An Interview with Professor Richard Ellis

John and I interviewed Professor Richard Ellis this Monday. He had just returned from a ski trip in Big Bear (it's snowing there already!)

I will try to restrict only to the questions I asked but will also add some of John's questions to provide context. This is not scripted, I am constructing from notes and memory. I will maintain first and second tense use because it sounds neater.

(John): Could you tell us a bit about your early education and what lead you to your career path?
My case is a rare one in astronomy. I was into astronomy since I was 6, I built a telescope in high school, and went off to the University of Durham knowing full well I wanted to do astronomy. I always wanted to stay in academia. After a bachelor's I continued for a PhD but was quickly disillusioned. I was stuck studying the composition of the sun to high precision via transmission strength, and it was very boring and tedious. I enjoyed larger scale observational cosmology.

So after getting my PhD, I decided to quit astronomy and get a real job. I applied for computing, advertising, and editing (Nature) positions. I got the advertising position and was getting ready to move when I realized, at the last minute, I didn't want to quit astronomy.

(The following are my questions)

In the 1980's you had to struggle with funding for the Supernova Cosmology Project. How is it like juggling research with funding proposals?

It was initially just 4 of us searching for supernova. We used an observatory in Chile so once a month one of use would have to go and sift through the data. Perlmutter joined us and had the idea of attaching a camera to the telescope with more pixels so we could see through a patch of sky, one large enough to guarantee at least one supernova. Our project got bigger then and we starting finding more supernova. The problem was none of them were as far away as the one we had found earlier on, and funding became tight. I had to travel around quite a bit to insure funding.

Now searching for funding is definitely more time-consuming, especially so given the economy. I am not very ambitious and have only a small group with no post-docs because they're expensive. You can also keep moving because each time you start working somewhere new you get a big starting package.

We're particularly interested in doing SURFs this summer as undergraduates. How would you identify a good researcher?

A good researcher has to conceive the important idea, and avoid the danger of gathering data without understanding it. It's a big picture goal.

It's also the topics you choose in research. The most exciting projects are the ones that are just feasible science and skirt the edges of what we know. You need vision and determination to get a lasting result.

Collaboration and generosity is also important. Will the professor share his brightest idea with a student to work on and publish a paper on? Sometimes I've had student researchers encourage me to take a particular project on.

There's a big jump to becoming a graduate student. You don't have classes or tests. You have to learn to be independent at this point when working on projects, and I try to introduce my graduate students to that early on.

To be a good scientist and not just a good researcher you need charisma and eloquence. You have to publicize your work, engage the audience with your enthusiasm so they understand why what you're researching is interesting and deserves funding.


We visited Palomar the beginning of the year...

That's great! How was your trip?

....It was quirky and interesting. We saw the rubber ducks and gloves used to mark important features there. You were the director at Palomar and you've also worked in observatories in England, Chile, and Australia. Have you seen anything like that there?

No, I can't say I have. That's unique to the environment here.

I know I want to do astronomy but I'm not sure what field I want to specialize in. What's your advice?
 
I should add a few things about career paths. I've swapped my research interests quite a bit. I like to pursue a variety of research topics at once. I've done solar composition, supernovae extensively, dark matter recently. That's not to say I've jumped over to, say biology. But I do know a couple physicists who have jumped boat and became biologists. I guess biology doesn't have enough physicists. You're not at all limited to a single of interest as astronomers. I'm sure if I had been more assertive, I wouldn't have ended up with studying the composition of the sun for my PhD.

Well that's all the questions I have, and I think we covered all we intended to.


Did you have the stone etched with the gravitational const...

You mean the cosmological constant?


Yes, yes of course. Slip of tongue.

I did, in Peru. I asked this stonecarver in a street fair if he could carve Greek symbols and he said yes. So I told him to carve \Lambda = 0. I realized what I had done later and took the stone back and asked him if he could draw a line through the equal sign! He did and it was mailed to me a bit later.
Next to that I have this small holographic projection of a piece of the universe. It's amazing how they can 3-dimensionally project that in glass. I still don't know how they do it.