Astrophiz214: Dr Anya Nugent

Listen: https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/astrophiz214-dranyanugent

Transcript:
Brendan: Welcome … and welcome to your 2025 season of the Astrophiz Podcast!

My name is Brendan O ‘Brien, and first of all, we would like to acknowledge Australia’s first astronomers, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the traditional owners and custodians of the land we are on. This episode is produced on Yorta Yorta country …and we’d also like you to influence your local politicians to do more to mitigate climate change by moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.

Each month, we produced two fabulous episodes on the first of each month. Dr. Ian ‘AstroBlog’ Musgrave gives us his monthly SkyGuide, plus a unique astrophotography challenge and an astronomy ‘Tangent’.
Then, on the 15th of each month, we publish an interview with a leading astronomer, astrophysicist, space scientist, data scientist, telescope engineer, project manager, or particle physicist, and we discover their science journey and rare insights into how they think, when they think best, and how they conduct their amazing research into exactly how our universe works.

Our audio files and transcripts are available on our website at Astrophiz .com and our MP3 files can be freely streamed or downloaded to your favorite device from our SoundCloud channel, our free audible stream, YouTube podcasts and Apple podcasts.

And right now we’re zooming over 14 time zones to Cambridge, Massachusetts To hear all about unbelievably powerful gamma ray bursts and their host galaxies, from an amazing Harvard and Smithsonian astrophysicist who uses incredible observatories like CHANDRA, XMM-Newton, SWIFT, ALMA, CHIME, MEERKAT, the VLA, and even our old friend Hubble … to reveal new understandings of how our universe works.

Please meet Dr. Anya Nugent. She is amazing and she has some beautiful stories for us. Let’s go.

Brendan: Hello Anya.

Anya: Hi Brendan.

Brendan: Today listeners, we’re really excited to introduce you to Dr. Anya Nugent, who is an enthusiastically awesome astrophysicist who does exciting research into some of the most powerful phenomena in our universe.

Specifically Anya uses some of the world’s most powerful optical and near -infrared observatories to hunt down the host galaxies of Supernovas, Kilonova gamma ray bursts… and it’s all for the purpose of understanding their unique origins.

So thanks for speaking with us today, Anya.

Anya: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be chatting with you about all this.

Brendan: Look, before we talk about these massive explosions in your short gamma ray burst research and your recent posting at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the CFA, can you tell us where you grew up please Anya. And could you tell us how you first became interested in science and space?

Anya: Yeah, so I’m from the Bay Area in California in a little town right next to Berkeley. So I should start off by saying that my dad is actually an astronomer.

So I think my introduction to astronomy and like space science in general came at a really early age. My dad would teach us everything that we wanted to know about space and it was just so fascinating to learn about from an expert like him. But I do think that my class to astronomy was really my own doing. I was really interested in math and science growing up and I really really liked physics in high school.

I remember taking my first physics course and just being amazed at how everything could be explained in just a few equations. And I mean it’s really not that simple, but it felt that way when I was 16 years old. And so take that to college and I think I just became so much more interested in the mysteries of the universe and how much more there is for us to solve how many unknowns there are and pursuing those mysteries and being part of the discovery process was so exciting to me.

And especially like my early experiences with working in astronomy research groups in undergrad and just seeing the amount of collaboration that astronomers have and the creativity and the kinds of problems that they’re solving, I think all of that was super exciting and really motivated me to want to have a career in astronomy.

Brendan: Fantastic! I was going to ask you about your school days and early ambitions, but I’m going to drop that. It looks like you were well on the road to astronomy and space and understanding the universe at a very early age … So I’ll move on.

So after your successful school career on the West Coast near San Fran, you headed right across the US to Hamilton College in New York State for your Bachelor’s in physics and Hispanic studies.

So could you tell us what inspired you to make that first big move from the West Coast over to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York?

Anya: Yeah, so I really wanted to go to a small liberal arts school for college and we don’t really have a lot of those on the west coast. There’s way more liberal arts schools on the east coast and so I think I was initially very interested in moving to the east coast. My parents are both from the east coast too and so I have a lot of family over there and so it wasn’t a scary transition for me to be thinking about moving so far away from home.

