 Yeah, welcome to Tuesday. I'm J. Phidelis's think tech. More specifically, this is a series called Millennial Mind. And today for our Millennial Mind, we have Christopher Lindsey. We have tracked Christopher Lindsey through his scientific and astronomical career. You know, they named an exoplanet after him, didn't they, where he found one. He discovered one back in Iolani days. And then he went to USC, and then we caught up with him right now, where he is hopefully en route to Yale. Welcome to the show, Christopher. It's so nice to see your smile and face. We'd like to check in with you every now and then and follow your career. Nice to see you too. Thank you for having me on. Well, it's been a few years and I want to first I want to catch up on USC. They were leaving Iolani trembling off to go to college. How was it? Give us give us a little praise to see about for you and how it changed you. Yeah, so interesting story about, I guess, my college trajectory is I left Iolani after my junior year to go to USC. I applied for colleges early. And just to see, you know, where I'd get in and what the prospects were. But I ended up going. I was thankful to have a full scholarship because USC is one of the most expensive schools out there. So next to NYU, I think, and is an expensive area in Los Angeles. Keep me careful about NYU, Christopher. That's my school. I went to law school there twice. I think there's always a list of which school has the has the richest students. And I think USC is usually second place to NYU. But just barely. You know, we have all the Hollywood people by NYU has all the the investment bankers. It's true fact. And other other wealthy, intelligent people. Anyway, so I was thankful that the trustees of USC paid for my my college education there with the trustee scholarship. And I, you know, I had a great time freshman year, made a lot of friends. I started in the astronomy major. But in that process, also added environmental studies and jazz minors. Environmental studies major and a jazz minor. So let me just count that through. So astronomy, jazz and environmental studies. Yeah, put that you put that in a bowl and mix it up. And what do you get? I guess you get something that looks like me. I think so. But I think that's really a testament to how flexible USC was with, you know, what you wanted to study. And they had a lot of resources for all those different things. You know, in Los Angeles, you have all these famous studio musicians. I play the drums. And one of the drum professors there is, you know, first call on all these studios to play on, you know, the Lion King and La La Land and types of movies. And in the fields of environmental science, there's also a lot of good stuff happening at USC. It's a very, you know, progressive environmental school with a lot of good stuff happening, both on the policy end of things. And also on the scientific end where I sort of fall as you would imagine. I do imagine. USC has a really cool campus out on Catalina Island, which is, you know, a couple miles offshore of the Port of Long Beach. So I was able to go there. You can only see it on some days, am I right? Yeah, if you're in Long Beach, you may not be able to see it on a given morning. Yeah, there's that marine layer that comes in. So frequently we leave the Port of Long Beach on USC's boat and arrive at their Catalina Island campus called the Wrigley Institute. I don't know if it's named after the bubblegum. Not sure. I think it might be. Maybe. Probably not. Anyway, and they have a nice area over there that you get. It's basically a, you know, research campus and a scuba diving situation. And they also have the pressure housing that you go into when you get the bends anywhere on the Southern California coast. If you get the bends, you will be treated by USC doctors at their pressure chamber. It's cool to see. Yeah. And in the fields of astronomy, I was very thankful to work with for four years, Professor of Astronomy at USC named Edward Rhodes, Dr. Rhodes. And he did, you know, wonderful job mentoring me. And I had a lot of opportunities. Thanks to him. USC has some connections with the Mount Wilson Institute and the Mount Wilson Observatory, which is a very historic Institute and Observatory with telescopes, many telescopes that are, you know, older than 100 years. And I'm sure everyone has heard of the Hubble Space Telescope. And Edwin Hubble, the namesake of that telescope, did most of his research at Mount Wilson. And that's where we discovered that there was more galaxies beyond just our own Milky Way, which we didn't know prior to the early 1900s. We just thought that, oh, these fuzzy objects that are now we know to be galaxies are just, you know, little clouds of dust in our own galaxy. And, you know, maybe our whole universe is only a couple hundred kiloparsecs, you know, couple hundred light years large. But in reality, it's billions of light years large. And the universe got a lot bigger thanks to research done at Mount Wilson. And I personally worked on the same telescope as Edwin Hubble worked on, which is kind of trippy considering it was, you know, 100 years apart. But it's still up and running. And we took data for Jupiter in support of NASA's Juno mission, which is a satellite that is in a orbit around Jupiter that takes various forms of data studying the planets, atmospheres and finding all about finding out about Jupiter. And we did research on the methane layers of Jupiter using the Mount Wilson 100 inch telescope. This was original research. This was not just being being a member of a class in astronomy. Am I right? No, yeah, there were four classes in astronomy at USC, but this research wasn't really part of that. I actually ended up being the only