This episode is part of “Young American scientists,» an independent editorial project which was carried out with the financial support of Regeneron.
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, dear listeners! For Scientific AmericanIt is Science quickly, My name is Rachel Feltman.
We’re skipping our usual roundup today for a special series. This week we will dedicate all our shows to SciAmthe inaugural class of young American scientists. This group of groundbreaking researchers represents the future of science, technology and medicine. You can find out all about them in the latest printed issue of Scientific Americanwhich comes out tomorrow. And you’ll also hear a few of them this week on Science quickly.
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Today’s guest is Erini Lambrides, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, also affiliated with the University of Maryland, College Park. She is here to tell us about her unusual journey from aspiring actress to astrophysicist.
Feltman: Thank you very much for coming to chat with us today.
Erini Lambride: Thank you very much for having me.
Feltman: So you didn’t always know you wanted to become an astrophysicist. What first attracted you to the field?
Erini Lambride: So I first thought I was going to become an actress. And I’m from New York, I was born and raised in Brooklyn, and in New York you can go to specialized schools for really anything you want.
And so in high school, I went to LaGuardia School of Performing Arts. [Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts]. I was in the theater. And when you’re at art school in New York, that normal adolescent need to be different from everyone else seems a little different because everyone’s artistic, everyone’s cool and discovering their identity.
And I’ll never forget, I went to the school library, and I was walking around, and I saw this book that caught my eye, and it’s so cheesy, but it was like, A brief history of timeand as a joke, I picked it up. And I started flipping through it, reading it on the train on my way to school, and it turned my world upside down.
Until then, I felt very disconnected from nature. I had a sort of black and white vision. I was like, “Oh, you know, I’m an artist. “And it was also 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 kidding, in Top Gunbecause for some reason Tom Cruise’s love interest protagonist was an astrophysicist. And at that point I heard about physics, and then I heard about astrophysics, I was like, “Oh, that sounds like space. Physics, space, that sounds awesome.”
So I told everyone that’s what I was going to do. And I applied to one college, it was the University of Rochester – it was pretty random – I majored in physics without ever taking a physics or calculus class before. So it was pure will. And I got really lucky when I started doing what I told everyone I was going to do, that I really loved it. And especially when I started researching it, I completely fell in love and can’t imagine doing anything else.
Feltman: Wow, that’s a really great story, I think, especially because we don’t think of astrophysics as something that people stumble into. So I would like to know, for example, what first attracted you to the atmosphere of astrophysics, and then what the actual experience was like and what kept you going?
Paneling: So one of the first concepts that really blew me away was the scale of it all. And I think the reason I was drawn specifically to astrophysics is that the scales that make up the universe are so far beyond the normal realm of our experience as everyday humans, that it’s an act of will of your own mind to just try to understand the real size of everything.
So you know, humans [are] notoriously, notoriously bad at intuitively understanding the difference between a million and a billion. And now in the field of astrophysics, you’re jumping from one scale to another on a regular basis, and I think something much bigger than me and anything I’ve ever known was one of the appeals of that.
I think I was also blown away by how much we are still figuring out. There’s a part of me that thinks it would kind of suck if humans were right about how we think the universe works right now, because that makes it seem like the universe is much smaller, than us puny humans can figure it out – which is, I know, a hot take as a scientist who publishes things and gives people my opinion on what I think is happening in the universe.
But, you know, this opening, this discovery, this attempt to understand, to put the pieces of the puzzle together to understand why the world around us is the way it is, from the first concepts that I learned in these pop science books, just immersed me in it.
So when I started studying physics, you didn’t do fun things. Like, you calculate, you know, [the] speed of a ball rolling down a hill. You do not look at the glories of the splendor of the universe. And it was hard. In fact, I did horrible things in my first physics class. It was an honors course in physics. I didn’t realize it. I thought everyone was a genius in my class. Little did I know, everyone had taken physics classes before. They had taken AP physics classes, you know, first and second. They had tutors. The reason they studied physics is because they studied physics and they liked it and they saw that they were good at it, versus me, who, like, I read a few pop science books and saw Top Gun and, you know, she was just a girl from Brooklyn with a dream.
Why this one? Not clear, you know. I also liked that it wasn’t really right for me, and I think there was this act of rebellion that almost morphed into nerddom. Um, but that’s when I discovered science fiction, around the same time. I discovered Star Trek. I discovered science fiction books like, you know, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and my whole life changed. And so, despite getting a C– in that first physics class, I didn’t drop the major.
And what was crazy was that your first two years of physics, you’re kind of… for most people, that’s a lot of revision. They’ve seen a lot of this material before. For me: brand new. This is the first time I’ve seen this kind of thing, and so I’m drowning. But I learned to swim. And by the time we get to the more advanced level courses in third and fourth years, I’ve built up the muscles to know what to do when you see something that’s completely out of depth compared to anything you’ve done before, it has no relation to it. And a lot of my classmates, for a lot of them, it was the first time they really encountered that in a long time. So I started doing really well, and that was around the same time that I was getting into research, which initially was physics research. It wasn’t even space research. This was an inertial confinement fusion. And I just started getting better and better.
