Opening the Universe: science outreach with Dr. Alex Thompson

Welcome to Growing Worlds, the podcast where we explore the science of exoplanets through conversation with early career researchers on the front line of discovery. I'm Lorenzo.

And I'm Jenny. In each episode, we meet a guest who takes us behind the science of planets, stars, and the search for life in the universe.

Today we are talking not about planets or stars, but about people, about who gets to do science, and how we make it more accessible, and what it means to bring your whole self into research.

To guide us through this conversation, we're joined by Dr. Alex Thompson from the University College of London. Alex, welcome to Growing Worlds. Anything like that.

thanks for having me guys.

Alex is currently a postdoc at UCL but soon she will be moving to INAF in Palermo, And she is one of the leads of Orbits, a program that connects school students directly with real space research projects. What makes Alex's story so inspiring is that she is bringing research opportunity to students who are often excluded from traditional science education, including those in hospital schools.

Alright Alex, so before we get into your amazing projects, will you tell us about your journey into astronomy, into outreach and communication? Tell us how it all began and how you got to where you are today.

I guess it should start from the beginning. So I actually have had quite an interesting and indirect path into academia, particularly for astronomy, but I've always been interested in astronomy since I was a young child. I think actually one of my most early recollections of really liking space was that I used to read the Tin Tin comics with my dad.

Mm-hmm.

and I would only ever let him read the ones when he went to the moon because why would you read the ones when they didn't go to the moon? And so actually recently I

You

got a tattoo of the the rocket from the the Tintin novels as like a reminder. So

like that, that's cute. Yeah.

I've definitely always been interested in space and then actually I was really lucky and quite privileged to when I was I reckon around 14 so like year 10 in the UK. I got the opportunity to do a GCC in astronomy at the Royal Observatory

Mmm.

in Greenwich, which is pretty rare. It was on a Saturday morning, but I've always been a huge nerd and I didn't really have anything else going on the Saturday mornings and neither did my parents and they like enjoyed going to Greenwich Park with me. So quite again, lucky

Nice.

in that sense. And that was the first time I remember someone being like a very strong mentor for me and encouraging me that I pursue this as a career if I wanted to. Obviously at that point I was 14 and it's very unrealistic to expect 14 year olds to know what they want to do the rest of lives.

Yeah, I agree there and they do make people choose, you know, their GCSEs and they're like, this is, it depends for the rest of your life. And it really doesn't, you know.

I don't really get that, I decided my career when I was 5.

Yeah

that's worse, no. You're the exception to the rule and you're ruining it

Yeah. Yeah.

for everyone else, Lorenzo. No.

it does like, it does put a lot of stress on teenagers. Like you've got enough stress as a teenager as it is. Yeah.

so I decided at that point that it was something that I was definitely interested in doing and it was reflected in my A-level choices, for example. So I decided that I was going to do maths, physics and chemistry. But unfortunately, during that time that I was doing my A-levels, I was also quite sick.

I'd just been diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is an autoimmune disease, one of IBD, so inflammatory bowel. And unfortunately I had quite a bad time with that and I ended up requiring some quite invasive surgery. So I went at that point from being someone who was maybe on the quieter, more like intellectual side of always doing well at school.

having like a degree of natural talent for things to missing a lot of school and having things be really difficult. And essentially with all the school I missed, didn't get the results that I wanted in my A level. I didn't do as bad as I could have done. I was still quite proud. But particularly undergrad level, a lot of these courses are oversubscribed. So I actually got rejected from at undergrad level to do astrophysics.

Which is ironic because I work here now and they pay me.

Yes.

Which is great. Definitely feels

full circle moment.

really good, like hair flip. So yeah, and at that point I really didn't know what to do and I think I'm comfortable now to admit that it was definitely not a good mental head space for me I understood even deep down, like I wouldn't have been well enough to go to university or at least have the traditional university experience. So I was like, okay, we've got to make peace with this. We need to do something else. And at that point, a friend of a friend who worked as a tattoo studio, basically I heard that they were looking for an apprentice, someone to train as a tattoo artist. And

my goodness.

