Career Interview Series: Sarah Lipscy on her non-academic career path in astronomy

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.

When Sarah Lipscy attends an AAS meeting, she needs an hour to get to each session. She might only be crossing the hall, but the five or ten-minute conversations she has with other attendees on the way light her up. “It’s one of my favorite meetings because I’m an astronomer by training. That’s my people,” Lipscy says. 

As the Director of Business Winning and International Business Development within the Space and Mission Systems sector at BAE Systems, Inc., Lipscy spends much of her day with engineers and business partners. When she has the chance to be with other astronomers, she takes the opportunity to chat, even if that means a five-minute walk takes an hour.

Lipscy has carved an interesting career path inside the business of space. Her interest in astronomy came accidentally through a summer course at the University of Colorado Boulder. She signed up for a creative writing course but found out she’d been assigned to an astronomy class instead. That random assignment turned out to be life-changing. 

Photo: Courtesy of Sarah Lipscy

At the end of the six-week course, she met with the professor, who asked what degree she wanted to pursue. Lipscy grew up in Delaware, where DuPont is headquartered. Many of her classmates had parents working as chemists; she assumed she would follow that idea and become a chemist, too. When she responded with chemistry, her advisor shook his head. 

“No, no, no, no. You should study physics. That’s the basis of everything, and you should get a minor in astronomy.” 

That is just what Lipscy did at CU Boulder. Then she pursued graduate school and got her PhD in astronomy and physics from UCLA. Once she was nearly finished with her academic studies, Lipscy found herself once again in her advisor’s office, this time at UCLA. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her degrees, but she was certain of what she didn’t want—a career in academia.

“I don’t want to be a professor,” she told her advisor. “That’s great,” he said, without missing a beat. “Let’s see what else you can do.” 

They used Yahoo jobs, popular at the time, to insert all of Lipscy’s skills, including IDL (Interactive Data Language) coding. Los Angeles hosts a number of large aerospace companies, including Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. Lipscy had the opportunity to work at all of them, but on a visit to Colorado, a friend who worked at Ball Aerospace encouraged her to apply. 

Lipscy landed a job quickly at Ball as a systems engineer and early on worked almost exclusively on Earth remote sensing programs. Instead of studying the stars, Lipscy found herself looking back at Earth, doing Earth imaging and atmospheric chemistry measurements. 

“But photons are photons, and so it was fine for me to do spectroscopy of the Earth instead of stellar atmospheres,” Lipscy said. She worked her way through various programs at Ball, picking up new skills when the chance came up. She worked her way up from systems engineer to team lead and eventually to business development director . Along the way, she got to participate in some great projects, including the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. BAE Systems built the Wide Field Instrument for Roman, a project Lipscy is proud of. 

Sarah Lipscy at Gemini South
Photo: Sarah Lipscy

BAE Systems, Great Britain’s largest aerospace company, acquired Ball Aerospace in 2024, and Lipscy transitioned from a relatively small aerospace company (~5,000 employees) to a segment within a huge international company, as the Space and Missions Systems segment is part of the American BAE Systems, Inc. portion of the company. Lipscy’s new role involves much more work within the extended company. She’s also learning, twenty-one years into her career, how to work and maneuver in such a large company. 

Part of business development for Lipscy has always been meeting with customers and partners, who include various portions of the US government. With BAE Systems, clients are now on the international side as well. In January, she attended a Middle Eastern space conference in Oman, where she met potential partners and customers from that sphere. One of the challenges in her role is assessing international clients and what BAE Systems can expect as they work together. This could mean having an enthusiastic client with little funding from their government for missions, or understanding cultural differences down to when a meeting should be held and who should sit across from whom at the table. 

“The rest of BAE does a lot of international business, so I'll be leveraging a lot of the policies and practices that they have, and then, of course, tailoring them to how they need to work for BAE SMS,” Lipscy said. 

When Lipscy first joined Ball Aerospace, she understood astronomy, but she had to learn on the job the nuances of being in business in the private sector. One of her best pieces of advice for anyone who is thinking of taking their astronomy or STEM degree outside of academia is to find ways to learn about business practices. 

“The thing that PhD school does not teach you is anything really about business: how businesses think about things and how businesses make money and how they value people's time and resources…that's just very disparate from what you get in academia. If you're in graduate school and you're thinking about industry, think about ways to bulk up your resume in business acumen methods.”

