October 10th, 2019 Posted by tp33Blog
0 thoughts on “Climate Change: What’s Likely To Happen According To Scientists And How To Be Part of the Solution”
After speaking with two meteorology experts and a chemical engineer who specializes in carbon capture technologies, it’s clear we’re not doing enough to get in front of what’s becoming a climate disaster.
A number of credible scientific publications stated that climate change puts the well-being of people around the globe at risk. And yet, most of us are not aware of what’s potentially coming nor are we planning for it from a business and personal perspective.
I spoke with Rear Admiral David Titley, who spent 32 years as the Navy’s meteorologist/oceanographer, when he appeared on my podcast Unmessable. Titley was tasked with assessing and planning for security risks our country faced with regards to global warming.
One big concern he spent a lot of time analysing is rising sea levels. He expects levels to rise up to 3 to 6 feet by the year 2100, but by the time levels stabilize (several centuries from now), we could be looking at a 30 feet increase globally.
This means ultimately Orlando becomes the southernmost point of Florida. Baton Rouge is the southernmost point of Louisiana. Everyone in Harlem, New York is elated because they now have beachfront properties. And that’s just the beginning.
In another Unmessable podcast discussion, Dr. Marshall Shepherd, a distinguished professor and Director of Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, and former Nasa meteorologist, said “Many people don’t understand that the increases we’re going to see in the next 0 to 50 years (sea level rise, ice caps melting, flooding, droughts, agricultural belt shifts, diseases, etc.) are going to happen at an exponential rate. They’re not going to be linear increases. The more time we wait on action, the further along the exponentially increasing curve of crisis we go.”
Scientists say there is an inflection point where the climate scales tip, which is when we reach an average climate increase of 2 degrees celsius. That’s where the rate of climate change will get away from our abilities to reverse it. Today, we are seeing a 1.5 degrees celsius average climate increase, which means there is still some time to be proactive.
So I asked myself, what can regular people (like me) do to help slow down this train wreck? What business opportunities exist around being part of the solution? Here’s a place to start.
Clean air: It’s likely to be very valuable
Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, a chemical engineering professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric pollution, believes CO2 carbon capture is a solution we should employ to reverse some of the damage that’s already been done.
“We have the capability to build synthetic forests that have the potential to remove some of the CO2 that is emitted into the atmosphere each year, ” Dr. Wilcox said. “Ideally, we avoid CO2 emissions to begin with, but we are not doing that at the scale required to meet our climate goals and so now we have to start pulling CO2 out of the air to avoid reaching a climate change tipping point.”
It sounds simple to pull CO2 from the air, but it’s not. Far from it. It’s a complex process that requires lots of engineering and funding. There are some businesses working on clever ways to do this, but we need way more innovation happening in this space and significant capital investments. It’s a great business opportunity that will predictably be in big demand.
Get involved with Congress and local government
Titley suggests to learn about climate change, we should all get involved locally, monitor the state of affairs, and become an advocate. There are short explanations from the AAAS where you can quickly develop a basic understanding of climate change. Then, if you don’t already know, find out who your representatives are locally and make your voice heard.
But when it comes to affecting change on a larger scale, it takes advocacy to organize slow-moving government agencies. Congress and local governments can create business grants and other incentives to fuel business opportunities at all levels to work toward achievable climate goals. Staying silent while the house burns isn’t an option any longer.
Be mindful of your own daily life choices
We can all take small steps to at least slow the effects of climate change, if not reverse it, but making simple choices like using LED bulbs in the home, reducing plastic consumption (especially one-time-use plastics), traveling less (or drive less when possible), using solar powered energy, and electric cars are effective strategies. Creating competitive, environment-friendly consumer options is one area where the market can help as long as it’s provided the right incentives.
Don’t buy real estate near the water
Although local governments are taking some measures, like New York’s effort to build flood surges (which are glorified sand bags) to avoid disasters like Hurricane Sandy, or the efforts of government officials in Miami to protect against a 3-foot water-level increase, Titley says it’s likely to be insufficient. If you are looking to set up shop for personal or business reasons, avoid high-risk areas for long-term investments.
World governments and industry responded quickly in the 1980s in an effort to undo years of ozone depletion. It worked. We can do it again.
The state of our climate and the advancement of global warming is top of mind these days. It’s in the news. Just this week, crowds in the millions, around the world united (#strikeforclimate) to show our political leaders the urgency and importance of the issue. Teenage activist, Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations in an impassioned speech some days ago demanding that our leaders rise to the occasion and wake up.
On this episode, Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd — former NASA research meteorologist and deputy project scientist — who is currently the Distinguished Professor and Director of the Atmospheric Sciences program at the University of Georgia, echoes the severity of the climate crisis. He explains what science is predicting and brings clarity to what most of us don’t understand.
Tune in to get the full conversation and learn about:
Changes we can expect as a result of climate change
What you can do to help
Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd’s biography:
Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd is a leading international expert in weather and climate and is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia. Dr. Shepherd was the 2013 President of American Meteorological Society (AMS), the nation’s largest and oldest professional/science society in the atmospheric and related sciences. Dr. Shepherd serves as Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program and Full Professor in the Department of Geography where he is Associate Department Head. Dr. Shepherd is also the host of The Weather Channel’s Award-Winning Sunday talk show Weather Geeks, a pioneering Sunday talk show on national television dedicated to science and a contributor to Forbes Magazine. In 2018, he was honored with the AMS Helmut Landsberg Award for his research on the urban weather-climate system and the UGA First Year Odyssey Seminary Faculty Teaching Award. In 2017, he received the AMS Brooks Award, a high honor within the field of meteorology. Ted Turner and his Captain Planet Foundation honored Dr. Shepherd in 2014 with its Protector of the Earth Award. Prior recipients include Erin Brockovich and former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. He is also the 2015 Recipient of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Media Achievement award, the Florida State University Grads Made Good Award and the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Sandy Beaver Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2015, Dr. Shepherd was invited to moderate the White House Champions for Change event. Prior to UGA, Dr. Shepherd spent 12 years as a Research Meteorologist at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center and was Deputy Project Scientist for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, a multi-national space mission that launched in 2014. President Bush honored him on May 4th 2004 at the White House with the Presidential Early Career Award for pioneering scientific research in weather and climate science. Dr. Shepherd is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Two national magazines, the AMS, and Florida State University have also recognized Dr. Shepherd for his significant contributions. In 2016, Dr. Shepherd was the Spring Commencement speaker at his 3-time Alma Mater, Florida State University and was recently selected for the prestigious SEC Academic Leadership Fellows program.
Dr. Shepherd is frequently sought as an expert on weather, climate, and remote sensing. He routinely appears on CBS Face The Nation, NOVA, The Today Show, CNN, Fox News, The Weather Channel and several others. His TedX Atlanta Talk on “Slaying Climate Zombies” is one of the most viewed climate lectures on YouTube. Dr. Shepherd is also frequently asked to advise key leaders at NASA, the White House, Congress, Department of Defense, and officials from foreign countries. In February 2013, Dr. Shepherd briefed the U.S. Senate on climate change and extreme weather. He has also written several editorials for CNN, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and numerous other outlets and has been featured in Time Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and NPR Science Friday. He has over 90 peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Dr. Shepherd has attracted $3 million dollars in extramural research support from NASA, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and U.S. Forest Service. Dr. Shepherd was also instrumental in leading the effort for UGA to become the 78th member of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a significant milestone for UGA and establishing UGA’s Major in Atmospheric Sciences.
Dr. Shepherd currently chairs the NASA Earth Sciences Advisory Committee and was a past member of its Earth Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council. He was a member of the Board of Trustees for the Nature Conservancy (Georgia Chapter), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Science Advisory Board, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s Hazard Preparedness Advisory Group United Nations World Meteorological Organization steering committee on aerosols and precipitation, 2007 Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR4 contributing author team, National Academies of Sciences (NAS) Panels on climate and national security, extreme weather attribution, and urban meteorology. Dr. Shepherd is a past editor for both the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology and Geography Compass, respectively.
Dr. Shepherd received his B.S., M.S. and PhD in physical meteorology from Florida State University. He was the first African American to receive a PhD from the Florida State University Department of Meteorology, one of the nation’s oldest and respected. He is also the 2nd African American to preside over the American Meteorological Society. He is a member of the AMS, American Geophysical Union, Association of American Geographers (AAG), Sigma Xi Research Honorary, Chi Epsilon Pi Meteorology Honorary, and Omicron Delta Kappa National Honorary. He is also a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and serves on various National Boards associated with his alma mater. Dr. Shepherd co-authored a children’s book on weather and weather instruments called Dr. Fred’s Weather Watch. He is also the co-founder of the Alcova Elementary Weather Science Chat series that exposes K-5 students to world-class scientists. Dr. Shepherd is originally from Canton, Georgia.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Current state of that is it’s a crisis and in fact, many of us that study this call it a climate crisis now more so than climate change.
Tanya: That’s Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd, who got his PhD in physical meteorology and served as research meteorologist and deputy project scientist at NASA for 13 years. Currently, Dr. Shepherd is a distinguished professor and director of the Atmospheric Sciences program at the University of Georgia and contributed over a hundred peer-reviewed scholarly publications. He’s a regular guest on major media outlets like CNN, Fox, and CBS, and is relied upon as a strategic advisor by key leaders at NASA, the White House, Congress, Department of Defense, and officials from foreign countries. In addition to his widely viewed TED Talk titled “Three Kinds of Biases that Shape Your World View,” he served as a member of the board for many prestigious organizations like the Nature Conservancy, the Georgia chapter, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, just to name a few. Dr. Shepherd was honored with a Presidential Early Career Award in 2004 from George W. Bush for his cutting-edge work.
Tanya: Dr. Shepherd, what initially attracted you to meteorology?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: It’s really an interesting story: a honeybee. Let me explain that. As a young kid, I used to catch insects in the yard. I thought I wanted to be an entomologist. I was catching honeybees in the yard. I got stung by one and found out at that young age that I was highly allergic to bee stings.
Sixth grade was coming around and I needed to do a science project. I said, “Well, I can’t do honeybees anymore. I needed a plan B literally.” I did my science project on weather. The title of that sixth-grade science project was, “Can a Sixth Grader Predict the Weather?”
