Search Interviews

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...

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...

Cloud scientist Steven Platnick is trying to learn how clouds may magnify—or minimize—the effects of climate change. He first got excited about clouds when his Ph.D. advisor, who "treated us like equals," started asking questions about clouds. "He asked questions...

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...

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...

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...

Who says work ends when you retire? For Tom Dunne, University of California Santa Barbara, the work is still finding him. Instead of heading off to the Amazon to find discovery, these days he need only look out his window...

What starts as a conversation about arctic change is actually an all-encompassing discussion about career growth, patience, and personal growth. Walt Meier, National Snow, and Ice Data center, introduces us to Jackie Richter-Menge, US Arctic Research Commission, who has spent...

Alan Gorchov Negron and Colten Petersen, University of Michigan, share their stories of becoming scientists, and their hopes for their continued research and involvement in geosciences. What is the role of an earth scientist? What is the role of climate...

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...

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...

While Patrick Taylor spends a huge chunk of his time in the clouds, his work has nothing to do with daydreaming. The Research scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center is working on understanding more about the role of clouds in...

The start of a fruitful career for Richard Eckman was being on a team which discovered that the stratosphere and ozone varied in relation to the sun’s 27-day rotation. Eckman, who now works with NASA’s Atmospheric Composition Modeling and Analysis...

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...

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...

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 –...

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...

Miguel Román, a Physical researcher Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, shares his journey from his childhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico to NASA. Seeing the impacts of hurricanes and urban growth where he grew up, and the practical...

For Jim Pizzuto, a career in science was never the plan. His father was a landscape painter, and he grew up surrounded by art and the majestic landscape paintings that his father produced. By the time he entered college, he...

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...

After one spends 50 years with the same organization, what’s next? That’s the question Dave Mao is attempting to answer after a highly-decorated career at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Born in Shangai and raised in Taiwan, Mao came to...

Daniel Minguez, a geophysicist for Chevron, helps create new geologic models of the earth’s layers, trying “to build geologic stories for how different geologic elements got there.” Daniel discusses his work which focuses on boring techniques and navigating plate tectonics....

Padma Yanamandra-Fisher, a research scientist at the Space Science Institute, shares stories of her career in planetary science. She recounts how defining the launch of Voyager was and the significance of the growth in the field since. Padma shares her...

Jack Kaye, associate director for research at NASA's Earth Science Division, discuss his origins as a chemist and earth scientist, and how he was recruited to Goddard to be a chemist among meteorologists. "My boss would advertise me as his...

There’s a bit of a culture change moving from Ohio to New Hampshire, which Melanie Perello, Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, did as part of her studies. Would you be surprised that going from either to Tibet to study paleoclimate...