“I think that's been really critical, and I won't say I've struggled with that, but it's certainly not something that comes naturally to me as a scientist,” Lipscy added. She acknowledged that her career path isn’t necessarily repeatable, but it is an example of finding and enjoying a career rooted in space outside of academia.

For students who are on the fence about grad school or anyone considering leaving academia for the industry, Lipscy says, “My advice is, if you think there's a chance you want to be in academia in five years, try it. I think it's hard to leave academia and then go back, but it's not hard to stay in academia and do a postdoc or two and then transition to industry.

I think the world's changed, and I think there's a place for everyone. And I think that if you are motivated and interesting, you'll do really well in industry.”

Sarah Lipscy with the rocket that carried Landsat-9 to orbit.
Lipscy's team built the camera for Landsat-9.

Career Interview Series: How Stories and Stars Led Lauren Albin to Astronomy

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.

As a child, Lauren Albin was immersed in star lore. Her father worked at a planetarium as a planetary geologist, and she spent many days inside the dome gazing at the night sky. Albin got to know the staff well, too. She hung out with Judy, the technician, and observed the staff, absorbing how these different people came together to tell stories about the stars.

Lauren and her father.

Her father also included Lauren in his hobbies and interests, from building telescopes in the garage to rock collecting and meteorite hunting. At the same time, Lauren’s mother taught language arts in the local school system, and she shared her love of reading and literature with her daughter. These two loves—story and stars—drew Albin into poetry writing. She pursued English literature and creative writing at Agnes Scott College. 

“I just loved the complexity of poetry and talking about it, reading it. I was just eating, breathing, reading poetry the whole time,” Albin said of her experience. Once she graduated, she pursued an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University, which happened to be her father’s alma mater for his master's in planetary geology. 

Albin became interested in Korean poetry, in particular, and decided to learn Korean to understand the poems in their original language. This led to translation classes in addition to poetry. “Korean poetry is interesting, too, because there are always stars or, you know, astronomy mentioned in it. So I enjoyed that. I like astronomical poetry,” Albin said.

The astronomical Korean poetry is what began to lead Albin back to her love for the stars. She returned to Agnes Scott College to teach creative writing, but also decided to get a master’s degree in space studies with an emphasis in astronomy remotely from American Public University. Her father was running the program and pitched the idea, asking for Albin’s feedback as she worked through the degree. Albin did so during the pandemic. The coursework focused on space flight and crewed missions to Mars, and Albin discovered an interest in women’s health in space. 

“I realized there's been so few women astronauts that we don't fully know how microgravity affects the female body. And I also am a big proponent of sending a full woman crew to Mars.”

With her master’s degree, Albin could teach astronomy and a spot opened up at the Fernbank Science Center in Druid Hills, Georgia, where her father had actually worked when Albin was a child. Then she applied to be the planetarium director at Young Harris College in North Georgia and landed the job. Now Albin teaches astronomy classes and directs the planetarium and observatory. While she enjoys the position, Albin is the only person in the astronomy department. 

Albin at work at the O. Wayne Rollins Planetarium

“I feel like I’m the technician, I’m maintenance, I’m director and creative director. All of these things fall under my purview. I’ve been trying to build a big network outside of my job of people that would have support and help because I'm also in a really rural area.” 

One of the ways Albin has connected is through ASTRO ACCEL Global Network of Networks, which focuses on connecting practitioners of astronomy education around the world. Albin has worked on a project through Astro Accel’s seed funding measuring joy, wonder, and awe in astronomy for over two years now. She created a survey and disseminated it, and the project continues to grow. 

Another project involves developing astronomy education curriculum and exploring partnerships with other observatories. “It's been really cool to see these partnerships all of a sudden sort of crop up that hook my institution with other institutions around not just the US but around the globe. So that's been really life changing for me. And through Astro Accel, I also met a lot of cool people,” Albin said. 

“It just really expanded my world and gave me a support system beyond what I have at home. I feel like that's been the way that I've been surviving, just meeting people and finding networks outside of my own, and that's made me more confident in talking to other people. I think I'm kind of a shy person. That's why I like the planetarium. I'm like a voice in the dark, like no one's looking at me, but it's sort of made it more comfortable to make connections for me.” Albin has also attended a couple of AAS conferences and found connecting with other planetarium directors there a valuable experience.