I made weather instruments from things around the house. We didn’t have a lot of fancy equipment at that time and predicted weather and developed little weather models for my community in northern Georgia. The rest is history. I knew I wanted to be a meteorologist at that point, but interestingly enough, I didn’t want to be the forecaster type standing in front of a green chroma key at a news station. I was more interested in the how and why of weather.
Tanya: That’s probably partly what motivated you to go into getting your PhD in meteorology and then working for NASA for 13 years. What was that journey like?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: It was really interesting because again, after sixth grade, I knew that was it. I started even as a sixth, seventh-grader, started saying, “Okay, where can I go to college to learn more about weather?” Being from the Atlanta metropolitan area in northern Georgia, I knew I wanted to stay in the south. At that time, there weren’t really many relatively speaking meteorology programs, but Florida State University had one. It turns out it was a very good one. It was one of the top programs in the nation.
I started doing things even in school, high school, to taking ecology classes and learning about measurements. Then went on to Florida State to do my undergraduate or Bachler’s Degree in Meteorology. Then I stuck around for a master’s degree. At that point, I was sick of school. I know we’ve all been there. Some people say I’ve got to go out and make some money and live a real life.
I got out; I worked for a private contractor for NASA for a while. Then actually got hired by NASA as a civil servant and realized that wow, they have these really cool programs that will pay for NASA employees to go back to school. No one ever applied for them. I did. I said, “I can’t pass that up. Go back and do your PhD on your full salary? That’s a no-brainer.”
Tanya: Wow.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Exactly, so I took two years, went back to Florida State. Did the courses, took all my exams that you need to take, the qualifying exams, and then came back to NASA, finished up my dissertation. In 1999, I was awarded my doctoral degree from Florida State.
Tanya: Wow, and while you were getting your PhD, were you still working where they gave you the freedom to just be a student 100% of the time and then you committed to going back after?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: No, for this particular program that I did, you applied for it at NASA. Any employee can apply for these. If you got accepted, you could go away to school for the two years and your job would be a student for two years to get your PhD. Then I came back for the final two years after that and did my dissertation while I was doing my “day job” as well. That was a [05:02] about a four- or five-year program, but the good news is my PhD research was very much related to some of the scientific research that I was already doing at NASA.
Tanya: What was it? What kind of research were you doing?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: The work that I did at that time, in my master’s degree work, I had looked at developing algorithms using Doppler radar data to track hurricanes. We developed some of the first-generation algorithms that actually tracked hurricanes using radar as they got close to landfall. For my dissertation doctoral work, I was looking at something called precipitation efficiency in convergence zone thunderstorms. What that simply means is some thunderstorms in Florida firer up along the sea breeze front or along outflow boundaries from other thunderstorms, these cold pools of outflow that move away from storms. We wanted to know how efficient they were at producing rainfall so that we could model them in our weather and forecasting models.
That was some of my – it’s not really the kind of work I do now or have done in my more recent career. I know this is a podcast about leadership and sometimes you are training and developing yourself for future activities. One of the things I tell my own students here at the University of Georgia, some of my doctoral students, is that a doctoral degree is a unique piece of research. It teaches you how to carry forth and manage a research program at a smaller scale so that perhaps one day, you will be a leading researcher running your own lab or research group.
Tanya: Yes, absolutely. At the peak of your career at NASA, what were you accountable for?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: It’s interesting; I did a lot of things while I was at NASA. That’s where I really grasped this idea that cities can affect weather. One of my main research agendas was related to how cities can actually initiate or enhance thunderstorm activity, and rainfall, and flooding. I developed a very robust research program using NASA satellite data sets and models.
I was fortunate enough to win the Presidential Early Career Award for scientists and engineers. I was given that award by President Bush at the White House in 2004 for research in that area because it was considered innovative and groundbreaking research at that time. I then took on more of a leadership position there. I became the Deputy Project Scientist for a new mission that NASA was developing called the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission or GPM, which is now in orbit. It’s a complex satellite mission and constellation that’s measuring rainfall all over the globe for use in our weather and climate models and to help us predict flooding. I was one of the leadership team of that mission for many years helping coordinate between the scientists and engineers to bring that from a scientific idea to an actual satellite that’s now in orbit.
Tanya: Wow, that’s pretty outstanding. Is that one of your most proud projects that you’ve ever worked on at NASA or is there something else?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah, but I think just being in NASA is one of the more points of pride.
Tanya: It’s a pretty good point, yes.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: There are only so many people on the planet that can say they actually worked at NASA. When I decided to leave it to come to the University of Georgia, I had all these people like, are you crazy? Are you going to leave NASA? That’s a dream job. It was; I loved my time at NASA because you are literally working with some of the smartest people in the world, movers in science and technology doing really cool things. Yeah, to say that I had my hands in cutting edge research that was improving our understanding of our weather and climate, and to actually have a satellite system in orbit that’s helping in those areas, yeah, I’m pretty proud of that. I would also say that Presidential Early Career Award from the White House is a pretty big moment as well.
Tanya: Yes, that is a huge moment of recognition for the work that you’re doing or that you did. By the way, that was not the only award that you got; you got so many I can’t even go through them right now because we would run out of time. What were some of the – now that you’ve had a little distance, you’ve been some time out of NASA, what were some of the key lessons of that experience that you were able to process?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think one of the things that I learned is that we have to be very willing to get out of our comfort zones. Because now, I was trained as a scientist. When you’re doing scientific research or getting a master’s or a doctoral degree, you’re learning how to do research, and ask scientific questions, and follow the scientific method, and those types of things.
In a NASA environment, in the environment that I was in at NASA, I was asked to do a lot of things that technically I didn’t necessarily have training to do or hadn’t taken a class to do. For example, there was no class in being the Deputy Project Scientist for a major [10:05]. You just figure it out.
Also, because someone along the way figured out that I was halfway credible in front of a camera and could convey complex scientific information to non-science audiences, I was often called to go on major network television whether it be the Today Show, or NBC, or CNN, talking about mostly weather and climate, but from time to time, I’d get asked about other things: tsunamis or volcanic eruptions. I’m not a volcanologist. I’m not an oceanographer, but you have to be able to be willing to adapt and be flexible. I think a couple of the lessons for me at NASA were staying free of your comfort zones, being willing to adapt and be flexible when called upon to do something, and to always just keep learning. I always felt like no matter what level of leadership or what level of a position that I was in, I was always learning something.
Tanya: Those are really great lessons to learn. Actually, not too long ago, I interviewed Erika Hamden who is in charge of the FIREBALL project which NASA in large part funded. That’s what she was talking about as well is when you’re at the edge of what is known. It’s really there’s no forged path.
You have to get comfortable with uncertainty. In that murky uncertainty comes the possibility for breakthroughs. In absence of being out of your comfort zone like you say, you can’t get to the unknown. That’s an awesome lesson to learn. What precipitated, and no punt intended there, the decision –
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I like that. [11:39] got you in the rainstorm world.
Tanya: I know, I had to do that. What precipitated the departure from NASA and move into academia?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: That’s a great question. It really was just again one of these lessons for the listener. I often talk about that, and I gave a lecture on it, a guest lecture on this recently to a group of young, emerging leaders at the American Meteorological Society’s Young Leaders Conference this summer in Atlanta. Meteorology itself is a very complex science. It’s very physics and calculus-based.
In fact, it’s based on a lot of what we call nonlinearities; in other words, things aren’t linear. A doesn’t necessarily lead to B or C and D. There are a lot of nonlinearities in the atmospheric system. It can, in fact, be chaotic. I was telling these young leaders that careers can be nonlinear as well. In fact, you can count on them being nonlinear.
I was quite happy and content at NASA. My career was going well. I was in a very strong leadership position with a mission. My science career was prospering, but an opportunity presented itself.
A colleague of mine that I knew met at a conference. We started talking. It turns out that they possibly had an opportunity or an opening at the University of Georgia. I grew up in Georgia. I came down and talked to the folks.
They even invited me to give a guest lecture, a seminar. I did that and I still wasn’t necessarily sure if I was leaving NASA. The more I thought about it and I was like, I preach to myself about staying out of comfort zones. I had never taught. I didn’t see myself as a professor or a teacher. Quiet is kept at a major university like the University of Georgia; it’s not just about the teaching.
We certainly teach. I’ve been fortunate enough to win some of the top teaching awards here. It is about research, and about developing graduate students, and acquiring grants to do more research in the cutting edge of science and technology. I took the plunge literally and left the very safe civil servant environment to go to the University of Georgia.
Initially coming in the door not with tenor. Of course, I have tenor now and I’m a full professor. In fact, my full title is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor. I had to jump through some of the academic hoops that you do getting tenor, and publishing, and getting grants, and all those things. It just was an opportunity that presented itself and it felt right.
Tanya: I know that you’ve published – is 90 the correct number?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: A little bit more than that by now.
Tanya: I assume.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: There’s something out there that on my bio that probably says 90, but I think with my graduate students, I’m pretty much well over 100 publications by now I would suspect. Honestly, I haven’t counted.
Tanya: That contribution is enormous. Have you done that mostly in your time at Georgia University?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: No, University of Georgia. It is a combination of publications during my time at NASA and at the University of Georgia. That’s what professors do. Our metrics for success at a major research university like this is our publication record, or how many grants and grant money you’re bringing in, our leadership positions within the community. It’s honestly par for the core. I probably am one of the more productive and prolific scholars in my particular field I suppose, but it’s not certainly unusual.
Tanya: You’ve raised how much grant money so far for your research?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh, good question. I don’t know; three or four million dollars over my career in various grants that I’m directly or indirectly responsible for.
Tanya: Which is amazing. That’s really outstanding. Actually, you mentioned part of what you’re interested in is really cultivating the leadership and students. Is there one person in particular throughout the last 13, 14 years that really stand out to you that you were just blown away with?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: In terms of my students?
Tanya: Uh-huh.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Honestly, I think I’ve had several students over the years and they’ve all brought something different to the table. I think as a leader in terms of educational mentorship and leadership, I think it’s my job, and I think this goes for frankly any good leader or any good administrator, it’s my job to recognize the potential talents in every individual because every individual brings different strengths and weaknesses to the table. Yeah, several of my students are now out prospering in their own careers as professors or working federal agencies, or private sector, or wherever they are. As I look back on each of them, the skillset and leadership qualities that I see – for example, there was one young man that I knew that he had just very good people and communication, as well as good academic chops as well. I knew that he would have strengths in certain areas.
