Search Interviews

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...

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...

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...

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...

James Butler has studied atmospheric chemistry, ozone depletion for over thirty years. Now, as the Director of NOAA’s global monitoring, he helps direct research into the hole in the ozone layer and climate change. He knows firsthand that we have...

Kenneth Jucks, Program Manager for the Upper Atmosphere Research Program at NASA Headquarters, has gone from launching weather balloons, what he calls a “poor man’s satellite” to take measurements up to 25 miles above the Earth’s surface, to managing five...

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...

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...

Denis-Didier Rousseau, Senior Research Scientist at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Fall Meeting Program Committee Chair shares how at six years old he set the goal to be a paleontologist. He discusses how that has shaped his life...

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...

Ross Stein is CEO and Co-Founder of Temblor, Inc., Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, a scientist at the Unites States Geological Survey, creator of films about earthquake science, and president of the AGU’s tectonic physics section. In this interview, Margarete...

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....

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...

Chris Atchison didn’t set out to create a project tailored for students with physical and sensory disabilities but ending up doing so anyway. He talks here about working on a virtual reality project and, when trying to find students who...

Zachary Wolff talks about how his path to studying and creating models as a graduate student at UC Irvine was not straightforward: he first considered medicine and meteorology before working on a CICE radiation study and discovering his interest. While...

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...

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...