Joyce Guzik

It is a challenge to pull out of my life story the reasons why I became a scientist. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and attended public schools. My parents didn't finish high school, and almost no-one I knew personally had a college degree. Most of my classmates had little interest in academic pursuits. My father had studied to be a tool and die maker, and learned a lot of advanced mathematics in his apprenticeship, and showed it to me as a child. I grew up during the time of the Apollo moon landings (I was 8 years old when the first astronauts walked on the moon), and was interested in the solar system and space travel. I also had a keen interest in 'ultimate questions', which I mostly kept to myself, questions like: When was the beginning of the universe? What was before the beginning? How big is the universe? Where is the edge? What is beyond the 'edge'? Is there life on other planets? Why are we here? What is the purpose of all of this? What are we supposed to do or be? Why did my parents or other adults not know the answers to these questions? Would it be possible to learn the answers in books, or figure them out from purely reasoning and thinking hard enough about the subjects? Why didn't others seem to care about these questions?

The culture I was in also taught me that I had opportunity--if I studied hard enough and earned and saved money, I could go to college. My mathematics teachers were women, and most of the top students in my schools were girls, and so it didn't occur to me that girls shouldn't like or couldn't do science or math.

I settled in my freshman year of high school on studying physics in college, because I saw that it would be a career where I would be able to apply my mathematics skills. Math and physics to me seemed like the places where ultimate truth could be found--you could prove something unequivocally, or, relying on a few basic laws of nature you could derive a truth from pure reasoning from first principles. Acquiring these abilities seemed like a great foundation for approaching life, and seemed less ambiguous than other subjects such as literature or art, where knowledge is pursued by examining tension and contrasts, or contemplating paradoxes. But I loved other subjects as well, such as music, literature, political science, and languages, and resolved to continue studying these throughout my life.

I attended a small liberal arts college (Cornell in Iowa) with only 1000 students, and it turned out to be perfect for me to build self-confidence and receive more personal attention. I majored in physics, math, and Russian studies, and also participated in many activities such as writing for the newspaper, discussion groups, and playing clarinet and saxophone. I knew that I had to go to graduate school to find a job in physics, but hadn't settled yet on an area of specialization. I didn't pursue astronomy because I thought that it would be impossible to find a job in this field.

I went to graduate school at Iowa State University; in my first year I considered focusing on nuclear physics, astrophysics, or mathematical methods in physics for my Ph.D. My choice ultimately was made by considering whom I wanted to work with as my research advisor--I ended up working for the only woman on the faculty, who was an astrophysicist, and I also liked very much the other astrophysics faculty. They assured me that the Hubble telescope would be launched soon, and there would be many opportunities for jobs in astrophysics.

Because I hadn't taken enough physics courses as an undergraduate, I had to take my qualifying exams twice (I almost passed the first time, and passed easily on the second try). That second year, when it was uncertain whether I would pass on the second and last allowed try, was difficult, but I learned that if I studied hard I could succeed, and that I should trust my own judgment and shouldn't be frightened or discouraged by difficulties or failures of others. The day I received my exam results, my advisors presented me with a research project--they had been thinking that stars like the sun might lose a lot of their mass in heavy winds early in their lifetime. They wanted to send me to Los Alamos where they had colleagues with computer codes that could be used to model the sun, and they wanted me to learn to use these codes and work out the implications of this idea.

I remember that the first time I traveled with my advisor to Los Alamos in 1985; I immediately thought that this is where I want to live and work for the rest of my life. That first trip, after some coaching from the lab scientists, I stayed up nearly all night using the computers (they ran faster at night) and by the end of a few days had produced my first solar model with mass loss that my advisor eagerly started examining and interpreting. I was very fortunate to be invited to return as a summer graduate student, and then a postdoc. The new field of helioseismology was taking off at this time, and I was given a set of tools to use to analyze my solar models against data from solar oscillations. I also had a chance to work behind the fence on a nuclear physics project to study whether superheavy elements beyond those in the periodic table today in a hypothetical 'island of stability' with long half-lives could be produced in nuclear weapons tests.

After my postdoc, I became a technical staff member at Los Alamos. I've had great opportunities, working both on classified research and continuing modeling of the sun and other types of stars and testing the models against observational data that is getting better all the time. One of the things I've enjoyed most is the opportunity to travel to conferences around the world. In the past 20 years I've traveled to England, France, Belgium, Austria, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Viet Nam. I'm looking forward to a conference in Poland this summer on "Interpretation of asteroseismic data."