the sky is not the limit

I just finished reading my students’ perspective articles (I’m teaching Scientific Writing at Caltech for the tenth time!). I love reading them because I always learn something new. Scientific Writing is a chemistry course, and since my research falls more within the realm of astronomy, I rarely (if ever) read about the electrochemistry or chemical biology topics that typically pop up as the subject of the perspectives.

The perspectives are supposed to include at least one figure, preferably one that is accessible to an out-of-field scientist reader. As an astrochemist, I am often that out-of-field scientist reader. The figures are usually great, with schematics that illustrate how cells work or how different systems are interconnected. What they show is generally described well in the body text as well, making it easy to understand what is going on.

Something I’ve noticed over the years is that I give a lot of feedback on writing captions. Thinking back, the only time I ever learned how to write a caption was probably in some social studies class where I was describing a picture in no more than five words. And when you’re captioning a photo of George Washington, just writing “Portrait of George Washington” below the image is perfectly acceptable. For figures in research, however, you need to have more.

It’s good practice to write figure captions that can be understood independently from the body text. Thinking about some of the figures I’ve made, a caption that just says “Abundance versus temperature” doesn’t sufficiently explain a figure that is a histogram with bins of 50 pixels (where each pixel is a region on a map) showing the relationship between molecular abundance and gas temperature. That is, abundance and temperature are what are shown on the axes, but they aren’t what the graph is about. Instead, graphs are typically about some kind of relationship.

Write Like a Chemist (Robinson and Stoller, 2008) includes some nice examples of figures, including figures with common errors and their revised and improved counterparts. In Chapter 16, the book goes over the different components of a figure, including captions.

"Place a caption below the graph, aligned with the left-handed margin. Do not include a title above the graph (except in posters, which sometimes have a caption and a title). A common format is to begin the caption with an identifier in bolded font (e.g., Figure 2.). Continue with a short informative descriptor (often a fragment) that can be understood apart from the text. The descriptor is usually written in sentence case and often ends with a period (e.g., Figure 2. Effect of heating on reaction rate.). The descriptor can be followed by additional information in one or more sentences or fragments."  -- Write Like a Chemist, Table 16.1, "Captions"

Okay, this tells us how to format a figure caption, but what actually goes into that caption?

I went to the American Chemical Society (ACS) Guide to Scholarly Communication to see what it says, and it offers a little bit more about what makes for a good caption than Write Like a Chemist.

"Be concise. Minimalize text within the figures. Use a typeface and size that can be read when the graphic is viewed at its publication size."  -- ACS Guide to Scholarly Communications, Section 4.1.3

The advice to be concise is more about what goes in the figure itself than it is about the actual caption, but it is advice that can be carried over to caption writing. You don’t want to have paragraphs of text of a figure; the point of a figure is that it illustrates something more clearly than what you could say in words. It complements the text, but it should not compete with it.

Captions should also be concise. You should have enough information in the caption to allow your reader to know what they are looking at and the types of information they should glean from the plot or image. However, any results or discussion of what’s in that figure should be left to the body text.

"Be complete. Identify or explain all parts of the graphics. Identify the significance of any special symbols or notations you use. Avoid using symbols that have multiple meanings unless you clarify them."  -- ACS Guide to Scholarly Communications, Section 4.1.3

Being complete is important. If you use symbols or colors, explain them. If I have a contour map with contours in both blue and red, I need to tell you what those blue and red contours represent.

It’s also important to explain any abbreviations. Chemical formulas or abbreviations that are commonly understood are fine, but anything else should be defined in the caption (as well as in the body text). For instance, if my axes are labeled N and T, I should mention in my figure that I’m showing the relationship between “column density N and rotational temperature T.” If I just write “N and T” or “column density and rotational temperature,” the reader isn’t guaranteed to interpret my axes correctly, especially if they are out of field or if I am using unconventional labels.

A piece of sage advice from the ACS that perfectly summarizes how to approach writing captions is this:

" If a reader has to search the article text for meaning, then the graphic or caption is missing important details, such as relevant experimental conditions (e.g., concentration, medium, temperature, excitation wavelength, scan rates of cyclic voltammograms, etc.) and definitions of abbreviations and symbols that are not obvious to most readers."  -- ACS Guide to Scholarly Communications, Section 4.1.3

I don’t know where they came from, but I have a bunch of Science Service Science Program boxed sets from the 1960s among my belongings in my parent’s basement. The booklets in these boxes are really cool. They’re full of drawings and photographs of all different areas of research and tech, from Magnets and Magnetism and Earthquakes to Ballistics and Space Flight Communications.

Among them, I found a Radio and Radar Astronomy booklet in pristine condition, carefully packaged in bubble wrap. I think I bought it off of eBay several years ago, and I completely forgot about it. Even the 12 stickers in it are intact!

It sure has been a busy year, and as such it has been not one but two terms since I last typed up a summary of my progress in graduate school. At this point, I've gone through nine terms of graduate school, which comes to about 39% of the average 5.7 years (or 23 terms) it takes a Caltech chemist to get a PhD.

Last time I provided a recap, I had just passed my candidacy exam and had found out my GBT. I also shared among other things, that I finally had my hands on my ALMA Cycle 5 data. Since then, I've spent a lot of time working on that data.

In terms 8 and 9...

I started selling science-inspired artwork (SciArt) on my website. I sell everything from stationery and stickers to jewelry and ornaments, the sales of which help me fund my science communication efforts by helping towards the cost of fuel and materials for activities. I've had a lot of fun with the project so far, and in my first five months, I've made over 50 sales, or a sale about once every three days, which I think is pretty good considering I'm a full time grad student and have been traveling a lot.

I traveled... a lot. My work took me to five states outside of California, and the family and I had six days of flying in addition to days sapped by driving. I visited Green Bank, WV, three times: once for fun, once for a remote observing workshop (so I can control the GBT from my computer in California if I so desire for future observations), and for collecting data, which I shared in an article I wrote for GotScience Magazine. I also spent a week in Charlottesville, VA, to visit the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and get help with my ALMA data. Finally, I went to Portland, OR, for the Professional Organizational Development (POD) Network conference, where I was awarded a professional development grant.

I gave numerous talks, most of which were during somewhat of a speaking tour while visiting south-central PA. My speaking tour included stops at Mount St. Mary's University (Emmittsburg, MD), Lycoming College (Williamsport, PA), Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA), Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA), and York College of Pennsylvania (York, PA) to talk about astrochemistry and radio astronomy. I gave an additional talk at Dickinson about my year as a Fulbright research fellow in Germany. In addition to those talks on my south-central PA tour, I also gave talks at California State University - Channel Islands, Green Bank Observatory, and Palomar Observatory, bringing the total number of talks up to nine!