One of the things that I really loved about Hamilton was that we didn’t have a general education program like I think you do at most colleges. It was a little bit more free in what you were able to take and so this I think helps me major in both physics and Hispanic studies to very different subjects but I was able to make my class schedule the way that I wanted every single semester and then on top of that because it’s a smaller school, our class sizes are very small.

I was able to build very positive relationships with all of my professors there. And I think that’s what really kept me interested in academia and helping me get to the next stage of my career.

Brendan: Excellent. Okay. Thanks, Anya. You’ve just mentioned your professors, and we know how important it is to have support of supervisors and mentors. Would you like to tell us about some of the people who have inspired and supported you as a scientist and as a PhD researcher and now in your first postdoc research position at the CfA at the Harvard and Smithsonian in Cambridge?

Anya: Yeah, I feel like, oh my gosh, there’s so many people who have and incredibly supportive in my career. I feel like I’m gonna miss out a few people. I mean, we can start with my professors at Hamilton. They were beyond incredible people. They would stay late hours, well after all of our classes to help us on our homework, the amount of like time that they would just dedicate to us and improving our skills, improving our writing skills, our presenting skills.

All of that was so vital in me gaining all of the knowledge that I needed and the confidence that I needed to be able to even think that I could go to grad school. And I mean also at Hamilton I had a lot of very supportive friends, but I also had a really good group of girls that I did physics homework with every single day. And I think it was a group of girls.

Girls in physics are quite rare and unfortunately I think that’s still the case and just having that supportive group with you, helping you do your homework, a lot of positive reinforcement going on to the next stage.

I think at Northwestern I have been so blessed to have like a wonderful PhD advisor Wen-fai Fong who has helped me both in my career, but also in my personal life. She’s been, she was really a rock and still is very much so a rock helping me in every aspect of my research and my career goals.

I had a really good research team, mostly women as well at Northwestern. And that was so cool, like such positive reinforcement in that group. And everybody is so, so supportive of each other will help you get through anything; will solve any problem with you. Beyond that, just a good graduate student cohort … some of my best friends from grad school and in Chicago were from grad school.

And then I had a wide net outside of that of just other friends that weren’t in astronomy, but I think all of them were so supportive of what I was doing and keeping me positive and excited about all of my research and all of those people, my family as well. Like I think I’ve just, I’ve been really lucky with the support group that I’ve had in my life to get me to where I am. And there’s, I’m sure so many other people that I would like to thank, but that’s all I can think of right now.

Brendan: Fantastic! …and your dad.

Anya: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Of course. Him too. Him very importantly. He’s been a very big, very big mentor in my career. I mean, it’s, I think I mentioned that in my defense that it’s such a special relationship to be able to look up to somebody who I love to so much as, you know, not only my father, but as a mentor in my career. So he certainly is someone who’s very important in astronomy for me as well.

Brendan: Indeed. And we still need to do a lot of work to encourage women and young women to get into STEM careers and it’s great to hear that your peers have been working with you in such a great way. Now last year, we spoke with your colleague Dr. Genevieve Schroeder. She’s now a Cornell and she very kindly and with great clarity gave us a big picture on GRB science.

Now, the plan for today is to remind listeners what short gamma ray bursts are, then have a quick look at your PhD thesis, then zoom in on your current research that you’re doing at the CfA. Now would that be okay with you, Anya?

Anya: That sounds great to me.

Brendan: Okay, we can find Genevieve’s work on GRB science back in Episode 202. But now, we should zoom in on your dissertation topic, centered around short gamma ray bursts and their host galaxies.

Now, you gave your thesis a great title: “Deciphering the origins of the universe’s most fantastic explosions with state-of-the-art environmental studies.”

Now, you’ve focused on short-duration gamma ray bursts and Type 1A Supernovae and you discovered a large population of short GRBs caused by neutron star collisions that were, I quote here, “polluting the universe with heavy elements when it was still quite young.”

Now I love that phrase “polluting the universe with heavy elements” because it reminded me about Carl Sagan’s ‘Star Stuff’. Now can you summarize your conclusions in your thesis for us please Anya?

Brendan: Anya: Yeah, definitely. I’ll also mention that my thesis title came from ChatGPT so thank you ChatGPT for giving me a good title.

Yeah, so my thesis mostly focused on short gamma ray bursts or short GRBs.

