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.

Bruce Wielicki, a NASA Langley climate scientist, discusses his collaboration with economists to help non-scientists understand how climate change will hit them in the wallet, and how they could reduce that risk with modest investments in improved climate science. He...

Kathy Cashman, professor at the University of Bristol, worked on the 1980 eruption at Mount St. Helen’s in Washington, one of the first monitored volcanic eruptions in the world (“it was a ‘who’s who’ of volcanology and geology”). Thanks to...

Glenn Orton is so deep in Jupiter mission information that he gets envious when he’s not involved in a space project studying the gas giant. The senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory studies the composition and structure...

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...

When Quinyan Duan was a student in China, he found his way into hydropower engineering. He wanted to pursue a graduate degree but couldn’t find the right professor to guide him. He took the difficult step of applying in the...

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?...

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...

Imagine this upbringing: only child, suburbs of Maryland, daughter of a mathematician and a pastry chef. If you guessed that child would achieve a management role with NASA’s famed IceBridge2 mission, congratulations, you truly have exceptional foresight. Linette Boisvert McPartland...

Laurie Cantillo, the Deputy Director of Communications and Education at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about her journey to become a science communicator. She developed an interest in science at an early age spending time in the outdoors with her...

Conor Nixon, a space scientist at NASA--Goddard Space Flight Center, discusses his work studying the outer planets. Watching the Cosmos show growing up interested him in the solar system and he's been studying the outer planets most of his life....

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...

How can scientists tell the story of science so that the public listens and understands? Dwayne Brown is the Senior Communication Officer for the Science Directorate at NASA and works with hundreds of scientists to communicate their ideas on television,...

As a child, Luke Oman was always looking out the window. Today, he works on atmospheric processing for NASA. How do volcanic eruptions affect everyday life? What happens when sulfur dioxide gases from volcanoes interact with sulfate aerosol and stay...

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...

Woody Turner, the program scientist for biological diversity and manager for ecological forecasting programs at NASA, and one of the few people in the world who directly harness the power of space to solve a whale of a problem –...

Through his work with SERVIR, Ashutosh Limaye could be described as one of Earth’s watchdogs. The project scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Center’s job is to take NASA satellite data back down to the Earth and help people use...

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...

Paul Stackhouse is a sun chaser, but in his case it means measuring the surface radiation budget. This means figuring out how much sunlight gets to the surface of the planet, and takes a deep understanding of factors like cloud...