I was on the local organizing committee for a conference in July entitled Astrochemistry: Past, Present, & Future in honor of Ewine van Dishoeck. That was an exhausting but rewarding experience in addition to being a throwback to my event planning days from college. I helped book rooms, run registration, and keep the audio/visual components running smoothly, even after the projector lamp broke the second-to-last-day of the conference. I also sketched an illustrated summary of every single talk using pen and a brand new set of Prismacolor colored pencils Alex gave me as an anniversary gift (three years of marriage, folks!).

I taught Scientific Writing for a fifth time. Even though I was away, I remotely gave feedback and helped students with their writing for the first half of the class, then facilitated peer review in person once I returned. I learned so much through my students' writing. As always, it was a pleasure to co-instruct that class!

We moved! 2018 was a rough year for many reasons, the tipping point of which was finding out that our rent in the family apartments through Caltech Housing was going up 5.2%, and without a raise to the stipend. I'm still bitter that they raised the rent most for families, many of whom have partners who can't afford to work because childcare is so expensive. Many are struggling as it is, especially with the sole source of income being the grad student stipend. This took a serious toll on my mental health, and I found my time was mostly being spent looking for cheaper places to live as a contingency. I also spent a lot of time figuring out whether we would be able to afford for me to stay in grad school since rent had gone up over 4% in the previous year as well.

Anyway, we threw the dice on a cheaper apartment in the grad student lottery, and by some miracle, we got it! We're saving $5100 this year by living in an apartment that is about a mile north of campus. While it doesn't have a dishwasher, it has an amazing courtyard in the center with a play structure for Güni, and our apartment seems to stay pretty cool in the summer. We love it.

This blog post was originally published as an article in GotScience Magazine on December 6, 2018. It has been posted here with permission of GotScience. This post retains as much of the original formatting as possible.

Pictured in the image above is the Jansky Laboratory, where scientific research is conducted at the Green Bank Observatory, with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in the background. The Jansky Lab is named for physicist and telephone engineer Karl Guthe Jansky, who in the 1930s first detected radio waves coming from the center of the Milky Way. Image by author.

Green Bank, West Virginia, is known as “America’s Quietest Town”: there is no cell-phone service, and the use of wireless internet, digital cameras, and even microwaves is heavily restricted. It feels like a snapshot of a time when everybody still had a landline and get-togethers were arranged in advance rather than on a whim with a quick text. For some, Green Bank is a refuge from the waves of ever-advancing technology; for me, it’s a paradise where I can marvel at some of the most remarkable technology in the world: the Green Bank Telescope (GBT).

MY LODGING: MISSING THE SIMPLE THINGS

The folks at the observatory put me up in one of the downstairs apartments in a rather dated on-site residence hall, across the road from the research building. Unlike the dorm-style rooms upstairs, the apartments, which are reserved for longer-term visitors, have a separate bedroom (with both a queen-size bed and a twin-size bed), a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen, and so they are perfect for small families like mine.

Straddling Virginia and West Virginia, the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) was established in 1958 by the federal government in part to protect future radio astronomy efforts from the anticipated boom in sources of radio frequency interference, or RFI. I’ve been to the NRQZ several times before, so powering down my cell phone during my recent observing run wasn’t a problem. But as much as I love Green Bank, staying at the observatory there does pose other challenges.

On several occasions, different members of the observatory team insisted that, contrary to popular belief, it was not their cell phone they missed most as Green Bank residents but the microwave oven. Thinking back to my summer visit as an undergraduate research student and, more recently, a visiting scientist, I fully understand this longing. Heating up water in a microwave for a cup of hot tea or cocoa on a chilly evening is so much more convenient than boiling it in a stovetop kettle, just as pre-popped popcorn on a movie night isn’t as satisfying as the microwavable kind.

I know of two microwaves on the observatory site: one in the control room and one in the upstairs kitchen in the residence hall. Mind you, these are no ordinary microwaves. Rather, they have been tampered with by the observatory engineers and stuffed into Faraday cages, that is, metal boxes lined with copper that are able to contain electromagnetic radiation of longer wavelengths, like those emitted by microwave ovens. These special microwaves will run only when the door to their cage is tightly sealed with a heavy metal latch, and because Faraday cages prevent microwave radiation from escaping, the actual cook time is much shorter than that recommended on food packaging.

TUNING IN

The observations I was to carry out required only about six hours of GBT time. Staying in Green Bank for two weeks was more of a precaution against the weather, as my work requires conducting observations at high frequencies, which are quite sensitive to variables like temperature, atmospheric water, and wind. My chance for a relatively dry and still night with stable temperature could come only once every few days. Fortunately, I got my chance already on the third night of my visit and was able to use the rest of my stay to consult with the scientists on staff as I looked through my data.

On the night of my observations, I arrived at the telescope control room at 9:45 p.m., about half an hour before my observations were to begin, to meet with my “project friend” (a staff member assigned to help me with my observations) and a resident high-frequency expert. Waiting anxiously as the previous observation run was being remotely wrapped up, I logged into a computer and executed the commands to pull up the appropriate software.

At 10:15 p.m., I got the go-ahead from the telescope operator and started up the receiving instrument for high-frequency studies, only to encounter a “fatal” error. As with any piece of sophisticated technology, the error was fixed with a complicated solution: I turned the receiver off and back on again. Once it was humming along, I initiated a code prompting a sequence to make the surface of the GBT dish as smooth as possible, which increased my ability to receive data with high levels of sensitivity and little radio noise.

Around 11:00 p.m., I started observing two protostars, or collapsing clumps of dust and gas on the verge of star birth. I waited patiently as the data streamed in, occasionally making sure everything was running smoothly. Just minutes before 4:30 a.m., after over six hours of executing various computer codes to control where the telescope pointed and what frequencies of radio emission it collected, I received my final data.

I hung around for another 45 minutes while the next observers remotely checked the surface of the GBT, and I was elated to find that the surface had remained constant throughout my observations, which meant that they were about as sensitive as they could be to the faint signals I was trying to pick up. At around 5:15 a.m., when the morning was dark and still, I trudged across frosty grass back to the residence hall and took a nap before my two-year-old insisted I wake up and join him for breakfast.

TRUDGING ON

The last 11 days of my visit became exceedingly difficult, mostly due to car issues. The morning after my observations, my family and I set off to Snowshoe, a ski-resort village about a 30-minute drive from Green Bank. On our way there, our car began acting funny, sounding more like a 40-year-old pick-up truck, not a 13-year-old SUV. Despite that, we enjoyed the landscape, as fall turned the green and blue mountains surrounding Green Bank amber.