astronomy major in my year. At the end of it all. Yeah, you and your mentor, Professor Rhodes, out there at Mount Wilson, you know, recognizing that you can have a telescope that lasts 100 years. Yeah, look, you look West because while you were in school at USC, we were having a bit of a tumultuous experience here at Mount again. What did you and Professor Rhodes think about looking West? Yeah, yeah, it's hard because I do kind of see where a lot of the animosity and protests are coming from. Because things have been, you know, very hard and unfair for a long time. But I do think that astronomy in Hawaii and astronomy in the world would be a lot better off with the 30 meter telescope on top of Mauna Kea. It's a better site than the Canary Islands. But if I'm being, you know, frankly honest, I don't think that a lot of people really understand why one site could be better than another in such a significant way. And you know, why should sacred land be given up for this telescope that has kind of nebulous benefits in terms of the science? Of course, there's something to be said for the high tech jobs and investment that would come from the telescope. So there's all sorts of things to think about at the same time. And it's, you know, hard to make a decision being so directly impacted by the telescope and also by, you know, the Big Island community in general, and Hawaii community in general. Well, if you but looking at it sort of in an optimistic way and and believing that it can happen here culturally and community wise, what would be your vision for the telescope for Mauna Kea for the Institute for Astronomy at UH for astronomy at Hawaii for Hawaii as a as a home for astronomy? What? Yeah, what could happen here? Yeah, I think that Hawaii really could be, you know, the capital of astronomy in the world. Right now, I would, I would venture to say that a lot of the most cutting edge astronomy is now done in the Otacama Desert in Chile. But due to the orientation of Earth and the solar system in our galaxy, the Otacama Desert in Chile, Southern Hemisphere, perfect for studying the center of our galaxy, which is very interesting and can tell you a lot about galaxy formation, how our galaxy formed, and things about the supermassive black hole in our galaxy, Sagittarius A, all sorts of interesting things. But also in the center of the galaxy, where the Southern Hemisphere is pointing is full of a lot of gas and dust, which obscures stars when you try to look at beyond our galaxy. But the Northern Hemisphere is better for other things in astronomy, such as looking outside of our galaxy towards the the edge of the universe, which is really what the 30 meter telescope would be best for. Because large aperture, you get, you know, the square of the radius times amount of light. And that would make studying very far away objects at the very start of the universe, you know, possible. And it would be very interesting and fascinating to have that data. And if that telescope was located in Hawaii, which I do hope it will be somehow some way, I think that the Institute for astronomy would see, you know, a great influx of of minds from from all over the world coming to, you know, take data on on the instrument. And I was talking about how, you know, some telescopes, like the ones on Mount Wilson have been there for, you know, over 100 years. But, you know, when you have the new instruments, to be honest, our group at USC is kind of the only ones actually taking real data on the on the 100 inch historic telescope on on Mount Wilson. So telescopes, especially if they lie on, you know, contested land don't have to to last forever. I think that that it would be important over the next, you know, 50 years, like how Keck, oh, my dog, I'm sorry, just how Keck, how Keck impacted the field of astronomy so much, I think that the 30 meter telescope could do the same thing for the next, you know, a few decades. And my, oh, sorry, my ideal belief for the future of astronomy as a field in general is, especially with this the SpaceX launch that just happened, which was amazing. I really hope that one day, you know, giant telescopes in space could be could be the future in some way. They're very hard to engineer, of course, we saw that with Hubble multiple, you know, resupply missions costing billions of dollars to get that running, but Hubble, you know, changed science forever. And even, even, you know, I guess the general population understands the beauty and importance of the Hubble Space Telescope. And I think that could be true in the future for future space telescopes, but also deep fields from extra, extremely large telescopes could also, I think, bring that sense of wonder. Well, yeah, I want to I want to go off that to ask you sense of wonder indeed. And then it strikes me that with all the trouble we have on the planet right now with coronavirus with protests with, you know, call it political aggression and all suppression of minorities and the like. You know, where, where does it all fit? These people, you know, engaged in, you know, various contentious activities around the planet, or victims of the coronavirus or other, other phenomenon. What do they care about astronomy? What does it mean to them? And therefore, what does it mean to us? Why should we get excited? Why should we care, Chris? That's a very good question. And a very, you know, deep and expansive question. I think that, you know, it's, it's true that some things, in my opinion, come before, before astronomy, you know, I don't think that it's, it's a good thing to, you know, put blinders on and ignore everything that's happening on the world to go look at, look at space. But I think that fundamental research into how the universe works, which is, at