s academic interests started close to home and have traveled millions of kilometers. “I’m a nontraditional student,” said the Chicago native. “I started off in community college” in 2015, she said, studying forensic chemistry. “I really wanted to help understand what was happening and solve some of Chicago’s crime and things of that nature. But [then] I received a scholarship at my now alma mater, Chicago State University (CSU), the only Black 4-year college in Illinois.”

Once at CSU, Walker took an opportunity to participate in an astronomy research project, which quickly became her primary research focus. While still studying forensic chemistry, she interned at Harvard University researching planet-forming disks and at Johns Hopkins University studying aerosol hazes in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan.

Many community college students earn their associate’s degree within 2 years and then complete their bachelor’s degree in another 2 years, she explained. “However, it took me a little bit longer.” After graduating from CSU in 2020 as the first astrochemist in the university’s history, she became a postbaccalaureate researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center investigating Titan’s atmospheric chemistry.

For the past few years, Walker has also focused on science communication, especially highlighting the experiences and amplifying the voices of Black scientists. As calls for racial justice increased during 2020, Walker founded and organized the first Black In Astro week on social media and co-organized Black in X events in other disciplines.

“I wanted to show some of the issues that we face as Black astronomers, aerospace engineers, space policy people, and so on,” Walker said. “I really wanted to show last year: This is what’s happened to us. There’s not many of us in the field or within these spaces. How can you all make us feel better? How can you all make us feel comfortable? This is what we see through our eyes and through our lens. This year we’re focusing on a celebration versus trauma. Now that we told our story and people know our story, we want to focus on celebrating us and how can we retain us and continuously recruit more of us.”

She plans to continue her work as a science communicator as she pursues a doctoral degree in atmospheric science at Howard University starting this fall. Walker (@That_Astro_Chic) encourages everyone to join in celebrating and amplifying Black experiences in space-related fields with Black In Astro (@BlackInAstro) during the annual #BlackInAstro events on social media and all year round.

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@AstroKimCartier), Staff Writer

In June 2015, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck Sabah, a state of Malaysia in the northern part of the island of Borneo.

“It was a big surprise in Malaysia because, actually, we never experienced a magnitude 6 [earthquake] in that region,” said Navakanesh M Batmanathan. The seismic event was located away from active plate boundaries. M Batmanathan was in the perfect position to investigate what happened. He’d been fascinated with rocks ever since he was a child and, at the time, was pursuing a master’s degree in geophysics and seismology at Curtin University in Malaysia. His adviser encouraged him to focus on the Sabah earthquake, given its surprising nature.

M Batmanathan mapped faults that contributed to the quake by using a combination of satellite data and on-the-ground field measurements. These methods also allowed him the opportunity to engage with residents in Sabah. He learned not only about how the event affected people living in the area but also that there was a lack of awareness about earthquake hazards in the region.

As the recipient of a National Geographic Young Explorer grant, M Batmanathan helped to produce a short documentary that combined locals’ stories with educational information about the Sabah earthquake. He and his colleagues also taught schoolchildren in Sabah.

M Batmanathan is now a Ph.D. student at the National University of Malaysia and continues to study earthquakes—but from a slightly different perspective. He’s exploring potential connections between tectonics and sea level rise, not only in East Malaysia, where Borneo is located, but in peninsular Malaysia as well. He’s also a research assistant at the Southeast Asia Disaster Prevention Research Initiative.

In addition to fieldwork, Navakanesh M Batmanathan and his colleagues educated children in Sabah. Here M Matmanathan (center) is pictured at a school visit. Credit: Eric Chiang Hinn Yuen

M Batmanathan has done outreach on a range of science topics and attributes at least some of his success to tailoring content to different audiences, depending on their immediate concerns: He spoke about earthquakes with kids from Sabah, for instance, but focused on climate change and sea level rise with children from coastal communities in peninsular Malaysia. Determining the emphasis of community-focused outreach “depends on the region,” he said.