Over the next few days, our car was in a limp mode, at the worst of times struggling to go more than 10 mph. This was problematic for two reasons. First, in his song “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” John Denver doesn’t refer to West Virginia as “mountain mama” for nothing. At the end of one drive, the car didn’t have enough power, and my husband had to push it up the last hill before the entrance to the observatory. Second, being in the NRQZ meant that if we broke down, we wouldn’t be able to call anyone unless we stopped near someone’s house or by the occasional pay phone.

Turns out the catalytic converter had gone out and taken the muffler with it. Fortunately, there is a mechanic several miles from Green Bank, and the observatory staff members were exceptionally helpful in giving me rides to the store to pick up milk for my son or to the garage to drop off and pick up the car.

When I wasn’t sorting out car trouble, I was working on my data with the help of the scientific staff on site. We concluded that the signals I had hoped to catch were most likely too faint for the amount of observing time I had. Although disappointing, this realization inspired a cropping of ideas on where to take my research next and how to approach the challenges of observing some of the faintest radio waves from elsewhere in the galaxy.

Once my observations were over, each remaining day went by more quickly and was more difficult than the previous one, with the time to leave Green Bank drawing in closer and closer. Somewhere in between a few dinners and drinks with the observatory staff, I reminisced about my stay there as an undergraduate student and was taken over by a feeling of being at home. Alas, it was time to say goodbye, and I left the paradise of the radio quiet zone and went back to admiring radio telescope data instead of the remarkable machine itself.

Until next time, GBT. I can’t wait to tune in to the invisible universe with you again soon.

—Olivia Harper Wilkins investigates the formation of complex organic molecules in the interstellar medium as an astrochemist and doctoral candidate at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Using sensitive radio telescopes, she looks for chemical signatures from the earliest stages of star formation to investigate whether complex organics form on the surfaces of icy dust grains. Olivia earned a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics from Dickinson College after which she spent a year as a Fulbright research fellow with the Cologne Laboratory Astrophysics Group in Germany. You can reach her on Twitter, Instagram, and on her website, http://theskyisnotthelimit.org.

All images for this article were contributed by the author.

GotScience Magazine is published by the nonprofit Science Connected, is made possible by donations from readers like you.

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Show off your love of the cosmos with these hand-painted star nebula earrings. These earrings were fashioned with acrylic paint on wood and threaded with matching purple embroidery thread.

In honor of National Chemistry Week 2018, I thought it would be appropriate to share some insight on what astrochemistry is, especially since this year’s theme is “chemistry is out of this world chemistry.” I have found that, even if they have at least heard of the field of astrochemistry, most people—including most chemists with whom I’ve interacted—aren’t familiar with what astrochemistry research entails. I’ll save what astrochemists actually do for a future post, but for now I’ll elaborate on a simple yet accurate definition of the field.

Astrochemistry is the study of molecules in space: where they are, how they got there, and what they are doing. I love this definition, which I first heard from fellow astrochemist Dr. Brett McGuire, because it succinctly sums up just about every research question there is in the field.

AS·TRO·CHEM·IS·TRY / astrō’kemǝstrē / (n) the study of molecules in space – where they are, how they got there, and what they are doing

So, where are molecules in space, and how did they get there? What are they doing? Various forms of these questions are actively being investigated, but I’ll give a sweeping overview.

Where are molecules in space?

If you are like me and grew up thinking that the spaces between stars were empty, you will be excited to find out that molecules are everywhere in space! Sure, interstellar space is relatively empty compared to what we experience here on Earth, but it is still chockfull of molecules we can detect and study using telescopes pointed toward distant objects thousands and millions and even billions of lightyears away.

How did they get there?

The saga of molecules in space is one that begins about 13.8 billion years ago. At the very beginning of the universe, hydrogen and helium atoms were formed just moments (within 0.01 to 200 seconds) after the Big Bang. Hydrogen and helium gas clumped together to form the first stars, which fused these atoms together in their cores to form heavier elements which astronomers call metals. (As a chemist by training, the definition of metal being anything heavier than helium makes me cringe... except when in the presence of other chemists where I can be entertained by their disgusted reactions instead!) When these first stars died they spewed these "metals" across the universe.

After things settle down following star death, nebulae—or clouds of dust and gas that are more affectionately referred to as stellar nurseries—form. It is in these clouds that molecules, from the ever-abundant diatomic hydrogen H2 to the complex organic molecules which have six or more atoms, first emerge. These molecules evolve, bonding together and breaking apart, as the stars within these molecular clouds also evolve from "cores" (dense clumps of dust and gas to protostars) to protostars (cores just on the brink of fusing hydrogen into helium, at which point they will be "born" into fully-fledged stars) and protoplanetary disks (gas and dust around a young star pushed out into a flattened disk by angular momentum where planetary bodies will form). Eventually, these stars also die, and the cycle continues.

Comets and meteorites exhibit even more evolved chemistries than molecular clouds and protoplanetary disks, and these objects are thought to deliver molecules to planetary bodies, including the early Earth. Thus, not only are molecules in space formed in situ, or where they are found, but they might also be transported about.

What are they doing?

Molecules in space are doing exactly what molecules on Earth are doing: forming, interacting, being destroyed. The difference, however, is that molecules in space are generally doing these things at extreme conditions by Earth's standards. For instance, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—also called PAHs, the byproducts of combustion found in vehicle exhaust, for instance—are thought to form in the outflows of stars at temperatures around 1100 Kelvin (827°C, 442°F). On the other hand of the celestial thermometer, some molecules are thought to form at temperatures as cold as 10 Kelvin (-263°C, -442°F); it is amazing that even at these cold temperatures so close to absolute zero, there is still enough energy for bonds to form between atoms. Similarly, much of the chemistry taking place happens in far less dense regions than that on Earth, so the fact that any molecules can find each other to react is nothing short of astronishing. Even more amazing, interstellar chemistry is bombarded by radiation—UV, X-ray, thermal—from evolving stars whereas chemistry on Earth's surface is by contrast well-protected by our atmosphere.

