Episode 129 - Fred Ciesla: "I want to know if there is life elsewhere."

Professor Fred Ciesla from the Department of Geophysical Sciences is on The Course this week to share how his career path to becoming a geophysical sciences professor started when he was a child. He was inspired to study astronomy after seeing stars, in particular Venus, glowing in the night sky. His path led him to Cornell, NASA, and finally to UChicago, where he met various important mentors along the way and worked on various research questions. Tune in to hear Professor Ciesla's sharing and his curiosity about whether there is life elsewhere.  

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Fred Ciesla of the Department of the Geophysical Sciences.

Professor Ciesla holds a PhD in planetary sciences from the University of Arizona, where he was awarded the Kuiper Memorial Award for Graduate Achievement. He's also worked at NASA where he was a part of the team that won a group achievement award for the near Shoemaker mission, which we'll be discussing.

After three years as the chair of his department from 2018 to 2021, he's currently serving as deputy director for the Chicago Center for Origins of Life. He's here to discuss the origins of planets, how Carl Sagan inspired him to go into this field, and of course, how he became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Ciesla, thank you so much for joining me this morning. How are you? 

Fred Ciesla 00:46
I'm doing fine. Thank you. How are you? 

Stephen 00:48
I'm great. Thanks. Just to get the basics out of the way, can you tell us what your position is at UChicago and just in layman's terms, a little bit of you know, what your, your area actually is and like what it is that you study?

Fred Ciesla 01:02
Sure. I am a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences here at the University of Chicago. What I am interested in and what motivates my research is trying to understand how planets form. So I've spent a lot of time working on issues related to our own solar system, trying to understand what meteorites and comets and other things may tell us about the formation of our solar system, but also try to extend that to understand how planets are forming around other stars and what other planets may be like in the universe. 

Stephen 01:35
Before we get to your actual academic career, just going to go even further back. am I correct in guessing that you were a Carl Sagan fan as a kid? 

Fred Ciesla 01:44
I very much was, you know, I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, you know, far outside of any city, and I just remember, you know, spending lots of time outside looking up at the sky and just really being fascinated. 

And I remember, you know, one time my dad pointing out to me that, uh, one of the stars I was looking at was Venus and you know a planet and it just kind of blew my mind, and so I just always loved looking up and you know that that got me into astronomy as a young kid and that's all I've ever wanted to do. 

Stephen 02:17
Cool. So by the time you were like enrolling in and starting college, were you pretty confident that was the path for you? 

Fred Ciesla 02:23
100 percent. Yeah, I said it in my yearbook in junior high and high school that I was going to be an astronomer and I just never wavered from that. 

Stephen 02:34
That's cool. Well yeah, can you just lay out for me like what the steps there were then? 

Fred Ciesla 02:39
Yeah, sure. So, applying for college, I knew I wanted, again, I was looking at places that had strong astronomy programs, and I ended up going to Cornell University, which happened to be where Carl Sagan was a faculty member. Unfortunately, he got sick shortly after I got there, so I never had the chance to meet him. 

But yeah, I went to Cornell intending to major in astronomy, but my advisor told me that it was probably wiser to major in physics, just because it was a more robust major and astronomy is essentially physics anyway.

So I majored in physics there and while I was there, I got to work with a faculty member, Steve Squires, who ended up being the PI for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars, and so while I never got the chance to meet Carl Sagan there, I met Steve Squires, which was just, you know, I think opened so many doors for me. I feel like I learned a lot more working with him than I did from any of my classes, just understanding what science was and what it meant to be a scientist.

He just had this incredible passion for his work that was contagious and you know, really, you know, solidified in me that that's what I wanted to do for my career. And so after Cornell, I went to the University of Arizona and got my Ph. D. in planetary sciences, and focused on understanding solar system formation.

And after that, I was a postdoc at NASA AIMS Research Center in California in the Bay Area, and then a postdoc at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D. C. before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago. 

Stephen 04:30
You mentioned, you know, your mentor like taught you what it meant to be a scientist. I'm curious, like, if you could unpack that a little bit more. Like what, you know, as someone who came in very interested in science, right? What do you think you learned during that time about the actual, like, work and career that was valuable that you didn't know about already? 

Fred Ciesla 04:50
I think I learned exactly, you know, not exactly, but I would say I learned what being a scientist was, you know, I knew, you know, as I said, applying to college, I knew I wanted to be an astronomer, but I don't think I ever really knew what that meant other than learning a lot about stars and planets, and galaxies and everything and so going to college, you know, I knew I had to study science. But how you actually, what it means to be a scientist was something I hadn't really appreciated. 