When Albin became more interested in a career in astronomy, she didn’t leave poetry completely behind. “It feels, the longer that I'm in the astronomy field…like those two worlds suddenly began to collide. When I first switched fields, I was kind of having an existential crisis..Like, I feel like I had two different phases of my life, but now I see more and more how storytelling is a part of the reason why I wanted to go into astronomy.”

Lauren Albin is the director of the O. Wayne Rollins Planetarium and Observatory at Young Harris College in Young Harris, Georgia.

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.

Career Interview Series: Teznie Pugh at McDonald Observatory

McDonald Observatory

“Start at the beginning. Tell me how you got involved in astronomy. When did you know this was for you?”

This is the first question I posed to Teznie Pugh in our career series interview this January. It’s always interesting to hear how people knew when they wanted to pursue careers in astronomy. Pugh, who is the Superintendent at McDonald Observatory at Fort Davis, Texas, hears this questions a lot. 

“They want you to have an aha moment, and I didn’t have that.” Pugh came to astronomy through a gradual love of STEM. She grew up partially in the foster care system in the United Kingdom, and partially with her grandmother in a coal mining town. When the mine closed in 1986, it gutted the community of traditional, hard-working families. Pugh recounts that her town went from an established working-class town to a welfare-based community nearly overnight. As she lived through the change, Pugh realized she needed a good education to make her life better.

“I was quite good at math, so…if I want to make my life better, that's my pathway out of it. I was always very interested in the sciences. I enjoyed physics because I wanted to be able to answer all of the questions all of the time, which, you know, you get to graduate school and you realize that it's not actually reality, but as an elementary school kid, you want to answer all the questions.”

Pugh ended up in a nuclear astrophysics program at the University of Surrey, still unsure what she wanted to do. She worked for a year with the UK’s largest defense manufacturer but had to bow out after a serious illness during her second year at the university. Pugh used this time to reevaluate what she wanted from her education. Astronomy and optics were her two best fields by far, and she decided to pursue what she was good at. First she did some x-ray astronomy programs, but quickly learned it wasn’t for her. 

"Logging on to the Chandra archive and downloading data just didn't do it for me. I wanted something a little more hands-on. So later, I transitioned into optical astronomy.” Pugh graduated from the University of York (after transferring) with a degree in physics, specializing in astrophysics.

Teznie Pugh presents at AAS 244.

She was a self-funded undergrad and found the idea of attending grad school and paying for it daunting. She happened to see an ad for Canadian universities seeking interested graduate students who could teach in exchange for funding. Pugh looked for an optical program and found one at Western University in London, Ontario, and made the journey from the UK to Canada.

It was here she had her “aha” moment, although she already knew she wanted to pursue astronomy. “I loved the act of observing, so all of the courses and things were great…But what I really loved was being at the telescope and collecting data and fixing problems in the middle of the night and maintaining glass, and all of the things that went into the creation of the data…and also just being out in the expanse of the wilderness in the middle of the night, even if the sky wasn't clear. I was a graduate student, and I needed my data, so I would sit on the deck and watch thunderstorms roll by, waiting for holes in the clouds to take data on.”

Pugh’s husband came with her from the UK, and halfway through her PhD, she had her daughter. The birth of her child became another point of evaluation in Pugh’s life. She struggled with work-life balance, especially as a new mother. She thought about work at home, and chores and her daughter at work, and quickly understood she needed a solution that allowed her to walk in the door at night and only think about parenting. Still, she didn’t want to give up being involved with telescopes. 

Fortunately, her PhD supervisor was the director of the local school observatory with a 1.2 meter telescope. For five years, Pugh monitored the telescope four nights a week and did all the maintenance and helped the technician. Through that experience, she found a job that wasn’t dependent on finding funding and writing research papers. She could still interact with telescopes, but she could also concentrate on her family in her off-hours. 

Naturalization 2025

“I know there are people that balance that (research and funding) and I have a lot of respect for my female colleagues who make that work. I'm just not one of them…I think that's good just knowing yourself because everybody has different tolerance levels.”

Pugh notes that she could not do the job she’s doing without her husband taking on the role of caring for their daughter at home. Pugh faced the same challenges in astronomy many women do when they decide to become mothers, where an interruption in a career can significantly alter research and forward momentum. 

