Lisa Kaltenegger and Later on I Appreciate It,” He Says

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CAREERS the files to phone-friendly versions using ‘Documents to Go’ so that he can carry all his data with him and can check them when TURNING POINT he meets with his supervisor. “Loading eve- rything digitally is a time-consuming task, but it’s helpful when writing a manuscript, Lisa Kaltenegger and later on I appreciate it,” he says. But will the portability and capabilities of these gadgets ever replace traditional paper Astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger is one of six lab notebooks? Toscano is not convinced; recipients of Germany’s 2012 Heinz Maier- electronic devices don’t mix well with Leibnitz Prize for early-career researchers. chemical solvents, and paper notebooks She divides her time between the Max Planck never run out of batteries. And when vir- Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, tual notebooks are shared between multiple Germany, and the Harvard–Smithsonian users, sloppy mistakes can accumulate and Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, the work becomes prone to sabotage. Massachusetts. But Vázquez is testing those fallibilities using an online program called ‘Evernote’. What is the most important thing that you’ve Most lab notebook programs, he says, are done to shape your career? designed for industry use — to guard and Move to a new country. Through travel and time-stamp sensitive proprietary or patient unfamiliar experiences, I learned how to think information — and are “crazy expensive”. differently and explore alternative approaches But with a low-cost Evernote subscription, to science — important for any young person. Vázquez can store any kind of file and data, I pursued master’s degrees in both astrophysics up to 1 gigabyte a month, in an organized and engineering, from the University of Graz data without details on how they were obtained. and searchable fashion on a server that auto- in Austria and the Graz University of Technol- I wasn’t aware of this limitation when I started. matically syncs ‘notes’ between his devices. ogy, respectively. But I did the research for both But I was one of the few people working on exo- Some of these services are available in the in other countries. With Erasmus mobility planet characterization who had a background freely available program ‘Dropbox’, although funding from the European Union, I travelled in engineering, so I knew how to make trade- Evernote has six times more storage and for six months to the Institute of Astrophysics offs between instrument design and detection more organizing options. “My plan is to get of the Canary Islands, Spain; we were trying to capabilities that wouldn’t hamper the science a couple more accounts and to start testing detect extrasolar planets using ground-based and would keep costs down. Doing presenta- shared notebooks with a couple of my stu- telescopes. I also studied biomedical engineer- tions at meetings and workshops connected me dents, which should make it far easier to fol- ing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, with Wesley Traub, an astrophysicist then at the low their progress,” Vázquez says. Maryland, where the Graz University of Tech- Harvard–Smithsonian Center, who invited me Of course paper notebooks tend to nology had an exchange programme. to apply for a postdoc. stay in the lab and do not beep distract- ingly. The portability of mobile devices So you considered going into medicine. Why How did you end up with positions at both can mean that scientists never completely did you choose astrophysics? Harvard and the Max Planck Institute? disconnect from their work. “That’s the Both fields interested me because I wanted to After finishing my postdoc at Harvard, I got an hardest thing about this technology,” says have an impact on society — I wanted either to offer from Max Planck to establish my own lab, Graveley. “You can be available 24–7.” work towards a cancer cure or to seek another but Harvard wanted me to stay. Luckily, I had He frequently turns the sound off on his Earth. I had offers to do both. But I got a job funding — a German Research Foundation phone so that he is not reacting to every opportunity at the European Space Agency Emmy Noether award, which helps early-career call, text message or e-mail alert that (ESA), which was designing a mission to look scientists to build a team and achieve independ- comes in. But resisting the temptation to for other planets, and I could see myself doing ence. Because I had this funding, I suggested play games or check e-mail constantly is this fascinating job for a long time. It wasn’t that I split my time between the two institutes — no different from avoiding the vices on a necessarily a logical decision, because astron- spending nine months of the year in Heidelberg desktop computer, Toscano says. omy can be a risky career path. But I had engi- and three months at Harvard. Exoplanet char- When the iPad first came out in 2010, neering as a fall-back option. acterization is not something that many people Graveley offered to buy one for each of his do in Germany, so there is an extra incentive to trainees, but they all refused, sceptical back What was the highlight of your time at ESA? maintain international collaborations. then of its value. “The utility of these mobile Helping to design and optimize a mission to devices is based on the apps that other people search for habitable planets. I had very little You’ve won multiple awards. Will any have an develop, so you don’t know what they’re experience, but the team encouraged creative impact on your career? going to be capable of next,” he says. Now, thinking and ideas. I had to model what the The young-researcher awards mean the most with an explosion of apps written by scien- atmosphere of a habitable planet would look because they give early-career scientists cre- tists for scientists and many available at no like to work out how to find one — insights dence and notoriety. In hierarchical systems, cost or for nominal sums, it is hard to imag- that later helped me to get a PhD in astrophys- such as in Europe, they help to level the ine smartphones and tablets not eclipsing the ics from the University of Graz. field a bit. The validation comes from being laptop, notes Carvajal, who says he would nominated by a peer who thinks your work is like to see them in the hands of “every single You didn’t publish much of your PhD work. exciting. Whether you get the prize is often a graduate student and postdoc”. ■ Was it difficult to get a postdoc? gamble, but the positive reinforcement from I wasn’t allowed to publish most of my work peer recognition keeps you going. ■ Kendall Powell is a freelance writer based because the technology to look for planets was in Lafayette, Colorado. proprietary, and I couldn’t very well publish INTERVIEW BY VIRGINIA GEWIN