Let’s go all the way back to where and when you were born, your family at the time, if you have any brothers and sisters, what your parents did, and if there was anything about those early years, or when was it actually that you developed an interest in what you have eventually pursued as a career? You call yourself a software engineer more than a scientist?
No, I call myself a scientist, first and foremost, a data scientist, but I do a lot of software work as well. I was born in England, in the UK. My dad ran his own business selling bread and baked goods. And my mom, when I was growing up, worked as a teaching assistant in the local primary school.
Where in England did you say?
Oh, in the Midlands of England, right in the middle. It’s a county in England. I had one brother growing up and he’s currently an engineer. Just one brother.
is your family still all in the UK, except for you?
Yeah, they’re all in the UK. They all live pretty close to where I grew up.
Have you been able to visit them during this pandemic?
Yes, I was able to visit them once during the pandemic, which was a few months ago. That was really great. It was the first time I had seen them in about two years.
And how early was it that you got some idea about the career you wanted to pursue?
My undergraduate work was in physics and astronomy. That was something I had wanted to do in high school, although I also gave some thought to pursuing an art career, which is something else I really enjoyed in high school where we did something called “A Levels” in the UK. So that was one path I considered, but I decided I liked physics better. I did my undergraduate at the University of Birmingham, and enjoyed it so much that I continued on to a master’s degree. And finally, when it came to the end of my master’s degree, I had to decide whether I wanted to go into industry or keep studying. I decided that I liked academia a lot so I pursued my PhD. At the end of my master’s degree, I had actually been working with Kepler data. Kepler is the exo-planet discovery mission that was run out of Ames. I had worked with the astro-seismology team at Birmingham, and that first opened my eyes to early Kepler data. That would have been about 2012, so it was pretty well into the mission. It was really exciting to get to work on that data set. And then when I joined the University of Cambridge and started my PhD, I really wanted to work on planets because I had become very interested in them from working on the Kepler data. And I had to fight a little bit to make sure I got to work on exoplanets. I ended up doing a lot of work with archival data. The benefit of archival data is that you don’t have to wait for someone to take it in from a telescope, you don’t have to go propose for it. The data is all there so I did a lot of work with Kepler and Hubble data.
You mentioned that you studied astronomy and physics in college. Was there anything in particular that piqued your interest? Was it looking at the night sky or was it a program on TV, or a personal contact with someone already involved in that discipline, that made you think “Hey, this might be a good thing to study and learn about?”
I can’t recall that there was a particular event where I was inspired to study astronomy. I think astronomy is one of those subjects that’s really an approachable part of physics. A lot of people get into it because everybody can see the stars. So that was the area that I wanted to study and that was the university where I got to do it.
It seems to have been a naturally evolving sense that you had, that this looks interesting, I think I can do something with this. If you’re interested and fascinated about something then it doesn’t become drudgery, it becomes interesting to learn about and motivational. So, was your PhD in astronomy or in physics?
I did my PhD in astronomy.
Then you somehow made your way to NASA Ames. Can you tell us about that path? Was it a direct line or was it somewhat convoluted, with multiple stops? What was it that finally got you here to Ames?
I finished my PhD in about four years and I was looking for my next gig. I looked at a few post docs but none of them felt quite right. I applied for a few but there wasn’t really anything that I felt I had to do, or that I desperately needed to be on a career track leading to a tenured faculty position. And then a role came up in the Kepler mission. I had known the Kepler mission since I had worked on data from it both for my master’s degree and my PhD, so I knew that Kepler had impacted my education and the idea of working on it was really exciting. And so, this opportunity came up for a support scientist for Kepler. I would get to work with people who worked on the telescope, I would get to be part of the mission team with the users of the telescope, and I would really be embedded in the NASA ecosystem, so I was excited when they offered me the job, which was right after my PhD. I think I defended my PhD on a Thursday and flew out on Saturday, to come to California, to come to Ames.
Was this a posted opportunity or was it from a connection with someone you knew?
it was a posted opportunity. I found it on the WAS jobs list.
Your timing was impeccably wonderful, to finish your PhD and turn around and come directly out here. We’ve talked to a number of researchers and their paths are often zigzag and serendipitous, really. Things they just happened to come together. Yours just seems like a straight line!