its core, what astronomy is, you know, since the beginning of time, we wondered, Oh, you know, does there, does the universe revolve around Earth? You know, no, does the universe around all of a sudden, no, you know, learning our place in the universe, and can kind of, in some sense, bring us all together because we're all part of the same community. That's in a very small point in the vast great universe that exists outside of Earth's atmosphere. And I think that it's important to learn about what's outside of us so we could value more the community that we have down here. Yeah, put things in perspective. Oh, yeah. And there's a lot of those, you know, pictures that I look at, especially of Earth from space, that you think about, for example, there's a picture that Buzz Aldrin took on Apollo 11 of, you know, of Neil Armstrong, and the Earth in the background. And the only people, you know, that have ever lived and died that aren't in that picture is our Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on the on the module, but everyone forgets about him. And that can really, you know, at least for me personally, you know, put some perspective into into these widespread, you know, conflicts, and maybe we should all all treat each other a little better. Seeing that, you know, we're very similar, even though, maybe down here on a microscopic level, you can only see differences. But from a from a space based view, you know, community is is very important. But I do think that, you know, some people in the astronomy community, you know, feel like, Oh, we should be completely apolitical and only care about, you know, what our research is. But I don't think that's, you know, that's really, really helpful to anyone, to be honest. Yeah, you have to be able to articulate a few that supports your own, your own science. Otherwise, science cannot live by itself. It is an expression of community. Alright, let's let's go forward and talk about the transition. By the way, you got you got a free ride at USC. Yeah, I did. And I also worked as a resident assistant for three years, which was very fun and rewarding and a growth experience for me, but also gave me free food and free lodging, which is which is very good deal. What a deal. I know it's a great deal. Other schools don't give their arrays free food or free or free housing. That's very thankful. And on top of all of that, can you share with us how well you did? In what sense, my my personal growth, or I did, you know, fairly well in my classes, it was definitely an adjustment going from, you know, junior year in high school to my my first year of college, you know, living outside of why for the first time that I can remember. And yeah, it was the first semester was definitely a change for me. I had my worst grades that I've probably ever had in my life. I got a C plus in calculus one, and I already knew how to do calculus. So I don't know how that happened. I missed one of the midterms due to over over sleeping, which is probably why. But I never did that ever again, or miss assignment colleges all about isn't it? Yeah, but I ended up, you know, magna cum loud. And I, you know, I had a lot of other extracurricular activities, not only research, but you know, doing the RA, doing the RA thing, doing scientific scuba diving, which was, which was very fun, participating in music. And I, I want a couple awards. I feel weird talking about, you know, myself, myself and my college men so much, but I'll just list some of them for you. I was a Warren Bennett scholar, which was a leadership program at USC named after a famous leadership guru who advised, you know, multiple presidents, and was the, you know, one of the higher up administrators at the university and was the president of a couple other universities. So Warren Bennett scholar was a great way for me to meet some other, you know, great leaders and some other people that, you know, I generally wouldn't interact with outside of the, my sciences path. There was a lot of, you know, political science, international relations students, global health students and people that are really, I feel gonna make a big difference in the world from USC. So that's good that I am very thankful to be able to be in that same program with them. I was also a, okay, I'll just finish and we'll go to the pictures. Yeah. Okay, I'll just listen really quick. I was a thematic option scholar, which was a honors track in the kind of English, which is not really my, my forte, to be honest. But it was, you know, very fun. And I got to learn from some, some great professors about areas of study that I never would have looked at before. I took, you know, an Arabic literature class that I've never would. And why not? Why not? Yeah, that was last semester too. So my last semester, I was reading a bunch of those books that really give an eye into that, that region of the world that I hadn't really thought about before. Yes, great. I was Renaissance scholar, which just means that you had major minor in, in very different fields. I was also a discovery scholar, which means I wrote kind of a thesis, some of my, of my research work at USC, which was, which was good. And I also wanted an honor called the Order of the Laurel and the Palm, which is, I'm not, it's supposed to be for a exemplary leadership and high achievement. I'm reading it. Good. But it's given to, you know, a couple, 10 or 12 students every year at USC. And I'm, and I know a lot of the other people that won that award. And I was very thankful to be recognized in the same plane as, as those great leaders. Recognizing you're not finished reading, but recognizing we have only a limited amount of time. I want to take a, I want to switch off here and go to the photos. Can you