In Conversation with Skylar Grayson
As an astrophysics PhD student at Arizona State University, Skylar Grayson studies galactic downsizing due to active galactic nuclei feedback. Combining her field of research with a long-standing passion for teaching, Skylar began a TikTok account in February 2022 where she regularly uploads science communication videos, as well as content surrounding her life as a PhD student. In an insightful interview with the Youth STEM Matters Team, led by Olivia Johnson & Tatenda Murigo, Skylar shares her thoughts on working in STEM, how her field can become more inclusive for women and minority groups, and the importance of communicating science and engaging a wide audience.
Skylar Grayson
Olivia: For those unfamiliar with astrophysics, could you give us a brief overview of the subject, and what it is specifically that you're studying in your PhD?
Skylar: Astrophysics is generally the study of space, and it's kind of a combination of astronomy and physics, where astronomy is studying space, and then you need physics to do that. There are tonnes of different subfields in astrophysics; you can do anything from studying the processes within our own Sun, looking at how our solar system was created, to studying specific planets and their atmospheres, and studying the structure of our Milky Way or other galaxies. And then, on a large scale, how did the universe start? What is going to happen to it? What are the components of the universe?
So, I fall in a large to intermediate scale research, I would say. I am a computational extragalactic astronomer. Computational means that I use simulations to do my research. There are a lot of astrophysicists who use telescopes and observation. I don't do that, I run simulations to model the universe and we do compare that to observation, but my work involves a lot of coding. And then the extragalactic part just means galaxies other than the Milky Way. So I'm studying how galaxies evolve over time. Most large galaxies have a supermassive black hole in their centre and sometimes those become really active, and can end up shooting material out of the galaxies - that specific process is what I study in my research to look at how galaxies get smaller over time by losing gas and the matter that would normally go into forming stars.
Tatenda: Amazing, thank you so much! Following on from what you mentioned about using simulations and being able to model the universe, could you talk us through the Simba simulation software? How does it advance your research quality and what prospective astrophysics students can learn again, from the platform?
Skylar: There are lots of different simulations used in astronomy, and the Simba simulation is in a suite of galactic evolution type simulations. Essentially, it starts at the beginning of the universe, where it puts a general structure in place with dark matter, and then allows gas to collect and stars to form and galaxies to form from that. You can run it with a bunch of different parameters. The most useful thing about simulation work is you can change things like, how does dark matter behave? Or how does a black hole end up shooting material out? Then, depending on the results that you get, you can compare it to observation, and that's how we figure out what's actually going on in the universe. When you just have observational astronomy, you look at a picture and you're like, “oh, that's cool”, but there's not necessarily a way of knowing what caused it. So that's where the computational work comes in. The Simba simulation is kind of a modified version of Gizmo, which is one of the more well known simulations, that can model thousands of galaxies at once going over the entire course of the universe. They take weeks to run on supercomputers, and there's a lot of data that gets output from it. You can do all sorts of stuff with it from spectroscopy, to looking at halo formation, galactic mass, or what I do, which is studying the cosmic microwave background, and how the galaxies impact the light from the cosmic microwave background. That's kind of the tool that we use to understand these black hole outflows, but there’s all sorts of applications.
Olivia: That's interesting! Moving away from that, as a woman in STEM, what kind of challenges have you faced and what did you do to overcome them? And, do you think there's more that we can do to encourage girls into fields like or related to astrophysics?
Skylar: I have been lucky in a lot of ways. I grew up in a household where I was encouraged to explore all of my academic options, which is not necessarily the case for everybody. I had a dad who was an engineer and so he was really into maths and which got me excited about it too. And when I got to college, I had women advisors in both physics and astronomy. That was a huge thing that impacted my experience because having advisors and mentors to look at you and understand more about your experience can go a long way to keeping you interested in the field.