I think so, yeah. It was great and the people on Kepler we’re happy to have me. They offered me the job a couple of months before the end of my PhD and that gave me a real impetus to finish up because they wanted me to start work right away (laughs).
Were you on the Kepler project before the reaction wheel failures or did you transfer into K2?
No, it was during K2. I don’t remember which campaign we were in when I first started out but it was one of the earlier campaigns. I started in June, 2017, so it was well into the K2 Mission. I had actually been using K2 data in my PhD.
OK, excellent. So now might be a good time to talk briefly about what your role is on Kepler or K2, what your daily work is, what your mission, what your assignment is on that project.
Absolutely. Kepler closed out about a year and a half ago, and up until then my job had been working with the guest observers, the people who use the data. It was a lot of collaboration with them on their research, helping them use the telescope, helping them propose to use the telescope, developing tools so they could better access the data to get their research projects done, which was really exciting. You had guest observers who were doing planets, stars, or black holes or galaxies or supernovae, all branches of astrophysics and that’s really rewarding to get to be a part of all those things. And then mentoring interns and helping them use the telescope, it was a really varied job. That is what I was doing up until the end of the mission and since then I’ve been fairly successful in getting some grants to fund my own research. I have a post doc to work with me and some other researchers, part time at NASA Ames, and that’s been fantastic. My programs now focus on archival Kepler work, and also TESS work, the telescope that does an all-sky survey, which is kind of analogous to Kepler, sort of the new spiritual successor to Kepler.
Your bio mentioned that you have learned several computer languages, Python, and I can’t remember the other ones, but you apply those to data in order to tease out information. In fact, somewhere I read, and I hope this is right, that there’s a process or algorithm that you use to turn a black-and-white picture into a color picture. Is that right? You gave a presentation about developing a way to turn a picture of a black hole into color.
That’s exactly right. I do work a lot in Python. I also make a lot of open-source tools. The goal with open-source tools is to develop them in a way that other people can read and see what you’re doing, can contribute to what you doing, can access your tool and use it and change it, for their own science. That’s a very rewarding way to interact with people. I also designed some algorithms to get at data in new ways and you’re totally right: one of them I’ve been working on and published this year is how to take black-and-white images and turn them into color images. This is a really new technology. Basically, it capitalizes on something, you can actually see this effect if you have screen near you, such as a computer or TV screen. I’ve found the best way to reproduce this is if you get the flashlight from your camera phone and shine it on a TV, you can see that it makes these little spikes and you’ll see that it’s like a rainbow inside those spikes. What’s happening is you’ve got a really bright light, and the TV may have to be off. (demonstrates with her iPhone and laptop monitor).
Oh, yeah!
So that’s kind of what’s happening inside the telescope. There are actually two effects. The second affect is actually a little more subtle but this is the easiest one to see. What happens is that a really, really, bright star is so bright that it causes these spikes, similar to the ones you see with your camera phone, and then the grid of the detector, and the optics of the detector cause that light to split into different color bands. So, I’ve been coming up with techniques to capitalize on this effect. The useful part of this is that you can have some additional color information. You can better separate different kinds of spectral variability. For some stars, pretty bright stars, you can tell if a source is changing color. And the reason that is helpful is because of things like stellar flares for example. Stellar flares are really bright and really hot and if you can tell that stars are changing color, it might help us understand better how hot the flares are that are coming off of them. The way that I would like to use it, hopefully I’m going to come up with new tools and new ideas for how to use this technique, is we have exo-planets, which are really cool, but they are really hard to find, and we also have this slightly more common, or this other contaminant, which is an eclipsing binary. Eclipsing binaries are two stars that are going around each other. And while they are cool, they are not planets, although they look a lot like planets in some cases. They can mimic the variability that we expect from planets. So, I’m hoping that this tool, because with stars going around stars, you end up with a lot of color variability. When you have just a little gray rock going around a star, you don’t have that color variability. Basically, when you have the eclipsing binary, you have stars of different colors and they eclipse each other, so it blinks between red and blue, and red and blue. But when you’ve just got a planet going around, it’s just a rock, it doesn’t change temperature, and it doesn’t change color. I’m hoping to come up with some tools that will help us validate exoplanets using just the data that we have, which is really exciting.