And it was just a really fun way to get to where I am now at NASA and specialize in really big black holes and try to understand how they got so big and what their point in the universe is for, you know, a kid from New York who was in art school and wanted to stand out from her peers. [Laughs.]
Feltman: It’s really cool to hear you talk about that because, you know, there’s so much research out there on the different points going on where people tend to drop out of science and math. And I know myself personally, I’m very happy to be in the career that I’m currently in and I technically have a science degree, but I thought I was going to do research long term. And I remember the first time I got a C in a college course, I was like, “Oh, that means I’m not very good at this. It’s time to find a new direction.” And it’s a shame that this is happening. So I’m really curious about, you know, how your experience influences some of the work that you do as a mentor.
Paneling: Yes. Because at the end of the day, it’s about who is good, who is going to be good, who has the potential to be good. It’s all expressed in opinions that are influenced by your own experiences of how you think the world works, and that means that whatever systems you’re a part of that you haven’t dismantled, that’s how you’re going to see it. So when you see someone come into a program and they get a C, that’s actually not very informative as to whether they’re going to be a great researcher or not.
Do you know what it is? They obviously like it enough to keep trying and trying again. Choosing, even if I’m not doing well but I want to do better – in my opinion and what I see in terms of the students that I mentor and, you know, the students that I have – you know, how successful are they going to be.
The benefit of taking action and experiencing this is that you are taught about rejection. That’s the name of the game. It’s mostly no people. But the way rejection is taught to you is a little different. When you don’t get an audition, or you don’t get the role you wanted, it’s less of a failure than, “Well, obviously they’re looking for something really specific, and I just wasn’t that grade.” When you move now to yes and no, the check on that is academia, which is essentially a series of yes or no: Will I get into graduate school? Yes or no. Will I get this scholarship? Yes, no. Will I benefit from this research grant? Yes, no, I’ve already been there in a way with this callus of refusing the profession of actor. That’s not to say things don’t hurt, but it definitely prepared me for it.
And it’s very satisfying to finally start doing really well and to know that, yeah, I got a C– in my first class, and, you know, just kind of like, uh, out of spite almost, just like, because I could, you know?
And I use that to inform how I train, how I teach, how I coach — you know, “What benefits of doubt do people give? Who do we give benefit of the doubt ? Do they look a certain way? Do they come from a certain background? ” – and I really question them.
Feltman: It’s great. Well, let’s talk about your research. So what’s interesting about young black holes?
Paneling: Yeah. So, like, the TL;DR [too long; didn’t read] is this: in almost every galaxy we have examined, there is a huge black hole at its very center. Even when you think of a supermassive black hole, you think, “Wow, that must be really big,” but it’s actually a bit small when compared to the scale of the galaxy it lives in. And that really has consequences because, you know, over the last 60 years we’ve looked at galaxies and their supermassive black holes at the center, and we see these relationships emerging, relationships that make it seem like the growth of the galaxy and the growth of the black hole are linked in spite of the fact. they are on really different scales.
As in our Milky Way, we have Sagittarius A*, which is our central supermassive black hole. If we were to remove Sag A* and tear it out of our galaxy, absolutely nothing would change. [your or my life]. It’s rather inconsequential in terms of dynamics. You know, the gravity of this supermassive black hole is really beyond our reach.
So this is a big question: why and how is the growth and life of one of these objects, the galaxies, related to the growth of the black holes at the center? So naturally you want to ask yourself, “Okay, well, how did this start?”
I was born rally, this question: “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? Do they do anything, you know, to the properties of these first galaxies?” was open. And so a lot of my research is basically trying to put the pieces of this puzzle together and use data across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, so all of NASA’s flagship telescopes and more, to look at the first massive black holes in their galaxies and try to say something.
And over the last few years, I was one of the first people to come across little red dots which are, curiously and very typical of astronomers,[a] name that, you know, the public hears, and they wonder, “What are these astronomers doing? What are these little red dots?” But for once, it lives up to its name, because they actually look like little red dots. And here is this set of sources that we found with JWST [the James Webb Space Telescope]NASA’s newest flagship telescope, which, at first, when people looked at them, they thought they were galaxies, and they were like, “Oh my God, we’re breaking the universe. Look at all these galaxies from the beginning of time that are so, you know, seemingly old.” And then we say, “Oh, maybe they’re powered by growing supermassive black holes.” » And lately, a lot of my research has been trying to really understand them. How similar are they to other growing supermassive black holes we know about? How are they different? How to reconcile them with each other to obtain a coherent image?
And the reason this is important to you, the listener, as you go about your day, is this: everything that is happening to you, where you are on Earth right now, is a series of relationships that are occurring with astrophysical phenomenon. One of the most important is the relationship between the black hole at the center of our galaxy and the galaxy around it in terms of metals going into stars going nova and then giving iron and things on Earth, what we call enrichment, the amount of star formation that happens in a galaxy.