In the future, M Batmanathan hopes to continue educating people in Malaysia and, someday, Southeast Asia more broadly. The region is one of the most geologically active in the world—in addition to earthquakes, it is home to volcanoes, tsunamis, and landslides. “Southeast Asia is huge—we definitely need more groups to work on this,” he said.

M Batmanathan recently presented his work on the earthquake geology of Borneo at a webinar from the U-INSPIRE Alliance, an alliance of youth, young scientists, and young professionals working in science, engineering, technology, and innovation to support disaster risk reduction and resilience building, in line with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. He also regularly posts about earthquakes on Instagram (@navakanesh).

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Jack Lee, Science Writer

Science journalist Robin George Andrews remembers first seeing a volcano—albeit an imaginary one—in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The ominous Death Mountain had sentient lava and monsters prowling its hollowed-out insides.

“It was all very fantastical,” Andrews said, and as a 10-year-old growing up in the United Kingdom, Death Mountain set him on a quest to visit real-life volcanoes around the world as a scientist. Now Andrews writes about volcanoes for National Geographic, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and other publications.

Andrews started out on a typical academic track. After earning strong grades in high school and encouragement from geography teachers, he attended a special program at Imperial College London. The program allows secondary students to earn a master’s degree in geology in just 4 years, bypassing a bachelor’s degree.

His next stop, after a year of rest, took Andrews to the volcano-ridden islands of New Zealand, where he studied at the University of Otago for his Ph.D. and helped create laboratory experiments that modeled volcanic eruptions. Although his work took him around the world, living in a quiet university town left the highly extroverted Andrews feeling isolated. Academia was losing its sheen too: Chasing funding frustrated him, and he didn’t like the prospect of leaving friends and family every few years for new posts.

Andrews hikes on a trip funded by the European Space Agency to take writers to see the northern lights in Norway. The photo “belies the fact that I recently fell right into a snowbank.” Credit: Robin George Andrews

Andrews started writing blog posts for Nature’s Scitable, the Earth Touch News Network, Discover, and Forbes—and found he actually preferred telling stories of science to doing it.

Andrews didn’t know any journalists, let alone science journalists, but after he graduated, he emailed an editor he admired at Gizmodo and scored a gig writing articles for her. From there, he cold-pitched National Geographic, Scientific American, and the New York Times, landing articles in publications he thought would take years to break into. “I put so much work into getting to that point,” Andrews said, bypassing sleep for almost a year and a half to build his reputation as “the New York Times volcano guy.” His own stubbornness and the emotional support from his partner and parents helped him make the jump from science to journalism.

Now Andrews freelances full-time and writes for a dozen publications. “Most science journalists have a beat of some sort, and my beat is generally things that explode in space or on Earth.” His first book, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About Earth and the Worlds Beyond, comes out this November. In it, readers can learn about strange volcanoes across the cosmos, like Tharsis on Mars, which tipped the entire planet 20 degrees. “To me, it sounds like magic sorcery”—or perhaps something out of a video game, he said.

Andrews welcomes messages from those interested in science writing through his website (robingeorgeandrews.com) or on Twitter (@SquigglyVolcano).

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Jenessa Duncombe (@jrdscience), Staff Writer

A Gwich’in scientist from Beaver, Alaska, Darcy L. Peter spent her childhood on the land around her Alaska Native village hunting, fishing, and trapping. Now she studies the Arctic tundra with the Woodwell Climate Research Center, where she investigates climate change while building bridges between Indigenous communities and research scientists.

Peter majored in environmental biology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. After graduating, she returned to Alaska for a 1-month Arctic research program with the Polaris Project.

That summer shaped Peter’s career in two pivotal ways: One, she fell in love with field research, and two, she found a workplace that valued her ideas. She pointed out an opportunity for Polaris to connect with the local people near their field site, so the project leaders invited her back the next two summers. It was “really cool as an Indigenous young career person to have my voice be valued and heard.”

For the next 2 years, Peter took jobs at several Alaskan Native nonprofits working with Alaska Native communities on issues such as permafrost erosion and contamination cleanup. She began volunteering on half a dozen boards that control the state’s fishing and river regulations to increase Indigenous participation.