That is fascinating! And what popped into my mind is that there’s a whole industry working to colorize previously black and white films and movies. You can go back and see documentaries of what World War II, for instance, looked like in color when they didn’t have color movies of it. Initially they actually took each frame of the film and manually painted the color onto it so they could get a color version of it. I’m sure it’s progressed beyond that now but if what you’re talking about becomes a viable technology it would have applications far beyond the astrophysics that you are developing it for.
You’re 100% right and there are some AI algorithms now that will do that automatically. They don’t do it by hand anymore. The difference between that and this technique is the thing that we are using to show that there is color variability. It’s called chromatic aberration. If you’ve ever taken a blurry picture with your camera, you may find that on sharp edges of things you can see there is something of a color rainbow, where it’s like red and green right at the edge of something. If you google it, you’ll see lots of pictures where right at the edge of a building, there are these colors. It’s that effect that we’re capitalizing on here. This very weak small dispersion, and all cameras have it, even your eye has this effect. But it’s slightly different from colorizing because what we’re looking at is an effect that shows there’s a color change, a differential in color, and we can use that in astronomy to say the colors are warping back-and-forth because we have this very weak little spectrum.
interesting! This is probably a good time to ask another of our questions: how would you defend your work to, for example, the taxpayers who foot all the bills for NASA? What is the return on investment for the general public? I almost hesitate to ask this question because anything that has to do with Kepler has enormous public support and interest, addressing as it does the potential for life elsewhere beyond earth. So, it’s almost self-evident, but in your own words do you have anything to add to that?
Yes, absolutely. We can definitely talk about why Kepler and TESS are a benefit, and I’m super happy to talk about that. But if we look at what my work brings to NASA missions like Kepler and Tess, my work really falls into a category of finding out how much further we can push the data that we already have to gain the insight without building new telescopes or launching new tools. And that’s important because I’d say my work is trying to get extra value added out of the investment we’ve already made. So, like the chromatic aberration stuff, it’s better to tease apart these binaries and planets because that’s one thing that you don’t have to spend all this money on the ground validating. If we can get information about asteroids out of TESS, that’s a mission that we don’t have to launch to serve that community.
Boy, that’s a great sales pitch for sure! There used to be, and probably still is, a periodical from NASA called “Spinoff”. It showcases the technologies and the things that NASA makes available to the public and the world, that come from its research and engineering and operations. There are some marvelous things over the years that NASA has contributed. Velcro is one, for example. And, of course, Tang, the wildly popular orange drink! And astronaut ice cream (laughs), along with many more substantive and valuable technologies. We’re not in typical times now because of the pandemic but we often ask what a typical day is like for you? What does your work actually consist of? Are you looking at a computer all the time and has that changed because of the pandemic? Are you saving time with your commute because you have extra hours that you’re not on the road? How has the pandemic affected you and your workday? Do you work in labs, or in the field, or is it mostly on a computer?
I’ve always mostly worked on a computer. I also work a lot at the whiteboard, with colleagues, collaborating and designing algorithms and coming out with new AI designs, but that work has gone away mostly because of the pandemic and mission close out. I changed roles right when the pandemic came in, and a lot of that collaboration and whiteboard work went away, which was really sad. It’s something that I’m desperate to have back as soon as we’re allowed back in the office. Aside from that, most of my work day is at a computer. I do a lot of collaboration through emails and Zoom calls and slack messages. I also do a lot of software writing, data analysis, and exploratory work, trying to come up with limits and new ideas for how to push forward and come up with new algorithms. So yeah, a lot of computer work.
Connected with that, and this can be answered from the perspective of today or back when we were on campus: what do you like best and least about your job?
What I definitely like best is collaborating with people and working as part of a team. Finding new ideas is very energizing. One of my memories from the past pre-pandemic time, has been working with mission teams directly, being a part of the NASA ecosystem. We’re all working to push the mission forward. My least favorite part of the job is probably email (laughs). Or probably just the day-to-day grind of emails and tasks that I said I would do and have forgotten or set aside. I don’t have a a better answer than that.
Well, you’re not much different from others we’ve talked to. You’re quite young in your career so maybe this is not a terribly fair question but has there been to date some important research finding or breakthrough or unexpected result from your work so far? Or just a favorite memory that was just a highlight for you?