I decided to do that, which is why I have...

wow!

tinted rocket themed tattoos.

A so left field from astronomy.

Yeah, I I drew a lot of space-themed designs. Unfortunately, the clientele in the area that I worked did not want that at all. So

Yeah

I really just wasted a lot of my time and didn't get paid. no, it was...

I'm sure your tattoos were the most scientifically accurate.

Mm-hmm.

They're so scientifically accurate. And I continue to draw and kind of fuse tattoo art and culture with science. definitely is something I like to do at my free time. But yeah, huge of direction. And while I was doing that, I found out from a friend that Birkbeck exists, Birkbeck is part of the University of London, and they actually run.

courses specifically designed for mature students, so people who are working during the day or have other commitments, but are interested in pursuing higher education.

Mmm.

And I'm really so glad that I found that because

Mmm.

I wouldn't be in academia without it. It's really designed for people like me or people who want a change in direction in their career, things like that, but can't afford to just stop working.

So I did a part-time BSc in planetary science, which was a lot of geology. And I was never a rock person before that. So I learned, there was a steep learning curve. Although

yeah. Yeah.

the other day, side note, we were at a conference and there was a pub quiz and some of the pub quiz questions were about minerals and I remembered them. I was like.

And we're you like, boom, degree.

Boom!

Eight years ago into my history, was like, come on, we've heard this word before. So was very proud of myself. Yeah, please go ahead.

Yeah, dig it out.

So I have a side question here now. So you have done a lot of geology and you say you are not a rock person. Is this why you are now working on stars? You went to the gasseous part of the universe.

Well, actually, that kind of turned around. I was doing my undergrad at Birkbeck, I expressed interest in the idea of exoplanets because I was like, oh, you know where you can't really look at rocks, where you can't see the planet? No, well, not really.

Hahaha

you

And actually, yeah, it was just a conference called Rocky Worlds and there was so much... magma oceans and interior modeling, but it turns out you absolutely can't look at rocks. And I don't

Hehe.

actually hate rocks, so it's totally fine. I'd expressed to my supervisor there that I was interested in exoplanets and they were like, cool, we don't really do that here, but you know where they do do that? UCL. And someone at UCL

You

owed this particular guy a favor and that someone was Ingo,

And Ingo for the listeners is Dr. Ingo Wohlmann.

yeah, and so I've actually, since I started working with the UCL Expo group kind of intermittently from my undergrad years, I've kind of been a part of the furniture ever since, which is probably why it's a good time to change it up and move to a different country. But yeah, so I did my master's at UCL for a year.

Unfortunately that year was entirety of COVID, so under lockdown.

Mmm.

But then I was lucky enough to apply for and get PhD position here. I decided to move as far away from rocks as possible and I started doing stars. So my main focus of my research while I've been at UCL and...

continues to be my main research focus is stellar activity, so the magnetic activity of exoplanet host stars and particularly how this interferes with or contaminates our observations, for example with Ariel, which is a future ESA mission that I work very heavily on, also with Lorenzo. But also I'm trying to more transition into learning about the stars for the stars' sake as well. There's a lot of information.

about the star in these like contaminating signals. So I'm hoping that if we put the effort in and try make the right models, then we can get twice the science from one observation

Mm.

essentially.

so not content with just studying stars, you know, figuring out all of their problems. You do lots of side projects and one of them is orbits, right? So tell us about orbits.

Okay, so Orbits, and I think I really credit my enjoyment and my continued enjoyment of academia with having a program like Orbits and something else to focus on that I really value and I'm just so happy to be a part of. But Orbits is a nationwide project in the UK where we partner, essentially we take our researchers from our department and the work that they work on.

and we partner them with a secondary school, a local secondary school, essentially to try and get, we try and send these researchers to secondary schools in maybe more deprived, less privileged areas so that they are accessing and interacting with kids from demographics that wouldn't necessarily get these opportunities elsewhere. Because there are similar opportunities and programs that exist.