briefly describe that was all okay. Oh, perfect. Perfect. I must have known. Let's, let's quickly go through your photos and you can identify them. Then I want to talk about Yale. Yeah. This is the Juno probe, superimposed on an image of Jupiter, which we were doing, you know, additional observations for using the ground based telescope. Because Juno, when it hits the Parajove passage, which is its closest passage to Jupiter, it is very close to Jupiter's surface. And the, the cameras are taking pictures of, you know, various different abundancies of different molecules on Jupiter, trying to learn more about its composition and atmosphere. And we take, you know, global, global, Jupiter's globe, pictures of Jupiter, to kind of place the Juno probe in context of the wider planet. So that's just a picture of Juno and Jupiter. Okay, what else? We know the story of Juno and Jupiter. I'm sorry, this is just a funny thing. I don't have to go into it. But Juno, Juno is the Roman name for Hera's wife. And Jupiter is, I'm sorry, Juno is the Roman name for Hera, who is, you know, Zeus's wife, and Jupiter is the Roman name for Zeus. So Juno is going to check up on, you know, her husband, and the moons of her husband, such as Io, Ganymede, Europa, which are all, you know, Jupiter's other, other women, so to speak. So all of these moons of Jupiter are named after the other women in Jupiter's life. And the probe to go sent to look at them is named after Jupiter's spouse. It's great to be a god like that. Yeah, all kinds of options. And they keep on finding more and more Jupiter moons, which is, you know, cool. And there's a lot of them. Okay, now the next. I can resist the picture. So this is scuba diving. Myself scuba diving in the Bahamas, which was a class given by USC, a summer class, which was, you know, very fun rewarding. We were looking at coral reefs in particular, and which is a, you know, tragic situation right now. They're very sensitive. Coral polyps are very sensitive to small changes in water temperature and acidity. And we were looking at possibly using small pieces of coral and attaching them to artificial structures to encourage the rate of growth of the coral animal, which usually grows, you know, slower than your fingernail, but can be increased in growth speed by putting it closer to the sun at during the day when they can get the maximum amount of sunlight. Because symbiotic plant cells basically in the coral polyps generate energy for the coral polyps using the sun. And putting it deeper in the water at night, when these coral polyp animals can consume more nutrients that are more abundant at deeper levels. So we were looking at that while in the Bahamas. That was on an island called Elutera, which is a, you know, very thin crescent, crescenty island with, you know, probably 1000 or so people that are living on it. So it was very, very interesting. Oh, great experience. Yeah. Okay, we got any more? Yeah, we are. So this is a couple of the people that you know, a couple of my mentors and fellow students outside of the dome of the 100 inch telescope on top of Mount Wilson. And the second man to the left, looking at it is Dr. Rhodes. And the one right to the right of myself, third from the left in the middle is Steven Pinkerton, who is another one of my mentors. He's a graduate student right now. Yeah. Okay, I want to, we only have a little, little time left and I want to take a moment. So did you apply to various schools or did you go sailing directly to Yale? I applied to a lot of schools, actually, it was a very, I don't want to say difficult, but it was definitely a challenging process. When you apply to physics and astrophysics and astronomical PhD programs, they're funded, you know, so it's kind of like a job in some sense, asking to be funded to do research from universities. So they don't make it, you know, terribly easy. And there's a lot of competition as well. There's, you know, lots of people around the world that would like to be astronomers and that have worked, you know, extremely hard. And you take a test, just called the physics theory, which was a standardized test that tests your knowledge of basically all of physics. So everything from, you know, basic mechanics, blocks on ramps, which everyone sees probably in high school, all the way up to, you know, the beginnings of particle physics and quantum mechanics and things like that. So it's a lot to study, you know, thousands of years of collective human knowledge. So I spent about a year studying for the test. I still didn't do terribly well. But I got into a couple places. And there was a lot going on at Yale that I really wanted to be a part of. And also my mentor at USC, Dr. Rhodes, has a good relationship with some of the professors at Yale, because Dr. Rhodes tried to hire them for USC, but lost that bidding war, I suppose. So are you on a free ride at Yale too? Yeah, so they, I want a fellowship called the Gruber Science Fellowship, which is all all PhD students are funded in the natural sciences generally, because you do research for the university and you also teach. But I have have additional funding from a group, the Gruber Foundation, which is a foundation affiliated with Yale that does a ton of very interesting stuff in, in biology, chemistry, genetics, and in, and in social sciences too. They have a fellowship at a law school for, for women's rights studies and things like that. So it's a wide reaching organization. And I was, I'm thankful to win there. There's one of their science fellowships. That's great. So it's going to take you a little while to finish a master's in science, I guess, in astronomy. And then my guess is you'll take a PhD. Yeah, maybe you get accepted to the PhD program, and you get