However, I also have had a lot of research experiences and seen how in industries, there is a clear divide between how women and men have been treated in the field. My first ever internship was at a pharmaceutical company, and when I started there, there were about ten senior chemists and none of them were women. I also had an internship at a national lab working on nanomaterials, and out of about 15 people in the research group there was only one other woman and I was also the youngest in the room. In general, there were a lot of condescending tones, microaggressions and unfair treatment in that setting. That experience made me doubt whether I wanted to continue on the scientific path, and is why I think the environment is really important when it comes to encouraging more girls to get into STEM.
“I think that is important to help show young women that progress is not always linear.”
There have also been a lot of studies showing that doing badly in one class or on one test has a much larger impact on a woman's self-image of her capability than it does on a man. I think that is important to help show young women that progress is not always linear. I failed midterms and I'm still here. Sharing both the successes and failures of your scientific journey is important because imposter syndrome can really get in the way of things. I have experienced it myself and so I think sharing that experience is important so that people feel less alone while overcoming challenges on their own too. I believe that is one way we could be doing more to help encourage more girls.
Lastly, I think having people to look up to, who you can relate to and who have similar life experiences and stories is also crucial. This is because most of the high-level, tenured professors at especially large institutions in the US are old white men and they aren't always the most encouraging to young women interested in a field related to STEM. That is why we need more women professors and more people of colour in leadership positions so that students have people to look up to and who can understand them. I think changing that kind of culture in academia is something that has begun but is making slow progress. There is definitely still a long way to go.
Tatenda: Thank you so much for answering that question. I think it is great that you talked about what is needed for growth and advancement within the world of STEM. You also mentioned changing the culture within the field of astrophysics and the scientific world and I know that something that you are quite passionate about is playing the drums. So, I was wondering if you thought that there was a space for the arts within STEM fields and maybe particularly in relation to science communication?
Skylar: That is a great question! I know a lot of people who went into mathematics or physics and are also musicians, and I think there's a lot of similar brain stuff happening there, like the ability to use numbers and process a lot of information and memorise and keep things in your head.
I also think that playing the drums and creating music on my platform is partially for entertainment, because although I like giving out scientific information, I do not want to be only explaining how physics works all the time. I think it is important to make yourself relatable and use humour as much as possible, which is the reason why I incorporate drumming. I also think that humanising scientists is a really important thing that needs to happen more. For instance, when you think of an astrophysicist you usually think of the Big Bang Theory type of people which shows these very socially awkward people who do not know how to talk to women and are just kind of aloof from the rest of society. I think that that in itself is discouraging to young people who are thinking “I feel like a pretty normal person, I am not a genius, I struggle, I fail tests, I don't think I can be a scientist”. So showing people that scientists also have struggles and hobbies outside of science can help STEM become more approachable as a field. That is why I think it is really important to bring scientists down from this completely unapproachable level to where someone can say that “I can see myself doing that one day”.
Olivia: Yeah, definitely. I play a couple of instruments and I think a lot of the thinking involved with how you do it is slightly different, but can help within science and science can help within music theory too. With new developments, like the recent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), how do you think that's going to affect how we study the universe? And what sort of data will we get from the JWST?
Skylar: We will get all sorts of data because technology is constantly improving in the realm of astronomy and JWST is just one very high-profile example of that. JWST is focusing on a lot of different subfields, but for me, working in the extragalactic field, I'm most interested in what it can see of the early universe because it can see further back in time to some of the earliest galaxies that we've never seen before, and we don't have a complete understanding of how galaxies form in the first place. I think that's something really exciting that JWST is going to help us understand a lot better. I have a lot of friends who do exoplanetary (planets not in our solar system) research and JWST is helpful in getting very high-resolution data telling us about the compositions of atmospheres, which is super useful for understanding how other solar systems formed and how potentially there could be life elsewhere, which is a very exciting thing.