Peter started graduate studies in wildlife biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks 2 years after graduating college but quickly felt stifled. She had to pass up job offers, like an executive director position at an Alaska Native organization, and was already familiar with the communities she was now reading about in papers. She left after 3 months and soon landed her “dream job” back where she’d started her career: the Polaris Project at Woodwell Climate.

Darcy L. Peter, left, crouches on the tundra to study the effects of Arctic climate change in southwestern Alaska. Peter credits her boss at the Polaris Project, Sue Natali, right, for being a steadfast ally to her. “She has the same values as me in terms of family, diversity, inclusion, communication, [and] ethical research.” Credit: Chris Linder“I am trained to be a scientist, but the cutting-edge science that is being done is not what I’m most proud of. It’s definitely the relationship building, making sure that the science is communicated, making sure the science is ethical, making sure that we’re incorporating Traditional Knowledge into our science…that is the most rewarding work.”

White-dominated spaces, including academia and workplaces, can be taxing on the mental health of scientists of color, particularly women of color, Peter said. But at Polaris, Peter is encouraged to think creatively, and when she presents an idea, her supervisor often tells her to “run with it.” Case in point: Peter wrote a guide for equitable research in the Arctic. “That’s something I’m pretty proud of because it’s gotten a lot of traction in the science world,” she said.

Peter encourages people to follow her on Twitter (@darcypeter1) and familiarize themselves with the Woodwell Climate Research Center’s guiding principles for working in local northern communities.

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Jenessa Duncombe (@jrdscience), Staff Writer

By her bedside, Fushcia-Ann Hoover still has the iron table lamp she welded as a 13-year-old in her junior high industrial technology class. “I like working with my hands,” Hoover said.

Now an assistant professor of environmental planning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, her passion as a “maker” drew her not only to engineering but also to business. In 2020, she founded EcoGreenQueen LLC to help people better integrate environmental justice into their work.

Hoover began her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota in 2005. During a summer abroad course in Germany studying renewable energies and her research on ethynyl as a McNair Scholar, she thought she’d found her calling. But when she graduated from college at the height of the Great Recession, the environmental engineering jobs she wanted required either a master’s degree or substantial work experience.

Instead, she took a job as a tutor in her hometown at Saint Paul Public Schools while researching graduate schools. “I used that time to really try and focus on where and what to study,” she said. Working as a tutor had a lasting impact on her career: Hoover noticed that her students, many of whom were people of color, faced challenges both inside and outside the classroom that made it difficult for them to excel. She had a realization that would serve as a guiding principle in her master’s and doctoral work in ecological science and engineering at Purdue University 2 years later. “Whatever it was that I was going to do, if it wasn’t going to somehow make [the students’] lives better, then I wasn’t interested in doing it.”

Hoover embarked on transdisciplinary research at Purdue, work that would pave the way to consulting in her specialty of urban green infrastructure. In her dissertation, she not only conducted an analysis of watersheds but also interviewed Black residents in Chicago’s South Side and city planners about Chicago’s green infrastructure practices. She sees a dire need for geoscientists to include communities in projects and critically examine power structures.

During her second postdoc, Hoover founded her consulting company to assist professionals, researchers, and government officials looking to incorporate environmental justice or interdisciplinary methods into their business, scholarship, or city plans.

Looking back at her career, she’s proudest of how she’s upheld her values. “I don’t have to leave out race or leave out water,” she said. “I get to bring everything in and say, ‘No, this is all important…and we’re going to talk about it.’”

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Jenessa Duncombe (@jrdscience), Staff Writer

Aisha Morris’s interest in geology runs deep. Growing up, she collected and cleaned rocks, and then sold them to the kids around her suburban Minnesota neighborhood. But despite this early financial success, it wasn’t until college that she seriously considered geology as a career path.

Morris was hooked as an undergraduate at Duke University, after Jeff Karson (now at Syracuse University) offered her a research opportunity studying mid-ocean rifts. “It was a challenge, because I was learning how to do research and ask questions,” Morris said, “but it was also very empowering to create knowledge as an undergrad.”