They just aren't necessarily targeting the same groups in the same areas. So what this researcher does is they go in pretty much every week, like every week that the school is in and they don't have like parents evening or half term or anything in the way. This researcher will go in and run some research project with the school kids.

An actual research project, that's so cool.

Yeah, so essentially it's almost like outsourcing your data problems to a big group of like 14, 15 year olds and trying to get them as excited for it as you are. Well, also, yeah,

so it benefits both ways.

in theory, like that's the best case. And pretty much the majority of our projects do work out that way, which is a really nice thing to be able to say. So ideally it benefits all of the parties involved, including the teachers we see as well.

because when the researcher goes in, the entire thing, all we really need from the teachers is for them to be there. They can be as engaged with what we do or distracted by their work as they need to be because they'll obviously have a lot of other commitments. Being a teacher is hard and time consuming. I'm sure we all realize that, but it's something that I definitely no longer take for granted.

I've got friends who are teachers and they are the hardest working people. I know the hours that they do. It's like people are teachers only work 93. It's like, no, no, they do one of their jobs 93. Prior to that, they're in preparing in the classroom. After that, they're preparing for the lessons the next day. Like it's, it's unbelievable.

Yeah, so we kind of try and make it so that we're not demanding like time or like effort from them other than being there. And then, but then what we do find is that oftentimes the teachers, maybe they do have other responsibilities and they're doing their marking, but definitely you can see them be interested and get

Hmm.

involved. And that's a really nice thing to see as well to know that when, when this, when everything comes together as we intend. everyone gets some kind of benefit from it. Yeah, so what else about orbits? I mean, that's the main thing.

I have a question about Orbit. How come that you expanded this project and bringing it into hospital school as well? Because something is going to schools, something different is going to hospitals.

Yeah, so actually I was just thinking of how to explain this because it was kind of a serendipitous series of events. So before I actually got involved with Orbits, I unfortunately in around the second year of my PhD had another poor period of health with Crohn's disease. I became immune to my medication and they had to change it. And in that period, things were uncontrolled to put it lightly.

And that was the year that I'd actually, I'd heard about all this and it's something that I'd always intended to do as part of my PhD. But unfortunately that year I'd had to say realistically, like I can't commit to this. Things are just a bit too unpredictable. And I really wouldn't want to go into school and get all these kids super excited for the science we're doing and then have to pull out because of, you

Mm.

know, it would be completely unavoidable, but I wouldn't want to do that. So instead like, Dr. Will Dunn, is one of the coordinators of Orbits, he said that I should come and get involved with the Orbits conference instead because it's a one-day

Mm.

commitment and you know if I'm well enough that's totally fine. And it also so happened that one of the school children that had, well children seems the wrong word, school teenagers who was involved

Yeah.

in Orbits had recently been diagnosed with with Crohn's as well.

okay.

And so it was a nice opportunity for them to meet me and maybe have that conversation with someone who

Mm.

can offer a perspective. It might be a bit harder, but if you really want to be here, there's a seat at the table for you in science.

Yeah.

It might just take a different amount of time for you to get there to your peers, and you might become a tattoo artist first or whatever.

Hahaha.

You

That's totally valid.

Yeah.

So yeah, and so that was my kind of entry point into Orbits and seeing that I could have this impact. And actually it was this student who suggested, they wrote to Will and they said, you know, what would be really cool because Orbits had been such a safe space for them and something that they could still enjoy while they were not able to attend schools regularly and they had other stuff going on understandably. They were like, you should really think about if you could spin this out or do a pilot.

of it in a hospital school.

Mm.

And I think they even mentioned that what would be really cool would be if Alex was involved with that. I was like, that would be really cool actually.

Yeah.

So I reached out to Great Ormond Street, which is actually, again, very poetically where I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. And I explained what all this was to them. And I said, you know, we acknowledge that the format's going to have to be different and that logistically it might be a bit more difficult.

to run it here, but I would be really keen to try and, you know, I will try and deal with some of those logistical problems and hurdles to make this work, if that's possible. And so, yeah, it took a little bit more and it required changing the structure of a traditional orbits project and also me to sit down and think about how I could design a project that was most accessible in this kind of setting.