Within the field of stellar astrophysics (studying how stars evolve), JWST can see into more dusty clouded regions, because infrared light doesn't get blocked by dust the same way that visible light does. So with JWST, we can see more into regions where star formation is happening, where stars are ending their lives and we can learn a lot more about that. So there are tonnes of amazing things that can come from JWST. It's been giving out data for a couple of months now and there are already a lot of exciting research papers coming out - like a ridiculous number of papers coming out, but you can't keep track of it all. It's definitely a very exciting thing for the field. Even if, like me, you're never going to use the data, it's going to be really helpful to further our understanding of the universe.
Tatenda: I think it's definitely something to look forward to, and just running along that line, what do you think are going to be the most exciting areas of astrophysics in the next decade?
Skylar: Well, there's a lot more solar system exploration that is starting and I think that is super exciting. One of the big fields right now is understanding how our solar system formed and how we came to be on Earth. All of these missions, like going to the moon, going to asteroids, going further out towards Jupiter out and into the Kuiper Belt. They help us put together a complete picture of the chemical composition of the early solar system, which can help us understand where water was and how it got here and all of these other important things.
Also, I think because of JWST, the fields of extragalactic astronomy and cosmology are going to really expand because we're just going to get so much more data than we ever had of these early galaxies. Even with my research, I use the cosmic microwave background to study galactic evolution and we have a new camera that we just put on a large millimetre telescope in Mexico and it has a higher resolution than anything we've ever seen before, so we can get better data. This is just one camera on one telescope that nobody really knows about, unless you're interested in this very specific field, but even that can have a really big impact on whatever niche research you're doing.
Olivia: It's all very exciting! I'm looking forward to seeing what's coming next! Concerning your secondary project in education research, we’ve been swapping between being off and online for two years during COVID-19 and we all relied on online technologies so much. How do you think we'll carry on using online resources now that we’re allowed back into schools and universities?
Skylar: It's interesting: my secondary research is with a specific group because Arizona State University (ASU) where I school has a very large online education programme where students probably never come to campus over the course of their degree. So ASU is really working on advancing the type of things that can be done online. The tools that are developed for this fully online programme can be brought to mixed virtual and in-person classrooms, or in the case of a COVID-19 outbreak, they can move it online more easily. So my research specifically is on undergraduate students getting research experiences online and that is something that is really crucial. If you're interested in going into an upper-level degree or doing research in your career as an undergraduate, you should try to get experience so you can know: a) if you actually like doing research, and b) how the research process works. So, we're developing research experiences that can be done online and I think that there's a possibility of translating into more in-person classes using the tools. There are a couple of in-person classes that use essentially online programmes, especially in astronomy, for coding and that can be done online or in person. Therefore developing these tools is super crucial for both.
There's also a lot of virtual field trips that happened during COVID-19, and I think that those tools are continuing to be developed, and can be really useful for the future if students have accessibility needs, or bad weather happens. Whatever it is, there will be more options and backups to make science more accessible. I think that one of the great things about online programmes is that people who have families or can’t access in-person education as easily can still study and follow their passions. So developing these tools is really useful for that, and then they can also be applied to in-person classrooms to make the experience more inclusive.
Tatenda: Yeah, I think it's really great to see how, even with the advent of COVID-19, it has helped people expand and broaden their view of how they could still pursue education and pursue knowledge. With the effect of COVID-19 in the last couple of years, as well as the climate emergency, science is becoming increasingly important in the news and our lives. What do you think is the best way of ensuring that people understand facts and the real story rather than holding on to fake news?
“I think that communicating more about our research and our results in a way that is digestible and understandable - without needing any advanced degree - is super important.”
Skylar: That’s a big problem at the moment. I don't think there is one right answer or easy way to fix it because the fact is a lot of people don't want to hear the truth. Especially when it comes to things like the climate crisis, some people would rather just deny that it's happening. I think having more actual scientists communicate with the public is really important, especially in fields like astrophysics. We say we study scientific courses largely for the advancement of humanity's collective knowledge about our place in the universe, but then we put our research in dense and complicated scientific papers that even if you have an advanced degree, it can be a headache to read them. I think that communicating more about our research and our results in a way that is digestible and understandable - without needing any advanced degree - is super important. That's partially why I started doing science communication so that people can understand more about how science works and how it's being done.
