Career Interview Series: Deborah Skapik Leans Into Research Skills With Her Students

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy has compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers, planetary scientists, and enthusiasts. These interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals who have navigated both traditional and non-traditional paths in the field.

Deborah Skapik traces her interest in space back to 1977, when a partial eclipse captured her interest. She built a shoebox diorama of the event on her own initiative. “I remember cutting out a circle on the side to put a flashlight. I even remember the color of the flashlight was this red plastic flashlight that my parents had, and putting that in the side of the box and hanging a styrofoam ball and making a shadow and just the visualization in three dimensions of what was going on.” 

Deborah Skapik

This wasn’t the only astronomy project Skapik tackled as a child interested in space. She also glued pastina—pasta shaped like stars—onto black construction paper and recreated the cosmos for herself. When Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos released in 1980, Skapik was mesmerized. She naturally gravitated to space and science, and felt fortunate to be in a public school system that encouraged STEM for all pupils. Her seventh grade science teacher allowed her the space to explore what it means to be a scientist as he led the class through multiple dissections that year. Skapik vividly remembers dissecting sharks outside and the smell as they dug into the process. “I didn't love that part of it, but the fact that we were so hands-on…he allowed me to explore and really do what felt like research science in seventh grade and use the tools of a scientist.” That same teacher assigned research papers, and Skapik enjoyed learning the scientific process of research as she looked up information in encyclopedias.

That encouragement came at just the right time. Instead of falling away from STEM, like so many can in middle school and junior high, Skapik pursued science and math. By the time she was a senior, she had taken every science and math course she could and headed to Swarthmore College with the idea of pursuing particle physics. Her first week on campus, Skapik needed to find a part-time job, and she hoped to find one related to astronomy. She knocked on the door of Sproul Observatory to ask if anything was available. A professor in a white lab coat opened the door. “He looked like Doc from Back to the Future,” Skapik recalls. 

“Can I help you?" he asked her, speaking with a German accent. Skapik asked for a job, and the professor immediately ushered her inside. “Yes, you will be working with this.”

He took her inside the dome where a 24-inch refractor telescope stood. Skapik was stunned. She had only used backyard telescopes to this point. The professor, Dr. Wolf Heinz, wanted her to observe binary stars using the telescope’s photographic plateholder. It was 1987. Skapik loaded glass plates into the plate holder to capture images. Skapik held this job throughout her college years, spending many nights in the observatory learning how to operate the 36-foot-long telescope, built in 1911. 

The next semester, when she met with the assigned class advisor, she said, “I want to do astrophysics.”

“No, you don’t,” he replied. “You want to be a physics major.”

“I don’t want to study physics,” Skapik replied.

“Yes, you do. Minor in astrophysics,” he advised her. “That was an incredibly wise piece of advice,” Skapic says. The advisor understood physics would give Skapik more flexibility and ground her well. 

While at Swarthmore, Skapik landed an REU opportunity at Kitt Peak in Arizona. “I was in love with the telescopes. I spent a lot of time at the summit, living up there, working on the 0.9-meter, doing a research project on quasar photometry, making some contacts, meeting some people, and meeting other people my age who were going into the field, but it really anchored me in knowing what I wanted to study.”

Skapik did her graduate degree in astronomy at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. She’d moved away from high energy astrophysics to quasar photometry. She also did another REU at NRAO in Green Bank, West Virginia, which taught her that she didn’t like radio astronomy. 

In Hawaii, she ran across the idea of colliding galaxies and became a research assistant studying the Butcher-Oemler Effect. While she was in the middle of this research, Skapik was also teaching and realized how much she enjoyed explaining these complicated theories to her students. At the same time, she observed how busy the professors were writing proposals to search for funding for their research and doing a lot of administrative work as well. It dawned on Skapik that she didn’t want to devote her career to that. 

She decided to take a job as an observatory supervisor, which included mentoring teaching assistants, at Williams College in Massachusetts. Skapik continued her PhD at the University of Hawaii by spending a lot of time on the phone with the telescope operator and flying out to Hawaii. Then she went to the University of Pennsylvania to help develop an astronomy education program, as well as running two observatories. She also had three children and decided she wanted to pursue education more than astronomy. Instead of finishing her PhD, she got certified to teach. She interviewed for a teaching position at Friends’ Central School and was hired to teach AP Physics, the same subject she didn’t think she wanted to pursue in college.

“Twenty-five years later, almost, here I am… I love doing research with my students. I am a researcher. I understand the tools, I understand the techniques, and I can teach them how to do it at the high school level.” Skapik’s students are currently looking at images taken on Haleakala to try to re-image an asteroid field to see if the object they previously found was actually a new asteroid. She is hopeful they can publish the data. 

Skapik’s advice on teaching, and on career paths in general, is simple: “Follow your heart and do what you love, because if you don't love what you're doing, you're not going to enjoy your life. And I know what I love doing; like I said, I get really excited doing the research. But it's not just doing the research alone—it's doing it with the students because they have so much energy. They're fifteen years old, and they're getting excited about a movement on a screen. They come back here, and they're excited to tell me about their paths that they've followed.” 

Skapik has former students at NASA and remembers one who told her how important it was to have a female role model like Skapik, even though she didn’t realize it at the time. “So I do think it's really important for women to be in these higher positions, but I think contact with students on a day-to-day basis is also really important, and showing confidence and competence, and not minimizing what astronomy educators do, or physics educators, for that matter." It’s hard, but to have a research background is so valuable because I can say, "These are the tools. This is what you have to do later. It's not all academic.’” 

Deborah Skapik currently teaches at Friends Central School and also teaches astronomy at St. Joseph’s University and Delaware County Community College. 

Skapik at UPenn in 2002.