All my students have solidly been academically solid. I think of another student now who he’s now a scientist with his own career in the US Forrest Service. He’s leading research now. He actually is doing some really good things. I’ve talked to him and he and I have shared that oftentimes, people may have underestimated or miscalculated his ability to go on and be a successful doctoral-level scholar and scientist. I saw some things in him very immediately from the time that I first met him.
What I’m saying is each of my students – there’s another young woman who’s at the National Weather Service. She was just so persistent. She did not let anything stop her. She was very determined. I just always tried to understand the individual strengths of a given student and then use that to help bring out their potential.
Tanya: You know what? That’s very diplomatic of you to say that. I love that you see as it as your job to really find that thing within people, that really – that potential that you can harness because that’s amazing.
I recently read a really good book called Grit by Angela something worth, really good. What it boils down to is even people that are off the charts genius, what it comes down to is their level of persistence. You were talking about a student that just didn’t stop; nothing would stop her. That element is what really gets people far beyond what anybody would experience or expect. That’s really amazing.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah, and I think it’s important because I think oftentimes, we try to – some people will try to fit everyone into the same box. They don’t look at the unique talents, personalities, and tendencies of people as individuals.
Tanya: Yeah, no, absolutely. What’s your favorite class to teach?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh, I don’t know. I probably enjoy teaching – I don’t know that I have a favorite because again, I teach one or two courses a semester. It just depends on the semester. Again, at a major research university, professors don’t teach all day like you do at high school or those types of things. Thicker courses come around, but I teach mostly upper-level courses in our major.
I still do like the energy and vibrancy that you get from teaching younger students like freshman, for example. I do a course, a freshman odyssey seminar. It’s just a one-hour course that exposes kids to different things. My course is observing the Earth from space.
It’s a really neat course. It’s an opportunity to really plant the seeds of knowledge in terms of why we study the planet Earth from space. I enjoy that course for a lot of different reasons because those young minds that are coming into those freshman seminars, they in most cases haven’t quite figured everything out yet. They’re still trying to make their way on a big university campus. They’re sponges for knowledge.
Tanya: Yes, no, absolutely. I know for sure that your students are very lucky to have you as a professor. Your background is just off the charts. I’m sure anybody would die to have a seat in your class.
I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about climate for a second. In climate, how would you – I know everybody’s heard the word climate change, but I’m not so sure that everybody knows what it is. Can you just give us a quick what is climate change and what is the current state of that?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: The current state of that is it’s a crisis. In fact, many of us that study this call it a climate crisis now more so than climate change. The climate changes naturally.
Let me put that right upfront because you do have the skeptic community that will always remind a PhD scientist like me that, you know climate changes naturally. We’ve always had hurricanes. Of course I know that, but we have – with the increases in greenhouse gases, changes in land cover, and some other things that are happening, our naturally varying and changing climate now has a human steroid on top of it in the same way that in sports whether it’s Major League Baseball or biking in the French Alps during the Tour de France. You had some athletes that were taking performance-enhancing drugs to boost their natural ability.
The climate, unfortunately, has this performance-enhancing steroid called greenhouse gases in the system now, so the naturally varying climate is actually amplified. That’s leading to changes in our weather patterns and extreme weather events. It’s leading to changes in sea level. It’s changes in ice on the polar ice sheets in Greenland, changes in where disease-carrying mosquitos can live, changes in agricultural productivity, in energy transportation. It’s a fundamental crisis of our time. That’s why many of us are concerned about it.
Tanya: Yes, and what are the Top Three or Five things that are really bad that are a direct result of this climate crisis?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh, yeah, I don’t know if we could give a Top Three or Top Number One. I’m a contributor to Forbes magazine. I wrote an article several months ago back during all the discussion about whether we should declare the border situation a national emergency. I wrote an article saying we need to declare climate change a national emergency because it’s not the polar bear or the warming temperatures that’s the problem. It’s not something that’s 70 or 80 years out. We have impacts now that are affecting national security, affecting food production, affecting our water supply, affecting weather patterns, and public health.
If you as someone listening to this sit down at your kitchen table tonight and say, well, climate change doesn’t affect me, it’s something about some polar bear somewhere, you’re not paying attention because essentially every aspect of our lives, our economy, our security, our health, touches on how weather and climate patterns evolve and change. This is an issue that – for example, last year, 2018, Hurricane Michael made landfall in Florida and then into Georgia. Devasted much of Florida’s tourism business, much of its oil and energy activity out in the coast from those oil rigs that lead to increased gas prices. As the storm moved inland, destroyed much of the cotton, peanut, pecan, perhaps even other agricultural activity in southwest Georgia. When you go to buy a t-shirt that’s made from cotton or you go buy some peanut butter, probably had a greater price on it because supply was reduced. Basic supply and demand from macroeconomics class. What I try to spend a lot of my time helping people to understand is that this isn’t about some esoteric scientific issue far off in the future; this is about our life right now.
Tanya: Why do you think that given the state of things right now which is a crisis, how can somebody like our President think that climate change is a hoax and actively work to dismantle very important initiatives like the Paris Accord or more recently which was reported a few days ago, the Climate Change Taskforce in the Navy was shut down, which you were talking about national security. How can that happen?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: As a scientist, as an academic, I don’t like to really call out any particular person, or anything, or politician. I stay out of the politics, but the notion that climate change is a hoax or the notion that climate change is not real, or it’s just some natural cycle, or it’s made up by scientists is flat out ridiculous. All of the major scientific organizations, the American Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, every major organization, every major report, the vast majority of the scientific literature that’s published by scientists all say the same thing. This notion, or this denial, or contrary imposition is very much rooted in special interests or those that stand to lose because of the changes their solutions face that need to be made. It’s a very well concerted misinformation campaign that many of us understand as well.
Up until several years ago, it was fairly effective, but I’m starting to see it erode. This whole machine of skepticism and denial is starting to come off the rails if you will. There was an article I just saw recently I believe in Vice Magazine or Vice about how the machine of climate denial is slowly falling apart.
You’re seeing that in public opinions as well. People get it. People aren’t stupid. There are some people that because of their vested interests in certain economies, they’ll say you’re not going to bite the hand that feeds you. There’s some people that have certain industries that they may live or work in that certainly aren’t going to bite that hand, but if you’re reasonable and objective about this, you understand that this is certainly something real. It’s happening right before your very eyes. There are very obtainable examples.
Tanya: Yeah, and I know you have outlined misinformation as a huge problem in your brilliant TED Talk, which anybody listening, I highly recommend that they check out. It’s been published in the media that we are past the point of no return considering the damage that we’ve already done to the planet. Is that actually real or is that misinformation?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: In climate science, we talk about these things called tipping points, these no return. If you think about a rubber band, if you snap it too much, it doesn’t have the elasticity. It has reached its point of elasticity. It’s a tipping point. I’m not convinced we’re at any tipping point yet, but I think we’re getting there.
We see substantial losses of the Greenland ice sheet. That has real implications for sea-level rise. We start seeing shifts in our Jetstream patterns. That causes more extreme events: droughts, floods, hurricanes, etc. These things are definitely happening. I’m not convinced we’re at any tipping points yet, but I think we’re in a crisis state.
Tanya: From what you can see, although, the rhetoric is starting to slow down around climate change is not real, and people are really starting to get it, do you see that people are much more conscious in taking action to stop that, governments and businesses?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I think what I’m encouraged about to get back to your question you asked me earlier about our government pulling out of the Paris Accord or Paris Agreement, the good news in all this is that it’s almost irrelevant in some sense because the Fortune 500 companies get it. The pit line gets it. Faith-based organizations get it. Local communities, and cities, and regional states, they’re getting it. There is so much action on climate change right now that it’s sadly almost irrelevant what the rhetoric is coming from the federal level because there’s – I think there’s been this resurgence or galvanizing of the problem because people recognize how ludicrous some of the higher-level denial is.
Tanya: That’s amazing that you’re echoing this because a few days ago I interviewed Dr. David Titley.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh, David’s a good friend of mine.
Tanya: Oh, is he? He was saying that he echoed the same thing that in a very politically correct way, although the President is actively speaking out against climate change and taking a lot of initiatives to dismantle amazing efforts, Congress is actually going in the opposite direction and really taking action to support stabilizing climate and really getting in front of it which was encouraging.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah, you see it at Congress. There’s something happening not only in Congress but at local and regional levels, too. This idea that climate change is a partisan issue that you have to be a Democrat to support climate – well, actually, you have to be a Republican to deny it is completely being shattered.
There’s a congressional climate caucus that’s equal membership Republican and Democrat. You can’t even join that caucus unless you bring someone from the opposite party. I’ve seen numerous articles from conservatives opposing things like carbon gases. If you go back and look at I think President Bush’s Treasury Secretary, his name is escaping me right now, he’s one of the leading voices out there, talking about carbon tax. Congressman Bob Inglis from South Carolina was a staunch conservative in almost every other issue, is very proactive on climate. This idea that the Republicans or Conservatives are against climate change and liberals and democrats are for it, it’s never – and David Tetley is actually very famous for saying this, “The ice doesn’t care whether you’re republican or democrat, it just melts.” I think one of the most positive things I’m seeing is that narrative is shattering.
Another thing is that the Yale Climate Communication studies America every year and they come out with this thing called the [Six] American Study. They show that America really breaks down under six different categories in terms of their perspective and worry about climate change. The last group is what they called the Nine Percent Dismissive. It’s about 9% of the population. It’s a small amount of the really dismissive types that you see arguing with people on Twitter or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. They’re really loud but there are really not that many of them, so they make you think there’s more climate denialism than there actually is.
Tanya: Well that actually makes a lot of sense. I can get that. I want to dive in a little bit to your TED Talk, which was so good, entitled Three Kinds of Bias That Shape Your Worldview. Basically, you were asking a very important question, which is how can we be so misaligned on something like climate change because it’s backed by science? Your answer was, the biases. Can you talk about that?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah that was a fun TED Talk. It’s out there on TED somewhere if you Google my name Marshall Shepherd and TED. I’ve been amazed at how well received it is. The last time I checked, it was nearly 2 million views, which is pretty surprising given that it was just a little TEDX talk that I gave here at the University of Georgia that TED picked up on in public.