I think another great way of doing things is allowing people to work with the raw data themselves. There's one example that comes to mind: my advisor, who I'm working with for my education research, is working with a student in Boston who is a biologist, and they developed this active learning research programme where students can look at data about kelp forests. They then look at how kelp has decreased along coastlines over time and they actually work with the raw data, where no processing has been done, and create trend lines for themselves. I think a lot of mistrust comes from the public saying, “you're just putting out false colour images” or “who knows what the scientists did to the data”, so I think there are ways you can bring raw data into classrooms to help students understand a bit more and come to those conclusions themselves. Intro Astronomy is one of the most popular classes for non-majors and it's often the last science class that people take in their entire lifetime. So incorporating things where people can look at raw data and come to conclusions themselves in those classes is really important and I think that is useful within a classroom.
With the public at large, sharing real information is the only strategy that I have right now to combat misinformation. I would also encourage people to do their research. Recently, there was this headline going around about how JWST disproved the Big Bang, which it didn't. But I had lots of people asking me questions about it in my life and if you just do some Google searches and look up the scientists quoted in that article, you'll see that they are misinterpreting the data and quoting the scientists out of context. So it's very easy to fact-check for yourself. A couple of quick Google searches when you see a big flashy headline about how science is forever changed can be very useful, and I would encourage people to do that.
Olivia: Yeah, thank you so much. I really like the idea of giving people raw data. I think that's really interesting, and it’s one that I know I hadn't thought of before. So we got the first images from the JWST in July, and I was just wondering if you had a favourite image?
Skylar: They're all very different, but I think I'm gonna go with Stephan's Quintet, because it has a lot of stuff going on in it. There is kind of a deep field in the background, you can see so many galaxies around it, which is one of the amazing things about all of the JWST images; they're just full of galaxies. And then the actual galaxies in this quintet are really interesting, as they're merging and combining, and you can see these trails from tidal effects. And, one of them has one of these active black holes that I was talking about and so they got a bunch of data about that. So I think it's one of the most scientifically rich images that we got. I mean, the deep field is definitely very scientifically rich, but it's between those two and I'm going to pick Stephan's Quintet!
Olivia: Yeah, I love them all! Maybe not from quite as scientific a point of view but I think they’re all incredible.
Skylar: Well, the southern Ring Nebula made me cry when I first saw it. It's just a beautiful image. So they're really all amazing.
Shayla: Do astrophysicists travel a lot for telescopes and other work related things around the world?
Skylar: I'm more on that computational side rather than the observational side, but if you are an observational astronomer, yes, there's tonnes of travel involved. That said, telescopes are becoming more and more easy to control remotely. So a big part of being an observational astronomer is you have to apply for time on the big telescopes. Then, depending on the telescope, sometimes you travel there and the telescope is at the top of the mountain and you just sit on the bottom and control it, or you can just do it from your own office at home. So it's kind of a case by case basis, but there's definitely a lot of potential to travel.
For example, I have several friends who work in radio astronomy, who are going to New Mexico to work with the Very Large Array for a while. I've had people I know go to Hawaii, down to Chile, down to Mexico to work on this camera, so tonnes of travel in that. And then even if you're not an observational astronomer, there is a lot of travel that happens around conferences.
A big part of science is communication with other scientists so there are these conferences that get put on all around the world, and typically, you can get funding through your grants to go to them. I haven't gone to one, partially because COVID-19 kind of wrecked the last couple of years in my undergraduate experience, and I have no results yet with my graduate research, but I will be going to more in the future, and there's a lot of travel involved in that.
Maddy: Earlier, you mentioned that the image of a physicist in the past has been very, cold and calculating and aloof to the world. I was wondering how if you could change that image to present to young people, what you would like the image of a physicist to be mostly based on? And what habits have you recognised are really important?
