Grad student gets influential space studies fellowship
She’s a woman of many talents – scientist, physicist, engineer and theorist. Padmashri Suresh was recently chosen to complete a prestigious fellowship with the National Academies, an organization employing the best of the best across the world and throughout many areas of study.
An international student, Suresh came to USU from India in fall 2008 to complete her master’s degree. Suresh is now finishing her Ph.D. in electrical engineering, specifically studying space instrumentation and physics.
Following in the footsteps of her mentor, adviser and professor Charles Swenson, Suresh is interested in working in space exploration policy, which is her link to the fellowship. Swenson is an experimental space scientist working in spacecraft systems and engineering at USU.
“There’s the actual science and engineering and doing it, and then there’s the administration of it, or policy,” Swenson said.
Swenson has worked with NASA doing policy reviews since 1992, almost as long as he started teaching at USU in 1991. Scientists working in policy ponder questions dealing with the future of the aerospace program and how it affects the global society.
“I like looking at big picture,” Suresh said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m doing this fellowship at the academies is to look at the big picture of the space industry as a whole. That’s one of the career options, to do space policy, to see how could my research impact the society.”
Attending the Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship next semester in Washington, D.C., Suresh will be working with the most elite professionals in her field.
“Academies is like the premier organization, which advises the nation as a whole on matters like engineering and science and medicine,” Suresh said. “What happens is you have the creme de la creme of each field that get elected as members of the academies, and that’s considered the most prestigious thing. You have the most distinguished scientists getting elected by their peers to do this.”
The important players in the fields of science and technology come to the academies for advice on big world issues. Suresh and 19 of her peers were elected across fields of study to shadow the process.
“You have NASA who come to them and say, ‘We have a problem, could you advise us on how to go about this?'” Suresh said. “Because they as technical people know the technical merits of something they’re doing, but they also need to think about the big picture. How does this impact the society? How does this impact maybe the legislation of the country? Then you have international relations.”
Suresh was elected to shadow the space studies board. Her 19 colleagues will study engineering and medicine as well.
“These people come together and they brainstorm,” she said. “They’re like the think tank that tell them how to go about doing this. We, 20 of us who are selected as the Mirzayan fellows, get to see how this happens. So we have these people training us.”
Suresh originally applied for a college internship and was surprised to be referred to this one instead. The majority selected for the Christine Mirzayan Fellowship have already earned degrees and finished their Ph.D.
“These are some amazing set of people,” she said. “Initially when I heard about this, I said, ‘Are you sure I should be doing this? Because I’m still in school.’ I was so nervous, to be honest. Just the fact that I’m going to go there and meet some of these people is something I’m so excited about.”
Suresh said the professionals training her are celebrities in her field.
“You have these people who are literally the celebrities in my field,” Suresh said. “These people who I have looked up to forever – to know that I’ll be sitting in a room with them, listening to them, talking with them. I hope I just don’t sit there with my mouth open. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Aside from the work she’ll do in policy in Washington, D.C., Suresh is doing hands-on research for her dissertation about the way solar activity affects the earth’s atmosphere.
“The sun is active and quiet,” she said. “It has this periodic and episodic activity where it gets really active and you have these auroras, which are the northern lights. You have that, but apart from having this pretty show put up at the poles where you can see this beautiful thing in the sky, it affects the atmosphere.”
She said it affects things like GPS and telecommunications signals. Canada once went without power for three days because of a solar storm.
“If the sun is really active, it might not just be Canada. It might be hitting Utah depending on the activity,” Suresh said. “You don’t want to come across the situation where we have to go without power.”
She’s also working with satellite instruments to measure the solar activity and temperature in the earth’s outer atmosphere. Small, handheld satellites called CubeSats are affordable and can link together to see 3-D images in space.
“Because they’re so cheap you can have a string of them together,” she said. “So you get real 3-D images, literally the Holy Grail of space physics, able to see it from all different places at the same time.”
Swenson said Suresh is working with interesting data sets to understand the atmosphere and CubeSats. She may be one of the leaders with the technology in the future.
“The hope is that within the next 10 years, we’ll be flying constellations of those satellites,” Swenson said. “She may very well be one of the lead people understanding the thermosphere and how it responds.”
He said the fellowship will open up many opportunities for her, and he could see her future dealing with the research and technology of space or working on the policy and administration side of it.
“I think it might open up the possibility for her to go to NASA headquarters,” Swenson said. “I’ve talked with the people there and they’re interested in someone like her, and maybe she’ll be one of the first postdocs at NASA headquarters, which is something that hasn’t happened yet.”
-daniellekmanley@gmail.com
Twitter: @daniellekmanley