Career Inteview Series: Meredith Rawls, Researcher with Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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.

Meredith Rawls grew up under the dark skies of Eastern Washington, where she loved to stargaze as a child. She thought her state could do more to protect the night from light pollution, though, and wanted to do something about it. As a Girl Scout, she focused her project for the Girl Scout Gold Award on diminishing light pollution at her local summer camp. Through fundraising, she was able to purchase shields to install on the street lights closest to the camp, allowing campers to have a better view of the night sky.

Photo: Anita Nowacka

Rawls carried her love of the night sky with her when she attended Harvey Mudd College. She enjoyed many STEM subjects, but she knew she had to narrow down to one major. At the time, Harvey Mudd offered six choices: math, computer science, physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering.

 

“I liked math more as a means than as an end in itself….Chemistry kind of drove me nuts…And then computer science felt similar to math to me.” That left biology, physics and engineering.  “Honestly, if biology hadn't been quite so chemistry forward in the beginning, I might have gone biology, but it was a lot of chemistry, and I don't like chemistry that much.” Rawls had a choice between physics and engineering, and she found engineering more demanding on her time, and she wanted to take some classes outside of STEM. “One of Mudd’s things is being an interdisciplinary world person, which I think is amazing and great. All colleges should do that to some degree, if possible.” So Rawls chose physics as her major so she could have time to also pursue other interests, music in particular. 

Then she proceeded to nearly fail her first physics class. 

I had an exceptional crisis—The bad freshman year, second semester, you know. I squeaked by with a D in physics…I don’t know what it is, but any kind of test environment is just challenging… If I hadn't passed that class, then I wouldn't have been able to major in physics. And I don't know what I would have done with my life, but it wouldn't be this. 

Rawls did manage to pass, and then she realized astronomy is like a subset of physics, and it was a subject she had always enjoyed. She studied physics with a focus on astronomy, and soon realized she wanted to continue to study in the field, but first she needed to pass another test, the physics GRE. Rawls struggled again with the test environment and had to settle for a score that got her waitlisted at several schools. While other friends made plans around her during their senior year at Harvey Mudd, Rawls had to admit she was waitlisted and wasn’t sure what her future held. 

So she ran away to summer camp—the same camp she had attended as a child and raised money to install light pollution shields on the street lamps. Rawls had also purchased a telescope for the camp with some leftover funds from her Girl Scout project. While working at the camp she loved so much, where she could simply look up and see the Milky Way each night, she knew she had to figure out a way for astronomy to be in her life, even if she didn’t get into grad school.

In July, Rawls got a call from San Diego State University. They had an opening. She took it and did her master’s in two years. When it was time to apply for a PhD program, she faced the same challenge as before. Her GRE score was too low to earn a spot with being waitlisted. This time, though, she didn’t have to wait until July. By April, New Mexico State offered Rawls a spot in their program and she headed south. As Rawls finished up her PhD, she and her husband were juggling academic life with his engineering career. They both wanted to return to the Pacific Northwest, and he found a job in Portland. Rawls actually finished her last year of the program remotely. She describes how difficult it was to manage the transitions from each program as a married couple, where her husband often had to stay behind to finish work while she moved to the next location. “I give him so much credit for being willing to be dragged around and through all of this. I don't know how I would have done it if he'd also been in academia.”

Rawls applied to several different postdoc positions close enough to Portland to make it work. She was offered a three-year postdoc supporting the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory at the University of Washington. Rawls finished the postdoc, while her husband made one more move to Seattle. She explored the idea of becoming a research scientist at UW and decided to apply and was accepted. 

Rawls wears two hats as a research scientist at Rubin Observatory. “One hat is data validation and verification, so making sure that the data that we're getting off the telescope is basically correct and not full of trash, that we don't have bugs in our processing algorithms so when we say there's a variable source here, it's actually a variable source.” 

Initially, Rawls was helping build the software to produce data sets from Rubin. A second part of her job emerged from a growing problem in astronomy — satellite constellation mitigation. “There’s this huge increase of Starlink and so many others… like now a million orbital data centers like, what are we doing? This has been a huge change in the last six, seven years, and just completely a fundamental change in Earth orbital environment that's obviously directly affecting ground based and low Earth orbit based astronomy.” 

In 2022, Rawls and some of her colleagues formed SatHub, within the International Astronomical Union, to analyze the problem and find solutions for the astronomy community and beyond. This venture is taking up more of Rawls’ time as the use of small sats increases. “It's a constant balance of remembering…Rubin is the thing that anchors my job, but then, in reality, there’s the chaos of new stuff interfering with astronomy.”

One of the challenges Rawls has faced is the fact that being a research scientist outside of academia has made her feel a little invisible. “Sometimes I feel like I'm not sufficiently legitimate career wise to be invited to certain tables, but I have just as much experience in certain areas, and more in some cases, than some faculty that I work with. And a few years ago, it started being weird to me that people who had gotten their PhD after me were getting faculty jobs…Now I've kind of made peace with that. And I'm fine not being faculty, because I'm fine not facing tenure and moving around more. I love living in Seattle. I'm very glad to be here. I have something close to my dream job.” 

While Rawls was on the path to Rubin, she also started a family. She had her first child when she was a postdoc, and her second as a research scientist. While trying to finish school and start her career, she agonized over the best time to have children, like many in the field. “There’s no good time. That became apparent. I’m glad I didn’t have them in grad school because that would have made my PhD six years long. The best advice I have came from the department head of UW. She told me, ‘Careers are long, and being a new parent is short…take the maximum leave available to you. Your career will be here when you come back.’ That’s not true for everybody. That’s a privilege in and of itself, but that was the gist of it.” 

Photo: Courtesy of Meredith Rawls

Rawls also feels fortunate to be able to have a hybrid work schedule that puts her at Rubin a couple days a week, making it easier to be available as a parent, although she didn’t have this arrangement with her first child. It wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic forced the staff into remote work that she was able to work remotely at first, and then agree to the hybrid arrangement. She’s also found that having other parents working at Rubin has created a more supportive environment. Rawls also admits that having a partner with a successful engineering career and living close to her parents has made childcare much easier for her research career. “If you have the opportunity to live near in-laws or grandparents who you get along with and trust…do that,” she says with a laugh. 

Meredith Rawls is a research scientist at Vera C. Rubin Observatory working on the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Data Management group to develop software for astronomical images. She also devotes time to SatHub-IAU to bring together the astronomical and wider community to increase and disseminate scientific understanding of the impacts of satellite constellations on astronomy, identify ways they can be mitigated, and publicly share expertise and tools that enable this.