Skylar: That's a great question. I think the biggest one is just more diversity, like if you ask students to draw scientists, they often draw Albert Einstein. And I think, immediately, having more women, having more people of colour in the mental image of a scientist, just from a physical standpoint is important. And then, in terms of the character traits, most people I know are pretty normal humans, like, we go out, we joke, we play Monopoly on the weekends and have game nights and stuff like that.
“ I truly believe that if you put in the work, you can be good at something even if you didn’t think you were.”
I think maybe an overarching factor is just a willingness to work hard, because science or maths doesn't come easily to most people. This whole idea of all scientists being naturally good at maths, and you just coast through all your classes is just not true. We nearly all struggled with classes, and we worked really hard, and I think that a more realistic image is one of people who are passionate about something and willing to put in the work to get good at it. I truly believe that if you put in the work, you can be good at something even if you didn't think you were. I see this often, especially with maths, with lots and lots of people commenting, “oh, I would love to do astronomy, but I'm so bad at maths”, but I believe maths is something that you can learn, and you can practise and get better at in most cases. There are of course some people who have dyscalculia that definitely makes it harder and I don't want to diminish that. But in general, I think that showing people that you can learn these things, no scientist knows everything when they start. I feel like I know 0.01% about my field, and I'm getting my PhD right now. So, this image of somebody who doesn't know everything, but is curious and passionate about the field and works hard to learn, I think is kind of the overarching thing I see in the scientists around me.
Olivia: Yeah, that sort of you can practice maths and get better at it was such an epiphany to me because there was something last year that I was struggling with, and then I ended up just practising it, and I could do it.
Skylar: My sister was really good at maths and I actually helped tutor her when she was in fifth grade, because she wanted to get ahead a grade in maths, and she was really great at it. And then she took a geometry class in her freshman year of high school and she didn't do very well in it. Ever since then she's like, “I'm so bad at maths, I can't do it, I don't know how you do it”, but I know that's not true - I've seen her be good at maths! Especially for young women, if you do poorly in one thing, that sometimes completely changes your mental image of your capabilities. And so, you can know how to do something, fail once and then say I'm out and I think that's something that needs to be combated a little bit more and we need to encourage people to question: “if I just worked on it, do I think I could learn it?”, because the answer is almost always yes.
Mhairi: I know there’s probably no two days that look the same, but what does a typical day in your life look like?
Skylar: I just started my semester, so I am taking a couple of classes, so on a typical day I have classes, do the homework, do the studying, the usual student stuff. But over the summer, I was a full time researcher, so it definitely does vary. It especially varies because, like I mentioned, these simulations can run for days and weeks. Sometimes I just get something running, and then I'm just waiting around for it to be done…But when it is done, it's a lot of coding, and you write these codes to analyse the data, you create plots, you try to understand what's going on, you debug your code over and over and over again. There's a very classic meme that says something like, “I got a different error message, success!” and that's kind of how it works. On a day to day basis, I do try to read literature, see what sort of articles have come out, get some background about my own field. But mostly, it's just a lot of coding and data analysis and trying to figure out what the next thing we want to run is and figure out if the data that we have is actually legit - we spent a whole year working on a dataset and then realise that the sample size wasn't large enough, and we had to use a completely different simulation. So, I had to kind of start from square one recently, which is normal. That's how science works. It's a lot of trial and error, but there is a general trend line upwards.
I don't want to sound too negative about coding - it can be very frustrating and a lot of debugging. But it is also really, really satisfying when you get results. And taking a step back and being like I am staring at this simulation that shows 1000s of galaxies over the course of billions of years; that's amazing. It's amazing that we can model that and it's amazing how much science we can do. So while yes, it can be frustrating, I think there is a lot of satisfaction in like, this is cool research that I'm doing and staring at pretty pictures every once in a while is nice.
Izzy: So the search for dark matter, it's been going on for quite a while now, since the 1930s. I was just wondering if your research has revealed anything interesting about the nature of dark matter or what possibly could be?