They were fortunate to be in Canada and be able to take advantage of generous parental leave. Pugh returned to observing after six weeks while her husband used the rest of the leave. “It worked well, but it was also a challenge. And I think it was a challenge that was only successful because we were somewhere where we could make that transition in parental leave. That meant my research programs weren't really interrupted to a degree, and I think that's something all women struggle with. Once you decide to have children, your research programs become interrupted and your career looks very different. And mine didn't have to do that because of the situation we were in, but it was still a challenge. Children are a challenge in their own way.” 

Pugh’s daughter is now sixteen, but her husband still gets questions about what he does and faces awkward responses when he says he’s a stay-at-home dad. “You can see that people don’t know what to do with the response…” Pugh says, “but he’s very comfortable with who he is and how it’s progressed…it gave me the freedom to pursue my career in an organic way, which has been wonderful…I do feel, I have these sad moments where I feel like I missed out some of her childhood by not being a mum, but her and her dad are so close. They have a magical bond that I'm not going to take away.

McDonald Observatory Christmas Lights

Pugh finishes her thoughts on parenthood and academia with this statement: “You see a lot of people who are both academics, co-married, and it still tends to be the female that bears the burden of the childcare and the child, so their career can stagnate, but their husband’s blossom. That's kind of sad in its own way. In the sciences, we tend to be a little more progressive, but it doesn't play out necessarily. 

When Pugh finished grad school, she now knew the direction she wanted to take. She didn’t look for postdocs. Instead, she looked for jobs on the operational market, and Lowell Observatory had just started using the Discovery Telescope. She applied and started in 2007. Because the telescope was so new, Pugh oversaw the commissioning of all the new instrumentation, including five spectrographs. Once the telescope was fully operational, her job shifted to a more managerial role in nighttime operations. That position expanded into managing all of Lowell’s observing sites, and a stint as the Deputy Director for technology to cover a retirement. 

Pugh enjoyed her time at Lowell, but her PhD supervisor was one of the forefathers of high resolution spectroscopy and spent two years and half a sabbatical at McDonald Observatory in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “All through my graduate school career, all he did was talk about how wonderful McDonald was. So when this position opened up, I felt like I couldn't not apply for it.”

Pugh accepted the Superintendent position at McDonald Observatory and made the move from Arizona to Texas in 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic hit. McDonald is already in a remote location, requiring those who work there to live on its campus and drive thirty to sixty minutes to reach the nearest towns and amenities. 

“It was a hard transition,” Pugh admits. “They warned me in my interview our nearest Walmart was ninety minutes away. Sometimes it's a three-hour drive to go and get the windscreen of a car changed out. Everything is planned very differently, and it's a very different way of living.”

While Pugh had her work at her doorstep, it was different for her husband and daughter, and the pandemic made it difficult to adjust and get to know other people. However, once the community opened up again, Pugh’s husband and daughter were able to settle into a more active lifestyle and enjoy the observatory as much as Pugh. 

As for the work itself, Pugh enjoys managing the observatory, although she admits being under a large university structure (the University of Texas at Austin) has its own operational frustrations, particularly with the bureacracy of spending state money on things. 

“The rest of it is playing with telescopes and getting people to like coming to work every day. Those are the two things I try to do. 

The observatory has a dozen telescopes, a water and wastewater treatment plant, its own housing, and over forty residents. Pugh likens her job to a city manager, part mayor, part admin, and part HR, and she oversees the entire operation. Not everyone on campus is an astronomer. There are administrators and custodians.

A double rainbow over McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas.

“I find a lot of my job is distilling down the mission statement of the observatory and the mission statement of the university into things that will actually inspire someone who has a job, so that they can earn money, so that they can pay their bills… they care about very different things than my love of keeping telescopes going so that our astronomers can make great discoveries…All of them love the observatory, which I think is great, but they don't always understand how that piece fits into the broader puzzle of keeping the observatory running.”

Though Pugh finds a lot of her position is navigating through the bureaucracy of running an observatory, every now and again, she also takes a turn on an observing program, to remind herself of why she loves what she does. 

Photos are courtesy of Teznie Pugh and used with permission. 

Explore Your Career Options

In honor of "Explore Your Career Options Week" (April 6-12, 2025) and in support of our Career Profile series, below we highlight some folks who started out in Astronomy but have since moved on to other career fields. Many of them are willing to answer your questions. Take a look!

• Monica Kress: From Physics Faculty to Director of Undergraduate Advising

• Isabel Hawkins: Astronomer to Museum Project Director

• Joseph Pesce: Astronomer to Consultant

• Katie Peek: Astronomer to Infographics Maker

• Liliana Keats: Astronomer to Anthropometry Engineer

Find more Career Profiles here. Would you like to be profiled? Let us know!

