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From aspiring actress to NASA astrophysicist
00:22:50
This young researcher’s unlikely journey into academia will change the way you think about science, failure and belonging
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- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. That's Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.
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Happy Monday, listeners. For scientific american science quickly, I'm rachel feldman. We're skipping our usual news roundup today for a special series. This week, we'll be dedicating all of our shows to SIAM's inaugural class of young American scientists. This group of groundbreaking researchers represent the future of science, technology, and medicine. You can find out all about them in the latest print issue of Scientific American, which is coming out tomorrow, and you'll also hear from a few of them this week on science quickly. Today's guest is Irini Lambertis, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Cent who's also affiliated with the University of Maryland, College Park. She's here to tell us about her unusual path from aspiring actress to astrophysicist. Thanks so much for coming on to chat with us today.
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C
Thank you so much for having me.
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B
So you didn't always know that you wanted to be an astrophysicist. What first attracted you to the field?
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C
So I initially thought I was gonna be an actress. And I'm from New York City, born and raised in Brooklyn. And in New York you can be in specialized schools for really whatever you want. And so at high school, I went to LaGuardia School for the Performing Arts. I was in acting. And when you're in an art school in New York City, that normal teenage urge to be different from everyone else looks a little different because everyone's artsy, everyone's cool and figuring out their identity. And I'll never forget I went to the library at school and I was walking around and I saw this book that caught my eye and it's just so Corny, but it was like a brief history of time. And as a joke I picked it up and I started flipping through it, started reading it on the train during my commute to school. And it rocked my world. I was just until that point felt very disconnected from nature. I had a very kind of black and white view. I was like, oh, you know, I'm an artist. And it also was very satisfying to be in a place where I was the only one who wanted to be an astrophysicist. And I didn't even know what that meant. The first time I heard the word astrophysics was I'm not joking in Top Gun because for some reason the love lead of Tom Cruise was an astrophysicist. And at that point I heard of physics and then I heard astrophysics. I'm like, oh, that sounds like space physics. Space, that sounds great. So I was telling everyone that's what I was going to do. And I applied to one college, this was the University of Rochester. It was pretty random. Went in and majored in, in physics without ever taking a physics class before or calculus. So it was sheer will. And I was really fortunate when I actually started doing the thing I kept telling everyone I was going to do that I really liked it. And especially when I started doing research, absolutely fell in love and I can't imagine doing anything else.
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B
Wow, that's such a great story. I think especially because we don't think of astrophysics as being something that people stumble into. So I would love to hear what was it about the vibe of astrophysics that first attracted you and then what was the actual experience like and what kept you going?
- [04:32]
C
So some of the first concepts that really blew my mind was the bigness of it all. And I think the reason why I was drawn to specifically astrophysics is the scales of which the universe is comprised of is so beyond the normal realm of our experience as humans in our day to day that it's an act of will of your own mind to just try to relate to how big everything actually is. So, you know, humans notoriously, famously bad at understanding the difference between a million and a billion intuitively. And now in astrophysics land, you're regularly jumping back and forth between skills. And I think that really something so much bigger than myself and everything that I ever knew was one of the draws to it. I think I also was blown away by how much we're still actually figuring out. There's a part of me that thinks it would be kind of lame if humans were right about how we think the Universe works right now because it makes the universe feel a lot smaller than us puny humans can understand it, which is, I know, a hot take as a scientist who's publishing things and giving people my opinions on what I is going on in the universe. But that openness, the discovery, the trying to figure it out, putting the pieces of the puzzle together to understand why the world around us looks the way it does. From the first concepts I learned in these pop sci books just threw me into it. So when I started actually as a physics major, you're not doing fun stuff like you're calculating speed of a ball rolling down a hill. You're not looking at the glories of splendor of the universe. And it was hard. I did horrific in my first class ever in physics. It was an honors majors physics course. I did not realize this. I thought everyone was a genius in my class. Little did I know every single person had already taken physics before they'd taken AP physics. The first one and the second one they had tutors. The reason why they were a physics major is because they took physics and liked it and saw they were good at it, versus me, who read a couple of pop sci books and saw Top Gun and you know, was just a girl from Brooklyn with a dream. Why this one? Unclear. You know, I also liked it. It was so like not on brand for me. And I think there was this act of rebellion almost going into nerdom. But that's when I discovered sci fi. Around the same time I discovered Star Trek, I discovered science fiction books like, you know, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and just my whole life shifted. And so despite getting a C minus in this first physics class, I didn't drop the major. And what was crazy is so your first two years in a physics major, you're pretty much. For most people, it's a lot of review. They've already seen a lot of this material before. For me, all brand new. This is the first time I'm seeing any of these things. And so I am like drowning. But I learned how to swim. And by the time we get to the more advanced level courses in your third and fourth year, I've built the muscle of knowing what to do when you see something that's completely out of depth of anything that you've done before, there's no relation to it. And a lot of my classmates, for a lot of them that was like the first time that they were really encountering that in a long time. So I started doing really well and it was around the same time as me getting into research, which initially was physics research, it wasn't even space research, so inertial confinement fusion. And I just started getting better and better. And it's just been this really funny way of getting to where I am now at NASA and specializing on really big black holes and trying to understand how they got so big and what their point is in the universe to, you know, a kid from New York who was in art school and wanted to stand out from her peers.