Now that you know more about what astrochemistry is as a field, you might wonder, why study astrochemistry at all? Astrochemistry gives us a glimpse at a primitive molecular world, a sort of chemical archaeology in space, by which nearly 200 interstellar molecules have been detected. These molecules include common compounds found on Earth, like sodium chloride (NaCl), more commonly known as table salt, and ethanol (C2H5OH), which is the alcohol that makes beer and wine adult beverages. Other interstellar molecules are ones not found on Earth at all, many of which I could not have dreamed of being possible as an undergraduate chemistry major. My favorites under this category are long, unsaturated (i.e. with few hydrogen atoms) carbon chains called cyanopollynes (cyano as in cyanide or -CN, pollynes meaning many triply-bonded carbons) like HC9N, or cyanooctatetrayne.

Astrochemistry can show us how chemistry takes place in laboratories uncontaminated by the complexity of life (at least as far as we know), but it can also show us so much more. By studying molecules in space, we can understand the physical structure of objects. For instance, SiO (silicon monoxide) traces protostellar outflows and is an example of how chemistry can help us distinguish whether emission is from a parent molecular cloud of from a newly formed star, as well as the nature of the physical processes happening in an observed region.

Chemistry can also be used to understand the history of various objects. The ratios of different molecules in comets can tell us the temperatures of the regions where these objects formed, similar to how cores of glacial ice extracted from the Arctic can provide a record of Earth's climate history. Astrochemistry can also tell us where exoplanets such as gas giants around other stars formed and whether they migrated to their present location. This is done by comparing the atmospheric composition of observed exoplanets with modeled profiles of the protoplanetary disks from whence they came.

Astrochemistry can tell us about the environment around young stars as ionic compounds (charged molecules, typically cationic or positively-charged in protoplanetary environments) and radical species (molecules with an unpaired electron) are produced by various types of radiation coming from a star at different rates. Similarly, temperature and density profiles can provide a look into whether the physics and chemistry within molecular clouds are driven by radiation from the star or by collisions of the molecules therein.

Whatever your interest in astronomy, whether it be diffuse molecular clouds or fully-formed planets, astrochemistry has much to teach us about space.

It is a beautiful fall day in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. I am currently working from the library in the Jansky Lab at Green Bank Observatory. The arm of the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is just visible over the other end of the buidling, mountains speckled with rusty orange trees in the background. I'm in Green Bank for just over two weeks on an observing run in which I will carry out observations of the chemistry in two protostars, young stellar objects early in the stages of their evolution on the cusp of star birth.

While my actual observations only took 6.25 hours, the journey to get here is one that started several months ago. Astronomers often put as much work, and perhaps even more, into obtaining observing time as they do using the telescope to collect data. This process is generally hidden one, so I am going to give you a look into how the proposal writing process works.

Call for Proposals

Between two and four weeks before a proposal deadline, the radio astronomy observatory to which proposals are due releases a call for proposals. This announcement lists the dates for the next observing cycle, the instruments available during that cycle, and the deadline for proposals. In the case of the current GBT observing cycle, semester 2018B, observations are being carried out between August 2018 and January 2019, and the proposals for this semester were due February 5, 2018.

While astronomers who intend to submit a proposal have hopefully been thinking about it before the call for proposals is released, realistically the call for proposals initiates a mad dash to read relevant scientific papers, run models, and draft up the actual proposal. Luckily for me, I had already proposed a similar project to the Effelsberg Radio Telescope, meaning that I simply had to tailor my Effelsberg proposal for the GBT.

Proposal Components

So what actually goes into a proposal? Typically there is an online application-type form to fill out, including an abstract of the project, a list of observational targets (stars, molecular clouds, planets, etc.), and requested telescope settings (observation time, receivers, frequency ranges). There is also a technical justification where you have to explain why your project is feasible with the instrument you are proposing to use.

The other major component of a telescope proposal is a written document, which is typically 4 pages long for a radio telescope proposal. This written document contains both a scientific justification and a technical justification (or a description of observations). Both of these pieces should be written for a general astronomy audience since they may be reviewed and evaluated by an astronomer in any subfield. The scientific justification provides background information on the scientific question you are trying to answer, including a description of the targets you selected and why they can help you answer that question. This part also explains any predicted outcomes and how you derived those predictions. In my case, I predicted being able to detect certain molecular lines, which I determined from models that I derived from abundances and temperatures of methanol (CH3OH) in my targets and other molecules not previously found in these targets based on typical relative abundances in other protostars. Finally, perhaps the most important component of a telescope proposal is providing motivation for answering your scientific question, especially if the proposal is read by someone outside your field. You want your reviewer to understand how this research question will impact other areas of research and how your field will progress if your observations are successful. There are far more proposals submitted than what can be observed, so the reviewers must be convinced that a proposal is valuable before it can be considered for acceptance.

The second part of the written aspect of the proposal is the technical justification or description of observations. In this, the proposer puts the technical justification from the online application-type component into context with respect to the science objectives. Here, the proposer should explain why they selected different settings and how these are the best settings for achieving the proposed science goals. This should include explanations of proposed observing times and achievable spatial resolution and how those are sufficient. A technical justification should also explain why a specific telescope is requested and not one at another observatory (without talking trash on another 'scope, of course!); in my case I explained that the signals I am looking for are quite faint and thus I need the most sensitive (i.e. largest) telescope possible. I described models I generated for smaller telescopes that required exceedingly long observation times that would be unpractical, even if they were granted.

The Review Process

After submitting a telescope proposal, you have to wait several months to hear back. During this time, proposals are sorted by observation category (mine was designated as an "Interstellar Medium" proposal) before being sent out to a review panel. The exact process here isn't quite transparent, but individuals on these panels (for the GBT, they are typically staff at the Green Bank Observatory) read sets of proposals separately before meeting together and deciding on how to grade the proposals.

For the GBT, each proposal is assigned a grade number on a linearly-ranked scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is the highest score and 10 is the lowest. Different cutoffs are set for letter priority grades—A, B, and C where A is highest priority—and rejections that will be used to weight accepted proposals in how they are scheduled. The results of the proposal review comes out several months after the proposal deadline and are posted on the observatory website (in the case of the GBT) and emailed out to the principal invesitgator (PI, or lead scientist) listed on the proposal. The abstracts for accepted GBT proposals are listed in the NRAO online proposal libary, where you can search by telescope, observing cycle, and science category; A screenshot of my proposal abstract is below.

A time allocation report is also typically published to show how many proposals were received, how many were accepted, and how much observing time total was available and requested. Perhaps the most widely cited statistic among astronomers is the oversubscription rate. For 2018B, the oversubscription rate was 3.0, meaning that there were 3 times as many proposals submitted as there were accepted.

In a previous post, I gave an overview of the NSF GRFP, including some quick advice regarding the Graduate Research Plan Statement. Here, I share some more about my experience writing the research plan, similar to what I did for the personal statement.