So working with Steve, you know, I got to see what that meant and it was great. You know, he was somebody who was just like insanely curious about many different things and just, you know, walked in every day with an excitement to, to try and understand what he was working on, learn more and just get excited about, you know, the latest discoveries.

And so being able to talk to him and see kind of what the day to day was, it wasn't just about, you know, reading books and memorizing facts. It was about coming in with a question and trying to figure out how to answer it. And it was really exciting to see that process. And, you know, one of the things that was great about him was he was just so encouraging as well, you know, as a person and for other people.

And so, you know, it just made me very comfortable in that environment. And it was something I wanted to continue doing.

Stephen 06:20
Yeah. What questions in the field intrigued you initially? 

Fred Ciesla 06:25
Yeah. Well, I mean, when I was working at Cornell, you know, Steve was part of the NEAR mission, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission, which was a mission to go to the asteroid Eros and take data, trying to understand a bit about the asteroid. And so, what I worked on specifically was kind of planning, observations. You know, the mission hadn't launched yet, at the time, so we were just trying to understand how can we maximize and get the most data possible. 

But like I said, you know, I was working in the astronomy department. I remember one day, you know, what really, I think, you know, served as a turning point for me, I was working on things and talking to one of the graduate students there and another graduate student came running through the hallway and announced that they had found a planet around another star. 

This was the first time an exoplanet around a main sequence star had been discovered and you know, it was just so exciting. And, you know, the guy was running through the hallway. I always say it was like Paul Revere, you know, announcing this discovery.

And it was just really cool. And what was mind blowing was that the planet was giant. It was a Jupiter like planet and it was really close to its star. And, you know, now we know those are the easiest things to see now that we've been able to detect all these other exoplanets. But, you know, it just made me curious, like, how do you get a planet like Jupiter's, you know, on this, you know, orbit that's inside the orbit of Mercury, you know, it was a planetary system, unlike anything we expected because we were expecting our own solar system, you know, to some degree.

And so I immediately wanted to know, like, what, you know, what determines whether or not you get a system like our solar system, a planet like Earth or something completely different and that for me was a light bulb moment where I was like, this is what I want to focus on. I want to understand what kinds of planets are out there and, you know, what dictates what kind of planet you get. 

Stephen 08:30
Fascinating question. And if you could, without getting into too much technical detail, which I realize might be difficult, what are the tools that you use to answer that question. Like how do we ascertain anything about these objects that are so far away? 

Fred Ciesla 08:49
 So me personally, the way that I approach things is I do, I develop numerical models. What I try and do is model how planets form, you know, at various stages. So for me, it's writing a lot of computer code and trying to understand, like, as you account for this process. How does it change things in layman's terms? But in order to do that, you know, we have to know what, you know, what is the model supposed to create? 

And so I work in collaboration with a number of people to try and understand what do we know about how planets form? And we get that information from in our solar system, studying meteorites.

Meteorites are pieces of asteroids, largely, that have fallen to Earth and asteroids, we think, are the leftover building blocks of the planet. So basically, they're time capsules back to the four and a half billion years ago when our solar system was, was, was first forming. So trying to understand what those meteorites and the minerals they contain the, you know, the diversity of things that are out there.

What are they telling us about the formation of the solar system? But then, you know, what I also do is work with astronomers who are making observations of young stars and young planetary systems. And we can actually use those as analogs for our own solar system to try and tell this coherent story about, you know, what were the processes that were shaping things throughout the different stages of evolution that led to our solar system or other planetary systems. 

Stephen 10:22
It's very cool. I have to ask about your time at NASA. Like what, projects were you working on there and what are your memories of that? Like, what do you think you took away from it? 

Fred Ciesla 10:32
Actually, I think, you know, that time probably shaped me as, you know, as an independent scientist more than any other. You know, as a graduate student, I was able to, you know, really understand what it meant to work on a research project. you know, but largely with the guidance of my mentors.

At NASA, as a postdoc, you know, you're an independent scientist. I worked with, I, again, I was very fortunate, worked under the supervision of Jeff Cuzzi, who was just a fantastic mentor, fantastic human being. And so he gave me the freedom to just, you know, work on whatever problems I found interesting and so, I was there as a national research council fellow, what I was working on was trying to understand how the distribution of water evolved during the formation of planets. 

So, one of the interesting things we have in our solar system or in any planetary system is, you know, we want to know water being a fundamental ingredient for life. How does it get incorporated into planets? And so, one of the challenges we have is understanding if you're very close to the star, temperatures are warm, so the water exists as a gas, and so it's not going to be incorporated easily into a planet like Earth. It's only when you get far enough out that it starts to freeze out and become solid and become available to, you know, the solid planets, terrestrial like planets that that could occur eventually form. 

So what I was working on was trying to understand as the solar system was forming. Where did that water end up and how did it impact the different stages of planet formation? 