And these are some of the most luminous explosions in the universe. And they come from two very compact objects called neutron stars merging together. And in this merger, they create very heavy elements that we call our process elements and they comprise things like gold, platinum, uranium, very heavy elements and also very precious metals that we have here on earth. So one of the driving questions with short GRB science and with neutron star mergers is when did they actually begin polluting the universe as you just said, with heavy elements.

How did Earth get its heavy elements? And was it coming through neutron star mergers or something else? And there’s been a lot of debate in the field over what creates all of these heavy elements. And so my research looked at this question and really attempted to answer this question from the perspective of their host galaxies. Because with the host galaxies, we can look at how young the stars are within that galaxy, which tells you how old the neutron star merger was when that actually merged together. And then that gives us an idea of how soon after the universe began, could neutron star mergers pollute the universe with heavy elements.

And so I did this huge study on about 70 or so short GRBs and their host galaxies … to track all of their host galaxy properties and come up with an answer to when did short GRBs start producing heavy ‘r-process’ elements in the universe? … and could they be responsible for the majority of heavy elements that we can observe?

And so I think my research has come to, it’s quite likely … that a lot of the heavy elements are coming from neutron star mergers, or specifically these r-process elements.

We know that some neutron star mergers can happen very, very quickly, which tells us that short GRBs were likely occurring very early on in the universe, but we also see them happening in very old galaxies … so there’s a wide breadth of time scales that these can occur on.

I think that is the most concise way and the the biggest points that I can pull out of what my thesis was focused on.

Brendan: Fantastic, that’s awesome. Now look … I should have sent you this question but you’ve just triggered something here. Of those 70 host galaxies you looked at. What was the earliest one, 200 million years after the Big Bang?

Anya: Oh gosh, I don’t think it was that far back in the universe. I think the highest redshift one that we have is around redshift 2.

Yeah, so I mean this and this a lot of that is driven by what our detectors are able to go out to. And so SWIFT … which is the instrument that we’re typically using to detect gamma ray bursts, it really only good at getting short GRBs out to redshift2. So we’re not really gonna see anything beyond that just because of SWIFT’s sensitivity.

But maybe in the future, we’ll be able to get to higher redshifts. We’ll see. That would be interesting.

Brendan: Yeah, maybe Nancy Grace-Roman?

Anya: Yeah, maybe like the afterglows with Roman, but we certainly will need another gamma ray burst detector similar to SWIFT to be able to see that deep into the universe.

Brendan: Okay, thank you very much Anya. And a quick follow -up again. You strongly emphasise the benefits of studying the host galaxies of these incredible explosions. Why is that?

Anya: Yeah so I kind of tried to allude to this a little bit before, but host galaxies are really the only way that we can understand the age of the progenitor of these explosions and that’s by looking at all the stars within the host we can kind of get an idea for how old the progenitor must have been.

You can also track things like how the progenitor depends on varying degrees of star formation in the of the origins of these events, which you can’t necessarily get just by looking at the explosions themselves. I do truly think that host galaxies give us the full history of the event, kind of tie in what we’re seeing with the explosion, with what created the formation pathway to the explosion.

So it’s I think it’s the history that we get of what created that event is, is what we understand from the hosts.

Brendan: Excellent. Forensics with a big net. Thank you. So that brings us up to your new postdoc position at the Harvard and Smithsonian CfA, the Center for Astrophysics. Now, for the benefit of our early career astronomers listening, can you tell us how you landed that position? It must have been a wonderful celebration for you and your family.

Anya: Yeah, for sure. No, I think my family was very, very excited. And all my family that’s on the East Coast, I think that they were just excited that I was going to be closer to them.

I think a lot of, like, postdoc applications and getting jobs is pure luck and good timing. And so it’s crazy to me, I think the people who get certain jobs versus not, and so I think that’s my mind is like … “Oh, I just got really lucky”.

But I think the best thing that I could do throughout my time in grad school was going to as many conferences to really showcase my research, make sure that I was going to all the places that I was interested in doing a postdoc at, giving talks there, talking with their scientists, making plans for exciting science that I want to do in my career and hoping that they see my excitement and my passion and that they want to be able to work with me.