Before I begin, a word of caution: I applied for the NSF GRFP after I had graduated from undergrad but before I went to grad school, so while the general advice should be the same, how you select a topic could very well be different if you are applying as a current grad student.

Regardless of your current status when applying for the NSF GRFP, it is important to remember that your research plan is not a contract; you don't have to actually carry out the project you outline in your plan. So if you have yet to join a research group, relax. This research plan is non-binding.

The application components page of the GRFP website states that your research plan should "present an original research topic that you would like to pursue in graduate school" and that you mut "describe the research idea, your general approach, as well as any unique resources that may be needed for accomplishing the research goal." Basically, the NSF wants to assess your problem-solving skills, something that is crucial for successful science. I'll break apart these three pieces, citing examples from my own statement.

Describe a research idea

Applying for fellowships is a lot of work, so pick a research topic that you are passionate about. I'm passionate about astrochemistry and particularly interested in how complex organic molecules (COMs) form in the interstellar medium, so I wrote about that.

I started out with an introduction section that talked about the gaps in our understanding about the origins of interstellar complex organics before going into a research objectives section that gave a list of what I thought to be three key steps toward understanding how such molecules form. (I totally forgot until just now that this is what I wrote about... turns out, it is very similar to what I'm doing now!) To make it clear exactly what gap I wanted to close, I used bold text to emphasize my main objective: "I propose to investigate COM formation pathways by coupling studies of site-specific reactions using stable isotopes with radio astronomical measurements." That way, if my reviewer was exhausted from reading numerous statements, it would be clear the key points they should pay attention to.

I also recommend having a short paragraph about intellectual merit and broader impacts (mine is at the end of my statement, just before the references). These two criteria are essential to your application, so including them in both your personal statement and research plan will show the reviewer you take these criteria seriously. In my research plan, for instance, I include a sentence repeating the importance of my work in the field of astrochemistry which was mentioned in the introduction. I also mention outreach opportunities I anticipate to engage in, naming Project Scientist (a summer academy for elementary and middle school girls) as a specific group I wanted to partner with.

Your general approach

While you don't need to (and shouldn't) provide a super-detailed outline of the methods you intend to apply in your proposed project, you should include enough detail to demonstrate that you have thought about what would be required to address your proposed research question. Space doesn't allow for a whole lot of detail, and painting a big picture of your research ideas is more important than details here.

In my research plan, I mention that I would look at gas-phase reactions observed under interstellar conditions, specifically very low pressures. I give the name of one such molecule I might want to study (aminoacetonitrile) and relate it back to glycine, which I had mentioned in my introduction.

I also mention radio telescope observations to observe the reactions I simulate in the lab and see how well they match up to what is actually in the interstellar medium. I listed three telescopes that are commonly used (again, just enough to show that I have thought about what would be needed to carry out such observations).

Another approach that might be useful, if applicable, is to share "preliminary results" based on previous research experiences. In my statement, I highlight some things related to my proposed research area that I had learned from my summer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and my Fulbright with the Cologne Laboratory Astrophysics Group. I also bolded specifically what I did (it can't hurt to emphasize that you have practice doing research) and the key "results" from this previous work as they applied to my research plan.

Unique resources

I'm not totally sure what the NSF means by "unique resources" that you would need, but my guess is that they want to assess whether you have thought about if you could even carry out your proposed research in grad school. I approached this by naming Geoff Blake from Caltech (who I ended up working with) as an example of a PI who had the laboratory equipment required for the experiments I might carry out. For radio telescope observations, I mentioned that all PIs I was considering for my grad school advisor "frequently secure telescope time; hence, I would have access to guidance from experienced observers when determining telescope settings." Finally, I described needing access to molecular line databases and that, if I had any questions about the databases I was using, I could either head up the street to JPL (who maintains one of the most complete databases) or reach out to my old research group in Cologne (who runs another big-name database). This also served to say, "Hey look! I have a network that I can use to collaborate... perhaps even internationally!" Where possible (and realistic), describe how you might collaborate with other groups and what connections you already have in place.

General advice

Bold importmant statements highlighting your objectives and any related past experiences that make you particularly qualified for the proposed work.

Write for a general science audience and avoid jargon. While your application will be reviewed by people who are "in-field," they still might not be close enough to your own proposed research area to follow along with the jargon. For instance, my application was submitted for review by physical chemists, but a theorist or spectroscopist probably wouldn't know that "complex" is used to describe molecules with six or more atoms in the context of astrochemistry.

Include at least one figure to illustrate something you explain in the proposal.

The other night, I joined my friend Cam on an observing run. Cam is a fellow grad student and astrochemist, and he's studying Hot Jupiters, which are massive planets with properties similar to the gas-giant Jupiter in our own Solar System but have very short (i.e. less than 10 days) periods. They are very close to their respective stars, hence the word "hot" in their name. (In astronomy fields, the more we study the heavens, the more we realized the Solar System might just be the odd one out.)

To study Hot Jupiters, Cam uses the NIRSPEC instrument on the Keck II Telescope at Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. It can be used to observe wavelengths in the near-infrared (near-IR) region of the electromagnetic spectrum at high resolutions. Without going into much detail, using the telescope—which we do remotely using four monitors on Caltech's campus as well as a webcam connection with telescope operators stationed at Mauna Kea—requires that we point to a star and collect its near-IR spectrum (its electromagnetic signal) while moving the telescope slightly back-and-forth. We do this for a couple of star systems per observing night, after which Cam goes back and extracts the spectrum of the planet (in his case, a Hot Jupiter) to learn more about it. When we observe, we observe the planet and star together through Earth's atmosphere, so Cam needs to subtract the star's and Earth's atmosphere' (called telluric) spectra to isolate that of the planet.

For those astronomers who stay up all night (e.g. Cam), how do you spend your time while staying up until 7:30 in the morning after putting in a day at the office? For Keck, we record information in the observing log every 10 minutes or so and click a button, but we have to keep ourselves entertained in between those times. How? I kept track. Here's the run-down:

It's been two weeks since I decided to take a break from marveling at the radio universe and join the millions of people basking in the awesomeness of the Sun. The "Great American Eclipse"—so-called for casting a shadow over the United States that traveled coast-to-coast from Oregon to South Carolina—was the first solar eclipse to touch the U.S. since the early 1900s; thus while solar eclipses themselves are not rare, the August 21, 2017, eclipse was remarkable because it could be viewed directly by so many people.

