NEWS From physics to environmental science: a natural evolution?

 

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Physics and envi­ron­men­tal research are more com­pat­i­ble than you might first think. Kate Rav­il­ious talks to three lead­ing physi­cists-turned-envi­ron­men­tal researchers, to find out about their jour­ney.  For the orig­i­nal arti­cle, click here.

How many peo­ple study physics and then go on to forge a career in envi­ron­men­tal sci­ences? Per­haps not a huge num­ber, but those who have a “physics mind­set” often bring a fresh per­spec­tive to envi­ron­men­tal research. Today an increas­ing num­ber of physi­cists are help­ing to tack­le some of the world’s most press­ing envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges. For Daniel Kam­men, a self-con­fessed Star Trek fan and direc­tor of the Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, US, the migra­tion from physics to envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence was serendipitous.

My path was very ran­dom, dri­ven by a love of physics and way too many inter­ests,” he says. Ini­tial­ly, Kammen’s dream was to be an astro­naut. “I learned to fly planes, took acro­bat­ic and sea-plane land­ing lessons, but I was ulti­mate­ly screened out of the NASA astro­naut qual­i­fi­ca­tion on the basis of vision,” he explains. How­ev­er, Kammen’s infec­tious enthu­si­asm for under­stand­ing the world around him soon opened many oth­er doors.

While study­ing physics at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, Kam­men learned about astron­o­my and cos­mol­o­gy, worked in the low-tem­per­a­ture physics lab­o­ra­to­ries and in sol­id-state physics, where he pub­lished his first papers on sol­id-state masers, and eager­ly absorbed cours­es on elec­tro­dy­nam­ics, quan­tum mechan­ics and quan­tum field the­o­ry. Then at grad­u­ate school, first at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and then at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, he was drawn towards cos­mol­o­gy, com­pu­ta­tion­al physics and neur­al networks.

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But it was while doing a post­doc in neur­al com­put­ing at Cal­tech that Kam­men real­ized he could apply his tal­ents to envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems. “Dur­ing my sum­mers I vol­un­teered on an ener­gy project, intro­duc­ing solar ovens to com­mu­ni­ties in Nicaragua (the US was blockad­ing the coun­try at the time), and as a result I pub­lished my first paper on ener­gy in Nature,” he says.

Accessing all energy

That chance vol­un­teer work set Kammen’s career on the path of both aca­d­e­m­ic and activist. For the last 25 years his focus has been find­ing solu­tions to the ener­gy needs of devel­op­ing coun­tries. Today his pas­sion is “ener­gy access” and he works large­ly with com­mu­ni­ties in East Africa, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca – includ­ing the coun­try that orig­i­nal­ly inspired him, Nicaragua – and on Native Amer­i­can lands in the US. “Physics has pro­vid­ed me with the most amaz­ing train­ing, and I con­sis­tent­ly use it today in work on solar cells, net­work stud­ies of ener­gy grids, and in dynam­i­cal sys­tems meth­ods applied to all sorts of things,” he says.

- “Physics has pro­vid­ed me with the most amaz­ing training”

Dan Kam­men

Step­ping side­ways from physics into envi­ron­men­tal sci­ences has required a flex­i­ble and open-mind­ed approach, but Kam­men rel­ish­es the chal­lenge of learn­ing new things. “I am keen to keep work­ing in ana­lyt­i­cal meth­ods and I always want to learn more in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences, where I am just a baby,” says Kam­men, who is edi­tor-in-chief of the open-access jour­nal Envi­ron­men­tal Research Let­ters (pro­duced by IOP Pub­lish­ing, which also pub­lish­es Physics World).

Kammen’s unusu­al career tra­jec­to­ry led him to con­tribute to the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change (IPCC) in its ear­ly days; work which was reward­ed in 2007 when the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize. These days his goal is to “de-car­bonize” soci­ety. Last year he joined a list of emi­nent sci­en­tists, busi­ness lead­ers, econ­o­mists, ana­lysts, influ­encers and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of non-gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions to set up Mis­sion 2020 – a col­lab­o­ra­tive cam­paign that aims “to bend the green­house-gas emis­sions curve down­wards” by 2020. Over time Kammen’s research inter­ests have tak­en many twists and turns, but his enthu­si­asm for Star Trek is one thing that hasn’t changed. “I still own Spock ears and gen­er­al­ly win the game ‘iden­ti­fy the Star Trek episode with the short­est quote’,” he laughs.

Down to Earth

For Anny Cazenave – direc­tor for earth sci­ences at the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sci­ence Insti­tute in Bern, Switzer­land and senior sci­en­tist at the Lab­o­ra­toire d’Etudes en Géo­physique et Océanogra­phie Spa­tiales at the French space cen­tre (CNES) in Toulouse, France – the jour­ney to envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence began with an inter­est in what lies beyond Earth. While doing her first degree in math­e­mat­ics and physics, Cazenave, like Kam­men, was fas­ci­nat­ed by space, and had ambi­tions of becom­ing an astronomer. Grad­u­al­ly her inter­ests evolved towards geo­physics, and she did a PhD at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toulouse on the rota­tion of the Earth. This led to a per­ma­nent posi­tion at CNES to devel­op satel­lite geo­desy – the use of satel­lites to study the shape of the Earth, its grav­i­ty field and its rota­tion, sol­id Earth tides and so on.

environments illustration

When Cazenave accept­ed the posi­tion, she had no inkling of how her work might trans­form envi­ron­men­tal research. “At that time [the 1970s] envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence was not at the fore­front of space activ­i­ties,” she explains.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, when satel­lite tech­nol­o­gy was far more advanced, that sci­en­tists began to ful­ly explore the use of satel­lites for envi­ron­men­tal appli­ca­tions. In par­tic­u­lar altime­ter satel­lites – which send a microwave pulse down to Earth and mea­sure alti­tude from the time it takes the pulse to return – start­ed employ­ing two dif­fer­ent wave­lengths, mas­sive­ly increas­ing the res­o­lu­tion at which they could map the Earth’s surface.