And so I think that’s hopefully what came across and that’s how I got a job at the CfA. I do think my current advisor, Ashley Villar, was very excited about somebody doing host galaxy work with her. And we had met in the fall that I was applying for postdoc positions and had chatted about working with her and, you know, all the exciting projects that we would be able to do with each other.

So I certainly think it’s advocating for yourself and making sure that people see how excited you are about the science, how knowledgeable you are in the field. Making those connections, networking is the most important as it is with any job.

Brendan: Excellent. So, early career astronomers … it’s strategy, and I think it’s more strategy than a little bit of luck, but that sounds like a very good way you’ve gone about it. Congratulations all around.

Now, I had a look at some of your papers on the ArXiv server, and you’re in some really nice collaborations, And I really liked the recent paper on repeating FRBs using that

 CHIME instrument up in Canada. Can you tell us about your postdoc research role at

 the CfA and what range of research projects are you working on right now?

And what big questions are you particularly keen to answer?

Anya: Yeah. So my research right now is extending all of these host studies and these analysis techniques that I used in grad school for short game array bursts to other kinds of supernova. So the group that I’m involved with at the CfA is very focused on different types of core collapse supernovae and they have used these large transient surveys to collect these very large populations of all these different kinds of core collapse supernova. And there are many open questions right now on to why we see differences in these kinds of core collapse supernova and what those differences could be coming from.

And so right now, I’m kind of overhauling the host studies on these big populations that they’ve collected to try to see if we can pick out factors within the host that might lead to a better understanding of how these populations differentiate.

Is it something about their progenitor or their environment that drives the explosions to be so different?

And then I think, you know, looking forward to the future, it’s in transient and supernova astronomy. And hopefully the next year or so, LSST will be capturing hundreds of thousands, I think, if not millions of supernova every single year and giving us these huge surveys of supernova and all these kinds of transients on which we can do host galaxy studies.. I think the host sets are going to be really important for LSST because we’re going to have such limited data for all of these different kinds of events that we’re detecting. Unlike what we’re capable of doing now, we can’t follow up all of the LSST transients with our bigger larger telescopes.

We don’t have enough resources, we don’t have enough time to do all of that, and so I think host galaxies are going to play a very big role in understanding all of these transients as they might be the only key in distinguishing them if we’re finding that hosts and environments are important in differentiating these different core collapse types. So really just expanding the research that I did in grad school to a lot of new and exciting events and gearing up for this really big era in and transient astronomy.

Brendan: Fantastic. Now, we have a terrific, a really fabulous conference down here called ‘Transients Down Under’. I hope we can get you down here some time.

And what about the nature of your postdoc position at the CfA? Is it all research, or do you have other responsibilities?

Anya: Yeah, so the cool thing about postdocs is that they basically are all research, so it’s like a very exciting time in my career. I’m done with classes, I’m done with grad school, and I can just fully focus on the research that I’m really excited about. Of course, I do have group responsibilities. Our team has a lot of observing time, and we need people to manage these programs to reduce data from these programs.

And so I would say I have group obligations, but they are all mostly research focused.

I’ve heard from basically everybody that the postdoc years are the most exciting in your career because it’s the only time that you have to fully dedicate to the research that you’re doing and get excited about everything. So I’m really enjoying the time that I have now to just develop myself as my own astronomer, beyond my grad school advisor.

Yeah, so it’s a very exciting, but yeah, all research.

Brendan: Beautiful. Now, I also saw that as you were finishing off your Masters, then jumping right into your PhD, you were working right through the height of the COVID pandemic when it was at its peak.

How did COVID affect you and your family? And what was the impact on your astrophysics research at that important part of your studies? Were there lessons learned?

Anya: Yeah, COVID was definitely, I think, a hard time, as it was for so many people. I would say the biggest impact on my research was not being able to be with my group physically.

I think that there’s so much value in meeting with other people in person and being able to work together, say walk into somebody’s office, say, oh my gosh, I have this question or I don’t know how to go about this problem and get that immediate help.

And I think it felt very, very lonely during that year, year and a half that we were locked indoors. So that was definitely a struggle to get through. I think my motivation definitely went down. Luckily that got back up, I think, once we were able to meet again in person and my group was able to be together. But certainly that was difficult to go through. And especially if your life isn’t happy outside of work, which I think it was a very lonely time outside of work as well, then your work is also going to suffer.

