Search Interviews

Colleagues Bryan Buckley (34) and Olivia Umoren (29) discuss growing up as the children of immigrants and their careers in health equity.

One Small Step conversation participants, Tom Hanlon (76) and Jennifer Trotter (32), talk about being raised Catholic, what they are passionate about, and health care.

On the football field, Bob Swap learned to read the field, look at the play, assess the information, and move forward. Today, those same skills help him manage over 250 scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center with NASA’s Pandora...

As a mission scientist with NASA's Operation IceBridge, John Sonntag has been keeping an eye on the polar ice caps for the better part of 20 years. The good news is, he is very well-versed in the science and analysis...

It took 21 years for Trevor McDougall to leave Australia, but when he did, he was on a plane headed to the University of Cambridge and a masters and Ph.D. in Oceanography. Besides the life-changing event of going from one...

A conversation between student and professor, this discussion reveals the subtle dynamics between good friends, even when they outwardly seem to be very similar. Lee Slater met Andrew Binley when the former asked the latter for a job at Lancaster...

For the last 14 years, Gari Mayberry has put her volcanology background to work as a disaster response coordinator at USAID. Disasters come in many shapes and sizes so that specialty is a start, but often Gari finds herself connecting...

In this inspiring interview, Becca Barnes, Bianca Rodriguez-Cardona, Evelyn Valdez-Ward, and Ben Sulman, four early-career biogeoscientists come together to share their reflections on what it means to be a scientist today. How can scientific knowledge be spread on social media?...

The next time you see a young kid skateboarding through the neighborhood, possibly listening to punk rock on their earbuds, remember that one day that kid could be your local science professor. Doug Jerolmack’s sturdy voice and love of experimenting...

Let’s say you’ve been involved in a project that has produced over 70 publications. Let’s say that project has spanned half your life. Let’s say you had to cross nations, endure tough conditions and delays, and negotiate a sometimes very...

In the mid-1990s, the town of Libby, MT, discovered they had a serious problem. The small town of fewer than 3000 people had reported over 300 fatalities from asbestos contamination. Enter Aubrey Miller, from the EPA, and Geoff Plumlee, from...

In begin in 1979, when Margaret Kivelson, UCLA, was part one of three women presenting a talk in which Fran Bagenal, University of Colorado Boulder, was sitting in the audience. They have been space scientists and collaborators for many years...

Brian Day, of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Virtual Institute, leads a group of scientists in visualization and analysis of spacecraft data. Brian was taught that there’s no water on the moon, there’s no atmosphere on the moon, and the moon...

After being drawn to the oceans at an early age, Paula continues to examine many factors that influence changes in the oceans. As a program manager for NASA, she enjoys the opportunity to work with dedicated researchers and learn how...

Nearing the end of her career, Anne Douglass, at NASA Godard Space Flight Center, has provided the scientific community with a better understanding of the ozone layer that protects us all from ultraviolet radiation. Anne describes the energy that it...

Sabrina Savage builds instrumentation for solar physics and studies solar flares at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The technology she helps create delivers the most high-resolution pictures of the sun anyone has ever seen. In a society more dependent upon...

As a radio astronomer at the Jet Propulsion lab at NASA, Joseph Lazio walks us through his work in radio astronomy and career at NASA. He helped design radio telescopes to solve the mystery of why a hidden star was...

Kristen Erickson, Director of science engagements and partnership, recently helmed NASA’s efforts to involve over 154 million adult Americans with direct participation with the 2017 total eclipse – the largest engagement effort in NASA history. But in her more than...

Sandra Cauffman was told growing up in Costa Rica that she couldn’t be an electrical engineer because she was a woman. Decades into a career which has largely involved getting her hands dirty building instruments to fix on spacecraft, the...

Stephen Running, an Emeritus Regent's Professor at the University of Montana, shares about his work with NASA studying the global ecosystem from space. Trying out a microscope at a young age ironically led him into a lifetime of looking at...

Steven Pawson, Chief of the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, shares his experiences working on atmospheric and Earth systems science, including interactions between the Ozone Layer and climate change, and predicting air quality for...

Sprites are electrical discharges like lightning, but up in the middle atmosphere. Having only been in the scientific literature since the 1990s, sprites captured Geoff McHarg’s imagination while observing the Aurora in Alaska. Perfect for a guy whose view of...

Michael Freilich, Director of NASA's Earth Science Division, shares about his life studying the oceans and Earth as a system. While still in his high school's oceanography club, he started exploring a question about how waves move that later became...

Frédéric Ouattara, Universite de Koudougou, knows the practical implications of his research into the ionosphere. Our mobile phone signals become worse due to the weakening of the ionosphere. In Burkina Faso, he helps train the next-generations of geoscientists. The 2018...

Jill Marshall, Assistant Professor of Geology at the University of Arkansas thought she was ready to go to college, but there she was on the campus of Boston University as a freshman overwhelmed by her surroundings and on shaky financial...