Stephen 12:18
I'm just curious. This might be a very stupid question. I don't know. But do you have a favorite system or like a favorite type of system? Like of the various ones that you have studied? Is there anything particularly weird or interesting that sticks out to you?

Fred Ciesla 12:31
I think what excites me is when we find something completely different, you know, for, like I said, going back a few decades now, almost 30 years before we discovered planets around other stars, you know, everything we imagined about how planets form, you know, our models and our ideas were based on the solar system. And so to see the, you know, broad ways that are diverse ways that nature can act is pretty exciting. And it helps us understand things better.

Stephen 13:04
Yeah, I mean, are there any specific kind of misconceptions or assumptions that you've seen disproven, like over the course of your time in the field? 

Fred Ciesla 13:15
I remember as a kid, you know, the, one of the stories in or not stories, but one of the ideas that was out there was that, you know, we're just a planet around a common star, you know, there's nothing special about us, which I think is, you know, largely true in principle, but are basic idea.

But the truth of the matter is, you know, most of the stars and the galaxy are not like the sun. They're, you know, smaller, not as big, not as bright. And so, you know, most of the planets that are out there are around stars that are very different. So, you know, the environments, their formation conditions, you know, everything could be very different.

And so, yeah, we're not necessarily typical, but that doesn't mean we're special either. 

Stephen 14:06
Well, to hear that, listeners don't take it for granted, the sun, it's very special. Yeah, looking kind of more at what you do now, can you just kind of break down for me, like what occupies your time during a normal semester? How much teaching are you doing? Are you getting a chance to do research in between that? 

Fred Ciesla 14:25
Varies year to year, day to day, to be honest, and that oftentimes makes it fun, although it can also be frustrating depending on what's the focus of my attention. So I teach two classes a year, one of the classes that I teach is, it's called Earth is a Planet. It's science for non-science majors. And, you know, I've always really enjoyed teaching that class because, you know, I feel like it's my chance to be, you know, a part of Carl Sagan.

It's my chance to, you know, try and get people interested in a topic that I am very excited about. And I've always really enjoyed that, and so that's been a lot of fun. It's a lot of work. It's a big class, nearly 300 people. So that's been my autumn quarter teaching for the last almost decade.

And then another class that I teach is more for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. It's very specific, a small class and either about how to use computers to solve problems in geophysical sciences, or focus on planet formation getting into the details there. And that's a lot of fun as well, because there you get to really dig deeply into topics. So it's a lot of work, but different type of work. 

So teaching you know, day to day can be, take up a lot of time. Sometimes it's just dealing with the grading or, you know, bureaucracy of the running the class. But then I have PhD students and postdocs who work with me and they're fantastic because they're doing the science that I wish I had time to do. So I live vicariously through them. And so I have meetings with them to just kind of talk about where they are and things, brainstorm solutions to problems that they may be running into, or thinking about what the next steps may be on a given project. That's a lot of fun that, you know, that's where, again, you get to just show up. 

On a given day, not knowing what you're going to do, but then be faced with an interesting problem that you really want to solve. there is, a lot of administrative work as a faculty member as well. So there's committees and day to day stuff. But, I think the most fun part is being able to work on research, either my own or with my students and postdocs. 

Stephen 16:49
Well, yeah, so like, what research is capturing your imagination at the moment, either stuff that you're doing or just stuff that people around you are into. 

Fred Ciesla 16:58
So, yeah, one of the things that my group is thinking about right now is trying to understand, how a planet like Jupiter impacts the formation of other planets. And so Jupiter being a gas giant, you know, we know that it had to have formed very early in our solar system's history because the gas that it has is basically, well, let me take a step back, you know, when we think about how planets form, planet formation and star formation go hand in hand.

So what happens when a star forms, from a molecular cloud, what happens is the gas and dust in space collapses under gravity and you form a star, but not all of the material falls onto the star directly. Some of it settles into orbit around the star and becomes what we call a protoplanetary disk. And it's in that disk that planets are created.

And so Jupiter. it being a gas giant, what we think happened was that it grew very quickly and the gas that it has, its atmosphere is basically a collection of the gas that was in orbit around, around the young star. You know, the earth, on the other hand, rather than growing that big, it just kind of accumulated from the solid particles that were there, the dust grains that were there that eventually grew through collisions to form the earth.

So Jupiter, we think, probably had a lot of influence on what was happening around it and now we're starting to see evidence of this. When we look at other stars, we're starting to see cases where we see a young star surrounded by a proto planetary disc, but we see the dust grains and we kind of see structures, you know, rings of dust and things that we think are being shaped by planets like Jupiter forming.

And so we're trying to understand how does its presence. Or in the case of another system, its absence impact what kinds of planets ultimately form. 