The project culminated in a senior thesis and a chance to dive in the Alvin submersible. With Alvin, she was able to see directly the rift she had been studying, through a porthole instead of on a screen.

Later, as a grad student at the University of Hawai‘i, Morris was wary of work–life imbalances and the lack of diversity in academia. She found a postdoc position with Karson that allowed her to work on both research and broadening participation activities among underrepresented groups.

She quickly learned that the work she was doing to create and support a more diverse scientific community was more fulfilling than the research. So Morris left academia in 2013 to further pursue that community building, first at UNAVCO and then at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where she is now a program director for Education and Human Resources.

Not everyone understood Morris’s decision to leave the academic path. “Sometimes you have to create your own pathway,” she said. “Who knows what kind of path you’re opening up for others in your forging ahead?”

At NSF, Morris is working to bring previously excluded groups into the geosciences through programs like the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) initiative. IUSE funds projects for precollege, undergraduate, and graduate students with a focus on service learning and outreach to historically excluded groups and from nongeoscience degree programs.

Success in the sciences doesn’t look like a tenure-track professorship at an R1 institution for everyone, she said. For Morris, the ultimate success would be to work herself out of a job by creating a community so welcoming it no longer needed the kind of broadening participation initiatives to which she’s dedicated her career.

To keep up with Morris’s work, follow her on Twitter (@volcanogirl17) or the Education and Human Resources portal at NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences.

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Kate Wheeling

Karen Layou started her college career as a chemical engineering major. But after a year and a half, she realized she hated it. One day she stumbled upon a small museum on the Penn State campus, tucked away in the geology building.

“It was like being reunited with old friends,” Layou said. She’d collected rocks as a child and even categorized them for a third-grade science fair project. The mineral samples and fossils in the museum’s collection reawakened her childhood interests, including a passion for paleontology sparked by a family road trip to the Grand Canyon when she was in high school.

At the museum Layou decided to go upstairs to the geology office and ended up speaking with the dean, and changed her major that day. Layou graduated and went on to complete a master’s program at the University of Cincinnati before working for what is now the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. While she learned a lot, she wasn’t satisfied.

As a high-schooler, Layou visited the Grand Canyon with her family—and was inspired to pursue a geoscience career. She is pictured here with her mother. Credit: Karen Layou

“I decided that, no, I need to go back and get [a] Ph.D. to fulfill that promise I made to myself, to get myself back out to landscapes I love,” Layou said. She earned a Ph.D. in geology at the University of Georgia and then obtained a position at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., as a sabbatical replacement. She found that she enjoyed teaching and “cobbled together” a career by working as an adjunct professor at several schools. In 2013, she became a professor of geology at Reynolds Community College in Richmond, Va.

Since then, Layou has been involved in Supporting and Advancing Geoscience Education at Two-Year Colleges, or SAGE 2YC. The project aims to broaden participation in the geosciences, clarify transfer and workforce pathways for students at 2-year colleges, and emphasize best teaching practices for faculty. Layou especially loves sharing science with nonscience majors and “spreading the love—the geo love.”

SAGE 2YC has also been able to provide mentoring for students and send them to the annual Virginia Geological Field Conference. “We were able to bring 2-year college students to mix with professional geologists and just talk about a day in the life of their jobs,” Layou said. She will also continue to further geoscience education as the incoming president of the Geo2YC division of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.

Layou encourages audiences to learn more about SAGE 2YC and also to check out the free online textbook she’s been working on.

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Jack Lee, Science Writer

For Munazza Alam, pondering the stars is part of being human. “Everyone, at some point, has looked up at the sky and contemplated the cosmos,” she said.

Yet as a New Yorker, Alam grew up without truly seeing the stars, because of light pollution. It took a couple of pivotal mentors and a trip to Arizona to bend her trajectory toward the Ph.D. in astronomy that she recently earned from Harvard University.