- [08:35]
B
It's really cool to hear you talk about this because, you know, there's so much research on the different point in the pipeline where people tend to fall out of science and math majors. And I know me personally, I'm very happy to be in the career I'm in now. And I do technically have a science degree, but I thought I was going to be in research for the long haul. And I remember that first time I got a C in a college class, I was like, oh, that means I'm not very good at this time to find a new focus. And it's a shame that that happens. So I'm really curious about how your experience informs some of the work that you do as a mentor.
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Yes, because in the end it is made up who's good, who's gonna be good, who has the potential to be good. It's all couched in opinions that are colored from your own experiences on how you think the world works. And that means whatever systems you are a part of and have not dismantled, that's how you're going to see it. So when you're seeing someone coming into a program and they get a circle, it's actually not very informative on whether they're going to be a great researcher or not. You know, what is, they obviously love it enough to keep trying and doing it again, choosing despite not doing well, but wanting to do better. In my opinion and what I see in terms of the students I mentor and students that I have, how successful are they going to be? The good thing about acting and going through that is you get taught rejection. It's the name of the game. It's mostly nos, but the way rejection gets taught to you is a little different. When you don't get an audition or you don't get a part you wanted, it's less of a failure and more of a. Like, obviously they're looking for something really specific. And I just wasn't that mark. When you now transition to the yeses and nos and the gatekeeping of that is academia, which is basically a series of yeses or nos. Will I get into graduate school? Yes or no? Will I get this fellowship? Yes. No. Will I get Grant? Yes. No. I've kind of went into it already, coming with this callus of rejections from acting. That does not mean things don't hurt. But it definitely did prepare me for that. And it is very satisfying to eventually start doing really well and knowing that, yeah, I got a C minus in my first class. And, you know, just kind of like a. Out of spite, almost just like. Cause I could, you know. And I used this to inform how I train, how I teach, how I mentor. What are the benefits of the doubt people are giving? Who do we give benefits of the doubt to? Do they look a certain way? Do they come from a certain background? And really challenging those.
- [11:19]
B
That's awesome. Well, let's talk about your research. So what's interesting about young black holes?
- [11:25]
C
Yeah. So the TLDR is in almost every single galaxy we've ever looked at. There is a massive black hole in the very center of it. Even though you think supermassive black hole, you think, wow, that must be really big. But it's actually kind of small when you compare it to the scale of the galaxy that it lives in. And this is really consequential because for, you know, the past 60 years, we've observed galaxies and their supermassive black holes in the center. And we see these relationships that pop up, relationships that make it seem like the growth of the galaxy and the growth of the black hole is connected, despite the fact they're on really different scales. Like in our Milky Way, we have Sagittarius aids, which is our central supermassive black hole. If we were to take SAG a pluck it out of our galaxy, absolutely nothing would change in yours or I's lives. It is kind of inconsequential in terms of dynamics. Like, you know, the gravity from this supermassive black hole is really out of our reach. So it's a big question, why? And how is the growth and life of one of these objects, galaxies, related to the growth of the black holes in the center? So naturally, you want to ask yourself, okay, well, how did it first start? So naturally, this question of what did the first massive black holes look like and what do their galaxies look like? What are the initial conditions of the relationship? How did they form? Are they doing anything to the properties of these first galaxies was an open one. And so a lot of my research is basically trying to put the pieces of that puzzle together. And to use data across the entirety of the electromagnetic spectrum to so all of NASA's flagship telescopes and then some to look at really early massive black holes in their galaxies and try to say something. And during this past couple of years, I was one of the early people that stumbled into little red dots, which are funnelly and very typical of astronomers name that, you know, the public hears, and they're like, what are these astronomers doing where these little red dots? But for once, it's kind of aptly named because they do look like little red dots. And these are these set of sources we found with JWST, NASA's newest flagship telescope, which at first, when people were looking at them, they thought they were galaxies and they were like, oh, my God, we're breaking the universe. Look at all these galaxies in the beginning of time that are so, you know, seemingly old. And then we're like, oh, maybe they're being powered by growing supermassive black holes. And a lot of my research as of late has been trying to really understand them. How similar are they to the other growing supermassive black holes we know of? How are they different? How do we square them away with each other into some coherent picture? And the reason why this is important for you, listener, who's going about your day is everything that happened to get to you where you are in Earth right now is a series of relationships happening with the astrophysical phenomenon. And one of the biggest ones is the relationship between the black hole in the center of our galaxy and the galaxy around it in terms of the metals that are going into the stars that go nova that then give the iron and things on Earth which we call enrichment, the amount of star formation that's happening in a galaxy. All of these things will impact how Earth and ultimately you came to be. It's these big movers and shakers on really grand scales. And so the types of things I work on is trying to understand these scales and these really, you know, crazy astrophysical phenomena, like creating and growing supermassive black holes and squaring this away with this new discovery of little red dots, which make it seem like there was a lot more of them in the early universe than we thought.
