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Hello Chris I have actually been lucky enough to travel quite a bit for my work. I have been to Sicily and I traveled to Japan many many times over the last few years. Travel is actually a nice little perk of my job, though I haven't traveled much since my daughter was born. Dawn

 Hi Chris,

I have also had the opportunity to travel outside of the U.S. for my job.  I have been to conferences in France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Finland.  Hopefully, I will be able to travel to a conference in Greece next fall.  Scientists can also travel out of the country to work on projects with other researchers.  Last year, two of the other researchers in my department traveled to Antarctica to work on a project.   Some of my co-workers have also traveled to the Czech Republic a few times, as they have a research collaboration with someone at a university in Prague.  Of course, this works both ways, so sometimes the researchers from Czech Republic come to visit Iowa instead!

 Kris

I get to travel quite a lot in my job, both for scientific conferences around the world (like one I was at just last week in Taiwan) and for team meetings for my spacecraft missions (for example, I was in England last month for a Cluster team meeting). Many missions these days have team members from around the world, each providing instruments and/or expertise - for example, MMS has instruments coming from Austria as well as the U.S., and Cluster (an ESA mission) has instruments from many countries. I also travel for educational outreach. For example, I have taken my Discovery Dome to reach 6000 students in Morocco last fall, and have done teacher or student events in Zambia, Ethiopia, Mexico, and many other places. I have interviewed some of my UK Cluster colleagues.. you can see them at my Cluster outreach website http://space.rice.edu/cluster/index_multimedia.php One of the great things about participating in space science is that you have colleagues all over the world, all interested in science and how the universe works. I just wish I were more fluent in other languages... I speak some Spanish, German, and French but I'd love to be able to speak Chinese!

Hi , I will reiterate the thread that some of the previous replies have mentioned, that international travel is one of the benefits of being a research scientist, if you would like it to be. I too have traveled quite a bit as part of my work requirements,  and I too traveled less frequently when my children were very small.