What does access mean to you? What about scientific merit? What are the things you take for granted that you aren’t even aware of because of your privilege? For Dr. Dara Norman, who is deputy director of the Community Science and Data Center at NOIRLab and the incoming president-elect of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), these are issues she grapples with every day.
Dr. Norman is an astronomer, and she uses her knowledge, background, and training in order to understand the challenges others face within her field.
“For astronomers, all you get is light.” Dr. Norman says with a smile. You can see the love of astronomy and science on her face as she speaks.
“In other science fields, you can set up an experiment, or you can get samples of rocks or samples of other things to bring back to your lab and analyze them. But for astronomers, all you get is the light that comes back from galaxies or stars.
“With that light, you have to try to figure out the mass of that star or the mass of that galaxy, what the temperature is. If there are pressures that are in there holding up the star, what are those pressures? You have to understand the evolution of those objects, where those objects sit, how old they are, and how they evolved to be the way they are, right? And you get all of that just from the light that comes back,” she says.
Being able to interpret and understand what that light means, as well as the large data sets that we get back, is crucial to any astronomer’s job. As deputy director of the Community Science and Data Center at NOIRLab (the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), the United States’ national center for all optical and infrared telescopes funded by the National Science Foundation, by doing her job Dr. Norman allows others to do theirs.
“We help the broad astronomy community use both the telescopes and data,” she explains. “The mission of the Community Science and Data Center is really to do user support and help people get time on those telescopes through a peer review process, and also help them get and use the data that we keep—whether it’s their data or data in the archives that anybody can use.”
“I grew up in Chicago, and I’m a proud product of Chicago public schools,” she says. It’s important to her that people know this. “I really liked astronomy, and I really liked science. But I wanted to be an astronaut.”
She credits Chicago’s free museums for fostering her interest in and exposure to science and space from a young age. “The Museum of Science and Industry was on the South Side of Chicago,” she says. “If we were hanging out with nothing to do, we could ask for 75 cents to take the bus to the museum.”
“I’m not saying we were really good kids and looking at the exhibits,” she says with a laugh. “But we were around science, and we’d see an exhibit and say, ‘Ah, how does that work?’ I have a real concern about museums that are not free now. They’re maybe free one day a month, during the week, because that’s the only time the museum can afford to lose that money.”
But it’s important to have those spaces where children can exist around science without having to pay for it. “It’s really concerning to me that there aren’t just organic places where students can interact with science,” she continues. “It’s a real issue, especially for folks like me who grew up in single-parent households—who are not rich, who couldn’t afford to drop, whatever it is, like 50 bucks, to go to the museum with their parents or siblings. That, and also because it was free, we had the autonomy to just wander around the museum and see what we wanted to see.”
Dr. Norman’s poor eyesight ruled out the astronaut path, so she turned instead to becoming a scientist. During one key moment, as an undergraduate at MIT, she looked through a telescope during a class and saw Jupiter for the first time. “It was just amazing,” she reminisces. “It looked like all the pictures, and I was hooked.” She decided to pursue astronomy on that day.
After graduating with a degree in earth, atmospheric, and planetary science from MIT, Dr. Norman decided she didn’t want to go to graduate school immediately. Instead, she opted to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, supporting the Hubble Space Telescope’s Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph. “When Hubble had its problems with the mirror, I basically was like, hmm, might be a good time to go back to graduate school,” she explains
Dr. Norman attended the University of Washington, got her PhD in astronomy, and then was at SUNY Stonybrook for a year. Then she applied for the Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which combines research with outreach.
It’s outreach that’s a key part of Dr. Norman’s work. Getting telescope time is a challenge, to say the least. There are only a certain number of days in the year, and the observatories we have are limited. But we have a lot of data from these telescopes that anyone can use.
“We have a lot of data in archives. We have data that you can compare from many, many decades ago to now,” she says. “The science that you can do with that data, that's limitless. It’s just about what you can imagine, so all you need there is imagination and access.”
When Dr. Norman was taking a sabbatical at Howard University in 2015, she got a crash course in just how different access can be at a smaller institution, versus the national observatories she was used to. “I was going to look at these images that a collaboration of mine had recently gotten. These images are really big; each one was like a gigabyte. And if you’re going to do research, you have to reduce the data, get multiple images, stack the images.”
But she ran into infrastructure roadblocks when she had trouble downloading the images to her computer because of internet reliability and speed. “I realized the environment at Howard was much less privileged,” she says. “Just trying to bring in the images—like, I wasn’t going to bring it in over Wi-Fi, right? No way that was going to happen.”
“So this was a real aha moment for me, not just about the technical and resource limitations, but the access limitations, the advisory limitations that people experience when they’re at smaller institutions”—and that’s just what Dr. Norman has been trying to change over the years.
“One thing I’ve really started doing here at NOIRLab, but also when I talk to people at other observatories, NASA, and other places, is suggesting that they try to identify people interested doing work, even if they’re not doing it, who are interested in being involved in projects. They can explain to you what the barriers are, because if you haven’t lived it, you have no idea.”
It’s a valuable way that Dr. Norman uses her background and training in her everyday work. “You have to understand what the science is, how to do the science, and where the different pressure points are of being able to do the science.”
In the end, what’s important to Dr. Norman is changing the culture of astronomy and STEM to be more inclusive. “I want to ask people to think about how we think about scientific merit in our fields,” she says. “I want to help make that change, where how we do the science is as important as what science we’re doing.”
“Currently, at least in the physical sciences, we might judge the merit of a scientific project by its science goals, right?” she continues. “And the technical analysis and other methods you’re going to use to achieve those goals. When people are applying for telescope time or for grants or other resources, that's how we consider the scientific merit of what they’re doing. But I’m really trying to push us to consider the human factor of how we’re achieving those scientific goals.”
“I use the fact that I am in the field to inform the ways in which you can move things forward,” she muses. “What I’d like to be remembered for is pushing that boundary of how we think about scientific merit.”