Career Profile: Have Sextant, Will Travel

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, etc. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Dr. Jennifer Bartlett, the Project Scientist for Astrophysics at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Throughout her career, she has been interested in astrometry, the history of astronomy, computer science, and library science and worked in government and industry between degrees. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and her graduate degrees at the University of Virginia, from which she earned her PhD in 2007.

Image Credit: Jennifer Bartlett

Where have you lived and worked?

I was born and raised in Virginia. When I left for college, I did not imagine that I would return to my hometown. However, after completing my bachelor’s degree, I returned to Virginia to live and work and eventually return to school. My graduate education was initially financed by my employers until the University of Virginia insisted I quit my engineering job to go to school full-time for a year. I continued to live in Virginia until last year. There is something both unnerving and uplifting to give a community outreach talk knowing your high school science teachers are listening.

What was your last academic position in astronomy/physics? Kinnear Chair in Physics, US Naval Academy 2021-2023, a 2-3 year visiting position that rotates between the Physics and Chemistry departments. Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Hampden-Sydney College 2006-2007, 2001-2002. I taught at the all-male Hampden-Sydney while I was in graduate school. The first time was the year after I completed my master’s degree. The second time was the year I defended my dissertation. What were the most important factors that led you to leave astronomy and/or academia? Much as I enjoyed teaching at Hampden-Sydney College and the US Naval Academy, I was not in the right position at the right time for a permanent position. My other opportunities for academic positions did not align well with opportunities for the rest of my family, either employment for my husband or education for my son. Our recent relocation to Massachusetts after years in Virginia was more challenging than we anticipated, but we believe it is the best choice for everyone. Because I enjoy teaching and mentoring, I am looking for opportunities to include more students in my work at CfA. Last summer, I sailed on the US Coast Guard Barque Eagle from Hamilton, Bermuda, to Halifax, Canada, to train cadets in celestial navigation, a very practical application of astronomy.

Working aloft on USCGC Healy
Image Credit. J. Bartlett

If you have made a career change, what was your age at the time? I have made multiple career changes, most recently in my 50s. Leaving RPI with an undergraduate degree in physics, I went into political campaign management, lobbying, and legislative service. After a few years, I tried information security for about a year. Next, I returned to using my physics background as a space systems engineer. Seven years after completing my undergraduate education, I started a part-time graduate program in astronomy using my employee education benefits. While still in graduate school, I moved from space systems to naval systems engineering and eventually to teaching. After completing my doctorate, which required 10 years, I joined the US Naval Observatory as a geodesist. I then moved into astronomical software application development. Three years ago, I tried teaching again when a temporary position opened at the US Naval Academy. Each change has brought challenges and opportunities. I have learned something and found interesting experiences with each new position. What, if any, additional training did you complete in order to meet the qualifications? To move fully from systems engineer to astronomer, I completed my doctoral work. To be a better teacher, I participated in education workshops offered at AAS meetings and through the teaching and learning centers at my institutions. As a graduate student, I also had a fellowship in instructional technology. I am currently taking training in effective lesson development from the University of California, Los Angeles. As I moved into software development, I took numerous short professional development classes in programming and software engineering.

To move from individual technical contributor to supervisor, I completed a Navy executive leadership training program, including earning my Project Management Professional certification and multiple courses at the Annapolis School of Seamanship. For privileged access to Navy networks, I earned a CompTIA Security+ certification. I will probably undertake some more formal training in computer and information science for my current position over the next few years. Describe job hunting and networking resources you used and any other advice/resources. I obtained most of my early non-astronomy jobs through networking. Even as I moved into astronomy positions, I maintained my engineering networks by keeping in touch with former colleagues and attending functions. Moving from graduate school into a professional career in astronomy, I leaned heavily on the school placement office. I made consistent appointments with the same counselor and developed a strong relationship with her as I worked to improve and tailor all of my application materials. More recently, I worked with Alaina Levine through the AAS employment services to make a late career change within astronomy. I have also participated in mentoring circles offered by the Association for Women in Science, District of Columbia chapter. Some of the best advice I received at my first or second AAS meeting was that the best use of my time at meetings was networking, regardless of whether I was actively looking for a job. I try not to miss an opportunity to connect with people, which strengthens all of our relationships.

