Search Interviews

While many of the interviews at the conference were with experienced professionals with a career spanning several decades, this interview is with a young up-and-coming PhD student who traveled all the way from the Philippines to attend her first AGU...

Margaret "Marty" Harding (84) talks to her friend Ann Davison (57) about her childhood as a sharecropper's daughter in rural Virginia, what it was like being the first member of her family to attend college, and her experience working on...

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...

Bidyut Bikash Goswami has found that people are very interested in his field of climate science and meteorology, even if they don’t fully understand it at first. He notes that people tend to assume that climate science means climate change...

Louise Prockter knows a thing or two about logistics and planning. When the first image of the unseen hemisphere of Mercury popped onto the screen during a flyby mission, her first thought was, "oh thank God, it's in the middle...

This Sao Paolo, Brazil based senior space research scientist is best known for explaining geomagnetic storms. In 2017, he received an AGU prize for “cutting-edge work” on space weather and processes. He remembers being a UC Berkeley graduate student in...

The potential downside of a career in always seeking discoveries is that it may stunt the development of your confidence. Even as someone who walked into NASA, living the dream in his mind, Nathan Kurtz experiences that downside, politely calling...

Richard Johnson is an AGU member who has been coming to Fall Meeting for years. He discusses some of the keynotes he’s attended in recent years, like those by Jerry Brown, Elon Musk, and Dan Rather. A sci-fi enthusiast, Richard...

Lori Glaze, Acting Director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters, works with everything from understanding asteroid trajectories and material make up to the InSight mission which recently landed a rover on Mars. It’s no exaggeration to say Lori...

I interviewed a significant person who is great at business

Interviewing my grandfather, I ask him about his childhood, his relationship with my grandmother and my mom, and he ends with a word of advice to his great grandchildren.

Amy Coulliette (51) interviews her father, Richard Allen (70), about his childhood in the Tunas, Missouri, his experience serving in the U.S. Navy, his retirement in the Ozarks region, and the characters that he has met along the way.

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...

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...

Emily Wolin is almost singe-handedly trying to upgrade Myanmar’s national seismic network. As a student, Emily saw the Mount Saint Helens eruption. Today, she helps scientists in Myanmar prepare their country for the aftermath of the next hurricanes to come...

Memory of being in Washington DC on July 4th at the Iwo Jima Memorial.

Seismologist Lucy Jones gained recognition for doing a TV interview following the 1992 Joshua Tree earthquake while holding her sleeping infant son. Long before that, she became one of the first American scientists to enter China after it’s normalization in...

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...

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...

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...

Krystal Yhap’s interest in urban water resource management was sparked by the conversations around water safety in Flint, MI. She’s now a graduate assistant at the University of Maryland studying the water system in San Francisco. She talks about her...

Erin Stevens (33) interviews father Craig Stevens (72) briefly about his life growing up, his adventures during his career, some of his many hobbies, and becoming a grandparent.

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...

Christine Schmidt: 2020-05-24 16:33:52 Albert Schmidt (94) and Kathryn Schmidt (91) interviewed by their daughter Christine Schmidt (66) about recent changes in their lives as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. They draw from early life experiences with solitude and...

Catherine McCammon, staff scientist at Bayerisches Geoinstitut, University of Bayreuth, Germany and longtime AGU volunteer discusses collaboration and explains how she has found that the “the whole is great than the sum of its parts,” is truly an accurate statement....