 I told my dad that I was going to take a course in cosmology, and he was like, what are you going to do with that? That's not a useful thing to do. What do you wish you had known about your career when you were my age? I wish a lot of things. It's a constant obsession. My daughter said that it was amazing that somebody was going to be interviewing me as their future self, and then she pointed out that it may be that you turn out to be way cooler than me. It's fascinating how much there is out there that we don't know. Every now and then I stop and sort of marvel at the immensity of the scales that we deal with. Hello, my name is Abby. I'm studying PHB science, and I would like to be an astrophysicist when I'm older. My name is Naomi McLeod Griffiths, and I am a professor of astrophysics at A&U. Today I'm going to be interviewing my future self, Naomi, the astrophysicist. At a dinner party, how do you explain what you do? So I usually say I'm an astrophysicist and then people stop talking to me, and so then I try to back up a little bit, and I say that I study our own galaxy and try to understand the structure of it and how it works. What did you think your job was going to be like compared to what it actually is? That's a good question. I think I thought my job would be doing a lot of mathematics and a lot of writing equations out, and instead it's doing a lot of programming and a lot of things on the computer. Do you do much maths in your job? I do, but very sporadically, so just enough time in between then I have to go back and remember it all, but then it comes back. What did you want to do as a career when you were my age? Yeah, I became interested in doing astrophysics probably around my second or third year, so are we in the right ballpark there? Yeah, I'm going in second year. Yep. I told my dad that I was going to take a course in cosmology, and he was like, what are you going to do with that? That's not a useful thing to do. I thought I have no idea what I'm going to do with that, but I like it. So I didn't actually have a career plan. I just thought I'd study and enjoy what I was learning. What do you wish you had known about your career when you were my age? I wish a lot of things. I wish that I had known how non-stop it is, so it's a constant obsession to be involved in research. You're always chasing a question that you want an answer to, and it's very hard to sort of stop and put it aside and just carry on doing other things. I don't think that would have changed anything, but I think it would have sort of mentally prepared me for what is sort of like getting on a treadmill when you get on to this career and you just keep going forever. Have you faced any barriers in your career? Yes. I'd say probably a few. When I was a student, I was the only woman in my physics major. I used to refer to the ladies toilet as my office. There was a sofa in there. There was never anybody else there. It was very pleasant. It was a great place to get away from things, but that also was fairly isolating to be the only woman at that time. So that was a bit of a barrier. I think, so I'm a mother and being a mother and a researcher is not trivial, but I haven't faced any huge problems that were, you know, oh my gosh, I don't know how to work my way through this. It was just stumbling blocks along the way. Yeah. Okay. And do you think the difference in genders in physics careers is kind of changing? It's changed enormously since I did my PhD a little over 20 years ago, and since then the number of women in PhD programs worldwide in most countries has become almost 50-50. So that's a huge change. It's got to filter its way up through the faculty. There still aren't very many of us at the professorial level, but certainly at the younger levels it's much, much more balanced now, and that's great to see. What amazes you most about astrophysics? The scale. I think, you know, by definition, there's nothing bigger than the universe. And the fact that we deal with things that are so big, we talk about timescales that are in billions of years. We talk about something that happened really quickly as being something that happened on a, you know, a few million-year timescale. That's a fast thing. The fact that we're talking about distances, I study the Milky Way and it's close, and I study things that are, you know, 25,000, 75,000 light years away, and that's just a blink of an eye in the astronomical scale. I think that's just every now and then I stop and sort of marvel at the immensity of the scales that we deal with. Based off of the, I mean, you asked me a lot of questions about sort of what I do and how my career works. Is there anything big in that that surprised you or put you off wanting to be an astrophysicist? Well, I like the sound of the diversity of the work you do, so all the communication, like using computers, talking to students, I guess I thought it would just be a lot of heavy calculations. So it's nice to know that there's a lot of different things you can do and just looking at the sky sounds so amazing. It's fascinating how much there is out there that we don't know, how you can just choose your own direction, what you want to learn. My daughter said that it was amazing that somebody was going to be interviewing me as their future self and then she pointed out that it may be that you turn out to be way cooler than me. So what happens if you become like a million times more successful than me? I'll make sure to tell everyone that it was you who inspired me.