But yeah, eventually it worked and we were able to run a pilot year with Great Ormond Street. And that was during the third year of my PhD. I think probably one of the most rewarding things that I've done as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, I had a really great time. So what we did was we remotely monitored some very active stars in the aerial target list. So for the future space mission that me and Lorenzo are involved in.

Mm-hmm.

We used a ground-based network of telescopes called the Las Cumbres Observatory. There's seven

Mm-hmm.

different locations. So we picked some stars that we know are going to be particularly difficult or, you know, active spicy stars. Well, I put together a target list of these stars and then I made the mistake of saying that one of them, A.U. Mick, is particularly popular and renowned for being a very active and variable and tantrum-y style and they were

Mm-hmm

like, we love that one, we want to do that one, fine. So we actually

Yeah. Yeah.

spent all of our observing time looking at AUMIC but it was really great because the scientific results were strong. In fact, like I'm still getting around to it but they are, I believe, publishable. We observed a lot

Mmm. That's amazing.

of flares, in fact so many so that the first, so this was the first year that I ran that particular project and we observed so many flares that we couldn't even cover the rotation period of the star because it was just so active. Yeah.

wow, it's just like lost in all the flare data.

Which was quite cool on one hand,

Mmm.

irritating on the other if what you really wanted to know was the rotation period. Luckily, other people have done it far more rigorously than that, so we do know. But no, it's very, very interesting and good for me as well as someone who doesn't do a lot of observations. So I also got to explore like a different different field and different expertise that I didn't have and just make it up as I go along.

What sort of impact did it have on the children of Great Ormond Street and then the children in the other schools to be involved in this kind of work?

Yeah, I think the impact is probably just in so many different directions. What we usually do for all Orbit's projects is we do some surveys before and afterwards to kind of measure and evaluate our impact and see if there's anything that we can do better the next years we run it and things like that. And so equivalently with the hospital school project, one of the things...

Typically what we see the students respond as like the best thing or what they found the most valuable is actually not the research itself, although that's always a close second, but they particularly like actually just getting to know a real researcher and seeing them on

Yeah.

a regular basis. Like, so one of the things of like a lot of outreach we do is typically like a one-off thing. Like you go and give a talk, like you do some kind of demonstration.

but it doesn't really give us the opportunity to be like our complete well-rounded selves. Especially because like, I don't know about you, but I've given a lot of outreach talks now. And so sometimes it comes out really polished and I'm like, I'm sure that's great. But it does reinforce maybe some stereotypes that you have to be highly intelligent or you have to be a certain type of person to go into science. Whereas if you go and you do your real research with a group of students on like a weekly basis.

they see you as like a whole person who is fallible.

Yeah.

And, you know, once you've watched me live code, you can say with certainty that you do not have to be. No, it's terrifying. But you can...

I would never live code. my goodness Live code

Hahaha

live maths. my goodness. I the other podcasts

Absolutely, yeah.

I do I like try to do some maths on the fly and it was easy maths and it was Horrendous and it was just totally wrong. It was her ass just so embarrassing So like now whenever I go and give talks, I just got a calculator with me because I refuse I'm not doing it. I just don't trust myself Cat of autumn, I know she does it.

Yeah.

I cannot even sum up what I'm buying in a supermarket I can't do math to live for a classroom it's no way, no way

No. It's horrendous.

it's kind of good. It feels like good practice for maybe one day having a position with lecturing responsibilities because you

Nah, calculator. Don't care.

know, yeah, no, I'm like 100%. I'm like, we do all the maths and we practice everything beforehand. None of this, like, you know, once you've been corrected by a group of 15 year olds and you're like, ah, yes, I was testing you. And it's

Yeah.

so clear that you absolutely were not. You just got it wrong. Which actually,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

no, that's not what I'd say. The best thing you can say in that instance is, oh. I made a mistake because actually it's really important because they then see

Yeah.

that we all make mistakes. the problem I think, or one of the problems with the how school teaches science and like the syllabus is the only named people you see are the huge geniuses.