And so I think the biggest lesson that I maybe learned was to make sure I’m enjoying all parts of my life, put emphasis on things that make me happy outside of work, because I kind of I need that in order to feel fulfilled and work to feel happy at work. And also just, you know, making sure that I’m meeting with people in the field, out of the field, developing those strong connections. That’s where I feel like I’m the most passionate about sciences when I’m talking with people about it.

And so I think it was really just, you know, making sure, like, appreciate the time that we have with other people, make sure I’m doing things to make my life happy.

Brendan: Thank you, Anya. But you’re immersed in solving some of the most complex and puzzling phenomena in our universe. Now, how do you do your best thinking? What circumstances do you usually need to swim clearly through that sea of data to come up with verifiable conclusions?
What situations and surroundings support your best thinking.

Anya: Yeah. So I think like I was saying before, I love being around people.

I love just like talking and brainstorming with people. I think that’s been a huge benefit at being at the CFA. It’s like this massive community of astronomers and postdocs and all these very brilliant people that you can just talk to and be like … “Hey, I have this crazy idea” … and everybody’s so willing to chat and work through to something that actually becomes a really cool project to work on.

So I would say like that, that is where I do my best thinking. I would say I definitely need time alone every week in my apartment to kind of just focus and push forward on the research that I’m working on. But I genuinely think it’s just talking with people.

It’s having my weekly meetings with my advisor and my team of observers at Harvard, learning what people are working on, the questions that they’re grappling with, and then thinking about, okay, how does my research and my skills fit into this? And can we think of something to do together that might get us closer to the answer that we’re looking for? So that’s what I would say.

Brendan: That sounds like an incredibly rich environment. Thanks, Anya. And the obvious segue to that is what research issues are you grappling with right now? Have you got deadlines, data streams driving you crazy, contradictions leaping up at you? What’s driving you crazy?

Anya: Oh my gosh. So I don’t think I have any hard deadlines coming up. We just had our big proposal season. It’s always April and August is when everybody’s submitting their time for proposals for different observatories. And so we just passed that, which is so nice. I feel like I have so much cleared off my schedule.

Now it’s really just working on my paper and hopefully having that out in the next few months. I was working for a long time, I would say like, up until probably today, working on making sure my code was perfected so that I could do all of my analysis. But I had a very exciting meeting with my advisor and we think everything’s working correctly now and everything should be good to go. And literally, I just need to run my code and then I can start doing my analysis and writing my paper. And so that is definitely very exciting. I don’t think I have anything like hard deadlines coming up until the fall. I’m hoping that, you know, there’ll be some proposals that I’ll be doing then.

But yeah, I think I’ve just moved past all like the crazy deadlines and now I get to do all the exciting science and really push forward on that front.

Brendan: Excellent, now here’s one from left field. You mentioned code. Are you encouraged to share your code up on GitHub?  

Anya: Yeah, so I do. Because a lot of the things that I work on, I would say that it’s not necessarily expertise of a lot of people.

And I wanna make sure that everything that I have learned to do my research is publicly available for others to use. And so I would say the host analysis techniques that I used in grad school, I made sure that I had tutorials available online on GitHub for people to use.

And I can actually see that people are actually downloading those tutorials and starring like my repositories on GitHub … which is great. And I’ve pointed people to that when they’ve had questions about … “Hey, how do I do this?”
And I’m like … “Here I have a tutorial for you.”

And then certainly with the project that I’m working on right now, there is actually a code already developed that’s publicly available for people to use. And we’re basically just modifying it a little bit. But that will certainly be publicly available.

We want the community to be able to use these resources and come talk to us about how we can make them better for the kind of research that they’re doing. So of course, code is always publicly available or given if asked.

Brendan: Excellent! And you’ve smashed another preconception that some people have about science that it’s these lone geniuses working in a lab somewhere on their own. And it really sounds like your astrophysicist community is a beautiful collaborative team that’s worldwide.

Now, would you like to talk about the team that you were leading to develop that huge catalogue of short gamma ray bursts at? Now, that’s going to be a boon for researchers for years to come. Would you like to give us a brief outline of that team?

Anya: Yeah. Oh my gosh, so many people. I would say that project was an effort made by people over two decades, like everybody who had started working on doing host stuff in 2005 when the SWIFT Observatory was launched, since my entire catalog was based off of SWIFT short GRBs.