My family and I drove 2,770 miles between Pasadena, CA, and Stanley, ID, over the week, going through 7 states, making 7 National Park visits (as well as touring the first nuclear power plant in the world) and experiencing one amazing eclipse. Here's an overview of our itinerary and the cool places we visited on our Road Trip to Totality! (You can also check out our adventure on Twitter via #RT2Totality!)

In honor of the 2017 total solar eclipse over the continental United States on Monday, October 21, I've done some digging into radio astronomy's history involving the Sun. While radio astronomy is often considered "exploring the invisible universe" (to quote the NRAO) in the context of the interstellar medium (ISM) and far-away planetary systems, the field also has an intimate past with our own solar system.

The Sun has been a player in radio astronomy history since the field's earliest beginnings, first making an appearance in Karl Jansky's notebook. Karl Jansky—an American radio engineer at Bell Labs who laid the foundation for radio astronomy in the 1930s—was searching for the source of static "of unknown origin" using a large radio antenna. Jansky ruled out thunderstorms, power lines, and radio transmitters as sources of the mysterious steady hiss because of how the signal sometimes disappeared depending on the position of his antenna. Initially, the static seemed to follow the Sun, coming from the east in the morning, the south at midday, and the west in the afternoon. After about a month, however, the radio noise no longer aligned with the Sun, and six months later the source of static seemed opposite the Sun. Eventually, the radio noise was determined to be radio waves from the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Over the next decade, there was little buzz over radio waves coming from outer space. During World War II, English physicist James Stanley Hey detected radio waves that were in fact coming from the Sun. Hey was employed by the Army Operational Research Group in 1940 to research anti-aircraft radar in an effort to combat the Germans who were jamming radio communications among the Allied Forces. In February 1942, radar stations along the south coast of England saw a significant increase in radio interference. While the interference was thought to be the result of Axis operatives on the French coast, the source could not be verified. Hey observed patterns in the interference, noting that the strongest radio interference came from the direction of the Sun. He was initially skeptical that the Sun could be jamming the Allies' communications, but after consulting with the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, he was convinced; the Sun was experiencing particularly strong sunspot activity at that time, resulting in the emission of strong solar radio emissions. After World War II, Hey continued to investigate radiation from the sun and how it correlated with solar activity.

Curious about the strength of radio emissions from the Sun, British-born Australian scientist (John) Paul Wild joined the Radiophysics Division of Australia's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in 1947. Over the course of several decades, Wild's team built several solar radio-observatories, including a radio spectrograph that pointed at the Sun 12 hours a day from Dapto and a huge radiotelescope near Narrabri at Culgoora Observatory—a radioheliograph comprising of 96 antennas in a three-kilometer ring that gave astronomers a look at the Sun's corona.

The Australian team jump-started solar research using radio astronomy techniques, specifically to study the solar corona. Their first major discovery was reported in 1950; using the spectrograph they had discovered three types of solar burst (Type I, Type II, Type III) which is the now-accepted international standard. With the radioheliograph a decade later, they observed the mysterious solar corona—the Sun's upper atmosphere that extends millions of kilometers into space. Phenomena in the corona are invisible to optical telescopes so had not been studied by the 1960s. Keeping in mind that sunspots are regions of intense magnetic field, the team devloped the telescope such that oppositely polarized radiation (think of sunspots as opposite poles of a magnet) would be recorded separately. When the recorded data were superimposed, an image of the Sun was generated, showing unpolarized regions in white. As a result of this work in radio astronomy, the foundation for solar plasma research was set in place.

The invisible Sun has long been illuminated by the field of radio astronomy. Since the field's humble of beginnings by amateur astronomers, solar radio astronomy has grown into a science that sheds light on our closest star. A solar eclipse, during which the Moon obscures not only the Sun's visible light but also some of its radio waves, provides an excellent opportunity to study the Sun and its corona. Plenty of professional astronomers and amateurs alike will certainly have their (properly protected) eyes—and dishes!—on the sky.

References

Hewish, Antony. "James Stanley Hey, M.B.E. 3 May 1909 – 27 February 2000. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 2002, 48, 167-178

"John Paul Wild [1923-2008]." CSIROpedia

"New radio waves traced to centre of the Milky Way." The New York Times, 5 May 1993

Penley, Bill. "Dr James Stanley Hey MBE FRS." Purbeck Radar, Purbeck Radar Museum Trust. January 2011.

"Radio Astronomy — Observing Explosions on the Sun." CSIROpedia

After three terms of grad school, I've hit 13% completion! (That is assuming the average of about 5.7 years or 23 terms for Caltech chemists.) I've completed the number of classes required for my degree (although I am taking Cosmochemistry next term anyway), leaving candidacy and thesis work to occupy my time.

Getting to this point has given me a chance to take a deep breath; I made it past what is (at least for me) perhaps the most stressful part of grad school: classes. Here are the highlights (a month late, but hey, I've been busy being a grad student!).

I attended the American Chemical Society National Meeting in San Francisco and presented a poster about social media in science. Although I missed the first week of third term, I learned a lot of astrochemistry. I also had great conversations about how scientists can use social media for both inreach and outreach, some of which landed me a gig as a member of a social media task force with the ACS Division of Chemistry Education! On our way to and from the conference, my family also trekked to six(!) different National Park sites: Pinnacles, Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Yosemite, Muir Woods, and King's Canyon.

[View the story "#ACSSanFran" on Storify]

I took my final required class toward my Chemistry Ph.D. I capped my five courses with Spectroscopy, the key instrumentation technique in my area of astrochemistry research. I'm still taking another class next fall, but it feels great to have completed a major component of my degree!

I co-built a new tutorial class from scratch! My friend Cam and I co-designed and co-taught Astrochemistry: Spectroscopy in Space, and we learned a lot (perhaps even more than our students) along the way. Over the term, we introduced chemistry undergrads to astronomy, described the methods used in the field of astrochemistry, and explored the research in the field from the interstellar medium through planet formation. It was an out-of-this-world experience!

Check out more Astrochemistry 101-related tweets via #astrochem101.

I submitted my first ever ALMA proposal, and I was listed as PI! I submitted a proposal to ALMA Cycle 5 about methanol isotopologues in Orion KL. The proposal was one of ~1700, so my hopes aren't all that high for it, but cross your fingers for me anyway; I should find out whether it was accepted or rejected at the end of July.

You can read about my interests in interstellar isotopologues generally in my Year 1 NSF GRFP Activity Report (2017). If you want to learn more about astrochemistry generally, check out my post "Chemical Archaeology in Space"!

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist. Whether I was collecting water samples from the stream down the hill, looking through the optical telescope with my dad, or reading books about volcanoes, it was clear that I was curious about the world around me. Throughout primary school, my interests changed almost daily—ecology, astronomy, paleontology, .... In third grade, I made a list of my dream professions, 50 science disciplines long.

