2021 EngineerGirl Ambassador Josephine Brumfield interviewed Dr. Claire Parkinson as part of the ambassador program in Spring 2022.
Dr. Claire Parkinson is a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Hi, I’m Josie Brumfield, I’m an EngineerGirl Ambassador this year.
Hi Josie, I’m Claire Parkinson, and I’m a climatologist working at NASA. How did you find out about EngineerGirl?
My mom actually told me about the program. I’m familiar with the Society of Women Engineers, though.
Oh, cool. I’m a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. The National Academy of Sciences doesn’t have anything like this, so I think the program is really neat. If I had been exposed to more engineering growing up, I might have actually become an engineer instead of becoming a scientist. I grew up in Vermont, and I didn’t know any scientists or engineers. After I became a member of the Academy of Engineering, one of the speakers at one of the first meetings I attended mentioned the difference between a scientist and an engineer: A scientist seeks to understand the world; an engineer seeks to improve the world. That made a strong impression on me; it sure made engineering sound good.
“One of the speakers at one of the first meetings I attended mentioned the difference between a scientist and an engineer: A scientist seeks to understand the world; an engineer seeks to improve the world.”
If you could go back and redo some of your younger years and become an engineer, what would you have become?
I don’t know, maybe a civil engineer. When I was growing up, I loved math. I really loved the simplicity, the fact that you either get a right answer or a wrong answer, plus the beauty and the power of math. It was just overwhelmingly my favorite subject. I was growing up during the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, and those impacted me a lot. I majored in math, but I decided that I couldn’t go into some ivory tower existence. The world has so many problems, and I couldn’t just ignore them.
At the high school I went to, all of us in the college prep track were taking largely the same classes. There were no engineering courses, and the only science courses were biology, chemistry, and physics. We didn’t even have earth sciences, which is what I ended up doing.
I might have taken civil engineering, if I had had that option. I think of civil engineering as really trying to help people. A really good program I heard about later that works on helping people is Engineers Without Borders. I’d known of Doctors Without Borders for a long time, but I had never heard of Engineers Without Borders. I think a lot of universities have partnerships with them.
I think that’s where I heard about them. Georgia Tech had a webpage where they do partnerships to work on clean water sources and good housing in Latin America.
I think that’s really cool. I would have loved to be able to help people like that.
To switch topics a little bit, can you tell me about what you’re doing now?
I work for NASA. I started in 1978, and I have two main jobs. I’m a research scientist studying sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, using satellite data to determine what’s been happening to the ice in the last forty years. Back when I started, we had really just started collecting satellite data on the sea ice, so we didn’t have a good data set to study. We finally had enough data to draw some good conclusions in the late 1990’s, and we saw that the sea ice in the Arctic has been decreasing. Now, we’re using the satellite data to track climate change, which has become a very big issue.
My other job is as the project scientist for the Aqua satellite, which is in orbit around the Earth collecting data about the atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice. I started that role in 1993, 9 years before Aqua launched. The spacecraft and the instruments were being built by contractors at the time. Until launch, the focus was on making sure that everything was being built correctly, forming science teams, and having the science teams develop equations to process the data. The data come in as huge strings of numbers, and those numbers are used to derive data products regarding temperature, water vapor, sea ice, soil moisture, land ice, evaporation from the ocean, and dozens of other Earth system variables. After launch, the scientists create and analyze the data sets.
One of my main tasks as project scientist is to lead the effort of writing proposals to continue the mission. Every two years - now, thankfully, every three years - we have to write a very long document about why this mission should keep going and why NASA should keep funding it. These proposals are really massive efforts. The last one was over 200 pages.
Can I ask you a little about what you do outside of work?
I’m very interested in the history of science, although I don’t get nearly enough time to work on it. In the past, I published a book on the history of science, but I haven’t had any time to work on that topic recently. Outside of academics, I jog a lot. I don’t have a car. In fact, I’ve never had a car. Until the COVID pandemic that forced me and my colleagues into teleworking, I jogged to and from work routinely, irrespective of snow, rain, and temperature. That’s the way I got to work for over 40 years, and it’s what I expect to be doing again once I am back to working in my NASA office.
That’s really impressive.
The sport I feel I’m better at is swimming, but I only do that in the summer. I feel that it’s much better exercise than jogging or running. In the summertime, the pool in my complex is open six days a week, all except Thursday. I don’t know why they picked Thursdays, they just did. I typically swim a mile six days a week, after work. I entered the Senior Olympics a few times, which is, as you could guess, for old people. Actually, it starts at 50, so not that old. I did win two bronze medals in the nationals, and quite a few gold medals in state competitions in Maryland; I was pleased to participate, although I most definitely am not a world-class athlete of any type, that’s for sure.
That’s about the end of our time for today. Anything else to say?
Nothing other than to say congratulations again on being an EngineerGirl Ambassador, and feel free to reach out again if you want to.
Thank you so much. Bye!
Bye!