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Questions and Answers with Lucy Fortson

Q. You have done quite a bit of outreach, but your Nicholoson Award focuses on the Zooniverse Project. Would you tell us a bit about the project?
The Zooniverse is an online citizen science platform that engages volunteers from around the world in actively contributing to research projects hosted by the platform. The idea is that the human visual cortex is excellent at pattern recognition tasks in complex images; in many cases, we are still better than machine algorithms at classifying or annotating images or other types of data. This is really important as the big data wave really begins to hit with all the upcoming new astronomical observatories and physics experiments. And it’s not just astronomy and physics suffering from difficulties in analyzing all the data coming in – citizen science solutions with the Zooniverse can also help fields such as ecology with large arrays of camera traps, biomedicine with huge numbers of electron microscope slices through cells, and the humanities with all of recorded human endeavors to transcribe and make available for digital queries. We started in 2007 with the Galaxy Zoo project where about 150,000 volunteers participated in labeling images of about a million galaxies deciding whether they were “spiral” or “elliptical” to help disentangle certain aspects of galaxy evolution which relied on accurate morphological classifications. After a survey of our volunteers told us that the most common reason for participating was a desire to contribute to real research, we realized we could expand to other projects including more complex tasks such as detecting dips in light curve data from stars that could indicate a transiting exoplanet or picking which galaxy merger simulation best represented an actual merger image or marking on videos where a solar coronal mass ejection petered out. Since the Zooniverse platform was launched in December, 2010, we have grown to nearly 2 million volunteer participants and over 200 projects. And something I definitely want to emphasize, the annotations and other data provided by the volunteers are used in peer review research – Zooniverse projects have over 250 peer-reviewed papers so far. What’s more, some of those papers describe discoveries made by the volunteers including a new type of galaxy – Green Peas – and several exoplanets. Over the past several years, we’ve worked hard to develop tools that make it easy for researchers to build a project on their own (yes, we called it the Project Builder) and have developed rather sophisticated infrastructure into the platform so researchers can integrate machine learning techniques into their projects to accelerate the classification process while still enabling serendipitous discoveries.

Q. What have you found to be the most rewarding part of the Zooniverse Project?
I am always awed by the fact that so many people want to help push research forward in whatever way they can and get real joy through participating in our projects. I also really enjoy working closely with research teams across so many domains outside of physics, learning about their fields and applying my problem solving skills to figure out how Zooniverse can help them attain their research goals. But the best part about the Zooniverse is that it so naturally combines cutting edge research work while engaging members of the public in that research. After spending a lot of time before the Zooniverse working on ways to engage the public in the process of research that were kind of contrived at best, I still just get a big grin on my face when I see a new project up that has a fantastic research problem and volunteers just flocking to it to help. It’s been long enough since the launch of Zooniverse that in some cases, we actually have students writing in their graduate school applications about how participating in a Zooniverse project galvanized their interest in astrophysics and how they want to continue in a research program related to what they were doing. It’s pretty amazing to think that something I helped bring into existence has had such an enormous impact on so many people.