Stephen 18:57
Is there anything else weird or surprising about the formation of Earth or the solar system that you wish more people knew about? 

Fred Ciesla 19:06
You know, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is, you know, what motivates me very broadly is like, I want to know if there's life elsewhere, you know, ultimately, you know, going back to that question. Do we get an earth where Giant Jupiter next to its star, you know, what I want to do is understand what it took to shape the earth to be the planet that it is that allowed life to develop and take hold here and one of the things I always end my Earth as a planet class with on the last day is talk to them about whether or not we expect life to be elsewhere and you know, I tell them, you know, depending on the day, you know, how early I had my coffee. Some days I'm more optimistic than others.

But, you know, the question of whether or not we're alone or if there's a planet like Earth out there, if the answer is yes, that's amazing. And if the answer is no, that's amazing as well. Either answer is profound. It's just, I really want to know what the answer is.

Stephen 20:12
I also, I wanted to go back. I mean, you mentioned that, you know, do a lot of models and you mentioned like sometimes teaching a class on, it sounded like you were saying kind of how to do computer models, how have you gained the skills necessary to do that, like as computers change dramatically?

Fred Ciesla 20:28
Yeah, so everything I do is self-taught, which, you know, in some ways I'm very proud of it. And sometimes in some ways I'm very ashamed by it because, if I write computer code and show it to somebody else, I know there's a better way of writing it than what I've done. So when I was in high school, I took a class in computer programming and it was, you know, learning how to program in BASIC. I don't even know if they teach this anymore. 

But, you know, it was just something that I wanted to do. I knew computers were going to be an important part of the future. So I figured learning how to use them would be important. And then when I was in undergrad working with Steve Squires everything that I did was computer-based, you know, I had the right programs to simulate how the spacecraft was going to look at the asteroid and try and figure out how do we map out and cover, you know, get as much information as possible.

And it was one of these things where I looking around you saw that. No matter what you're doing, whether you're doing models, like I eventually did, or you were analyzing data or what have you. Computers were a central part of all of that. And so if you wanted to understand how to get the most information out of whatever you were doing, you needed to understand what the computers were doing.

So I learned to program just through experience, you know, there'd be a problem that I need to work on. And so I had to come up with a way of solving it. And so I just learned how to write programs based on that. But in teaching this class, you know, I tried to make that point, you know, that even if you're not going to write a thousand line program to simulate something you may, you know, want to you need to understand. 

How do you fit a line through data? How do you, you know, interpolate between data points? What are computers doing? What are the limitations of what they can do? And how much should you believe them? And so I think that's central to all of science.

No matter what kind of approach you use.

Stephen 22:27
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What advice would you give to someone who was considering, you, know, following you into this field? 

Fred Ciesla 22:34
Follow your passion. You know, one of the things I tell my graduate students, pursuing this, I, you know, there's a lot of stress and frustration, you know, you know, and just because you're doing something that nobody's ever done before.

You know, one of the exciting things about what I do is I get to wake up in a given day identify the problem I want to work on and try and solve it. That's exciting, but it's not easy. And there's, you know, times when you're beating your head against the desk trying to get things to work.

It'll make you question your life choices at times, but, you know, to know in the end that when I'm successful, I'm going to learn something that nobody else has learned before. That's just, you know, awesome. 

So you need to have that emotional kind of fallback that allows you to ride out the lows so that you can really experience the highs. But if so if you want to do that, you know, it's completely worth it. But it is not in, it's not a linear path. I'll say that much. 

Stephen 23:46
Yeah. Yeah. That's I think that's very good for people to hear. Perhaps you, you may have sort of just answered this, but the last question we typically ask is what would you say you find most fulfilling about what you do? 

Fred Ciesla 23:58
I love sharing what I learned. I really do, you know, like I said looking back at my journey, you know, thinking about reading Carl Sagan as a kid and watching documentaries on TV and then going to Cornell and not knowing what it meant to be an astronomer, but knowing that that's what I wanted to do and having somebody like Steve kind of take me under his wing and help me understand what all meant, you know, I am deeply grateful for all the people who have worked with me and mentored me over the years. And so for me, it's really important that I am able to give back in that way. 

So I love, you know. When I'm teaching a class, and at the end of the quarter, a student comes up and tells me that they really learned a lot, that they didn't think they were going to enjoy the class, but they really, you know, they're watching space documentaries on Netflix now or, you know, seeing my students that I work with as, you know, the graduate students to see them grow and start tackling things on their own. For me, that's really rewarding. I get a lot of, you know, joy and pleasure out of seeing that happen and to be part of it.

Stephen 25:15
Thank you, Professor Ciesla, for your time today. And course takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.