All of these things will impact how the Earth, and ultimately you, came to be. These are the big players who are moving on a very large scale. And so the kinds of things that I’m working on are trying to understand these really crazy scales and astrophysical phenomena, like the creation and growth of supermassive black holes, and square that with this new discovery of little red dots, which make it look like there were a lot more of them in the early universe than we thought.
Felt: So, as we’ve established, you came to astrophysics in a pretty unique way. But what do you think is unique about the perspective you bring and perhaps your research methods?
Paneling: So I kind of object to authority, you know, just because someone says something doesn’t mean I’m going to take it literally. And it’s a really interesting place with that, especially with the little red dots, because there’s a lot of confidence about what they are and what they’re not.
And frankly, I would say we’re still in the early days of understanding them. And so a lot of my research is from the perspective of…not that I’m this lone wolf genius, but rather never taking anything for granted and never assuming that something is true just because someone else said it was true, which many scientists do, but it becomes very difficult when people move on things very quickly, to not fall into one camp very easily.
Second, one of my favorite things to do is try to learn from a completely unrelated subfield or modality and see how we can apply it to get new perspectives or new ideas on some of these problems that we’re working on.
And so a lot of my work sort of has this theme of, you know, okay, well, there’s this kind of article from the 1980s or 1990s that, like, did that in that context. It was a bit forgotten. We can actually learn from it, 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 came from me moving from acting to physicality and finding that there was some commonality between the two. I mean, I did some of that acting training to be able to just take this call with you, communicate science, try to find ways to, you know, distill really complex topics with all this jargon in a way that you don’t have to have a PhD. to understand the gist of what I’m saying.
This definitely reflects in my science and the way I practice science, because, thirdly, I fully believe that it takes a village, in all aspects of life and especially in science. What keeps me in this field, despite the challenges, the competition, the lack of funding, you know, being in one of the worst job markets since 2008, is the people. Collaboration, you know, is what got me through the tough times, both scientifically and as a person. So I fully subscribe to the idea that science is not this objective and immutable concept. Objectivity is impossible. We are humans, not machines. We can strive for objectivity, but every decision we make, about how we organize our experiments, in terms of, you know, the opinions we have about, you know, the interpretations of our results, all of that goes through the same brain that makes us humans, which means you can’t exclude humans from science.
So it has been very important for me to develop, build and be part of communities. First, it improves my science, and the type of science projects that my research likes to do is trying to find ways to connect people from really different fields.
There’s that, and then also asking your village and community to go through the process of becoming a scientist. It’s hard right now. And so having support and having a community is really important. So anything that assumes that great science happens in isolation – I’ll die on a hill about this – I think is actually impossible.
Feltman: I’d love to hear your advice for early career scientists, or even just young people who are interested in science and who, you know, maybe hear this message and think it’s awesome but don’t really know where to start. What advice do you give them about what they can do to swim against the tide in terms of how academia is really structured to operate in silos?
Paneling: Find your people. So I founded this program called NASA-PEER, which is at NASA Goddard, and that was one of the ways that I discovered the community at NASA, found other like-minded people throughout my career who cared about mentorship and, you know, connecting early career researchers to science and applying to graduate school, all that stuff.
One of the core principles of NASA-PEER is to build your mentoring network. And so there should never be one person who you can get all your thoughts and opinions about what you should do and how you should do it. Cultivating a network of mentors is very helpful, and using different mentors for different things.
Some mentors can talk better about identity, you know, [they] may have similar identities and navigate academia with those identities. Some are in the exact same scientific discipline, you know, that you might want to get into. Some have the type of career you want.
And honestly, what determines whether most people, at least in my field of astrophysics, can point A to B is “How good was their mentorship and when?”
And then, secondly, you know, the love has to be there. What happens most is that when you do something or try to do it for a long enough period of time, it becomes a part of your identity. And then it becomes really difficult to be able to say, “Am I doing this because I love the identity of thing X or because it’s my passion?” And that’s, like, one of the hardest things, especially in fields like academia and physics and astronomy, where when you say it out loud, sometimes it feels like there’s a social influence that goes along with it, like, “Oh, wow, you must be so smart.” I think it’s really hard to do that if you don’t have some kind of deep passion or love for the question that you’re asking scientifically.
You know, there’s a reason my parents were very confused. They were like, “You’re going to go from the arts, which are known to be competitive in getting a job, to the type of academic spaces that I’m in, which are also very competitive and hard to get a job in? That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done or that you shouldn’t have a passion or fight for your dreams. But it does mean that you have to be strategic in how you fight for your dreams.”
Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back Wednesday with another Young American Scientist Award winner to talk about the surprising neuroscience behind learning new things.
Science quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pa thak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Marielle Issa and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more recent and in-depth scientific news.
For Scientific American, This is Rachel Feltman. Have a good week!