Yeah.

and they aren't like amazing stories and like they've advanced our scientific knowledge so much, but they are not relatable people at no point have I ever woken up yet.

Yeah, because they are one in a million.

Yeah, and science isn't about the one in the middle, particularly now, like science is so collaborative. It's not about just being the one in the million. It's about how you can communicate what you've done, how many people you can work with, how well you work in a big group.

could not agree more.

One of my favorite things actually that I show, and Lorenzo, Lorenzo is actually in this photo, I believe. But one of the things I like to show in the first session I do with Orbits or any kind of similar outreach is that we had an aerial consortium meeting that had a photo booth one year. And it had a photo booth with props and like fun space backgrounds. And we were having the best time. Well, some of us were, like it was quite...

underused and they kept asking us if we wanted to take more photos and we were like yes.

Ha ha

Yeah.

And so I have a lot of photos of,

I have them on my desk.

I have them on my

Yeah.

desk as well, like they're there for, they will be with me for life. But one of them in particular I like to use because it has my PhD supervisor, Professor Giovanna Tinetti, who's also the PI of Arial, and she's wearing thug life glasses and

Ha!

striking like a really fun pose. And so what I really like to do is show this fun photo and then I label it with all the people and like what they do and like what they work on.

Mmm.

And it really, I think I was like, you really does humanize us as people,

Yeah.

maybe not in the way that we want to be construed, but I actually think those kinds of things are great because science can feel very like rigid in some ways. And so if you feel like you don't fit into that mold.

you might be less inclined to pursue a career in science. And I think that's one of the other important things to break.

Yeah. do you think that the Orbits project is inspiring the students to maybe consider science because they're seeing someone like you, they're seeing that the scientists can still have fun and things like that.

I think absolutely. we've been running and I say we, I've only been involved with the Orbitz management team for the past like two and a half, three years. And Orbitz has been running since about 2015. So we've kind of been existed for enough years where we can start to see the impact. And from the responses that we get, where we send out forms and we try to be scientists and collate data in some way, we do see...

In some schools we saw 100 % increases in the number of girls that go on to take A-level visits. yeah,

my goodness, that's impressive.

so like doubling your the number of girls in your cohort because they had a space where they were heard

Mm-hmm.

equally and encouraged and maybe, you know, even if they didn't have a female researcher that came in, we try and get our researchers, we give them a lot of training and then we try and get them to make it like...

to think about how they can make these sessions as inclusive as possible without it being like too pushy or like the focus, just a natural consequence of being involved in research is that like everyone's voice should be heard equally and actually having so many different perspectives and different backgrounds is only ever really beneficial to science because it gives you...

100%.

You're just summarizing an entire different culture, research culture. You're basically redesigning all the way we are doing science. It's beautiful. You're mentioning equality. You're mentioning humanization. You're mentioning inclusivity. You're mentioning all the values that more and more in the last years, I think, we are bringing into science. And this is amazing because you are pushing it forward because you are teaching them.

the new generation starting from what

Mm.

is 7th grade.

Yeah, I think actually, so I actually did also do, I did a Christmas lecture and a STEM club practical at a school where we did have, it was down to year seven. So I had 11 year olds asking me, I was drawing like the interior of stars. And I was like, this is the radiative zone and this is the convective zone. And then they were just like, okay, but like, why, why is this star more active than this one? Like,

Yeah.

why is Trappist-1 active when it's like billions of years old? explain and I was like,

They ask the best questions kids, they really get into the nitty gritty and they do quite often ask questions that there is no answer for yet. But then you can always tell them, like, we don't know yet, maybe you'll be the one to find that answer. And then they're like, maybe it will be me.

They are the best research assistants. They ask the questions you don't dare to ask.

yeah and then you're like that's a good point i better go and investigate that

Yeah, they're kind of like the worst thing a paper reviewer could ask you at any given point. is,

Ahahaha, yeah.