What has been your career path since you completed your degree? I completed my doctorate while teaching full-time (4/3 load) at Hampden-Sydney College as a sabbatical replacement. At the end of that 1-year contract, I accepted a GS-12/13 career position with the Naval Observatory in the Astrometry Department. I learned about the position from staff members to whom my advisor had introduced me and with whom I had remained in contact for several years. After 2 years, I moved to a GS-12 position in the Astronomical Applications Department. In my first months in that position, I learned I was pregnant. Instead of full-time maternity leave using all of my available leave, I negotiated to work from home for several months using a few hours of leave each week, I returned to work full-time in person in time to apply for the position of GS-13/14 division chief, supervising a nominal team of 4 government astronomers and 3 contractors. After 11 years as division chief, I accepted a rotation as Kinnear Chair at the US Naval Academy. I stumbled across this position when I was on the institution website looking for other information. I taught one course each year in the general physics program, supported astronomy lectures, and mentored research students. Although my rotation was extended to the full three years, I chose to join the CfA as project scientist for astrophysics. I learned of this most recent opportunity through a banner on the ADS website. What have been particularly valuable skills for your current job that you gained through completing your degree? The most important technical skill for my current position is one I developed as part of my degree program: how to do research - how to ask a question, how to consider what additional information I need, how to develop a means of testing the ideas I have about the topic, and then how to summarize what I have learned for others to use. This skill applies to the research portion of my job and to the service portion of my job, and what changes is the types of questions I am asking. I can ask what stars are most practical to observe during nautical twilight or I can ask how we index bibliographies within a digital library. I am still working on both. The most important soft skill for my current position is one I developed as part of my degree program: managing multiple priorities, projects, and people simultaneously. As a graduate student, I had my academic responsibilities alongside a professional career and a separate family business. As a project scientist, I have multiple projects designed to improve our services, community outreach

Bartlett on her first day at CfA
Image Credit: J. Bartlett

responsibilities, and leadership roles in AAS working groups along with my personal research. In both cases, I have to manage a family life as well. Describe a typical day at work. Like many jobs, a typical day involves too many meetings and too much staring at a screen. Today, I arrived at CfA at 9:30 AM after a 1.5-hour commute due to bad traffic, which I made longer by detouring to the Post Office to mail legal documents related to a family business matter. At 10:00 AM, I attended an in-person interview for a new librarian hire. Between the interview and a virtual planning meeting for the NASA booth at the January AAS meeting, I worked on a proposal for a fellow to assist me with illuminance research and uploaded data to an Open Science Foundation project as a step towards making it publicly available. I ate lunch at my desk, a habit that I am trying to break. I had planned to attend a stress test of a new feature that would improve the reading of scanned literature hosted by ADS; however, that session was deferred to next week. I had planned to attend a virtual meeting of the Astrophysics Data Center Executive Council (ADEC) but my supervisor recommended that I simply submit an update for the minutes. Instead, he met in-person with all the project scientists to review which professional meetings we planned to attend over the next year and would we be staffing a booth or presenting. We were briefly sidelined by a discussion of the network issues ADS and SciX have been experiencing. As a further aside, these issues were also preventing a colleague from compiling a bibliography of all the papers written by Steve Murray, one of the founders of ADS. The biography of Murray will appear in the third edition of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers that I am editing. After that, I worked on a draft lesson plan for a training module intended to teach librarians about using the new Science Explorer (SciX) interface and about Open Science resources. Then, I met virtually to discuss our progress in designing these lessons with the librarian with whom I am collaborating. Next, I cross-referenced candidates for the ADS and SciX users groups and issued invitations for new members of the ADS Users Group. The commute home took only an hour. My menfolk were at Boy Scouts so I ate dinner alone, chatted with my mother on the telephone, and, then, attended a virtual Compline service. By then, my men were home and I put my son to bed. I am now writing this profile, which I should have completed last week. Earlier this week, I chased down registrations for the January AAS meeting for our team here and the Oral History Interview program. I started collecting information for a HAD News article about the Astro observatory. I looked over illuminance measurements made by a colleague during the 2017 total solar eclipse for comparison with my 2024 experiment. I walked across Harvard to collect a book about the development of astrophotography because CfA no longer has a local library. I attended a colloquium given by Stephanie Jarmak, our project scientist for planetary science, on her asteroid research. I reviewed recent claims of planets orbiting Barnard’s Star and sent the latest paper on the topic to my graduate advisor who is now retired. I participated in a planning meeting for the November ADS User

