Caroline Juang: Blending Art, Science, and Outreach
Caroline Juang is a doctoral student at Columbia University who uses satellite data and other techniques to study climate hazards. She is also an artist and a STEM promoter.
In a 2002 TED talk, former astronaut Mae Jemison urged the public to make it our mission to integrate science and art into our thinking, education, and outreach. This may interest you : Russian scientist accused of treason dies in custody. She suggested that if we frame art and science as a dichotomy and ask people to choose whether to be “logical” or “creative” (but not both), we lose talent on both sides.
Fortunately for the fields of science and art, Caroline Juang’s parents and mentors didn’t ask her to make this choice. work with NASA. Today, she is an artist, a STEM promoter, and a PhD student at Columbia University who uses satellite data and other techniques to study climate hazards.
A scientist is born
Caroline’s parents, both scientists, shared their enthusiasm for NASA’s work as a child by introducing her to the INSPIRE Online Learning Community. Later, just after graduating from high school, Caroline interned at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland under the direction of Dalia Kirschbaum. There she worked on developing models to predict the probability of landslides using rainfall data from large databases. Read also : The U.S. Senate has called for more research funding by 2023. During this internship, Caroline learned that in addition to the satellites NASA uses to monitor space, NASA also uses satellites to monitor Earth systems. This realization and experience were the starting point for Caroline’s concentration on Earth sciences which she maintains to this day.
When Caroline began her undergraduate studies at Harvard University, the memory of how much she loved her high school internship project at NASA gave her confidence to choose a major in Earth and Planetary Sciences. To gain more experience in Earth science research, she spent her summers doing internships, delving into research on the polar caps of Mars, food sustainability and space policy. As an upperclassman, she decided to focus her graduate research on understanding carbon exchange in the Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts. She received an honorable mention for this work.
After earning her Bachelor of Arts in Earth and Planetary Sciences and a minor in Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, Caroline decided to rejoin Dalia Kirschbaum at NASA Goddard as a project coordinator. This time, instead of just building landslide databases, Caroline developed a community-based science project (“the Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository”) to invite people around the world to submit landslide data. She analyzed data from the first year of the results and was able to demonstrate that data from community scientists was viable and could be used for future modeling and scientific research.
As she cataloged and built these databases, Caroline began to learn about the 2017 Thomas Fire that caused mudslides across much of Southern California, leading to fatalities and devastating infrastructure damage. She was amazed at the severity of the impact and the interconnectedness of the dangers. Until now, Caroline’s research had focused on landslides, but now she wanted to learn as much as possible about fire here.
Caroline speaks about her NASA citizen science work at the 70th International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC in 2019. Photo: International Astronautical Federation
Shortly after this new interest was sparked, Caroline read excerpts for a conference and discovered the work of Park Williams, then a hydroclimatologist at Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (now located at UCLA) who studied how climate change interacts with droughts. and wildfires in the western United States. Inspired by her colleagues at NASA, Caroline had already started considering going to graduate school – she wanted to learn more about modeling in natural hazard research and build her expertise so she could eventually lead projects. Upon discovering Park Williams and later discovering that they have common interests in both research and outreach, and a shared enthusiasm for collaboration, she decided it was time to embark on her graduate career.
A PhD student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, working in Park Williams’ research group (“The HyFiVeS Research Group”, which stands for “Hydroclimate, Fire, Vegetation, and Society”), Caroline has diverse interests. She focuses on using satellites and large data sets to model wildfires in the western United States, and received a Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology grant to fund this study. In her first chapter, published in Geophysical Research Letters, she found that the total wildfire area burned annually grows exponentially with drought in the western United States because of the rapid increase in the size of the largest wildfires. Individual fires are increasingly spreading across the landscape, so the largest fires have the greatest growth potential. Thus, each incremental increase in drought leads to a much larger increase in burned area each year. In other words, explains Caroline, “the largest 10% of fires per year were responsible for about 67% of the observed increase in annual forest cover burned between 1984 and 2019.”
With this research and much more arising from her PhD, Caroline hopes to contribute to our understanding of natural variability in wildfires and how fires are affected by climate change. Her ultimate goal is to improve our ability to predict climate-fire interactions to inform disaster management efforts, and her next chapter examines the uncertainty in predictive models of fire activity.
Presented my proposed dissertation research on @LamontEarth today! Eternally grateful to my advisor, committee, mentors, & friends for supporting the M.Phil. I’m ready to continue modeling the causes of variability in wildfires in western US 🔥 @columbiaclimate pic.twitter.com/QQFNe02Y3U
— Caroline Juang (@caro_in_space) August 23, 2022
This work is clearly a huge undertaking. Caroline has even built and maintained a database that combines satellite and fire data from government agencies, and she performs all the time-consuming data cleanup associated with database management.
Caroline says that while taking the shuttle bus to the Lamont campus is certainly not her favorite day-to-day activity, working there has been “inspiring and very motivating. What really makes this program is the people I interacted with and shared ideas with. It’s a very collaborative environment with a lot of great climate work. It’s just really cool that the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory community is part of my PhD experience. There is so much collaboration between students, postdocs and professors. I am also very grateful to my advisory committee. They give such great feedback and have stayed in touch with me even during the pandemic.”
Making time for art
With so much work on her plate for her research, you would expect that she wouldn’t have much time for much else. To see also : Sloppy Use of Machine Learning Causes ‘Reproducibility Crisis’ in Science. Caroline says, “You find time to do things you want to do.”
