Elizabeth Hunke

I thought I would be a musician. My high school did not offer AP or advanced courses in science, mathematics, or anything else. Instead, I played in the band. I learned to type. I was pretty good in math class, but it was basic stuff. Physics was the hardest subject offered, and I managed to get through that because I could do the math. During my first year of college, I postponed choosing a particular degree program and took all kinds of courses, including math, science and music. I learned two important things: first that if I majored in music, my enjoyment would probably fizzle because it would be "work," and second that it would be much easier to make a living doing math or science, playing music for fun, than it would be to make a living playing music and doing math or science for fun.

My college guidance counselor, who was a math professor, introduced me to mathematical applications that were fascinating, things like population dynamics and the way drum heads vibrate. Then I got a summer job at AT&T Bell Labs, and that settled it: I wanted to work in a laboratory. I spent that entire summer sitting in front of a computer, trying to make a software program simulate the way certain atoms attach to other atoms in a potential superconductor. This was cutting-edge physics! But superconductors were inscrutable to me, and indeed much of physics beyond Newton's apple seemed rather esoteric. With a mathematics degree, I realized I'd have the basic skills to work on any scientific application that seemed interesting, and I could still work in a laboratory!

One day in Tucson, I listened to a professor give a mathematical description of how hurricanes work, and I thought I'd found my life's work. Even before moving to the desert, I thought clouds were beautiful and mysterious; weather has always been a critical element of my farming family's life. My Grandfather never missed a weather forecast on the TV. In Tennessee, remnant hurricanes produce deluges that turn gullies into roaring rivers, and my family never irrigated---they depended on the sky to rain the right amount at the right time of year. I was thrilled to study such a powerful aspect of the weather! This is the topic that became the focus of my graduate studies.

When I began looking for a job, climate change was just becoming a "hot" topic. Sea ice and hurricanes seem like very different phenomena, but the mathematical equations used to describe them are actually quite similar. As I had anticipated, the mathematical knowledge and skills that I developed in graduate school translated easily to my new job as a sea ice modeler for climate studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

I have been to Antarctica and taken samples and measurements of real sea ice, but I spend most of my time typing on a computer, creating simulations of how the ice grows and melts, crumples and moves. One of the things I love best about making music is the sensation of creating something beautiful from essentially nothing; not everyone would consider a computer program "beautiful," but I have gotten a lot of satisfaction from building our sea ice model. Designing a mathematical model for a particular scientific phenomenon and then writing a computer program to solve it is a creative process, and I am continually delighted when other scientists from all around the world express appreciation for my work, which enables them to design and carry out their own computer experiments to understand climate change.

As my understanding of global climate has grown, I have also enjoyed learning about how it affects day-to-day life on the local scale. As a pilot who likes to fly light aircraft around the West, I am interested in how climate changes affect the weather, particularly heat that makes for a bouncy ride or wind patterns that whiz me along to my destination. As a gardener coaxing tender plants to thrive alongside chamisa and cacti, I am fascinated by our desert precipitation cycle and how global climate changes affect our ability to live in a sustainable way on this landscape. Thus, my scientific career informs my daily life, and I still get to play my French horn all the time.