a master's on the way. So you're kind of, you're expected to, you know, finish your doctoral thesis at Yale eventually, you know, however long that may take. And you're committed to a PhD in some, some area of astronomy. Yeah, well, you don't have to choose an advisor immediately. That's one other thing that is, is cool about Yale is you, you kind of, you know, do a couple projects with a couple different people and see which kind of area, which advisors, student relationship you like, and, and which area of astronomy and astrophysical science you want to directly go into, whether that's, you know, that could be studying black holes and extremely energetic objects or studying, you know, objects in our own solar system. There was a study by a Yale professor named Greg Laughlin that was looking at that Oumuamua long cigar shaped asteroid that flew through our solar system, going zillions of miles an hour, very strange object that was, you know, interstellar, it didn't it's not part of our own solar system. And that's very interesting, because we've never really seen terrestrial things outside of our solar system. I'm sure you're going to see all kinds of things that will surprise and delight in the next few years. But I have two more questions before we, before we have to leave. And one of them is, what are the chances with all of this that you'll come back and make a career, or that you could come back and make a career here in Hawaii? I think it's, you know, very possible. I would love to work at the UH Institute for Astronomy, either as, you know, post op tour researcher, generally, after you finish your your doctorate, you go to a different institution and, you know, continue your research and possibly do some teaching. And I would, you know, love to teach astronomy and physics at, you know, any university really, but I think it would be especially, you know, impactful here in Hawaii, to do teaching and research. And especially if there's world class telescopes on Monacoia, still like how they are now, I would, I would love to be able to access those because, you know, astronomy is a pretty expensive science in the grand, in the grand skew of things. If you don't have the generally in history, only the richest people did astronomy. Sure. The consortium that's expected to build a 30 meter telescope is putting in 1.5 billion. So that's expensive. Let me go to my last question. And that is to put this all in perspective in the world in which we live. Yale is not sure what it's going to do as a university. And that includes astronomy. It includes your program. It includes, you know, the your activities on or with campus. Where does that stand now? You're in, you're supposed to go. It's coming close in two or three months, you know, there'll be a big crunch. What is Christopher going to do? Is he going to go there? Is he going to go remote? Is he going to wait? Does anybody know? Yeah, I wish I knew too. It's, it's, it's nice, though, that you know, if I were graduating with, you know, like a business degree or something like that. And, you know, from USC, that's, that's, you know, a good thing to have and a lucrative degree to hold. But it would be very hard to, you know, find, find work at the very, at this very moment in, you know, in, in what as a job that you would want to have, that was when me, but in academia, it's somewhat, once you get the position, it's somewhat insulated from, from these, from these goings on in the, in the overall world that affect the economy so devastatingly. And, you know, Yale is has has a lot of money. I've heard that though. So they, they can, they don't really rely so much on, on yearly, you know, payments to keep their, their situation running, they can, they almost entirely, in terms of research, are funded by, you know, government grants, or from their endowment, and they spend, you know, about a billion dollars a year on research. And part of that will be towards my, my stipend and my research continuing. What about COVID, though, Chris? What about COVID? What about social distancing and masks? What about remote connection like we're having now? Yeah, so my last semester at USC. Classroom experience. Yeah, my last semester at USC was, you know, remote for the most part. But they USC put out a statement saying that they would have in person college classes for those that want it. They would also have the option to take it online up until Thanksgiving. So they're cutting the semester short, squeezing more into less. And Yale hasn't put out a statement like that. But I suspect that their college might, might do a similar thing with shortened semester in class for those that wanted. And if you have, you know, in person classes, you have to have grad students, PhD candidates to, you know, teach sections, teach labs, and, you know, grade papers and that sort of thing. So you're going to have to go to class? So and I would, I would go to class, I think, with a mask and far enough away from everyone else. There's not too many people that, you know, are accepted and go to astronomy programs. So in my year, there's less than, you know, I think there's eight people that you won't have any problem social distance. Yeah, there's a class. It's not like a beginning OCam class, like at USC, the OCam lectures are, you know, 200, 300 people. But not many people study ours. But I want to circle back with you, you know, next time we can and find out how you're doing. I'd like to see more of you and talk to more of you and keep in contact and connection. That's Christopher Lindsay, a proud graduate, a graduate, an early graduate of Ilani, and a spectacular career at USC. And now only the best at Yale. Thank you so much, Chris. It's wonderful. Thank you very much. Aloha.