Bartlett and her son on eclipse day.
Image Credit: J. Bartlett

Group. Looking forward to the rest of the week, the project scientists will meet with the leader of our development team to discuss priorities for the next year. We have a general staff meeting. I have two virtual appointments to mentor proteges: one is a non-traditional graduate student and the other is a mid-career scientist. I also need to write a recommendation for my summer intern from last summer. I will meet with a developer about assigning keywords from the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus to scholarly articles but need to review the 100 test cases he sent me so far. The senior editors of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers will meet this week to coordinate assignments. I anticipate editing at least two articles. On a personal level, I attended the live (touring company) Mamma Mia! with my husband last night but will probably spend this weekend working on the tax filings for our family business. All things considered, going to sea sounds like a wonderful idea right at the moment. How many hours do you work in a week? I plead the 5th. What is your salary? I am a Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory trust fund employee in the Boston metropolitan area, IS-1330-14 step 10, with a mandated annual salary of $179,462. What is your level of satisfaction with your current job? Very high. What are the most enjoyable aspects of your job? I enjoy the flexibility to define my position and pursue my own interests while contributing to an essential community resource.

Showing how a sextant works
Image Credit: J. Bartlett

What do you like most about your working environment? My current team is mutually supportive and bound together by a common passion for ADS. What opportunities does your job provide to be creative and/or to take initiative? On the creative side, I am exploring how to better promote and exploit public libraries within ADS. I am also considering how to harvest dissertations for ADS and the Astronomy Genealogy Project more efficiently than the current practice of hand entering all the data. All the project scientists are thinking about what relevance means within our discipline and how we would express that algorithmically. With respect to taking the initiative, I am working with the new AAS Working Group on the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus to recover from the loss of the part-time curator previously provided by the Wolbach Library. While the abrupt closure of the Wolbach Library was very disruptive, it is an opportunity to re-think everything about the Thesaurus and to revitalize this project to provide a single, controlled vocabulary to describe research products in astronomy, planetary science, and heliophysics. How satisfied are you with your work-life balance in your current job? To the extent that my life is out of balance, the fault is in my own enthusiasms. I am very intellectually engaged in many of the improvements to ADS on which we are working. I enjoy working with my scientific data. I am passionate about the preservation of our astronomic heritage and understanding the human cultural aspects of our science. I like doing public outreach projects. My son is at the angsty teen phase where no parent could understand the social trauma of high school nor remember how to solve an algebra equation or punctuate an essay. He does not, however, hesitate to ask me to work from home on a school holiday so he can have friends over or invite me to play D&D with his friends when tax season passes. Although I only work in-person at CfA three times a week, the hour plus commute from Framingham means that I see little of my family on those days. However, living closer would mean less satisfactory accommodations for our family. How family-friendly is your current position? My supervisor and my colleagues have been nothing but supportive of maintaining work-life balance. Our discussion today of what professional meetings we should attend included an appraisal of whether the anticipated travel would put too much stress on our families. The three-day a week in-person requirement is very much tempered by flexibility to take care of family matters, a sick child, a school play, What advice do you have for achieving work-life balance (including having a family)? I am blessed by a supportive husband and a delightful (for a teen, that is) son. I have an extended family, including elderly parents, that I love. My life would be diminished by the loss of any of these. On the other hand, I do have to work to support my family. However, I cannot work or take care of them if I do not maintain my own mental and physical health. Everyone’s requirements and responsibilities regarding work and family life are different. Each of us must determine our own definition of balance and figure out for ourselves what we need to accomplish that. In addition, the balance point will probably shift over the course of our lives. We need to keep assessing our situation and our needs. Do not be afraid or ashamed to ask for what you need to be a balanced and successful person. What do you do for fun (e.g., hobbies, pastimes, etc.)? My family are medieval re-enactors. I enjoy archery, axe throwing, fencing, dance, cooking, embroidery, weaving, and nalbinding. I am determined to master the drop spindle. I look forward to some version of my schedule that allows me to resume swimming on a regular basis. I read voraciously. My husband generously refrained from commenting on the number of my books, even when two trips with a pick-up truck were required when I was moving offices. Can we include your email address for people who may want to contact you directly about your specific career route? Certainly, jennifer.bartlett_at_cfa.harvard.edu (replace the _at_ with @).