Caroline always wanted to be an artist, since childhood if she can remember. Her parents, as scientists, motivated her to explore STEM in order to share their love of science with their daughter. But they also bought Caroline her first digital drawing tablet and made sure she always knew they appreciated her art. Although Caroline had support, she had no guidance when it came to art, but she had the motivation to educate herself and look for learning opportunities where she could. In high school, with a full academic schedule, Caroline had no free time to fit into art classes, so she asked the 8th grade art teacher if she could just sit in classes and learn to draw with charcoal while eating her lunch. Finally, in 11th and 12th grade, Caroline was able to take some studio art classes at her public high school to learn new media. Her love for art continued to grow and soon she started participating in art competitions and even designing logos for various organizations.
Now, as a PhD student, Caroline is an artist in addition to her science. “I used to call myself a scientist and an art hobbyist… but then I realized, no, I’m an artist. The working day as a graduate is doing Earth sciences research, but the passion I have for art and the time I spend on art is considerable. Technically I’m an artist on the side, but it’s as much a part of my identity as science. Also, I sometimes get paid for my art, so I guess I shouldn’t call myself a hobbyist.” Art and science play an equally important role in her life and her career plans.
“You Bloom”, by Caroline Juang
Recently, Caroline has begun to bring these passions together by connecting her artworks with her identity as a scientist and as a Taiwanese-American woman in STEM. While she still loves drawing cats and horror comics, lately she’s been focusing Asian female astronauts in her artwork. Caroline hopes this will help her create sources of inspiration for others that she didn’t see when she was trying to imagine herself as a scientist growing up. A recent piece of which Caroline is particularly proud, entitled “You are Thriving,” features an Asian-American astronaut who is waist-deep in water with seemingly nowhere to go. Despite the challenges and uncertainty she faces, she is rooted in her own identity – symbolized by a terrarium in the helmet of her spacesuit. Remembering who she is keeps her focused and allows her to move on and explore.
Caroline has also brought her love of art and science together through her logo design work, creating logos for scientific organizations, such as this cute and thoughtful logo she designed for the Brook Owen Fellowship Program, and this for Asian Americans and the Pacific Ocean Islanders in the Geosciences group. She also now has a comic in production that tells the story of Swati Mohan, who navigates NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars, which Caroline is working on for Space Generation’s Diversity & Gender Equality Project group as one of their illustrators. This work will appear in the second issue of Our Giant Leap magazine in early fall (stay tuned!).
Caroline’s comic about Swati Mohan, an Indian-American woman navigating NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars, is out this fall.
Whether it’s art in the form of traditional media such as working in ink and acrylic (which Caroline also enjoys), or digital art, creating these images takes a lot of time. She is also the sole writer of her comics, and the story development and writing process involves a lot of research so she can lay the groundwork, provide the necessary historical information, and create the context she needs to tell a story. Because of this extra work, including storyboarding, creating thumbnails and calibrating the timing for comics, Caroline has had to make some tough decisions regarding limiting the projects she can take on, especially to make more room for a another crucial part of its identity – outreach and community empowerment.
Making space and science more accessible
For Caroline, community empowerment and outreach means much more than inspiring people through her art. For example, she regularly visits primary and secondary school students to talk about her research and she participated in the New York Academy of Sciences Chat with a Scientist. She also serves on the board of directors for the Brooke Owens Fellowship Program, a nonprofit internship and mentorship program for women and other gender minorities interested in aerospace careers. She has an understanding of the program from multiple perspectives as she was a fellow in the program herself, which now guides her as she manages the program. Caroline is hands-on in bringing in every class of fellows, pairing them with mentors and competitive internships across the industry (including places like SpaceX and Blue Origin), and hosting a four-day summit with a major challenge project to solve a problem. unloading in the industry. She recalls that when she was a fellow, her project was a challenge to use satellite capabilities to alleviate drought while working with the affected community. Caroline is excited to see some of the more recent projects being presented as startups.
Caroline and the other Fellows of the 2017 class for the Brooke Owens Fellowship, in Washington, DC.
Caroline first learned about the Brooke Owens Fellowship program through a Facebook group she was a member of. She remembers thinking, “How can people who aren’t well connected yet discover these great opportunities?”
Driven by the awareness of this problem of inaccessibility, Caroline decided to create a platform of resources to direct people to opportunities not normally found on job boards (for example, scholarships, grants, grants and internships). She approached her old friend from high school, Chris Fu, who is a software developer, to invite him to join her in founding this platform, building out the website, and taking over the user experience and design. He was excited about the idea, so they co-founded Space Interns, a database of hundreds of opportunities for high school students, college graduates, and budding professionals. The site also includes guides, created by multiple organizations and collected by Space Interns, on how to get into the space industry.
Cultivating these lists of opportunities involves hours of scouring Twitter and other resources; many opportunities were simply shared through word of mouth, others were bundled into Google spreadsheets. It was a big effort to bring all these opportunities together and make them searchable and filterable (for example, for characteristics that make someone eligible for different internships or fellowships, such as being part of a specific underrepresented group). Fortunately, they now have a small team that manages the website and keeps it up to date.
“It’s a grassroots team effort to make space and STEM in general more accessible to everyone,” explains Caroline. “We’re also trying to emphasize that space isn’t just engineers, it’s scientists, artists, people who work in finance, and more, all of whom play different, important roles in making the space industry a whole.”
Sure, this is a lot for a graduate student to have on their plate, but Caroline swears she’s getting plenty of sleep. She believes that working on her art is a great outlet for mental health, especially when she can use art to uplift her community. Caroline also credits her advisor, Park Williams, who she says “values the outreach and science communication. Having that support really helped me balance everything out. ”
Alexis Earl is a PhD student in ecology and evolutionary biology at Columbia University.
