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Honestly, when I was a kid, my interest was in athletics. I guess I showed an
aptitude for science and mathematics. But, I didn't really apply myself in school,
pretty much through high school. But the exams that one takes to determine
aptitude in science and math, always indicated that I had a strong capability in
high order mathematics and science. When I got injured in athletics and couldn't
play sports anymore, I had to sit out of school for a while. And, in the interim,
my Dad had come to me and said, "Hey look, you've spent enough time not making
progress in life, I want you to make me a promise." Now, my Dad is a very sincere
person of few words. So, out of two promises he'd ever asked me to make him
in life, "yeah, Dad I'll go back to school and I'll get a degree in something I
enjoy and that'll be my career." And two weeks later, he died. So, I fulfilled
my promise. It is well known at this point that the solar magnetic field drives
space weather. So, space weather forms the aurora; it also can prove dangerous
to the humans aboard the International Space Station and any humans that will
eventually expand out into space. Understanding how changes in the sun's magnetic
field impart explosive energy into events like coronal mass ejections and flares
- developing that understanding is critical to our ability to expand safely into space or maintain all the assets that
NASA and the US government have in space ( our fleet of satellites for telecommunications and other applications .)
I knew the work I was interested in was funded by NASA. There was no other avenue through which I was going to
garner funding or be emplolyed. So, I knew going to college that I was going to work for NASA. I was either going to
be a contractor or a civil servant with NASA. At least if my personal goals were going to be attained. So,
originally, when I went to the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, technically, I had met my goal. I was there
- I was building spacecraft for the Hinode spacecraft, partnered between
NASA and the Japanese. Or the atmosphere imaging array on the solar dynamic
observatory. I was building spacecraft for NASA. Then, the opportunity
came for me to transfer from Harvard to Marshall to run my own instrument
program, and take more of a leadership role in the day to day operations for the Hinode. That was offer that I
just couldn't pass up. I do think of my Dad when I have big moments like that in life. My Dad, my daughter, my wife
- because in some small way, I'm either living up to a promise or to the
expectation that each of them has for me. So, yeah, those are important
folks. Whenever something big happens in life, I reflect on what they meant to me,
or how this event might impact them, too. I'm really interested in stellar astrophysics
- in particular, how hot atmospheres for stars are formed. So, I think I'll continue to build
instrumentation to study the solar atmospheres or solar analogs (stars like our sun) until people ask me not to.