Skylar: The research that I did as an undergraduate was on one very specific model of dark matter and this is dark matter that is self interacting. So the “standard” model of dark matter is something that's collisionless and cold, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) kind of fit into that paradigm, they just clump together. But self-interacting dark matter can bounce off itself and scatter and transfer heat and energy, and in some cases actually form bound states. So that's what my research was looking at, it was looking at this one specific model of dark matter that could form bound states. You can think of it like the nuclei of an atom, except it could get up to billions of particles in one bound state because we were working with a model that didn't have any repulsive forces, like there is in electromagnetism. This kind of self-interacting dark matter model has some successes, over the more standard model of cold and collisionless dark matter, and it can preserve a lot of the successes of cold and collisionless dark matter. The research we were doing was mainly theoretical maths, we were seeing how this would behave. There's been no success in directly detecting dark matter, which is kind of frustrating, and the reason I didn't continue my dark matter research into graduate school is I felt we might not know this in my lifetime. That's a somewhat pessimistic view, a lot of people are way more optimistic about the dark matter detectors. It was kind of just a personal feeling of, “I would rather do something that we can compare to observation”. Although I moved away from it, the research was really interesting, and we were studying how big these bound states could get and also what the clues would be if they were actually out there in the universe. So it was exciting research, it was interesting - it just wasn't what I wanted to do for five more years.
Maddy: I was wondering if during your undergrad, if you always knew (or at what point you knew) you wanted to pursue research? Or if there was ever a point where you wanted to go into industry and what that might have looked like?
Skylar: For me, the question was actually, initially more about whether I wanted to do astrophysics at all. When I went into undergrad, I was debating between astrophysics, chemistry, because I'd worked in a pharmaceutical lab and enjoyed it, political science and environmental studies, because I did a lot of climate activism in high school and so I was also interested in that. When I started taking classes in each of these fields, that's when I realised astronomy is what I'm actually interested in. From there, I always knew I wanted to go the academia research route, because I really love teaching. I've always taught in some way or another, I taught percussionists in high school, I coached mountain bikers, I tutored all throughout undergrad. So while I really love the research process, and wanted to do that, my mind was always more towards academia, so that I could also teach.
Now, I'm one year into my PhD programme, I’ve got four years to go and a lot can change in that time. I'm discovering that the science communication thing can really fill that gap of teaching and so I'm keeping my options open, because you can do research in industry and then also do things like science communication, to teach and share that with the public. But that was my mindset pretty much as soon as I decided to go into astrophysics, I wanted to do it in a way that I could also teach.
Olivia: From your TikTok account it's really clear that you're enthusiastic, not just about astrophysics, but about science communication and sharing your enthusiasm with a greater audience. So what is it that you find so enjoyable in it, and where does that sort of passion come from?
“Science communication has helped remind me why I love this field so much.”
Skylar: I think a lot of it is almost an innate passion for teaching. I've just always loved doing it. When my sister was like three and I was seven, I would set up a summer school for her and try to teach her how to count to 10, and she would get bored after two seconds, but I just loved doing that, so I think I've always loved that teaching. As I'm getting more into the process of grad school, I’ve honestly struggled with my mental health a lot last year and had a lot of impostor syndrome issues, and I think that doing science communication has helped remind me why I love this field so much. Seeing people's excitement about learning about space can build up my own excitement, and it's this kind of positive feedback loop that's really wonderful to share passion with other people. So that's been an amazing thing. And then just kind of from a philosophical standpoint, that idea I was talking about earlier about wanting to share the research that we do with everybody - that should be the goal of science, it shouldn't be something that is separated and levelled off, like you have to be this smart to enter this knowledge bracket, I really don't believe in that, and so I feel like I should be sharing this with people. It's important, just for me, personally, to make science more accessible, and I think this is a way that I can do it. I've really enjoyed doing it, it's really just a creative outlet, and I never actually thought it would get as big as it did. I just started doing it for fun, and now, a lot of people like to hear me talk about science, which is amazing, but I'm just going to keep making the videos that make me excited, and I think that sharing that passion with people sparks passion in return.