You

so it is really good practice, I find. Like I've not been asked even half of the amount of harsh questions at like a conference with other

Yeah.

researchers as I've been asked in a classroom with like 14 year olds and 15 year olds.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, so we definitely do see impact. We see it in...

in the quality of the impact that we're going for is like making real change with like a small class size like typically we would like to have 10 to 15 is quite a good number any more than that we also try and sometimes we partner researchers together so particularly if you have a more experienced researcher that's done orbits the previous year or and you have a first year PhD student for example who's really interested in the ethos of everything but hasn't fully cemented themselves in their research yet because

Yeah.

they might have only just started. So in that kind of situation, we like to kind of pair them up so that they

Mmm.

get the experience of going in and doing these projects. And it can also help them think about the direction they want to take their research into. Like I've shifted the direction of my research for because of orbits and in terms of what I wanted to do and what's more fun and interactive. So.

I think

I say,

it's made me more well-rounded research because of it.

Has it given other researchers pause for thought or has it enabled them to complete research that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to just because of time and hands and things like that?

Yeah, I honestly think so. we actually quite a large number of or substantial number of the projects do end in publication, either

Mmm.

to some kind of either an articles like we have a column with the RAS, H &G magazine or at times in real journals. So while we say like that shouldn't be the indicator of whether a project succeeded or not. Like the actual indicator is like, did everyone have a good time? Has it given them a perspective of like whether or not they want to go into science? Because actually like some of the best students that I've had or the most engaged, when you ask them like, do you want to go in like, are you considering a career in STEM? They're like, no. But it's because they've got like a really clear understanding that they want to do something else like politics. And

Yeah.

I'm like, okay. It's a shame because STEM would really benefit from you, but at least you kind of, it's having that wider perspective.

Yeah, for sure.

I love what you say, STEM will really benefit from you.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think it's really important to realise how much potential everyone has to offer and particularly the younger generation. I do try and not be condescending or impose anything kind of rigid idea of this is how we do science because I think how we do science is very fluid and changing with people and with different methodology and different ways of thinking.

So I'm certainly not going to go into a room and be like, if you don't do it this way, you're doing it wrong. Which I think is what makes it so refreshing to do real research because when typically like physics, chemistry, biology, all of those are more exam based and there is a right answer. And the thing about research is, well, ideally there is a right answer, but you don't know it. No one

Mm.

knows it yet. That's what you're aiming for.

Yeah.

And so I think it's that. kind of discovery in that journey that makes is what makes science and STEM so like exhilarating and fun when things are going well when things are going badly you're like my goodness

Yeah, it's a nightmare, It's a nightmare.

I always say frustration is part of the process but there's a lot of frustration involved sometimes.

is yeah yeah

Yeah, some days I'm just like, my god, I can't believe that like, I'm this worked up and I'm just looking at stars, But.

So I am now gonna put on my eight-year-old hat and ask you a difficult question. Right, my difficult question is our ending question, which we always ask everyone at the end of the episode. Which is, it's not easy, it really makes people think. And our question is, if you had to choose one celestial body, a star, a planet or something else entirely that represents you, what would it be and why.

I think I'm going to have to stay true to my research roots. If I picked anything other than a really horrifically active dwarf star, I would be

Hahaha

doing a disservice to my field. So I think I'm going to go with AU Mick. It's a very young star constantly having tantrums. It's more of a baby than an early career researcher, but I throw lots of tantrums too and my code doesn't work. So it was like,

You

and yeah, I just admire, I like the idea of living forever and just being chaotic the whole time. Like I truly also aspire to never calm down.

yeah oh that's a great choice i love that

Alex, thank you for being with us and thank you for reminding us that science isn't only about discovering new worlds, but also about opening doors so that more people can take part in discovering them.

thank you to everyone listening. Join us next time on Growing Worlds as we explore another corner of the universe and the people bringing it closer. Thanks again Alex.