By the time I reached high school, I had settled on a single discipline: archeology. After a decade of marathoning the Indiana Jones movies (and the original Star Wars... I had a bit of a crush on Harrison Ford) and making holes in the backyard, digging into the past seemed like the adventure of a lifetime. After I took my first chemistry course (which I fell in love with because it seemed to be glorified algebra), I figured I'd study chemistry in college. While a key tool in archaeology, carbon dating had the word "carbon" in it after al thus must be chemistry; why not go the chemistry route and apply it to any other discipline—archaeology or otherwise—that piqued my interest?

A lifelong subconscious fascination with radio telescopes blossomed into a love for radio astronomy during college, and I was turned to astrochemistry.

Turns out, astrochemistry isn’t completely different from archaeology. Instead of traveling the world to visit dig sites, I travel the world to visit radio telescopes. Instead of looking at artifacts from hundreds of years ago, I look at chemical signatures from parts of space hundreds of lightyears away. Instead of studying human history, I study the universe’s chemical history. I’m pretty much a space archaeologist, right?

If you look up astrochemistry on Wikipedia, you'll find:

Astrochemistry is the study of the abundance and reactions of chemical elements and molecules in the universe, and their interaction with radiation. The discipline is an overlap of astronomy and chemistry.

True, but not exactly glamourous-sounding and definitely not the whole picture.

Astrochemistry is much bigger than cataloguing chemical abundances and reactions. It’s the study of chemistry at its most basic, stripped down level. It’s chemical evolution, looking back to before life, before a planet, before a star.

It’s a field in which “complexity” begins at six atoms. (To put this into perspective, on Earth the monosaccharide glucose is considered a “simple sugar” with 24 atoms.)

It’s trying to trace our chemical origins back to comets, or even further to protoplanetary disks—the dust and gas circling a newly-formed star that will eventually snowball into planets and other bodies that will orbit the star.

It’s understanding how planets form by using chemistry as a marker for where a planet formed and mapping how it moved closer or further from a star throughout a system’s history.

It’s a cycle of formation and destruction through stellar evolution, from the collapse of dense clouds into protostars to the formation of protoplanetary disks and ultimately planetary systems.

It's extrapolating what an atmosphere of a planet looked like millions of years ago based on the chemistry we see in that atmosphere today.

It's studying the weather on other planets.

It's computer modeling to test reactions we can't otherwise study on Earth.

It's laboratory astrophysics at extremely low pressures and temperatures.

It's thinking about what life might look like elsewhere in the universe.

It's tuning into the universe's radio waves and collecting them with a radio telescope.

It's also using telescopes to have infrared, optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray vision of the chemical universe.

It's watching the physical dynamics of interstellar clouds like the Orion Nebula, a diffuse collection of molecules, dust, and ionized gas thought to be 24 lightyears (about 140 trillion miles) across, situated over 1300 lightyears (7.6 quadrillion miles) away in the sword of the constellation Orion.

It's understanding how environment influences chemical formation.

It's building family trees of different interstellar species, from hydrocarbons like ethylene glycol (C2H2, a common ingredient in antifreeze) and saturated oxygen-bearing species like dimethy ether (CH3OCH3, a refrigerant and laboratory solvent) to long unsaturated cyano-carbon chains like cyanotriacetylene (HC7N, a long molecule not found on Earth).

It's chemistry and astronomy...

... but it is also planetary science, map-making, computer science, mathematics, biology, physics, engineering, and art.

It is understanding our chemical past, explaining our chemical present, and making hypotheses about our chemical future.

Catherine Drennan from MIT visited Caltech and met with students and faculty to discuss everything from her research in structural biology to her ideas about teaching pedagogy and general chemistry. During her visit, Dr. Drennan gave a talk called "Is the classroom lecture becoming exting or simply evolving?" in which she discussed the "small changes [that] make a difference" in teaching, pulling from her own experiences teaching general chemistry. Throughout, she also showed the change in attitudes from students exposed to her classroom developments.

Dr. Drennan started by asking the audience to think of advantages and disadvantages of "traditional" classroom lectures. Here are some of the ideas for each:

- Advantages -

The expert (faculty member) leads and maintains control

Practical format for addressing a large group of people

- Disadvantages -

Hard to engage with students

Uncertainty as to whether students "get it"

One lecture does not fit all (students at different levels in prior knowledge and have different disciplines/interests)

The lecturer is the face of the entire field

Dr. Drennan then went into what she called "selective pressures", which were small changes she implemented in an attempt to evolve her classroom teaching. These included clickers, examples of application, and short videos.

The first small change discussed was how to use clickers in the classroom, emphasizing a key theme in teaching pedagogy: what technology you use is not important; it is how you use that technology that matters. Clickers are commonly used as a quick way to get instant feedback from your class. Pose a question, see if most people get it right, and decide whether to move on or try to explain confusing material in a new (and hopefully better) way.

Dr. Drennan proposed using clickers in a new way, describing what she called clicker competitions. In these competitions, teams of students separated by TA-led recitation section competed weekly to outdo other teams in clicker questions. Winning teams were rewarded with treats at the following week's recitation section, and some teams' TAs offered rewards to their group just for beating another (typically a friend's) team. The outcome was that students felt more engaged and challenged by the clicker questions, and overall they felt like their TAs wanted them to succeed more than had there been no competition. Whether students performed better in the class wasn't as clear, but attitudes overall improved.

Dr. Drennan had looked at her pool of students and noted that most of them were not going into chemistry; the overwhelming majority of students in general chemitry were actually biology students (along with a significant number of engineers). Many admitted to not being interested in chemistry at all, and pure chemistry examples made chemistry seem like a dead science.

To combat these feelings, Dr. Drennan swapped out "pure chemistry" examples for real problems in biology and medicine. She also worded some problems to mimic tasks that might be expected of students doing summer research. As a result, students were convinced that chemistry was in fact useful, and they even became more interested in the subject. The actual content of the course did not change, just some of the practice problems. Thus students learned the basics of chemistry established decades and decades ago while understanding their utility in contemporary research fields.

I've been told that showing pictures of "old white guys next to their experiments" makes chemistry (and science generally) seem like a club that excludes women and people of color. The early pioneers of chemistry are (literally) the portraits of chemists, along with the lecturers who serve as living representatives of the field. That being said, students have little exposure to the breadth of people (i.e. everyone) who can become chemists. Even when others and their research are discussed in lecture, the portraits of what a chemist look like remain the same.