- [15:22]
B
So, as we've established, you came to astrophysics in a pretty unique way. But what would you say is unique about the perspective you bring and maybe even your research methods?
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C
So I kind of buck at authority in terms of, like, just because someone says something doesn't mean I'm going to, like, take it at face value. And it's A really interesting place to be with that, especially with little red dots, because there's a lot of confidence about what they are and what they aren't. And frankly, I would argue we are still in the early days of their understanding. And so a lot of my research is coming from the perspective of not that, like I'm this lone wolf genius, but rather never taking anything for granted and not assuming something to be true just because someone else said it was true, which is a thing that many scientists do. But it gets really hard when people are moving really fast on things to not just fall into a camp very easily. Secondly, one of my favorite things to do is to try to learn from a completely unrelated subfield or modality and seeing how we can apply that to gain new perspectives or insights on some of these problems we're spinning our wheels on. And so a lot of my work has kind of this theme of, okay, well, there is this paper from the 80s or the 90s that did this in this context. It was kind of forgotten about, actually. We can learn from that. And if we apply it to this brand new problem with brand new data, we actually get a different story or a different answer. And so I think a lot of that comes from the fact that I switched from, like acting to physics and finding that there was commonality between the two. I mean, I went through some of that acting training to be able to just be on this call with you, communicate science, trying to figure out ways to distill really complex topics with all this jargon into ways where you don't have to have gotten a PhD to understand the gist of what I'm saying. I think that's definitely bled into my science and how I do science, because third, I fully believe it takes a village in all aspects of life, and especially in science. The thing that keeps me in this field, despite the difficulties, the competition, the lack of funding, being in one of the worst job markets since 2008, is the people collaboration. It's what's guided me through any of the hard times, both scientifically and as a person. So I very much subscribe to the view that science is not this immutable, objective concept. Objectivity is impossible. We are humans, not machines. We can strive for objectivity, but every decision we make in terms of how we set up our experiments, in terms of the opinions that we have about interpretations of our results, it's all coming through the very same brain that makes us humans. Which means you cannot take humans out of science. And so it's been very important for me to develop and build and be a part of communities. It makes one my science better. And the type of science projects my research likes to do is trying to find ways to connect people from really different realms. There's that and then also having your village and your community to go through the process of being a scientist. It is hard right now. And so having support and having community is really important. So anything that is assuming that great science is happening in isolation, I will die on a hill about this. I think that's actually impossible.
- [19:13]
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I'd love to hear your advice for early career scientists or even just young people who are interested in science who maybe hear that message and think it's awesome, but don't really know where to start. What's your advice on what they can do to kind of swim against the current in terms of just how academia is really structured to silo people?
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C
Finding your people. I founded this program called NASA Peer which is at NASA Goddard. And it was one of the ways that I found community going at NASA was finding other like minded individuals in my career stage who cared about mentoring and connecting early career researchers to science and apply to grad school, all that stuff. A big tenet that we do at NASA Peer is building your mentorship network. And so this is there should never be just one person where you're getting all your thoughts and opinions on what you should do and how you should do it from. Cultivating a network of mentors is really helpful and having different mentors be used for different things. Some mentors can be best talking about the identity may have similar identities and navigating through academia with those identities. Some are in the same exact science discipline you might want to get into. Some have the type of career that you want. And honestly, what is determining whether most people, at least in my field of astrophysics, are making it to point A to B is how good was their mentorship and how early on and then two, you know, the love has to be there. A big thing that happens is when you do something or try to do something for a long enough period of time, it becomes a part of your identity. And then it becomes really difficult to be able to tell am I doing this because I like the identity of the X thing or because this is my passion? And that is like one of the most difficult things, especially in stuff like academia and physics and astronomy, where when you say it out loud, sometimes it feels like there's a social clout that comes with it, like, oh wow, you must be so smart. I think it's really hard to do this if you don't have some sort of deep passion or love for the question that you're asking scientifically. You know, there's a reason why my parents were very confused. They're like, you're gonna go from the arts, famously competitive to get a job in, to the type of academia spaces that I occupy, which are also very competitive and hard to get a job in. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done or that you shouldn't have passion or fight for your dreams, but it means you need to be strategic in how you fight for your dreams.
- [21:49]
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That's all for today's episode. We'll be back on Wednesday with another Young American Scientist honoree to talk about the surprising neuroscience behind Learning New Things. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff d'. Alvisio. This episode was edited by Alex Suguira, Marielle Issa and Erin Shattuck. Fact check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up to date and in depth science news For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week.