What I was talking about there is that people generally, and not just in science, are informed by their biases. They’re informed by their upbringing. They’re informed by what I call their personal marinades. What kind of marinades have they been sitting in their entire lives, politically, religiously, or from an academic standpoint because that informs their perspectives on things? I talked about in the TED Talk, Dunning–Kruger effect for example. There are these people who just think they know something about everything, even though they’re not experts and they’re talking and they miscalculate their knowledge base on certain topics.
I talked about confirmation bias. How people consume information from places that already support their own beliefs. Somebody that’s watching a certain news channel is probably watching that because there’s confirmation bias there. They’re hearing things they already believe, not necessarily more objective perspectives on things, or the magazines they read or the radio personality they listen to. That’s an example of confirmation bias, and in other kinds of cognitive [dismissiveness] out there as well. As an example, I made a little joke about the fact that somebody will come up and ask me whether I believe the Groundhog Day forecast and what the Groundhog Day says about spring [33:27] the farmer’s almanac. Two things that we know that do not have a lot of scientific accuracy. Then in the next breath, they’ll doubt experts’ opinions and data on climate science, which illustrate the insanity of the biases that we carry.
Tanya: The scariest one is confirmation – well, I mean they’re all a little bit scary because in effect what your biases are doing are distorting reality. One of my favorite quotes by Anaïs, I’m forgetting her second name, “…we don’t see things how they are; we see things how we are” and that’s what you’re pointing to. The question is how do we overcome these biases?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: As I said, by making people aware that they carry them. I think we live in our tribes so often and we never come out of our [hurtful] comfort circles, we might not even see them as biases. I challenged people in the audience during that Talk that just reflect on what your biases are. How has your upbringing, how has your marinade of perspective and background shaped your bias? Why is it that you look at a degree climate scientist and don’t think that what she is saying about climate change is real, when that person is trained, they don’t have anything to personally gain, if anything they have more to lose because they get harassed and trolled and all of these types of things. It’s actually silly but yet you see people do it.
I saw something on Twitter the other day where one of the top climate scientists in the world, my colleague, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, sat down for an interview with some random guy that was a climate skeptic. Now why in the world does his opinion about climate change carry the same amount of weight as hers? It’s like me sitting on CNN with a plumber and debating with the plumber saying that I know about putting that garbage disposal in my sink than you do. I don’t know anything about that. I have an opinion about it, but the plumber’s an [35:31].
Tanya: Just to help people out there because I think that this idea of discovering or even acknowledging your biases, which can be very hard to uncover because it’s almost like we’re blind to them. We just see them; we don’t see that we see through them. What are some questions that people could ask themselves to single out biases?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I don’t know that there are questions I would ask. I would ask people to think about where they consumed them. Regarding their information, if we’re talking about science, where do they consume their information from. Are they consuming it from scientifically credible sources or are they consuming it from some confirmation bias blog or news station or website? Where do you get information from? Take a critical look at whether you are consuming bias information or are you really seeking objective information.
It’s important to understand, science doesn’t operate like journalism. People say, well I’ll need to hear both sides of the story. Well there is no both sides of the story to the fact that the sun’s coming up tomorrow or that if I jump off a building, I’m going to fall. Those are just basic science things that are truths. Those things are going to happen. There is no other side of the story to that, so climate change stuff and climate science and meteorology fall into that category as well. Yes, there are certainly scientific questions and we should be asking questions and testing and retesting and those things, that’s what science is, but to – listen, you never hear someone say, well I think that that gravity thing is a hoax, so I’m going to jump off this building and see what happens. Yeah, we’ll say climate change is a hoax, as if we have some different level of merit in terms of its science legitimacy.
Tanya: Where do you think we are going wrong as a society with climate change? Is it that we don’t understand the potential repercussions of it and that’s why there’s such a large disagreement about it that turned into whether it’s valid or not? How do we end up questioning something that is based on science?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I think that’s my point. I don’t think it’s as large as people think it is. I think there are loud voices but I think the majority of people, based on recent polling that I see and even movements that I see, I don’t think it’s as large – I just think the 9% crowd is very loud and they, in some cases, have some very influential voices. I think the majority of people get it. Now, at the end of the day it still boils down to the fact that some of the doubt and some of the skepticism is not so much related to the science as it is the fear of what has to be done.
Climate change, there’s mitigation, which is you’ve got to reduce, somehow, the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere and that takes on different forms. It can be capping trade, it can be carbon tax, it can be everyone buying an electric car. It can be eating less beef. Those are all mitigation strategies. There are adaptation strategies. You just retrofit buildings with air conditioning or build seawalls around places that flood. Those are adaptation strategies. I think a lot of the angst and denialism comes from the fact that if you, for example, go from a fossil fuel-based economy to a renewable-based economy, there are winners and losers. They don’t have to be because some of the companies that are invested in fossil fuel energy is now starting to be big players in solar and [39:11] and other alternative fuel supplies. I think one of the big mistakes is that for so long, certain people saw threat or challenge in the solution space for climate change but in fact, there is opportunity as well.
Tanya: What do you think from a leadership standpoint is going to be needed to really stabilize the climate?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: This question I’ll answer from multiple perspectives. We need scientific leadership. We need scientists like me to step out and lead and be able to get out there and speak. If we’re not speaking to the media or policymakers, then people with misinformation messages are happy to fill the void. We’ve got to lead on that because part of it is a messaging. We know what the science says but we’ve got to lead on engaging. We’ve got to lead on sharing information in a way that people can understand it, instead of showing our fancy graphs and equations. We’ve got to have the message fine-tuned. That’s one layer of the leadership.
Two, we have to have leadership not just at the federal level but at state, local and regional levels. We do have that because I think that’s where a lot of the action and progress is going to take place. Ultimately, we do have to lead as a nation too. With the United States not being in the Paris agreement, for the United States to not be leading anymore on renewables, China and others are starting to really come up and, in some cases, pass us on new technology, those have direct impact on things that have nothing to do with climate. Just about our ability to maintain our leaderships in technology, sustainability, resilient systems, resilient environments and infrastructure.
There are opportunities for leaders, irrespective of your political leanings, conservative, liberal, libertarian, independent, whatever you are, we only have one planet, so it’s going to take not only leadership, it’s going to take bold leadership. It’s going to take, in some cases, going against the grain, if you will, and [technique].
Tanya: What is predictable to happen if what you just outlined doesn’t happen?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Well, I think we will start to – I think from a science standpoint, we’re trying to keep warming below 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees Celsius. Again, for those of us that live in the States, it’s an even larger number if we convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. We think we reach that 2 degree Celsius tipping point, if you will, which is what the Paris agreement was trying to prevent, then we are going to start to see some of these tipping point things start. Things are bad enough as it is, but the problem that many people don’t understand is that the increases that we’re going to see in the next zero to 50 years or going to happen in an exponential or very rapid pace. They’re not going to be incremental or linear increases. The more time we wait on action, the further along the exponentially increasing curve of crisis we go.
Tanya: When you say things are going to increase exponentially, what –
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I’m talking about things like sea level rise, melting of the ice caps, the intensity of drought and rainstorms that are causing flooding. The rapid shifts in agricultural belts where we can grow certain things. The movement of a mosquito that can carry dengue that used to only live in Panama or wherever, can now live in South Georgia. These types of things. Things that we’re seeing slowing happen before our eyes are going to accelerate.
Tanya: I know that the increase, and some even call it an epidemic, of Lyme disease in some cases has been connected to climate change. What’s your view on that?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Yeah that makes sense to me. I think the vector, the tick that carries Lyme, I don’t think it could even live in parts of Canada several decades ago, but now it can. Canadian doctors, in the last several years ago, have had to learn how to treat Lyme disease. We’ve got many examples like that, it’s not just Lyme disease. That’s one that’s often cited but so many examples of changes in – even here in the State of Georgia for example, most people have allergies. Because of change in climate, pollen and trees bloom at different times of the year now, earlier, so people are suffering from allergies sooner. That has an impact on your comfort level. It has an impact on your healthcare costs.
In some cases, going back to something you asked me earlier, the mistake that we’ve probably made as a science and messaging community, is we just haven’t connected the dots for people. We’ve spent to much time talking about polar bears and 208 and 2100, when there’s plenty to talk about in 2019 and are right there in our own backyard.
Tanya: Yes, absolutely. I love that you said that because if people actually get that some of the things that are happening today are happening because of climate change, it makes it real for them. It makes it tangible and it gives them an incentive to act, so I love that. I love that you’re doing that.
Misinformation, this is something that you’ve been quite outspoken about. What is the number one or two misinformation out there about climate change?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh my gosh! Again, I [don’t know] if I can give it. Of course, you hear all the time the climate changes naturally. Well, I always respond to that by saying, grass grow naturally too but if you put fertilizer on the soil, it grows differently. That’s irrelevant. It’s not either or, it’s “and”. You have natural climate change and you have an anthropogenic or human [signal] on top of it.
The other thing we always hear and scientists want, there’s a financial interest. Science isn’t saying this. That’s ridiculous. I don’t know any climate scientist that got into this business to get rich, but I know certainly plenty of people in some of the industries that are promoting this information, certainly live in gated communities and those types of thing. That’s a false narrative that gets out there as well.
You hear these things that I call zombie theories because they’ve long been refuted by the scientists but they live on, on blogs, social media, and on radio stations. Things like it’s caused by the sun or there’s a lot of good things can happen from climate change or it hasn’t warmed since 1998. You just hear all of these zombie theories.
By the way, if you want to see scientific debunking of them, there’s a really awesome website called skepticalscience.com that is run by scientists that debunks all these climate myths.
Tanya: Okay, skepticalscience.com?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Skepticalscience.com, yes. There’s another one called realclimate.org, too. They’re both very good.
Tanya: On a lighter note, do you have any funny or interesting stories that you can share about a time that you met somebody highly influential or famous?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I’ve met my share of famous people because – just in the world that I orbit in. I hosted a show on the Weather channel called Weather Geeks, which is still [out as] a podcast by the way. Check out the Weather Geek’s podcast put out by the Weather channel. We talk all things weather and climate. I’m just trying to think back. Last year, I met a member of one of probably the hottest, if not the hottest, rap group out there right now. A group called Migos was in my studio. I was really surprised to find out that I know not only – not only that met him but I’m actually pretty good friends with his parents. I thought it was just funny to see the reaction of my students when they find out I know a member of Migos.