I think definitely the color paper we were talking about, designing something to try to get at something that sounds a little bit impossible. It’s been very personally rewarding. I don’t think there’s been anything like a huge leap forward in science because of the thing that I found and wrote an algorithm for, but I think it’s still very rewarding. It’s a bit like discovering something with telescopes, it’s a very rewarding piece of extra information that nobody knew was hidden there.
You don’t know how often it comes up from the minds of the scientists that we interview that they are stimulated by knowing they are on a cutting edge and coming to understand something that other people don’t know yet. A discovery or insight, or whatever, that they were the first to know, or to appreciate. That’s fairly common among those we’ve interviewed. Now that you’re a data scientist for NASA, if you weren’t pursuing that career, have you ever thought of what your dream job might be?
This is something that I’d have to think about because I’m on softer money and you’ve got to think about your next step, how you want to build your career. I go back-and-forth. I’d be very interested in staying in the NASA ecosystem. There’s something very rewarding about being part of big teams that are trying to put stuff into space and uncovering cool news, astronomy information. So, I’d very much like to stay as part of NASA and be part of future missions. I don’t know if I would like to be leading any missions, but I would definitely want to be part of them.
Any thought of being something other than a NASA scientist? We’ve had answers to this question that range from ballerina to funeral director! (laughs) but you had such a straight path that you seemed to be laser focused on what your interests were and you pursued them, and are obviously happy and passionate about your work so your hesitation is understandable. We just never know what answer we’re going to get when we ask this. We also ask what advice you would give to a student or someone you’re mentoring, who would like to have a career like you are having and pursue the kinds of scientific work that you do?
I do have a few little pieces of advice for young people who are coming up. My basic advice is to pick your supervisor and your team very carefully. Really invest some time in doing that. People will pressure you into joining a team very quickly, but you work with people for a long time, it’s a big part of your life, so making sure that you’re in the kind of a space where it’s a working relationship that you would want is really important. I was on a really great team on Kepler and that made my life much happier and easier, being on the right team. But it’s a little bit of a strange peculiar path, and it’s hard to replicate, coming directly into a support science role. There are several places where you can jump on some of these kinds of career plans, like NexSci, JPL, Ames, where you can jump into mission work but the jobs to do it are a little rare because there aren’t a lot of missions. So exactly following this career of being a support scientist is a little hard but there’s a slow change going on now in academia towards encouraging open science, open software, and skills in how to develop software, how to do data analysis, and I think we’re getting towards where there are more careers like mine in data science.
Good, thank you. You seem, like most scientists, very focused on your work. They sometimes appear to eat, drink, and breathe the science work that they do, they are passionate about it. But what do you do for fun?
Oh! What do I do for fun? I very much enjoy board games and video games with friends and colleagues. I have been getting into climbing at the gym, which has been kind of fun. It’s a new kind of challenge. I like music and movies. Oh, and I like hiking, backpacking, camping, cooking, and baking. And I guess I also like sewing and crocheting. Anything to take my mind off science! (laughs)
I’m tempted to ask how do you find time you work in your career with all those other interests?
Well, I engage in those interests sporadically,
I understand. Would you like to share anything about your family? Kids, pets, trips you like to take? Anything about your home life?
I don’t have kids yet. My partner and I, we do like to go on trips. We are enjoying California a bit more this year than last year, because of the pandemic. I’ve been to Joshua Tree and Yosemite, and also to local parks and state parks.! I got to go to the UK a little while ago, that was a good time. And we’ve enjoyed going to New York. It’s fun to merge my work trips with personal trips. I got a work trip to Yosemite Park and we got a little Fresno trip in with that, so that’s a good way to explore the country. You definitely travel if you’re in astronomy, except not so much these past two years.
Do you have any particular interests or talents or hobbies such as musical instruments or a genre of something you like to read, anything like that?
I do play piano. A genre of things I like to read? I think I’m all over the chart with what I like to read. Skills? At the moment I’m watching the British Bakeoff, so I’m practicing my baking skills. It’s a shame we don’t go into the office because I don’t have anyone to offload my baked goods on (laughs)
That’s too bad for us! I’m delighted to hear that you play the piano. I very much admire people who can play a musical instrument. I never really tried hard enough to be able to do that but I wish now that I had. It’s wonderful to be able to do that, especially when you have so much on your plate already. The piano, or any musical instrument, takes a lot of time and effort to work at. Has there been an accomplishment in your life that you’re most proud of that’s not related to your science work?