“I was always a curious child,” Alam said. In high school, she channeled this curiosity into physics class, where she was captivated by the way her teacher, Betty Jensen, unveiled the inner workings of the universe. Jensen was also the first woman Alam met who’d earned a Ph.D. in physics. Because of her, Alam started wondering whether academics could be her path too.

Alam wanted to stay in New York City after high school, so she joined the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, City University of New York. This selective program covers its students’ tuition, which allowed Alam to attend college without going into debt.

Alam knew she wanted to major in physics, but her scheduling adviser told her she needed to choose a specific research direction. Try astronomy, her adviser suggested.

As a graduate student, Alam conducted research at Las Campanas Observatory. Above, she calibrates the observatory’s Magellan Clay Telescope in preparation for her first solo observing run. Credit: Munazza Alam

At age 19, a year into her career as an astronomy researcher, Alam traveled to Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. For the first time in her life, the Milky Way stretched before her, without interference from streetlights and apartment buildings. Alam was starstruck. “It’s just etched in my brain,” she said. The trip solidified her decision to become an astronomer.

Alam chose Harvard University for her graduate work because she found the astronomy department exciting and innovative. Her work focused on exoplanets, and she hopes it will one day reveal whether life exists outside our solar system.

Although Alam loved her work, she initially found graduate school exhausting. One of the most valuable lessons she learned is that it’s OK to take breaks.

As Alam begins a postdoctoral position at the Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory, she says she’s most proud of the network of mentors she’s built. She described her Ph.D. thesis adviser, Mercedes López-Morales, as “an absolute phenom,” and she’s also formed lasting connections with other faculty, staff, and students. To round out the crew, Alam still keeps in touch with her high school physics teacher, who attended Alam’s Ph.D. defense this past spring.

Alam welcomes messages through her website.

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Saima Sidik

In the early 1980s, when Rick Jones was studying geology as an undergraduate at the University of Wyoming, the U.S. oil business was booming. He anticipated a well-paid position following graduation and a stable career as a geologist. Then the oil industry went bust.

“[The economy] changed my trajectory,” said Jones. He was able to find work at companies that did groundwater monitoring, and in the mid-1980s, Jones found himself overseas, working with a nongovernmental organization installing water utilities in refugee camps. He became involved in sanitation education and quickly saw how “a little bit of education can go a long way.” When he came back to the United States, Jones decided to go back to school, getting a second bachelor’s degree in science education as well as a master’s in natural sciences at the University of Wyoming.

His first job after graduation was as a middle school science teacher in Lihue, Hawaii. The experience was eye-opening: “I got to realize really quicky that I had it pretty easy,” Jones said. “I realized that I really need to make sure that I give an opportunity to my students, so that they can definitely go wherever they want to go.”

A family circumstance led Jones and his wife to return to the mainland, to Billings, Mont. There, Jones was a middle and high school teacher for nearly 2 decades, teaching everything from Earth science to biology to physics.

A field mapping class at the University of Wyoming in 1982 inspired Rick Jones to earn a geology degree. Credit: Rick Jones

“The thing that you’re most proud about when you’re teaching,” Jones said, “is when somebody that you really didn’t think that you connected with comes back and says, ‘It’s because of you that I am a success.’”

Jones has continued to pursue his passion for teaching and learning, both inside and outside academia. He twice participated in the NOAA Teacher at Sea program and obtained a doctorate in education from Montana State University.

Jones has since moved back to Hawaii and is now a geoscience educator at the University of Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu. He is also president of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, where he aims to instill a love of learning in the next generation of science teachers.

Find out more about Jones on Twitter (@mtzennmaster), where you can follow his science advocacy as well as see his quilt designs and updates about his 55-year-old Volkswagen convertible, or at his website.

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Jack Lee, Science Writer

Zdenka Willis always loved the ocean. Every summer, her family trekked from Indiana to South Carolina, where Willis and her sisters combed the beaches for sharks’ teeth, watched the dolphins swim, and wondered what other marvels were out there, just out of view.

When it came time for college, Willis returned to the Eastern Seaboard to study marine science at the University of South Carolina. Encouraged by her father, who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia and joined the Army Reserves after settling in the United States, Willis applied for a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship. When she graduated in 1981, she became a U.S. Navy oceanographer.