My main team were people at Northwestern … so there was my advisor Wen-fai Fong. I had an undergrad, Vic Dong, who is actually now a fourth-year grad student in the Fong Group at Northwestern, which is exciting.

And then a whole bunch of other people. We had a lot of collaborators in Europe who helped out with that project. And a lot of people who had gotten us data over, I mean, since my advisor was in grad school, so over many, many years that were included on that paper and had really great advice for the directions that we should go with this paper and really brilliant ideas that we should bring up there.

That was definitely like a very exciting project, it felt like a community work where that I was, you know, just piecing together all of this work done in the short GRB community over the past two decades. And we just actually recently had a meeting in Italy for all of SWIFT Science, but it was so cool to be with those people again, and see, you know, how my research, how so many people in that team, their research has contributed to the science and has given us this brilliant research all on short GRBs and GRBs in general.

So a very exciting team to work with.

Brendan: Okay, thanks Anya. Now to sum up, you’ve painted the big picture of short gamma ray bursts and the host galaxy research that goes with it. We’ve briefly looked at your PhD and your load a CfA, your research there. We’ve gone all sciencey just for a little while.

Now, when I was getting background material for your interview, I discovered your many achievements as a successful and competitive swimmer and swim coach. Now, you hinted earlier about the importance of keeping yourself happy to be productive. Would you like to tell us about some of the things outside your astrophysical research that regularly brings you great joy over there in Cambridge, Massachusetts?

Anya: Yeah. So funny that you found all my swimming and swim coach things.

That was definitely huge, huge part of my life for, I think, you know, since I was seven years old up until the end of college and that definitely kept me grounded in academia. That was such a positive outlet for me. I would say these days I definitely am so crazy about exercise that seems to be the one way that I can get out my energy. In the day it’s finally sunny here in Cambridge and the weather’s been perfect and so I’ve been going out on runs. I’m excited to go on bike rides.

I think you know connecting with nature being outside, moving my body in a way that makes me feel happy, those are all things that keep me really grounded and excited to wake up every day and do science and, you know, get the most out of my day.

I would also say just like connecting with people, I think that’s been a theme that I brought up throughout this interview is just, you know, meeting with people, having joyous experiences with friends, especially like I, you know, I just moved to Cambridge too. And so I think seeing new things with new people and also the amount of history that there is here in Cambridge, there’s so many cool museums. I’ve been having a lot of fun, I think, even outside of work with all these new people and all these new places to explore.

So I definitely, I’m keeping myself happy finding a lot of things that are, you know, bringing my life joy here in Cambridge outside of astronomy, which obviously that is too.

Brendan: That’s fantastic. I’m sitting here with a huge smile on my face. I can hear the excitement and the happiness in your voice now. What about outreach? You mentioned earlier that you’ve done a lot of presentations and posters and talks at various conferences in your specialty.

You’ve done a lot of presentations and videos and you’ve organized science outreach events at local breweries and planetariums. You’ve planned trivia activities and speaker presentations. You have paired with elementary pupils and middle school student pen pals, to demystify STEM careers. It’s really necessary to do. You’re doing that stuff. It’s fantastic outreach.

Now, is outreach an important part of being an astrophysicist? And what’s next for you?

Anya: Yeah, I think the thing is, that’s the most exciting …  I have not met a person who is not excited about astronomy or just excited to learn. And I think being able t connect with all these different people and answer their crazy questions, whether that’s, you know, about supermassive black holes or how astronomy could be connected to astrology, which I’ve definitely … definitely gotten that question many, many times.

It’s really exciting to connect with people in that way. And then I think also just showing the world that your typical astronomer isn’t this old person standing alone in a room by themselves, is that we come in all different shape sizes and colors and genders and all of this. And so I think it’s just exciting. I think it is a huge part of our career.

But I certainly love it. I think so many other people enjoy doing outreach just because we get to connect with people and get them excited about all these cool like research that we’re doing, or that other astronomers are doing and through their questions and be able to answer them.