I’m positive there is.
Like have you ever climbed Mount Everest or something like that? (laughs)
No. Sure, there are lots of things, but I don’t think there’s anything that just stands out like this is the accomplishment that I would want written on the Internet as the thing that I’ve accomplished.
You can take some time to think about it as we work to develop this into a transcript and then a post for the website. You can add it later. And we might’ve skipped a little quickly past pets: do you have a dog or a cat or a fish?
No, we’re not allowed to have cats.
This is another question that you can ponder if you don’t have anything that immediately pops to your mind: who or what inspires you?
Oh, who inspires me? All of my colleagues inspire me a great deal. I find it very inspiring to chat through science things with them, I get a lot of exciting ideas about how to move things forward. I just find it inspiring to talk with my colleagues. When we go to conferences it’s just like the good stuff right there. Just a week to talk to your friends about cool science ideas, that’s the best. I find that my friends also inspire me to do better, to pursue new things. I am very inspired by my friends who I go climbing with and try new things with.
Sometimes we can learn a lot about someone just by walking into their office and looking at what they’ve posted on their wall. We can’t do that right now because we’re not on site but what picture might we see on the wall in your office or cubicle?
(Pointing) That one is an art print of a map of Mars. That I like very much, it was a gift from a friend. And this one (pointing the other way) is an art deco poster of video game locations.
We’d like to ask you to provide some pictures to go along with this interview, of things that you have discussed, that you’ve worked on, or that are just interesting and motivational for you, that we can post with it. So, if you want to provide pictures of what you’ve pointed out, or anything else that represents your life and interests, the readers will know what you’re talking about. A picture, of course, is worth a thousand words and readers will enjoy seeing whatever it is that you find interesting or inspiring. We also ask if there’s perhaps a favorite quote that you find motivational or clever or that you have committed to memory? You can take your time with that one too. Sometimes people have one right on top of their head but if you don’t, you can think about it. Before we conclude, perhaps I should ask if there is anything that we didn’t ask you that you wish we had asked?
No, but I am realizing that I left out so many hobbies. I thought I’d send a picture of my D&D group because I run a D&D group with some other astronomers around the country, but then I realize that we don’t take pictures, even if we’re in the same room, we don’t take pictures, because that would be a great picture to add.
What is a D&D group?
Dungeons and dragons?
Oh! OK! That’s great, that’s wonderful! That’s exactly why we poke and push a little bit because somebody’s going to read this post and say “Oh, I didn’t know she was into dungeons and dragons!” And because they are too, there’s a connection! And just the fact that you mentioned it, if there’s a picture or something representing that, we’d be happy to include that as well. Often when you think about something afterward, you might think “Oh, I should’ve said this”, or maybe even “I wish I hadn’t said that”! You can correct that as part of the finalizing of this for posting.
Sara: You said that you went to college in Birmingham? I also went there to study my last year of college. I’m sure it was many years before you. In Spain you usually take a year, you get a grant called Erasmus. I got one of those and it was in Birmingham, and it was quite an adventure for me coming from the south of Spain. I remember it was really dark there, you know, like gloomy! (laughs)
Yes, it’s very wet all throughout England, and Birmingham was no exception, it’s very gloomy and cold in winter. Birmingham is a good university, it was a great university and their physics department was fantastic, and I had a great time, but I agree with you it was gloomy! (laughs)
(Sara) I had a lot of fun but in the winter it was like “Wow! What’s happening here? I never see the sun. Why would people live here?” (laughs)
Yeah, it’s not the south of Spain!
So, you see, right there is an unexpected connection that we wouldn’t have known about if we hadn’t had this little chat together. Christina, we’re so delighted that you took a moment to visit with us and, as we said, it was practically painless. Thank you very much. It was wonderful to get to know you better through this means.
It was great to meet you guys.
Interview conducted by Fred and Sara on 10/14/21 virtually.
Past interview archive:
https://www.nasa.gov/ames/spacescience-and-astrobiology/past-interviews