Meet the Scientists

Mandy Hagenaar
Lockheed-Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab

I was born in 1971, in the city of Delft, the Netherlands. Nowadays, I live in San Francisco, and work at Lockheed-Martin Solar and Astrophysics Labs, in Palo Alto.
After finishing high school in 1989, I started studying physics at the University of Utrecht. The city of Utrecht is a very old, beautiful college town, with a great atmosphere, which is why I chose that university. I chose to study physics because I was interested in high-energy physics and particle physics.

After three years, I decided to switch to astronomy. The curricula for physics and astrophysics overlap to a very large extent, so the change didn't take much extra work. The reason I chose astrophysics rather than physics was that I liked the atmosphere among astronomers. At first, I actually wanted to go into cosmology. After taking some high-level classes of "real" stellar and solar astrophysics, I became fascinated by solar physics. I have never been one of the "star-gazers"; I still look at stars, and especially the Sun, as a physicist. The Sun plays a special role in astrophysics, because it is still the only star that we can look at in detail: it is literally in our backyard. When looking at the Sun with special telescopes, from Earth or from space, we can see the gas moving around like a pan of boiling soup. In this "soup" magnetic fields move around like noodles. The Sun is an average, rather small, star, like many other stars in the Universe, but it is the only star we can look at so closely. Therefore detailed knowledge of the Sun is so important.

Unfortunately the field of solar physics has shrunk significantly in the Netherlands. Traditionally the University of Utrecht focused on solar physics, but nowadays many young scientists prefer something more exotic, such as black holes or dark matter. One disadvantage of being a scientist in Europe is the lack of permanent positions for the younger scientists. A consequence is a "brain-drain" from many European countries. Also, some good scientists have to leave the field and find different jobs. Another disadvantage of being a scientist is that one gets paid less doing academic research than working for industry. The advantage in this is that only a select group of highly motivated people stay in fundamental research.

In February 1995, I finished my master's thesis. In March of the same year, I started my PhD research, with the subject "Flows and Magnetic Patterns on the Solar Surface''. One month after I started, I traveled to the USA, to work with my (Dutch) thesis advisor, in Palo Alto, California. During the four years of PhD research, I "commuted'' between Amsterdam and San Francisco: I traveled seven times to Palo Alto, and altogether spent roughly 1.5 year in the USA. In May 1999, I graduated, and in June I moved to San Francisco.

Presently, I do research in Palo Alto, still looking at magnetic patterns on the solar surface. I develop methods to recognize locations where new magnetic fields emerge from below the visible surface, which happens all the time, everywhere on the Sun. A typical day for me involves a lot of computer programming, in order to analyze observations of the Sun taken with the Solar Optical Telescope on board the Hinode satellite (Hinode is Japanese for sunrise). With the naked eye it may be easy to recognize certain patterns. It is a whole different thing to teach this to a computer: the complex thinking process inside the human brain needs to be divided into small steps and explained to a computer.

When I find something new, I discuss it with other scientists in my workplace. They can suggest solutions for problems, or critique my results. Writing down reports of the work enables other people to understand, reproduce, and verify the results. It is very important to publish the work in papers that (a) formulate the problem, (b) describe the work that other scientists have done in the past on this subject, (c) explain which data were used, (d) what method(s) were applied, and (e) which conclusions may be drawn from the analysis and everything that may have possibly gone wrong. To me, writing can be very frustrating: sometimes my writing is absolutely clear to me but totally incomprehensible for other people. This also makes it all the more satisfying to finish a paper and get it published.

Being a woman in solar physics has both bad and good sides, like everything. One advantage I have noticed is, for example, that people easily recognize the ten women among 100 men. Therefore, making contacts seems to be easier for a female. The disadvantage of this very same observation is that everything, positive or negative, is more noticeable.

I like the international character of science: you meet people from all over the world and get to travel to places you would otherwise never see. I have to admit, though, that I love traveling anyway.

I'm happy that through the years the telescopes keep getting better. With every new telescope we observe more detail and understand how little we really know. Our understanding is refined, new techniques and models need to be developed. This keeps my field interesting and dynamic.