Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Star light, star bright
UA alumna is an astrophysicist working with NASA on space telescope.
It’s easy to imagine Amber Holley Straughn as a little girl: red-haired, long-legged, skin almost certainly tanned — or at least freckled — from life on a farm in Bee Branch — official population 63 at the time, she points out.
“I drove by the sign every day on my way to school.”
But that little girl dreamed big. She looked up into the “beautiful dark sky,” and she wondered what made the cosmos tick. And when the Hubble Space Telescope launched in April 1990, the fifth-grader saw the videos of scientists cheering and thought, “‘I want to be part of that, part of that science story.’ I wanted to help answer those questions I had been asking.”
Today, Straughn is a “civil servant” astrophysicist working with NASA on the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. And yes, she agrees, “It doesn’t get much better than NASA.”
ARKANSAS ROOTS
Bee Branch, an unincorporated community in Van Buren County, might not seem like the best incubator for a budding scientist. Located on U.S. 65, it’s 30 miles from Conway, the nearest thing resembling a city.
“Both of my parents were really supportive in general,” says Straughn, “but they were a little bewildered by me. I was always asking outlandish questions about the stars. I remember my mom telling me, ‘I don’t know the answers, but I know you can figure them out.’ She is still my biggest cheerleader.”
Straughn was the first person in her family to go to college, “so I didn’t have that context for wanting to be a scientist. I was a little bit of a weirdo.” But she says she got her work ethic from her father, “the quintessential example of hard work.” He was a mechanic, worked on a dairy farm, raised watermelon, beef cattle and at one
“Given her background and the things she gets to work on — like the biggest and baddest and coolest telescope in the history of Earth — she is the humblest and most genuine person you could be around.” — Amber Straughn’s husband, Matt, says about the native of Bee Branch and University of Arkansas alumna
time, pigs. “We always had a huge, beautiful vegetable garden for our family,” she remembers, adding that she’s planted one in her little backyard in Maryland the past few years. “He really modeled hard work. Mine just ended up being a different kind.”
Thanks to a counselor at South Side High School in Bee Branch, Straughn started doing summer internships as soon as she was old enough. “I would never have known about those. You get into the first one, and then it’s just stepping stones, and I followed those stepping stones all the way to NASA.”
Graduating from South Side High with 27 other students, Straughn might not have considered attending the state’s flagship college. But she found an advocate at the University of Arkansas before she ever arrived. Another student from Bee Branch told Lin Oliver, a professor of physics, “There’s this very bright young lady back home, and she loves astronomy.” Oliver asked for a copy of her senior paper, “and I was quite struck by how well she wrote and how much obvious interest there was,” he says.
New UA Chancellor John White had promised scholarships to any Arkansas high school graduate who scored a 32 or higher on the ACT, and Oliver called Straughn to invite her to apply. “She did indeed get one of those scholarships,” Oliver says. “And I thoroughly enjoyed having her in our program. She was dynamic in class and active in the department.”
“I was really lucky,” Straughn says. “My parents couldn’t have afforded to pay tuition. With the Chancellor’s Scholarship, my parents didn’t have to pay a penny. I ended up going to college at no expense to them!
“I was so excited to go to college,” she adds. “I was ready to get out of my little town even though I loved it.”
Beyond completing her undergraduate degree, two significant things happened to Straughn at the UA. One was meeting her future husband, Matt Straughn, from Little Rock. They met through their church organization, but they bonded over their passion for science — specifically Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time.
“Literally, our first conversations were about favorite books, and they were very scientifically focused books,” Matt Straughn says.
Amber Straughn also had her first contact with NASA, working with a student team on a proposal for an experiment on NASA’s microgravity KC-135 plane (the “vomit comet”) in 2001.
“We got to build it and fly it and experience weightlessness,” she says. “It was the most fun thing I’d ever done in my life — something you can’t describe in words! It got me on the path to NASA.”
Oliver, her academic adviser, says Straughn was “unusual but not singular. We’ve had others who have done amazing things. But I don’t know of any who have had the career she’s had at this point.”
FLYING HIGH
Armed with a master’s degree and a doctorate in physics from Arizona State University — received with the personal well wishes of Hawking — Straughn is now an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and serves as the deputy project scientist for James Webb Space Telescope science communications. She is also the associate director of the Astrophysics Science Division — and, in an interview, seems just as excited about it all as the little girl she describes growing up in Bee Branch. Part of her job is public speaking, “telling the story of the science we do at NASA,” she says. “It’s like the best job in the world, so who wouldn’t want to tell people?”
The James Webb Space Telescope, she explains, is the successor to Hubble, which has been in space 27 years this month.
“It has revolutionized astronomy in really fundamental ways,” she says. “But in a lot of ways, we’ve pushed Hubble to its limits.”
The Webb telescope — also referred to as JWST — is “the largest and most complex space observatory NASA has ever built,” Straughn says. “It’s three to four stories tall, and the largest part of it is a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Obviously, we don’t have any rockets that big, so we have to fold the whole thing up to sit inside the rocket, until, sort of like origami, it unfolds in space.”