Tanya: Yes, such a different industry but that’s amazing.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: One of the things that I try to pride myself on, I’m a scientist and I do all the things that scientists do but I’m a pretty – if you meet me outside of my science hat, I’m a pretty regular, ordinary guy that just does regular ordinary things. I think it catches people off guard sometimes when they see me and interact with me. In a way, the personality didn’t necessarily fit what I expected when I heard that you were this renowned, whatever, scientist.
Tanya: Yeah, absolutely, I would echo that. What are you mostly focused on now? Where does most of your time go to?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I’m the Director of the Atmospheric Sciences program here at the University of Georgia, which is growing rapidly, so I spend a great deal of time between that, teaching my classes. I have research projects and grants from NASA from the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, US [48:03] and various others. Those research projects and mentoring my graduate students certainly keep me busy.
I do a lot of external things. I currently chair NASA’s Earth Sciences Advisory Committee. I’ve been the President of the American Meteorological Society in the past. I divide my time between those things. Then at home, I’ve got two kids, a teenager and a preteen that are very active in sports, so family life keeps me busy too.
Tanya: Well it seems like you have a full plate, a really full plate! For the folks that want to get in touch with you, how do they do that?
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: I’m pretty easy to find on Twitter @drshepherd2013. I’m pretty active on social media. I also have a public Facebook page too, if you just Google my name as well. I’m pretty easy to find. I have a website, drmarshallshepherd.com also.
Tanya: Well Dr. Shepherd, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing all of your amazing incredible knowledge.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh absolutely, I enjoyed it.
Tanya: It was a pleasure to have you.
Dr. Marshall Shepherd: Oh happy to be here and thank you for inviting me.
Dr.Erika Hamden is a TED fellow, Ph.D. Astrophysicist, and Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona who has been nominated by NASA for the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019. Erika leads the team building FIREBALL, a project funded by NASA which is a large telescope that hangs from a giant balloon at the very edge of space and looks for clues on how our stars are created. Erika’s scientific endeavors have received close to $4 million in grant funding from partners like NASA and MSF.
She got her A.B., in Astronomy & Astrophysics from Harvard, a Ph.D., in Astronomy from Colombia and did her Postdoctoral Fellow at California Institute of Technology.
Despite these achievements, Erika struggled early-on when she first attended college. She felt anxious and didn’t quite fit into student life. She dropped out of MIT after a short attendance period and worked at a local bookstore for 1 year. Oddly enough, she thought that maybe she was one of those smart people that couldn’t thrive in high-pressure situations.
She finally gathered her courage to try her luck at college again and got into Harvard. She gave herself permission to not ace everything, but rather ease into it. Her willingness to try again led to a career as an astrophysicist and innovator. She shares that being at the edge of what’s known, meaning, work to discover the unknown through cutting edge initiatives, has proved to teach her some of her most important lessons on failure and resilience.
Scientists fail 90% of the time as they navigate uncharted paths and Erika’s relationship to failure and resilience is fundamental in her success. In a candid discussion, she shares the ups and downs in her riveting journey to discover the universe.
Tune in to get the full conversation and learn about:
Launching telescopes into space
FIREBALL project
What it takes to stand at the edge of what’s known
How to deal with failure
What role resilience plays in success
Science at it’s finest
Leadership lessons
How to manage a team
Dealing with uncertainty
Dr.Erika Hamden’s biography:
Dr.Erika Hamden is an astrophysicist.
She studies the universe. She builds telescopes and spectrographs to observe (mostly) hydrogen in its faintest and most diffuse forms throughout our galaxy and the universe. Primarily in the ultraviolet, but sometimes the visible.
She’s leading a proposal for a Small Explorer class UV telescope called Hyperion.
She’s a professor at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Erika Hamden used to be a chef.
Her instagram is excellent but her CV is something else.
Dr.Erika Hamden’s e-mail address is: hamden at email dot arizona dot edu
This is a picture of FIREBALL (the telescope that is supported by an air balloon) next to the moon, sent by your very own Dr.Erika Hamden and co.
Full Transcription:
Erika Hamden: I was a pretty nerdy kid, oblivious about a lot of things actually.
Tanya: That’s Professor Erika Hamden, TED fellow, Ph.D. Astrophysicist, and Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona who was nominated by NASA for the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019. Erika leads the team building FIREBALL, a project funded by NASA which is a large telescope that hangs from a giant balloon at the very edge of space and looks for clues on how our stars are created. Erika’s scientific endeavors have received close to four million in grant funding from partners like NASA and MSF.
Erika Hamden: My family, I have four sisters. I am the second to last one, so there was a lot of us around. In some ways, that was nice because no one gets too much focused attention. I spent a lot of time reading. I was always trying to talk somebody into driving me to the bookstore or the library so I could get more books.
Tanya: What were you reading?
Erika Hamden: All sorts of things. I would read fiction and non-fiction. Partly, I wanted to always go to the bookstore because I just liked to look at all the new books that were out and peruse things. I developed this method of trying to figure out whether a book would – whether I would like it or not based on the cover, and the back page, the back description, and then the first couple pages. I just read almost anything if it caught my attention.
For a while, I had a phase where I was super into Star Wars novelization stuff. There’s a whole bunch of Star Wars books. I read a ton of them from the mid-’90s. I would get into things and just read a lot about it. Then I would go to a different subject. I varied all over.
Yeah, I read a lot. I was always really good in school. My family was super into academics, so we all had to get good grades. I always did my homework.
Tanya: Where did you grow up?
Erika Hamden: I grew up in New Jersey in a suburb of New York City called Montclair that actually Buzz Aldrin is from.
Tanya: Oh my God, yeah. That’s amazing. First of all, I was just in Montclair Sunday.
Erika Hamden: Oh, awesome.
Tanya: Yeah, my uncle lives there. Yeah, no, beautiful suburb.
Erika Hamden: Yeah, it’s a really nice town. The schools were great.
Tanya: Is that where Buzz is from?
Erika Hamden: Yeah, he was born in the hospital in the next town over, but he grew up in Montclair. He went to my middle school, which at the time when I attended was called Mount Hebron and then they renamed it a couple of years ago to Buzz Aldrin Middle School. Then he went to the same high school. I met him one time actually when I was a senior in high school. He asked whether we still played football on the same field and stuff.
Tanya: Oh, wow, that must have been such an honor for you.
Erika Hamden: Yeah, I used to joke in middle school. There’s a bust of him in the entrance lobby. I would say one day there was going to be a bust of me there, too.
Tanya: It very well might be. You’re getting there. You really are on a path to potentially uncover some incredible spatial stuff that we don’t know. What initially sparked your interest in space and specifically stars?
Erika Hamden: I actually have a very particular incident that I feel started it. I was in second grade. I remember I was sitting reading on the couch, I think. My mom came over and she was making dinner. She had the news on. She said, “Oh, there was just a story about how scientists want to come up with a new name for the Big Bang. There’s a contest that people can enter so I think you should enter the contest.”
I looked at her and I was like, “Oh, what’s the Big Bang?” Since she was making dinner, she was too busy to explain the mysteries of the universe to me. She said, “Oh, go look it up.” I went upstairs. We had an encyclopedia, so I looked it up in the encyclopedia. I remember reading the entry. That was the first time that I realized that space was a thing.
It talked about the beginning of the universe. Then in the back of the encyclopedia, the last volume was an atlas. I remember going to the atlas, and in the end, it had a map of the solar system, and then it had a map of the galaxy, and then it had a map of the known universe. I read all of that. I just was like, oh my God, this is the greatest thing I have ever heard of. That was basically it.
Tanya: How old were you?
Erika Hamden: I think I was seven or eight. I knew how to read and I learned how to read in first grade. Yeah, I think I was seven.
Tanya: Wow, so your love for space really started at a young age?
Erika Hamden: Yeah, as soon as I learned that space was a thing, I was into it. Then I immediately wanted to be an astronaut because I was like, well if space is so awesome, I want to go there.
Tanya: Wow, and is that still one of – a goal of yours to go there to [05:24]?
Erika Hamden: It is, yeah. It’s a goal of mine. I’ve talked to a few astronauts and they always say that you should do the things that you love. If along the way, you can qualify for being an astronaut, then that’s great, but the odds of it are so low that you can’t design your whole life around something that is very unlikely to happen. I’ve tried to take that advice and do the stuff that I love. I still am qualified, so I’m going to try the next time around. I also know, well, the odds are small, but I’m going to give it a shot.
Tanya: What do you need to qualify?
Erika Hamden: The very base qualifications are very basic. You need a bachelor’s degree in a hard science and then some years of experience in your fields. It could be engineering, or math, or if you have a Ph.D., then that meets the years of experience qualification. You have to be in good health and have good vision. That might be it. There’s very few actual requirements.
Then they will take the applicants and they split them into qualified versus highly qualified. Then they really only consider the highly qualified people. For that, they consider things like do you know how to scuba dive? Do you speak another language? What kind of experience do you have in a difficult environment or isolated conditions?
Do you know how to fly a plane? Are you the type of person that someone would want to be stuck in a tiny spaceship with for six months? They say things like, would someone want to go on a camping trip with you where you have to rely on the other person, but also you have a good attitude?
Tanya: Wow, yeah, those are a little bit more ambiguous for sure. Okay, well, hopefully, you’ll get there. You’ve done work at the Jet Propulsion Labs which is connected with NASA just to switch gears a little bit. What was that experience like? What were you working on?
Erika Hamden: The experience was awesome. I started in 2008 as a grad student. I was a grad student at Columbia. I worked on this project that was at JPL. I remember the first time that I went there to start working on a project. You’re driving on the highway and then the exit it says NASA JPL next exit.
I was so thrilled because JPL builds Mars Rovers. They build all these satellites that have gone to the outer planets. They built Voyager. I just have admired the work that they do for a really long time, so it was very thrilling to go there.
The project I was working on was this new type of detector technology that we were trying to develop to be very efficient in the ultraviolet. At the time, I didn’t know very much. It was my second year of grad school. I was drawn in this team of people who had been developing these detectors. I was going to work on one aspect of making them work better.
Tanya: Just for people that don’t know, what is the purpose of working on these detectors? What do they do?