Willis’s first assignment at sea was aboard a 122-meter hydrographic research vessel, where she led a small boat crew mapping the ocean floor off the coast of Haiti. In those days, Navy ships were still using paper charts, but as technology evolved and Willis’s responsibilities expanded, she helped the Navy transition to digital charts and adopt new weapons systems. Willis loved both the challenges and the opportunities presented by a military career. “You’re always being challenged with new ideas and new tasks, and that makes it exciting,” she said. “You certainly don’t get bored in your job.”

Zdenka Willis’s parents, Vladimir and Margaret Saba, attended her retirement ceremony as she left the U.S. Navy. Credit: Zdenka Willis

Willis retired from the Navy as a captain in 2006 and went to work for NOAA. There, she became the founding director of the agency’s U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System office, which aims to connect data, tools, and people all along the nation’s coasts. It was her broadest mission yet. Willis had spent her Navy career thinking about how what she was learning about the ocean might affect naval operations and warfare, whereas “at NOAA, I had to care about everything from microbes to whales and everything in between,” she said.

Willis currently serves as president of the Marine Technology Society, an international organization that “brings together businesses, institutions, professionals, academics, and students who are ocean engineers, technologists, policymakers, and educators” in the advancement and application of marine technologies.

Willis is working to make both the organization and the field of marine science in general more equitable and inclusive, adding programs and positions to support young professionals and promote women leaders. She is committed to providing young professionals the same kind of opportunities and support she received in the Navy, where shipmates take care of each other. “The Navy gives you responsibility, expects you to perform, but is a very supporting environment.”

To learn more about the Marine Technology Society and its programs, Willis encourages people to follow the society on Twitter (@MTSociety) or through its website (mtsociety.org/).

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Kate Wheeling, Science Writer

Cooper Elsworth can trace many of his career decisions back to his long-standing obsession with cycling. From a young age, he was amazed by the mechanics of the bikes that carried him along the roads and trails of rural Pennsylvania, where he grew up.

He was always interested in understanding how things worked. That interest fueled his undergraduate and master’s degrees in engineering, during which he worked on numerical methods to study fluid dynamics. When it came time to pursue a Ph.D., it was the hours he had spent biking, hiking, and kayaking with his family that inspired him to turn to the geosciences.

As Elsworth thought about how to apply his theoretical skills in fluid dynamics to applied science, studying ice sheets seemed a natural transition. “The ice sheets are really just very, very slow moving fluids,” he said. “Even more than that, I was excited about working on something climate related. The response of the ice sheets to climate change is one of the biggest unknowns in our projections of sea level rise, so it seemed like a really impactful area of research to go into.”

Initially, Elsworth felt empowered by basic science research and the opportunity to help answer outstanding questions about the climate system. Like most grad students, he planned to stay in academia. That began to change with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He watched the results come in from Antarctica, where he was studying how subglacial meltwater influences the large-scale ice flow, and afterward he grew increasingly troubled by the environmental deregulation and climate inaction of the Trump administration.

“We’ve had climate science saying this is something we need to act on for decades,” Elsworth said. He became increasingly interested in how to take that basic climate science and turn it into climate action. Now a Ph.D. candidate in geophysics at Stanford University, he turned his professional interest to the private sector.

Elsworth became an applied scientist and, more recently, a program manager at the sustainability start-up Descartes Labs, where he leads the production of sustainability tools that use remote sensing to track things like carbon emissions from agricultural and consumer goods supply chains.

Now he tells students stressing about life decisions after grad school that academia, private industry, and the public sector aren’t as siloed as they seem, nor should they be: “It’s really valuable, especially in sustainability research, to break down those silos and to realize that we’re all moving toward a common goal and we’re trying to solve a common problem.”

Elsworth encourages people to reach him through LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/coopere/) or his personal website (cooperelsworth.com).

This profile is part of a special series in our September 2021 issue on science careers.

—Kate Wheeling, Science Writer