Dr. Drennan discussed a project in which chemists—from faculty to undergrads—developed two-minute videos showcasing MIT chemists from different research labs. (The videos can be viewed at chemvideos.mit.edu.) From these videos, students could see genuine excitement about chemistry and learn others' struggles, triumphs, and motivation for research. It is no surprise to me that students responded more positively to people who "looked like" them, but I was surprised by what "looks like me" meant for students. Dr. Drennan found that, regardless of gender and skin color, age was the characteristic most significant for whether students identified with a scientist or not.

To change the modern classroom, all it takes is some creativity to make small changes. Showing students that chemistry is collaborative, relevant to a variety of research fields, and most certainly not a dead science can foster appreciation for and interest in the discipline. There are many shortcomings to textbooks despite their potential to be great resources. Perhaps their biggest shortcoming is that they fail to show how real chemistry is. And unfortunately, these textbooks serve as the basis for many classroom lectures.

Last week I was on a panel of Caltech grad students who had been Fulbright research fellows. We were talking to juniors who were thinking about applying to the Fulbright 2018-2019 program.

One of the questions asked was "Do you recommend applying to grad school at the same time as applying for a Fulbright?" (This question can also be applied to most fellowship and study abroad programs, including DAAD, Rhodes, Marshall, and Gates-Cambridge.)

First off, whether you apply to grad school and a "gap year" program at the same time is totally up to you, and your decision should be based on your own wants and needs, not what your friends/parents/professors expect of you.

Here are my thoughts mixed in with the perspectives of the other panelists about what you should consider.

Applying to grad school and a gap year program at the same time.

Of the seven panelists, I was the only one who put off applying to grad school. The other six had applied ahead of time, so they had accepted and deferred a graduate school offer before shipping overseas. I got the impression that they were all in favor of that route because...

... "the bones of the grad school application are already written." While you'll need to tweak the final product, a personal statement for a grad school application is similar to the Fulbright personal statement and statement of grant purpose combined.

... "you don't have to worry about applying while on your grant." If you already know where you are going to grad school, you don't have to spend the first three months of your grant applying to grad school while settling into a new research group in a new country, perhaps with a new language. You can just enjoy your grant.

... it is good to have a back-up plan. The Fulbright and other similar programs are competitive, and "chances are, you're not going to get it." Be prepared to not be awareded a grant and have a solid plan if all else fails.

... it might be too difficult/impossible to go on grad school visits while abroad.

... you might as well get it over with. If you're (fairly) certain you want to go to grad school anyway, why wait?

Holding off to apply to grad school rather than defer.

There are many reasons why you might not want to apply to grad school if you are hoping to get a Fulbright or other fellowship. Holding off was definitely the right choice for me, and I felt like my Fulbright enriched my grad school application rather than my grad school application detract from my fellowship time. As a result of my Fulbright, I think my application was much stronger and the same might be true for you if...

... you need a break. Applying to the Fulbright (or any program whether for a gap year or grad school) is a lengthy process. I had planned to apply to grad school the same time as I did to the Fulbright, but I was exhausted between that and working on my senior thesis that I decided I was too tired to apply to grad school and couldn't put forth my best application.

... you don't know exactly what you want to pursue in grad school. For instance, I knew I wanted to study astrochemistry, but I came from an undergrad institution where no one else had even heard of the field. I didn't know much about it myself. Did I want to do lab work or more astronomy? Holding off on applying gave me more time to make an informed decision.

... you're not sure if you want to go to grad school, or you're not sure you know where you want to go. Your feelings about going to grad school could change during a gap year, so if you're heart isn't set on a particular type of program (or grad school at all), you might hold off to remove the pressure of committing to something you aren't quite sure about. You might also want more research experience first to see if research is a good fit for you at all.

NSF Graduate Research Fellows submit an Annual Activity Report summarizing how the grantee progressed during the previous year as an NSF fellow.

Because the NSF GRFP is federally-funded, I am making it public here to share how my graduate school experience has been impacted by the grant.

Year 1 Summary (as of March 17, 2017)

During my first year as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, I have begun a research project of my choosing, have taken opportunities to develop my skills in sharing science with others through university teaching and public outreach, and will have completed all the required coursework toward the Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech.

Complex organic molecules (COMs) are interstellar molecules with six or more atoms containing at least one carbon atom and one hydrogen atom. Nearly 200 COMs have been detected in the interstellar medium, but the formation of COMs is poorly understood. Understanding their formation could provide insight to the fundamental concepts of chemistry as we know it as well as to the chemistry that brought about the emergence of life. To address the problem of COM formation, I am looking to the Kleinmann-Low nebula of the constellation Orion (Orion KL), a star-forming region and chemical factory in the Milky Way galaxy, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Orion KL is home to a diverse collection of astrochemicals, many of which are COMs. Furthermore, many of these COMs are isotopologues—molecules with the same chemical formula but slightly different masses on one or more of the atoms (e.g. ethyl cyanide, or CH3CH2CN, has three carbon atoms with mass number 12, five hydrogen atoms with mass number 1, and one nitrogen with mass number 14, giving a molecular mass of 55, but in its isotopologue 13CH3CH2CN, one of the carbons has a mass number of 13, giving a slightly higher molecular mass of 56). Because the mass distribution varies among different isotopologues, how they rotate and vibrate in space varies too. (Think of two balls connected by a rod teetering on a point in the middle. If you change the mass or weight of one of the balls, even slightly, there is a change in how the ball teeters.) This results in a different radio wave signal that can be detected by ALMA. While my project is in its infancy, quantifying the abundances of these isotpologues could give clues to the formation of these molecules.

In addition to beginning research, I continued work on my radio astronomy website and graduate school blog (http://theskyisnotthelimit.org). I also volunteered with the undergraduate chemistry club at Caltech as a driver and demonstrator at Pasadena, CA, elementary schools. As a result of taking “Social Media for Scientists”, I am presenting a poster at the ACS National Meeting in San Francisco (April 2017) encouraging chemists to participate in social media as a tool for inreach (sharing science with other scientists) and outreach (sharing science with the public). This is especially important for chemists who are among the least visible scientists on platforms such as Twitter. I have also pursued avenues to better teaching, starting certificates of teaching at Caltech and co-designing and -teaching a chemistry tutorial about astrochemistry (including elements from my research) for undergraduates.

By June 2017, I will have completed all of my coursework toward my degree, having completed the following:

Elements of Quantum Chemistry

Atomic and Molecular Processes in Planetary Sciences and Astrophysics

Social Media for Scientists

Planetary Habitability (Astrobiology)