Straughn waxes eloquent about the JWST.
“I’ve seen it. I’ve been up close. I work in a building at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and across the street is the building where the telescope is sitting right now. I can go see this gigantic, beautiful thing! The mirror is coated in a very thin layer of gold to reflect infrared light efficiently, so it’s this 22-footwide gold mirror, and it’s beautiful.”
It’s also serious engineering and serious science with missions that will change a great deal of what we know about space.
“I think JWST can produce stunning surprises in many areas,” says John C. Mather, doctorate, senior project scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope, a Nobel Prize winner and one of Straughn’s bosses.
In a Reddit interview, he elaborated.
“We don’t know how galaxies formed or when; we don’t know how they got super-massive black holes in their centers; we don’t know whether the black holes caused the galaxies to form or vice versa. We can’t see inside dust clouds where stars and planets are being born nearby, but JWST will be able to do just that. We don’t know how many planetary systems might be hospitable to life, but JWST could tell whether some Earth-like planets have enough water to have oceans. We don’t know much about dark matter or dark energy, but we are expecting to learn more about where the dark matter is now, and we hope to learn the history of the acceleration of the universe that we attribute to dark energy. And then, there are the surprises we can’t imagine!”
Asked about real-world benefits, Mather says assuaging mankind’s infinite curiosity might be the most important. “We all want to know where we came from.” But he adds that “physics research underlies the progress in almost every area of science, from chemistry to biology to electronics to medicine.”
Like Straughn, Mather says it’s important for scientists to spread the gospel of what they do and perhaps recruit others to do it. And he says Straughn is “really good at explaining it.”
“She’s a perfect example of what a ‘lady scientist’ is like,” he says in answer to a question. “She’s really bright, does a lot of interesting things, is an airplane pilot, and she’s in demand because she’s eager to see people get excited about what we’re doing.”
PLANES AND DANES
Straughn’s web page — amberstraughn.com — shows a photo of her speaking at a Comic Con and describes her as “NASA astrophyisicist, Arkansas farm girl, pilot, yogini, home brewer, Great Dane mom, Pearl Jam superfangirl and Razorback football fan (not necessarily in order of importance).”
“I’m a scientist, that’s been a part of who I am since I was a kid,” she expands on the description. “I’m driven by curiosity, wanting to know how the universe works, what is out there. Part of that is the pilot side of things — it’s an exploration thing as well. I got my pilot’s license in 2013, because it’s something I’d always wanted to do, and I love learning something new.
“My job is very much a brain thing. Flying is very physical. So I love the physicality of flying as sort of a contrast from what I do as my day job.”
Straughn says she can credit her interest in flight to growing up in northcentral Arkansas, where C-130 military planes flew over from the Air Force base in Jacksonville.
“They’d literally rattle the windows,” she says of the planes, “and I’d run outside and wave at the pilots and marvel. I’m an explorer at heart. I think we’re all explorers — all trying to find our way through this world in different ways.”
Straughn has been on the Webb Telescope project for six years and is excited about its launch in 2018. But next on her schedule is a visit to Arkansas to speak at her alma mater.
“In my lecture at UA, I’ll be talking about NASA’s search for our origins — which sounds like a big topic, and it is,” she says. “But the missions we build at NASA are designed to answer some of humanity’s biggest questions: Where did we come from? How did we get here? Are we alone?
“NASA’s next big astrophysics mission — the James Webb Space Telescope — is designed to help answer some of these big questions. I’ll discuss the science drivers behind the telescope as well as the incredible engineering that has gone into building NASA’s largest, most complex space observatory ever.”
“The ‘Honors College Invites’ lecture series was started a few years ago by A.J. Salois, an honors physics/English double major studying astronomy who was passionate about light pollution,” explains Chelsea Hodge, assistant director of recruitment for the UA Honors College. “She brought documentary filmmaker Ian Cheney to campus to show his film The City Dark. Honors students continue to lead this lecture series, with some help and guidance from Honors College staff.
“We see ‘Honors College Invites’ as an opportunity for our students and community members to hear from thinkers and doers, the people who are creating everything from the most popular satirical news site to the next space telescope,” Hodge goes on. “We want to inspire students to think about what they can contribute, whether through the arts, the humanities, the sciences, or whatever they are passionate about. For this year’s program in particular, Amber Straughn will help show students where a University of Arkansas honors degree can take them — even as far as a telescope launched into space.”
Straughn, however, remains grounded.
“Arkansas is definitely still home for me,” Amber Straughn says. “Mom still lives in the same place I grew up. Dad passed away the summer before my senior year of high school, but I still carry his value of hard work. My husband is from Little Rock, so we go back every year for Christmas, and I especially love coming back during the winter.
“That’s when the sky is the clearest and the brightest. It’s so grounding for me to go home to my backyard and look up at those stars and remind myself how I got started on this path.”