Sci­en­tists, includ­ing Cazenave, spot­ted the poten­tial of high-res­o­lu­tion satel­lites for map­ping the peaks and troughs of the sea sur­face, and real­ized that they rep­re­sent­ed a new way of mon­i­tor­ing sea lev­el changes and ocean cir­cu­la­tion. “Although I was not an oceanog­ra­ph­er, I learned about it while work­ing,” says Cazenave. “At the begin­ning of the 2000s, I also start­ed to devel­op hydrol­o­gy from space – the study of ter­res­tri­al waters using space techniques.”

- “Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research needs hard work but it is high­ly moti­vat­ing too, and I’m pas­sion­ate about learn­ing new things”

Anny Cazenave

Today Cazenave’s focus is using satel­lite data to mon­i­tor cli­mate change, for exam­ple, sea lev­el rise, land ice melt, ocean ther­mal expan­sion and changes in the glob­al water cycle. She feels that her orig­i­nal back­ground in maths and physics has been a use­ful tool, but flex­i­bil­i­ty and will­ing­ness to learn have also been key to enabling her to move into a new field. “Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research needs hard work, to gain expe­ri­ence in the field in which we are a new­com­er, but it is high­ly moti­vat­ing too, and I’m pas­sion­ate about learn­ing new things,” she says.

Naturally outdoors

Unlike Kam­men and Cazenave who came to envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence via curios­i­ty about space, Jen­nifer Bur­ney of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego, US, found her enthu­si­asm for the envi­ron­ment to be a con­sis­tent thread through­out her life. “I’ve always been an out­doorsy per­son, and grow­ing up in New Mex­i­co always had a strong inter­est in the nat­ur­al world,” she explains.

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Fol­low­ing a degree in his­to­ry and sci­ence, Bur­ney began a physics PhD at Stan­ford, devel­op­ing a super­con­duct­ing cam­era that cap­tures images of cos­mic bod­ies such as pul­sars or exo­plan­ets. Part­way through her stud­ies, Bur­ney decid­ed to defer for a year, so that she could vol­un­teer with rebuild­ing efforts in Nicaragua after 1998’s Hur­ri­cane Mitch. “It was excit­ing to be in the field devis­ing cre­ative solu­tions,” she says.

After fin­ish­ing her PhD, Burney’s desire to bring pos­i­tive change to oth­er people’s lives resur­faced and she fol­lowed a non-aca­d­e­m­ic route, work­ing for non-gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion the Solar Elec­tric Light Fund on rur­al elec­tri­fi­ca­tion around the world. “One project was solar-pow­ered drip irri­ga­tion in West Africa,” she says. “They need­ed some­body to fig­ure out how to eval­u­ate the tech­nol­o­gy. That required assess­ing the design and how to make it cost-effec­tive and sustainable.”

Over time Bur­ney became intrigued by how ener­gy and cli­mate affect food secu­ri­ty, water avail­abil­i­ty and agri­cul­ture, and in 2008 she tran­si­tioned back into acad­e­mia via a post­doc at Stan­ford on food secu­ri­ty and the envi­ron­ment. Her research has con­tin­ued in this vein ever since. These days Bur­ney inves­ti­gates the cou­plings between human activ­i­ty and the envi­ron­ment. How­ev­er, her physics mind­set is still at the fore­front of every­thing she does.

- “I fun­da­men­tal­ly see the world as a physi­cist, and ulti­mate­ly most of my projects have that kind of ‘flavour’”

Jen­nifer Burney

I fun­da­men­tal­ly see the world as a physi­cist, and ulti­mate­ly most of my projects have that kind of ‘flavour’ – for exam­ple, in our projects try­ing to under­stand what role air pol­lu­tants play in impact­ing both cli­mate and humans, I tend to think about how they change the radia­tive prop­er­ties of the atmos­phere and much less about the bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal process­es for exam­ple,” she says.

But Bur­ney rel­ish­es the cross-dis­ci­pli­nary nature of her work. “You learn to see the world in a new way,” she says. And it is this will­ing­ness to see things from oth­er people’s point of view, com­bined with a thirst for knowl­edge, that seems to have enabled Bur­ney, Cazenave and Kam­men to slide smooth­ly between physics and the envi­ron­men­tal sci­ences. “Physics pro­vides a fan­tas­tic toolk­it, but envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems are the biggest chal­lenge we have,” says Bur­ney. “It will take all hands on deck.”

  • Enjoy the rest of the March 2018 issue of Physics World in our dig­i­tal mag­a­zine or via the Physics World app for any iOS or Android smart­phone or tablet. Mem­ber­ship of the Insti­tute of Physics required

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