Erika Hamden: In general, for building telescopes of any kind, the detector is really the heart of the telescope. It’s the most important component. It really sets a lot of the telescope capabilities. Most people associate telescopes with the big mirror; that is important, too, but the detector is really a key component.
What we were trying to do is develop this different type of detector technology. In the ultraviolet, the technology has lagged a lot compared to other wavelength ranges in astronomy. We were trying to develop this new sensor that was easier to operate; it’s easier to fabricate; it’s cheaper to make. Historically, this type of sensor didn’t work in the UV, and so we were – because the previous technology that had been used on a bunch of space missions was really not very efficient. For every 100 photons that hit the detector, it would actually record maybe 10 of them. That’s not a lot. We were working on this new technology that would be able to detect between 60 and 90% of the photons.
Tanya: Just so that I understand what you’re saying, basically the telescope would only record about 10% of what it was seeing?
Erika Hamden: That’s just for the light sensor. The rest of the telescope also has different losses like every photon that hits a mirror, some of them get absorbed and they don’t necessarily reflect. The overall throughput of these telescopes is really low, but the detector is a huge part of that. If your detector only is 10% efficient versus 60 or 80% efficient, it makes a big difference.
Tanya: Wow, no kidding; okay.
Erika Hamden: Yeah, the detectors at the time, we didn’t know if they were going to work or not. That’s the whole point of discovery, but they had a lot of potential. We thought it was worth putting basically years of work into it.
Tanya: What did you actually accomplish in your time there?
Erika Hamden: In addition to having a great time in all of my trips to JPL because it’s just a super cool place, you can go visit the Mars Rovers. They have these clean rooms. There’s viewing galleries where you can go and see the progress. They just build the most incredible stuff there.
We were successful in developing this detector. When we started, we had a couple of different technologies that we needed to try out individually, and then try them out altogether, and then show that they were robust and that they would work under a variety of conditions. Then the final step of that was actually putting the detector in a telescope and flying it to say, look, this even works in a telescope in the exact environment that we anticipate. FIREBALL was actually in addition to doing interesting science. The idea of it was to prove that this detector technology that we’ve been working on for a really long time would actually work.
Tanya: Amazing; okay, before we get into FIREBALL because that’s a super interesting topic, how many people were on your team at JPL?
Erika Hamden: At the time that started, it was a pretty small group. The woman that led the team, she’s still at JPL. Her name is [11:38 Sholay Nexodd]. She originated really the foundational technology that made this type of detector work in the UV. She was our group leader. Then there was me and maybe just a handful of other people, I want to say like three or four who were doing some of that initial basic work and testing.
Then as we progressed and as it seemed like the sensors were working, that group started hiring more people. I joke with them that I started as a grad student and then they’ve since hired three or four people that do the job that I was doing. They definitely expanded. They do a lot more detectors now since it’s much less experimental. They just have a much bigger – which I’m still a part of. I’m still working with them. This proposal that I’m writing right now uses the detectors. I was just on a telecom with the whole team [12:34] all about what we were going to do.
Tanya: Yeah, I’m assuming it’s just this beginning?
Erika Hamden: Yes.
Tanya: You guys have lots and lots of work to do. How long did it take you to develop this sensor where before it was capturing about 10 photons or about 10% of all the stuff and you got it to 60 or 70? What was the period?
Erika Hamden: That took about three years from the beginning to our very first sign that it worked. Then it took another – yeah, so those three years just we had proof from other things like we tested it out on just bare silicon wafers, not on actual detectors, but just test wafers. I could say, oh, it works in that environment, but that’s really different from saying it works in a real detector. Yeah, it took three years of mostly messing things up before we finally got it right. Then after that, it took another two years before I would say that we felt really good about the process and that we could make it work for anything. Then until the final flight, like the actual flight when we put it on FIREBALL, that was ten years.
Tanya: Wow; okay, let’s talk about FIREBALL. What is FIREBALL?
Erika Hamden: FIREBALL is a telescope; it’s an ultraviolet telescope. The name stands for the Faint Intergalactic-medium Redshifted Emission Balloon which is a very long acronym, so we now call it that.
Tanya: Thank you for that.
Erika Hamden: Sometimes, even I forget one of the words in that.
Tanya: Yeah, that’s a long one; okay.
Erika Hamden: Yeah, we call it FIREBALL. The version of the telescope that we flew in September was actually a second iteration, so we call it FIREBALL 2 because there was a FIREBALL 1. It’s an ultraviolet telescope which means that it has to be – in order to do its observations, we have to be above most of the atmosphere. If you have a UV telescope, you either have to do it from space or the stratosphere. Those are your options because ultraviolet light is the kind of light that gives us a sunburn but the atmosphere luckily for us, it blocks most of the UV light that is coming off of the sun or just from space. UV light is really damaging to DNA, to people’s skin. That’s one of the causes of skin cancer. It’s also damaging to all of your space hardware.
FIREBALL is weird for a telescope because it’s not actually a space telescope, but it’s not ground-based telescope; instead, it’s a balloon telescope. It goes up on these giant weather balloons. In our case, it observes for one night. It’s this strange hybrid of an atmospheric experiment, but we’re looking at space.
Tanya: Why just one night, like a 24-hour period?
Erika Hamden: Mostly due to the FAA requirements and the fact that we want to get it back. You send it up, and the balloon – there’ s a branch of NASA that’s called the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facilities, CSBF. They do the balloon launches. They have a whole team of weather people.
The weather people determine once the balloon goes all the way up to the stratosphere, goes to 130,000 feet, they determine its potential trajectory across the United States. We do these launches from New Mexico. They’ll calculate, okay, if we launch today, then the balloon will ascend to 130,000 feet. Then the wind at that altitude is heading west at 20 knots. That means that we’re going to be above California in 15 hours.
The problem with being above California is that in order to come – to bring the telescope down, we have to pass through LAX airspace. The balloon people are friends with the FAA and they can make some accommodations. If we pass through other airspace like if you’re coming down in the middle of Arizona, there’s probably no major airport there, so that’s fine. If you’re coming down in the Texas panhandle, that’s probably fine, too, but if you’re coming down through LAX airspace, there’s no way that they will let you do that.
Once you hit California, you either have to cut down immediately or you have to fly all the way above California, across it, and then ditch in the Pacific Ocean. California is a very hard stop on where you can allow the balloon to go, so partly that sets the limit. Then in the other direction, if the wind is heading east, you can’t fly over Dallas. It just starts to get – the airspace becomes a lot busier. Even though we’re floating above it all, we still have to come down at some point. That sets the east-west limit. The wind tends not to go too far north or south although there are restrictions like we can’t fly into Mexico I think for obvious reasons.
Tanya: FIREBALL is an incredible project which has involved a lot of different people, and entities, and players. How was it conceived? How do you get something like that green light?
Erika Hamden: It was conceived in the early to mid-2000s by Chris Martin, the PI who was a professor at Caltech. Basically, the first thing that you do is you come up with a science question like what do you want to know about the universe that you don’t know and you also can’t find out using the telescopes that exist already? You have to motivate it and say, we want to do this really interesting thing, but we can’t do it any other way, so we need to build a telescope. Once you have that question, that actually – the question sets almost everything about the rest of the mission. It will set what type of telescope do you need. For our science question about trying to observe hydrogen around these distant galaxies, we need a UV telescope.
Tanya: What’s the interest in observing hydrogen around the galaxies?
Erika Hamden: It’s basically to understand how galaxies evolve through time. We look out into the universe and you can see galaxies. They have this wide, wonderful variety of shapes, and colors, and sizes. We can explain like, okay, well we see this is a newly formed galaxy. It’s making lots of new stars. It’s blue-colored because new stars are blue. It’s like a spiral versus this other galaxy that has no new stars in it.
We can talk about their present state, but we can’t necessarily explain why they have these two different patents. What’s different from a galaxy that has lots of new stars versus a galaxy that has no new stars? We think that the reason is the environment that they’re in. A galaxy with lots of new stars has a connection to the larger – these large clouds of hydrogen that we think are in the what we call the intergalactic-medium, the space between galaxies. A galaxy that has big reservoirs of hydrogen flowing into it, those reservoirs will sustain star formation in the galaxy. A galaxy that doesn’t have those reservoirs, it’s not going to be able to keep making stars. It’s going to run out of hydrogen.
We think that the nature and the size of those reservoirs’ changes throughout the history of the universe. If you look at really distant old galaxies, they’re going to have a different hydrogen reservoir than ones that are right nearby to us. FIREBALL is trying to look at a very particular age of galaxy to understand the hydrogen reservoirs that are around galaxies of that age. It’s one step in a bigger question which is, what’s happening throughout the history of the universe; not just at the one stage that FIREBALL’s looking at, but earlier and later? It’s a really fundamental question.
Tanya: Yes, it is.
Erika Hamden: Why do galaxies look the way that they do?
Tanya: Awesome; and then in terms of green light, you were green-lighting the FIREBALL. You mentioned that it was originally created and then you had to come up with the big question and inquiry which sets the path forward for it. Then what needs to happen?
Erika Hamden: At that point, you build a science team and you figure out, okay, how are we going to actually construct this? Chris, the PI, he had a long-standing collaboration with a number of scientists in France. The French have a very long history of ballooning and ultraviolet science, so that was a natural connection.
Basically, the process is like, Chris wrote a proposal to NASA and describes the mission. Then the French team also writes a proposal to the French space agency to describe the mission. Then both of those have to get funded. Then you can build, start building the telescope.
That proposal process is open. NASA has a website where they publish what they call Announcements of Opportunity, OAs, where you can propose to different calls. In principle, it’s straightforward, but in practice, it’s complicated because you have to do an initial design of your mission before you can actually propose it. You have to do a little work ahead of time. Then once you get the funding to build it, then you can start doing detailed designs and refining things.
Tanya: How much money did you estimated that you needed for FIREBALL to get it launched?
Erika Hamden: FIREBALL 1 had flown in 2006 and 2009. That was before I really worked on it. The team realized that they needed to improve the telescope and make the detector better in order to actually do the science we wanted to do. That’s partly what motivated my detector work.
Then we re-proposed in I want to say 2012 to reformulate the spectrograph to make it more efficient. That’s when changed from just FIREBALL to being FIREBALL 2. The total mission has been going on for I’d say for 15 years. Probably between the French and the US, the contribution is about $20 million.