Q. Which of your outreach projects have been the most rewarding to you?
Well, it’s a bit of a funny question since I worked for many years at the Adler Planetarium, first as an Astronomer, then as Director of Astronomy and then as Vice President for Research. In that time, while still conducting my own astrophysics research as part of the VERITAS gamma ray observatory, I sunk my teeth into every imaginable way of working with the public to engage them in astrophysics. I developed content for planetarium shows, exhibit galleries and educational programs. I gave many, many public lectures and talked with kids ranging from 5 to 100 years old. I worked to get people out to our observatory to experience the wonders of looking at the night sky and I pushed for new visualization technologies to help visitors immerse themselves in some of the fantastic data and imagery that astronomy so enjoys. I also worked on policy and many national committees to help improve STEM education opportunities and the engagement of the public in the process of research. And it was at the Adler where I co-founded the Zooniverse with colleagues from Oxford and elsewhere. In many ways, all of this has been rewarding – I took the Astronomer position at the Adler way back in 1995 when I actually had 3 faculty offers, because I felt compelled to give back to the public but I didn’t want to have to give up my research which was the typical track at that time. Under University of Chicago astrophysicist David Schramm’s orchestration, the Adler had just started a program to make combining research and outreach possible with joint positions between the University of Chicago and the Adler. I believe I was the third person to be hired into such a position. So from that perspective, I have a rather unusual career trajectory spending obviously a lot more of my time in outreach than most scientists with research positions. And I found nearly all of my outreach work rewarding. For example, I loved giving presentations to the public in the Adler’s Space Visualization Lab where I could take small groups on an adventure through say, the Hubble archive image of Eta Carinae in high resolution on a “power wall” and describe the life cycle of stars using the rich detail in that image. However, the Zooniverse is by far the most important and successful program I have been involved with, so it’s only natural for me to say it’s been the most rewarding. And to see how it has evolved over the years gives me real pleasure.

Q. What advice would you give to researchers about doing outreach?
If you want to do anything in outreach, find an outreach mode that really makes you feel good too. There are so many ways to “do” outreach, the key thing is to find a way that allows you to convey your passion about science. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about your research. Maybe you’re most comfortable talking with little kids about how things work – then connect with your local primary school or church group to offer to come in for an activity. Be willing to accept that in many circumstances especially in formal education, the groups you work with may have constraints so be patient and find ways to work within those constraints. If you want to work with the public, most museums will have a volunteer program that can place you where your skills are most appropriately needed. The point is, you have to invest in doing outreach – real outreach isn’t something where you can just do a random public lecture somewhere and tick off a box for outreach. So like any investment, it takes thought, time and effort to make it rewarding for both you and the people you are outreaching to.

Speaking of outreach taking time and effort, it is important to acknowledge that it is difficult for researchers to balance all expectations on them professionally and keep a sane work-life balance at the same time. Here is where my advice is in the “do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do” category as I am notoriously overcommitted. Just try to set realistic goals for what you can accomplish. A little bit of outreach well-placed can go a long way. Being a consistent tutor in a neighborhood community center for a few hours a month can create real change; trying to develop an outreach program within your department to provide middle school girls with coding experiences because you think it will help with your Broader Impacts section on your next proposal is laudable but you need to know what you’re getting in to. Bottom line, if outreach is important to you, you will find a way to make it work. If it is not important to you, don’t force it – if you feel there are expectations on you to take on outreach that you’re not comfortable with, explore with your chair/advisor/supervisor other ways to accomplish broader impacts that may be more meaningful for you such as creating industry connections or doing service work with a professional society or contributing to policy efforts or contribute to open source coding, as just a few examples.

Q. What do you find most exciting about outreach? Most rewarding? Most difficult? Most important?
To me, the most exciting thing about outreach is it opens doors to experiences I might never have had otherwise – everything from appearing on live radio or television explaining some of the latest discoveries to serving on NASA’s Advisory Council and visiting many of the NASA Centers including Stennis where I got to watch new rocket technology being tested in the company of several astronauts. For someone who actually applied to be an astronaut (don’t ask) that was truly exciting. The most rewarding? Taking a complex topic like my research work on very-high-energy gamma-ray emission from blazars or my dissertation topic in high energy physics searching for a 4th generation quark or “just” the life cycle of stars and seeing an audience (of one or many) stay with me and seeing them get some satisfaction after I work to break down the underlying concepts in a way that is accessible for them. The most difficult? When the intended audience does not care at all about science or my efforts to make it interesting and engaging because they have too many other problems in their lives or they have turned off any critical thinking capacity they might have once had. The most important? Finding a way to reach people who don’t normally think about science and building opportunities with them and their communities so they can investigate science as part of their daily lives. And maybe, through that effort, inspiring a kid to think more broadly about the world and the universe, and becoming a scientist herself.