In this series of posts, we sit down with a few keynote speakers of the 246th AAS meeting to learn more about them and their research. You can see a full schedule of their talks here and read our other interviews here!

Jennifer Wiseman’s path to astronomy began on her family’s farm in Arkansas. Growing up in a rural area, she enjoyed learning about the natural world and the night sky. As a graduate student, she used the Very Large Array to construct large images of a star-forming region in the Milky Way. Now the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA, Wiseman and her team oversee every science aspect of the Hubble mission. They work with NASA leadership, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the Hubble user community to optimize Hubble’s compatibility and complementarity with other observatories. In other words, Wiseman has spent her career thinking about the bigger picture, whether with her research, her science policy experience, or her leadership role at NASA. 

Background

Wiseman initially studied physics at MIT with the support of her family, school, and church community. She took a couple of astronomy courses and seized on every opportunity she could find to think about or work on space exploration. She went on to a Ph.D. program at Harvard, where she studied star formation in the Orion Molecular Cloud (OMC-1) with the Very Large Array radio telescope. She developed a mosaicking technique, a method which combines a lot of smaller images into one bigger picture, to study the large-scale structure of star-forming molecular clouds in new detail. This led to her discovery that OMC-1 was made of long filaments which were collapsing to form stars. “At that time,” she told me, “we didn’t really know that [filaments] were a common feature of how large interstellar clouds become chains of star-forming cores.” 

After graduating with her Ph.D., Wiseman continued her work as a Jansky fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and then a Hubble fellow at the Johns Hopkins University, where she continued studying star formation and protostars. She also became interested in bigger-picture questions about how science is structured and supported in the United States and how different fields of astronomy come together to inform our understanding of the Universe.  Wiseman said, “I began to look around for other opportunities in astronomy that might enable me to also use that bigger picture interest that I had… It was a time of deep soul-searching and getting advice.” 

Science policy

She found a place to think about the big picture as a Congressional Science Fellow for the American Physical Society. She spent a year on Capitol Hill working with congress members and their staffs and using her technical & quantitative skills to advise them on decisions about science priorities. Her role on the staff of the House Science Committee included oversight of physics, astronomy, and Earth and space science programs at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA. “It was really interesting to see how these agencies worked… [I] learned a whole lot about the big picture of how science is advocated and managed at [the] federal policy level,” she said. Through her work, she learned about the science oversight positions available at national agencies like the NSF and NASA, where she ended up next in her career.

Her involvement in science policy also extends to roles involving dialogue with the public, including a volunteer position as the director of the Dialogue On Science, Ethics, and Religion, or DOSER, an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) program which facilitates conversations between scientists, ethicists, faith communities, and the public. “These interactions and facilitating them has been a wonderful way… of using my personal interests in the broader uses of science in society and really connecting with people from other communities, including outside of the practicing scientific community.”

NASA

After her year as a Congressional Science Fellow, Wiseman took a job at NASA Headquarters as a Program Scientist, where she “was able to learn and be involved in this bigger picture of astrophysics support in the country.” She worked with grant programs and missions including Herschel, the Space Interferometry Mission concept, and primarily Hubble, just as exoplanet science and studies of dark matter and dark energy were becoming main priorities for astronomy. This experience led her to move to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2006 to become Chief of the Laboratory for Exoplanet and Stellar Astrophysics. This was an opportunity to work with scientists focusing on a variety of subfields, including exoplanets, stellar astrophysics, circumstellar disks, and instrumentation to optimize the work of existing instruments and to develop science plans for new telescopes like Webb which would enable a revolution in the field. “So this was a fantastic period of time learning how to supervise other scientists and to really encourage them as we developed these extremely fruitful fields of astrophysics,” she said.  

In 2010, she became the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope mission. In this role, she oversees all scientific operations of the telescope, working as part of the larger Hubble Project management team. Her role “involves making sure that our stakeholders both within the government and across the sphere of scientists and the taxpaying public are getting the best benefit from the Hubble Space Telescope mission,” she said. She also works closely with the Hubble user community to make sure the telescope’s unique strengths like ultraviolet light coverage and an extensive data archive are properly utilized and leveraged for maximum science return, including in complement with other observatories like Webb, ALMA, Chandra, and many other current and future facilities like Roman and Rubin, in space and on the ground. 

When asked about the science that excites her, Wiseman told me, “I’m really excited about the capabilities of having this powerful, complementary suite of facilities that will open our eyes in new and creative ways to what’s going on in just about every realm of astrophysics, including transient events that can also spawn gravitational waves. I’m also extremely excited about long-term time-domain studies that are enabled by having Hubble’s decades-long archive…  things that change over years in, for example, Solar System planets and their atmospheres, or seeing precursor objects that become supernovae… These are discoveries  that simple snapshot observations don’t allow.” Wiseman’s talk at AAS will focus on Hubble’s accomplishments and its future as a leading flagship observatory, with a focus on its complementarity with other missions “… as part of the suite of major astronomy facilities that we will have in the coming years.”

Her advice

Wiseman said she really valued the internships and opportunities she had as an undergraduate at MIT. She recommends that undergraduates try everything, even when things don’t seem like they’re immediately related to one’s career goals. “I got to experience a broader range of science than what I ended up doing, and that really helped me understand the broader scientific experience and hone my understanding of my own interests.” She emphasized the value of internships and research experiences as an avenue to experience different kinds of workplaces and climates. She also recommended taking a wide variety of classes, especially outside of STEM in the humanities and extracurriculars. “A well-rounded education as an undergraduate is a priceless gem that you will benefit from for the rest of your life.” 

Wiseman recommended graduate school for anyone interested in science, even if their interests fall outside a “traditional” research/academia path and are more aligned with science communication or policy. “Getting the graduate degree… enabled me to go on and qualify for the Congressional Science Fellowship, and then to move onto these oversight positions as a qualified scientist in a federal agency,” she told me. 

She also said she thinks it’s important that early career scientists know that they don’t have to choose between science policy, science communication, and research. As a Senior Project Scientist at NASA, she oversees big picture stuff while still maintaining research collaborations. On the other hand, she works with academic faculty members and research scientists who volunteer on federal science advisory panels, write white papers to help shape national science priorities, and participate in public science communication. “I want to assure early career people that often if you choose to focus on one direction of using astronomical skills and education as a career path, you can still be involved in some of the other aspects of astronomy from within that primary role,” she said. “You can really do both within the same career path.”

To hear more about the future of the Hubble Space Telescope, tune into Jennifer Wiseman’s Plenary Lecture at 8:00 A.M. AKDT on Wednesday, June 11 at #AAS246! 

Edited by: Neev Shah

Featured Image Credit: AAS