Tanya: Wow; and has the mission ever succeeded in actually addressing the initial inquiry to date?
Erika Hamden: I hesitate to say no. We’re still working on the data from the most recent flight. I think we will have – we’ll be able to extract something, but it won’t be a complete success. The flight in 2018 for FIREBALL 2, we have – we did prove a lot of things. The technology development we have been able to prove that it worked in a space-like environment.
That’s part of the function of these missions. It’s not just to do the science, but it’s also to do technology development because NASA is very conservative about what it puts into space. If you want to purpose a detector for a space telescope, you have to show that it’s going to work in space which is a little bit of a catch 22 because you can’t send it to space until you’ve proved that it would work in space. Doing these balloon flights is an acceptable alternative.
In that sense, it was a success that we tested the detectors. We tested a bunch of other new technology that the French have contributed and that we had added. From a technology standpoint, it’s been great. From an observing hydrogen standpoint, it has been frustrating.
Tanya: You talked about the flight in 2018. You gave a brilliant TED talk about that, which by the way, I highly recommend anybody listening to go check out the TED talk. Erika was just really incredible on failure actually. Can you talk about the flight and some of the most challenging parts as well as the thing that you’re most proud of?
Erika Hamden: Yeah, the flight was in September of 2018. We had actually been in – we do the flights from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, this little town. We had been there for about eight weeks, six weeks by the time we actually had the flight. We’re testing things out. We’ve put everything together. We checked that it works. Then we wait for the weather to be good.
Finally, after a long time, on the morning of September 22, we – the weather was good. Everything looked great and so we had our launch. The telescope ascended up to the stratosphere. That was really a thrilling experience for me because I almost never thought it was really going to happen. I had been working on it for so long that it just seemed like this endless thing. Then we finally got it off the ground.
It took off at 10:30. It takes about three hours to reach the float altitude. Then we wait for the sun to set because it’s a UV telescope; we needed the sun to be down to do the observations of space. Throughout the day, we were just checking that we could still communicate with it. We all took a nap.
Then that evening, we got back to the base where we work. We were starting our operations. I was running the mission control. I remember telling the person who was taking the log, I would read out the altitude every so often. I remember I’m reading the altitude out and I’m like why is this number still going down? Because it drops a little bit and then it’s supposed to stabilize. It did not stabilize; it kept falling.
Eventually, about an hour after sunset, the balloon people came downstairs, and they told us that there was a hole in the balloon. That’s why we kept losing altitude. The altitude is really important for us because the lower you are in the atmosphere, the more the UV light gets blocked. The altitude was such a crucial thing.
All of our equipment actually worked beautifully which was a nice. Maybe that’s my favorite thing about the day that we worked so hard on all of these different complicated components and they all worked really well. Then the altitude was so low by the time the sun set that we really didn’t get a lot of good data. The more time went on, the farther we dropped. We were scrambling to change from our planned targets to something brighter that at least we could just get some data, a brighter object. We ended up pointing at Andromeda because Andromeda is a super bright UV source even though that was not at all in our science plan, but by the end of the night – or not even by the end of the night; it was a few hours in. We just were like, well, we need to look at the brightest thing around.
That was really a huge disappointment. It was the kind of thing that we can’t plan for because we don’t do the balloon launches and we can’t control it. That’s a thing that happens sometimes with them. Personally, when they told us, I was – we were so in it and I was like I do not have time to have an emotional response to this new development.
The next day, I cried. It was a huge accomplishment that we got the telescope off the ground, and we had built it, and it worked, but still, that one tiny piece that would have told us that the mission was a total success, that we – we didn’t have that. It was really hard because I – and I talk about this in the TED talk. It made me think a lot about why I do the things that I do and what keeps me going in times when, inevitably, things go wrong. In some senses, it’s been a point of reflection. If everything had worked, I wouldn’t have stopped to really think about why I do the work I do. I’ve tried to at least take the positive things out of that experience.
Tanya: Actually, the people that are listening, on your website, you have this incredible, and you also show it on your TED talk, this incredible picture of FIREBALL 2 that is out there in space right next to the moon. It’s pretty amazing. When you see that, obviously, it’s a huge bittersweet moment like you just shared.
What was the conversations like the next day within the team? How do you pick yourself up and keep going? What do you say to the team? What were the internal discussions like if I was a fly on the wall?
Erika Hamden: One of the great things about the team – well, all the people on the team I’m really grateful to work with. A number of them, they have a lot of experience in balloon flights in general for FIREBALL. There are people who have been on it since the very beginning. They all have had experiences where you do the flight and then something goes wrong. For them, there was no question. One of the French guys came up to me the next day and he was like, alright, so when are we going again? He was 100% ready for trying the next time.
For the newer people, I think – this was my first balloon flight, and so for me, I would put myself into that category of, I had to really work through the feelings of let’s say we do this again and the same thing happens, will it be worth it to me. I think from my position now, I would say, yes, absolutely. You get way more out of it than just the data at the very end and so that process is worthwhile. I think the other members, who are new, they’ve all had to make that assessment for themselves.
The internal discussions, we had a meeting of everybody – actually, we had a party. It was that we rent houses in this town and so I had them run over to the house I had rented, I made a bunch of food, we all brought a ton of drinks and we tried to just be positive about having made it through a flight because that was a huge accomplishment. Not let what happened take away from the fact that we had done it. I would say we were mostly positive.
Since then, we’ve had a lot of discussions about, okay, what do we do need to do – what can we improve for next time, what do we keep the same, more logistics of getting it put back together for the next time around.
Tanya: It sounds like you were pointing to this, the more senior people, the time in which they were ready to go again and jump back on it, was very, very small. It happened, things didn’t go well, when are we doing it again versus this was your first flight and you really had to work through that emotion. That’s actually a really great way to experience failure and process it. First of all, what did you learn about that on failure, and what do you think, perhaps, allowed the more senior people to reduce the time they maybe felt bad and to get back on it?
Erika: For me, I feel like personally I learned that I can get through anything. That experience, from the launch to when it crashed and we had to go get it, I would say that was one of the best and also one of the worst days of my life. Having been able to get through it and do all the stuff that I needed to do in the moment, I felt very proud of myself. Then being able to think back on it and try to understand how can I go into the same situation again? That’s been something I’ve had to figure out. Am I prepared to rebuild this telescope, show up, again, in this tiny town in New Mexico and do this all over again, knowing that the outcome could be the same? That I feel like I’ve thought about it and I think it’s worth it because I don’t know that the outcome will be the same, so I’m willing to take that risk, just because I think the payoff of understanding is worth it.
I think for the senior people on the team, they’ve just seen everything. They’ve been through a lot and so they know that this one failure is not a killer, but there’s no endpoint. We try again and then we get better results the next time. They can see that this process is iterative, that and the, I don’t know, wisdom that comes with age.
Tanya: That’s also a muscle. That’s something I was wondering, resilience. You said FIREBall initially started in 2006. That was the first launch, right but when did it actually start?
Erika: Yeah. It started in 2002 or 3.
Tanya: Yeah, so from 2002 to today, 17 years, that takes commitment, and unquestionably you guys are going to get there, it’s just a matter of time. You’re going to work through whatever needs to get worked through. Resilience, what are your thoughts on that and what has it taken, from your standpoint, to keep going?
Erika: Resilience is really – you can think of it is like a muscle that you can choose to exercise and the more you use it, the better you get at it. I sometimes think about it as self-knowledge or confidence. I know that I will be able to do something, or that I can handle whatever gets thrown at me. I guess those two are probably two sides of the same coin. I think for me, really the first serious experience that I had was going to college and dropping out of college and realizing after I dropped out of college that I was still a valuable person who mattered. I was able to rebuild my sense of self and go to college again and succeed and feel like I could take this devastating experience and move passed it and use it to inform my future choices.
Tanya: What made you drop out of college because your academic accomplishments are outstanding, completely academic. What happened?
Erika: I went to MIT and I was 18. Maybe all freshmen are very naïve but I was especially naïve. You asked me what I was like as a kid, and I don’t think I was that different. When I was a teenager, I liked to read. I was very straightforward. I thought that people were going to go to MIT because they really loved science and they wanted to discovery things. Then the reality of college was just not what I was anticipating, and I wasn’t really equipped to deal with that. I didn’t know how to do things for myself or, I don’t know, soothe myself. I felt a lot of anxiety and I had panic attacks, which I never used to have.
MIT, it may be better, I don’t know, but they, sort of, said, “Well, you can just leave, if you want.” That’s what I did. I just dropped out and they took my name off of things. That was really hard because my whole identity was about academic achievements.
Tanya: Yeah, I can imagine.
Erika: Then I took the rest of that year, I worked at a Borders in the café and I read a lot of books. I worked –
Tanya:[26:38]
Erika: Yeah, I took classes at the [Youth Montclair State], the university in our town. Yeah, I just tried to exist and figure out what actually drove me, and to make sure that my identity and my choices were around things that I wanted to do and not what I thought people wanted me to do.
Tanya: That’s a big one. That’s a huge one, actually. I just want to highlight this because what you said is so important and it’s something that I hear over and over and I’ve also experienced. When you’re doing something that is not in alignment with your higher purposes, whatever that is, you get these signs: anxiety, depression, no energy. It’s just like, life feels clunky. It sounds like that’s – it’s amazing that you were astute enough to recognize that and put a pause because most people don’t. They go through it.
Erika: Push through it, yeah.
Tanya: Yeah.
Erika: I struggled with that too because I don’t want to be a quitter, I didn’t want to be a quitter. There’s a lot of stigma about just saying, now I need to give up.
Tanya: Even if that’s the right thing to do.
Erika: Yeah, and for me it absolutely was. I would joke with my graduate school adviser about how I didn’t have a lot of grit because I have no tolerance for just being stuck in a bad situation. I don’t do all-nighters because I know I need to sleep. You could interpret that as I’m not committed or I’m not going to do whatever it takes. I guess, from my perspective, I feel like I know what I need to do the work that I love and so I have to do those things first.
Tanya: There’s also not one way of doing it.
Erika: Yeah. For me, I have to be happy every day in my work and in the place where I am, to keep going. I guess the lesson I really learned was I need to – at MIT, I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t taking the steps that I needed to make myself happy, and I didn’t even know what those steps were. Now, I know what I need and I know how to get it and I do not let anything keep me from that.