Brendan: Fantastic! Thank you so much, Anya.
Now, finally the mic is all yours and you’ve got the opportunity now to give us your favorite rant or rave about one of the challenges that we humans face in science, in equity, representations of diversity, or science denialism, that’s my favorite, or even the current anti-science sentiment that we’re seeing worldwide, I think, in politics, or perhaps even science career paths or your own passion for research or even our human quest for new knowledge.

The microphone is all yours.

Anya: Yeah so I think before I say anything I just want to say that I am speaking right now as a citizen of the US with my own personal political opinions not as a scientist at the CfA or Western or any other institutions that I’ve been affiliated with. I think right now is kind of a scary time, especially in the US to be in science. I think so many of us are feeling the science denialism that you just mentioned, but also the fact that so much of our research is being defunded for what seems like no reason.

There’s so many people that are being affected by this and it’s been really heartbreaking … heartbreaking to see. We’ve seen grad student admissions go down. We’ve seen there are less postdoc positions available simply because all the funding that we have from NSF is going downhill, or we don’t know that it’ll exist … and now we’re seeing threats that NASA funding might be cut significantly, and I think to be in this field right now especially at an early stage of my career and so many other people’s careers, is a little bit daunting to consider what kind of future do we have for us if no funding exists.

I don’t want to be so negative though.

I am really hoping as much as I’m preparing for the worst to happen, I am hoping that things will turn around And that if we as a community stay strong, we stay passionate about what we’re doing, we advocate for ourselves. Then things will maybe slowly improve, but we’ll get through this moment in history and we’ll push to whatever we’re trying to do in the future.

I want us to stay hopeful and optimistic. I don’t want people to be afraid of joining the science community because they’re worried about what’s going to happen to all of these fields or astronomy. I really want people to be excited about all the incredible things that we can look forward to in the future and that they can be a part of it and we just have to get through this really difficult moment right now.

I hope that that leaves us with a more positive note than just being sad about everything that’s happening and the effects of what’s going on in the US government.

Brendan: Indeed and I can echo those sentiments over here in Australia. We’ve got a national election happening in early May, and I for one, and a lot of my colleagues are fearful if the most conservative party wins then that will end up being a similar sort of attack on science here … and we’re concerned for the prospects of our CSIRO, our national science body, and we don’t want to see funding cuts for them.

They’re doing incredible work on the environment, on climate change, on lots of fields that are important to us. So fingers crossed, I am so optimistic that we’ll get over this hump in history. Thank you, Anya.

Now, is there anything else that we should watch out for in the near future?
What are you keeping your eye on?

Anya: Oh, my gosh. I think that there’s so many exciting things to look forward to in astronomy, where technology has just so rapidly improved in the past few years.

And I think how that is going to affect the sciences is crazy. We’re already seeing so much of our research being affected by including AI techniques and machine learning. And it’s been really fascinating to see the improvements that we’re able to do in science with that.

Technology has also affected, you know, the instruments that are being created. JWST science, James Webb, for instance, that is giving us these beautiful results across a whole bunch of different fields.

As I mentioned before, we have the LSST, the Vera Rubin Observatory, that we soon expect we’ll be taking so many images of the night sky, detecting so many different transients, and then soon after that, we’ll have the Nancy Grace Roman telescope. And that will be doing similar things, but in the Near infra-red.

And so I am beyond excited to be in this field at this time. There’s too many things to look forward to. And so I’m excited to see what happens next. I’m really excited to be part of this, this time in astronomy. I think that there’s going to be a lot of really fascinating discoveries that are going to change your entire perception about the universe in the next decade or so.

Brendan: Excellent. Fantastic. Well, we’re at the end now. Thank you so much, Dr. Anya Nugent, on behalf of all our listeners, and especially from me. It’s been really exciting to be speaking with you way over there in Massachusetts.

Thank you especially for your time at the end of an incredibly busy research day and good luck with your next adventures and all your future travels and I really do hope you get down to ;Transients Down Under’ at some stage. I’ll look forward to your next discoveries.

We’ll be following your career with great interest down here. Thank you Anya!

Anya: Thank you so much! This was so much fun!

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Brendan: And remember, Astrophiz is free, no ads, and unsponsored.

But we always recommend that you check out Dr. Ian Musgrave’s Astroblogger website to find out what’s up in the night sky. So we’ll see you in two weeks when we bring you Ian’s fabulous June SkyGuide …  Keep looking up.

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