Tanya: You spent a year – you said a year, reading a lot of books, working at Borders, taking classes at the local university. At what point did something click for you and you’re like, okay, I’m ready to go back out?
Erika: I would actually say that it didn’t really happen until I was back in college. I reapplied to college and I knew that I was ready to stop living at my parents’ house. When I got to Harvard, which is where I ended up going, that first day I was so scared. I was like, what if the same – what if I just can’t go to college. What if I’m one of those smart people who is unable to perform in a stressful environment. I had all these fears and I just was like; I’m going to take this one day at a time. I signed up for classes that I felt would make me happy and would keep me interested, and I gave myself permission to do okay and make it through the semester. It took a while to really feel like I could do it. I had to be kind with myself about being scared and give myself leeway to have all those feelings and not just assume that everything was going to be perfect.
I think that’s helped a lot to – even when we were doing the balloon flights and we’re in this tiny town in New Mexico and it’s really stressful and there’s nothing to do for fun, but I know from – now, from all these experiences, I know, okay, if I have the right food with me, if I make sure that we have a good schedule, that we take breaks, that we sleep, that we take the time to have fun, that we’ll be able to get through it and it will be enjoyable. At the time – I remember driving home from MIT in my parents’ car, they had come to pick me up, and feeling like I was so worthless and like my life was over. Now I look back on that and I feel like that was the bravest, most valuable thing that I could have ever done.
Tanya: Absolutely, yeah.
Erika: I’m really glad that 18-year old Erika did that.
Tanya: That’s amazing! First of all, thank you for sharing that because it takes balls. It’s a very vulnerable moment. Especially coming form somebody that has received so many unbelievable awards, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 2019, nominated by NASA, TED fellow –
Erika: Yeah, I’m very thrilled at that.
Tanya: Yeah, I’m even nervous about reading some of these awards because I probably will mispronounce them, it sounds so great. That’s incredible. It seems like the experience that happened to you in college, at least initially, allowed you to trust yourself and trust that you are going to make the right decisions for you. That’s your path and since then, you’ve accomplished some incredible things. That’s amazing. Actually, I’m going to quote you for a second, something that you said in your TED talk, which I thought was pretty amazing. You said, “Discovery is mostly about finding things that don’t work, and failure is inevitable when you’re pushing the boundaries of knowledge.” As someone that primarily deals with the unknown – it’s an uncharted path. Nobody’s telling you, Erika, if you do this, this, this, you’ll get there. You’re completely unchartered.
What does it take from you to really hold that space and tackle some of these enormous inquiries and questions?
Erika: I’ve had to get comfortable with being uncomfortable all the time. I’ve spent so many days – I’ve even told people working on the detector stuff, I’ve said, my God, I wish someone else had done this so I knew what to do. I tell myself, I’m like, Chris, the professor I worked with at CalTech, the PI of FIREBall, so many times he says, “If it was easy, someone else would have done it.” I have to remind myself that what I’m doing is hard and no one has done it before and that’s why it’s hard so it’ okay. I can’t ever guarantee that I’ve going to discover something, I can’t know that it’s going to work, but I also know that if I don’t try, then I’m definitely never going to find out.
I think that’s actually part of what keeps me going is the fact that I insist on being happy in it every day. I have a good life. I work with people I like and admire. I still find the problems interesting. That helps keep me going because I can’t rely on a discovery as the thing that will make it worthwhile. I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen, so it has to be worthwhile today.
Tanya: That’s very interesting. It’s a different context that you apply to your work and your life. Instead of being hungry for a major discovery and being miserable in the meantime, whether it happens or not you invented, or created, for yourself a context of, I’m going to enjoy the journey, working with people that I love, and be happy in my work and connect to the actual enquiry and the mission.
Erika: Yeah.
Tanya: That’s very powerful. In other words, nothing changed except the context that you created for yourself.
Erika: Yeah.
Tanya: Amazing. That is brilliant, brilliant. Okay, so what are you working on now?
Erika: Right now, I’m working on a proposal for a new space telescope. This is my own idea, which is pretty exciting because up until now, I’ve really been carrying out other people’s ideas. This is first mission that I’m PI of. It’s an ultraviolet space telescope called Hyperion. It’s designed to observe clouds of hydrogen in our own galaxy that are parts of star-forming regions. Right now, we don’t know what is required. We can’t look at a nebula in the galaxy and say, in 2 million years this will form this many stars. Even though the process is it should be something we can understand, right now we don’t have that level of knowledge yet. This telescope is focused on that, on trying to understand the origin of stars. The tag line is that it’s a Hyperion origin of the stars.
Tanya: Very nice. Who are you going to submit the proposal to?
Erika: This is also a submission to NASA. It’s due on August 1st, which as of this recording, is not that long from now. We’re going to submit it actually on Monday because we have to do it a couple of days ahead of time, for logistical purposes. I have six days until it’s done and we’re in the final stage of just polishing things. The cost of this telescope size for NASA is modest, it’s $145 million, which is a lot of money, but compared to a Hubble space telescope, it’s a small telescope. I’m working on it with people from Ball Aerospace and Ames Research Center and JPL. It’s been a really interesting process, to take something from just an idea, like my science question, all the way to a concept for a mission and it’s been a really great time.
Tanya: When do you know if NASA is going to give you the grant?
Erika: We’ll find out probably in December. It goes through a big review process.
Tanya: I can imagine. You’re asking $145 million; did I get that right?
Erika: Yes.
Tanya: Wow! Well, I’m sure that if this project gets approved, which I really hope it does, the learning when you’re really the architect of the idea, is brutal, but it’s unbelievable.
Erika: Yeah, it’s already been brutal.
Tanya: Yeah, I can imagine. What about FIREBall? Are you still planning to launch, I guess, FIREBall-3 in 2020?
Erika: It’s going to be just like a second launch of FIREBall-2 because we’re not really going to change too many things about it. Our plan is, yes, for 2020. As soon as this is submitted, I’m going to France to work on it. Partly, the schedule depends on how things shake out with other balloon missions. The campaign for this year is starting and we have to see who flies, how the weather is and then that will determine where we are in the list of missions for next year, but we’re still going. There is another team member who’s taking over some of my responsibilities so that she can get experience running the team too, so I have a little bit less work to do on it.
Tanya: Okay that’s great. Given that this will not be your first rodeo, I’m sure the ups and downs will be a little bit smoother.
Do you have a funny or interesting story that sticks out in our mind about your time working at the labs or any other project?
Erika: I have a lot of funny stories about being in New Mexico for the balloon launches. The town has very limited – there’s a very small grocery store and the food options are pretty slim. Half of the team is French and they really like their food. One night, we were doing this night-time test and one of the French guys didn’t have anything to do at that moment, so he came over and was chatting with me. He was like, “You know, Erika, I have to tell you that I am so tired of eating white bread and Cheddar cheese!” I’m like, [Johan], you can buy Brie from the Wholefoods in Albuquerque. It’s two and a half hours away. They’re so funny. They’re so great at what they do and they’re such lovely people but he just like that day he had had it and I was like, you can eat other things.
Tanya: The French take their bread and their cheese very seriously, and rightfully so.
Erika: Partly in my role as running the team, I want all of my team members to be happy and fulfilled and so I had French cheese Fed-Ex’d in from Murray’s Cheese shop in New York City. Two days later, I gave him a box and I was like, Johan, for you!
Tanya: Oh my God! What was his reaction?
Erika: He was so excited and all of them were so excited and they like – I think they don’t really appreciate the power of Fed-Ex and [51:15]. They could not believe. They were like, how did you get this? How did this happen? I was like, we can get anything in America in two days.
Tanya: That’s awesome. This is a really, really awesome example of a way to just connect with your team and really keep them motivated. Going through such a long process and such a challenging process, how do you get your team motivated and connected
Erika: Well, I think the most important thing is that I make sure that they know that I really value their time. People do a job because they care about it and because they need the money, but I want them to know that it’s not – I think that their time is the most valuable thing that they have and so I’m not going to waste it. They know that if I ask them to do something it’s important, and I only ask them to do things that I think are important. That helps a lot that people really trust you with their time, if they know that you think that they’re valuable.
Then I pay close attention to what motivates people because different people are motivated by different things and so they need to be treated in a different way. The French are a good example because to manage them, they prefer to know all the bad things right away. They don’t want me to tell them everything that worked; they’re not concerned with that. They want to know what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed. Whereas some of the grad students who are still starting out, I can’t just leave with a giant list of everything that they did wrong, they will feel attacked, so I have to handle them in a different way.
I just pay really close attention to individual people and try and treat them in a way that is respectful but also – I change my style depending on what I think they need and then I adjust that. It’s like a continuous process, which requires a lot of attention. I have to really pay attention, but I feel like that’s the way I can get good work out of them and they can be happy and feel supported. I think that also contributes. The people that were in New Mexico with me, all of them have said that they’ll come back.
Tanya: Wow that’s an incredible testament to your leadership. That’s actually one of the signals that we look for in a great leader. Do people follow you? In your case, the answer is yes. That’s great.
Erika: We had been there in 2017 and we didn’t even get a flight and everyone came back. I think that’s also because they all know, on their own, why they’re doing it.
Tanya: Erika, how do people get in touch with you, if they want to check in, keep up to date?
Erika: You can follow me on Instagram. I’m tooting my own horn now, but I have an excellent Instagram account. I post one post a day but I try and find something that is beautiful in my life every day, so it changes. Sometimes it’s about my work and sometimes it’s my cactuses at my house. I have an active Instagram and the handle’s just my name, erika.hamden, so follow me on Instagram. I have a Twitter account, that’s also @erikahamden and that’s a lot more science and technically focused. Yeah, those are the best ways. I have a website, which does not have a ton of information. You can see my very technical CV and links to my papers, which are also very technical.
Tanya: They can also see the picture of FIREBall-2 next to the moon, which is amazing.
Erika: Yes, and I am working on a website that I will link to on my personal website. That’s about Hyperion, the mission that I’m proposing.
Tanya: That’s awesome. Well, Erika, thank you so much for taking the time amidst the final deadline to submit the upcoming project, I really appreciate it and I wish you all the best. I’m going to send a lot of positive energy for this project. Amazing, amazing story. Thank you so much.
Erika: Thank you so much for having me, it’s been really great talking with you.
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