(Intro Music)

Host:Hi, thank you so much for coming. I’m Anders Lee, and I’m the co-finance and sponsorship director on the Millennium STEM executive team, and this is Sophie, the co-chair of Millennium STEM BC. I’d just like to ask you a few questions about yourself and STEM. To start off, could you please tell me a little bit about yourself?

Maaike van Kooten:Well, it’s nice to meet you both. My name is Maaike, I’m one of four daughters—so I grew up in an all-girls home in British Columbia for the most part. We did move around a lot, growing up, but yeah—basically Vancouver, Richmond, and also on Vancouver Island. Growing up, my dad was a [professor] in Economics so I was very familiar with being at a university. On the weekends we would go to the campus, go for coffee, go to bookstores, so it was a very familiar place for me to be—a university. I’m also married, I got married between my two graduate degrees, and so I’ve been able to do graduate school thanks to a very supportive husband who’s been really—I’ve been really fortunate in terms of, he’s allowed my career to be a priority in our relationship. And I guess on a professional level, I’m a researcher in Astronomy, specifically in Astronomy Instrumentation.

Host:Alright, thank you so much. Now can you tell us a bit about your education and your STEM experience? Just elaborate on that a bit further.

Maaike van Kooten:Yeah, of course. So I grew up going to public school, and I went to do my undergrad in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Victoria in Canada. And I did a four-year undergraduate degree. During this period I wasn’t part of the co-op program, but I did do co-ops, so I did three co-op terms. I think to get an official designated co-op degree it required four. And during these co-ops I worked at the National Research Council of Canada, which is also in Victoria, and it’s an observatory where they do science but they also build instruments for astronomy. And then I went on to do a master’s degree, and I actually did it in applied science in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Victoria. Finally I went to pursue a Ph.D and I did that in Astrophysics at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Host:How would you say that co-op experience affected your STEM journey?

Maaike van Kooten:Oh, it definitely had a major impact for me. So I knew I was always interested in STEM, I was always interested in tech and science, biology, chemistry, physics—I loved math. And, you know, physics and math were a bit more difficult for me, and I actually really liked the challenge of that, and that’s kind of how I went into a physics degree and math degree because it was something I really enjoyed but it wasn’t until I did a co-op that I could see a career in STEM. So my first co-op was—you know, you would just apply to these different jobs that were available, you’d see like, this one sounds interesting, and I ended up being a telescope tour guide and working with the public at the observatory—also working on science programs for kids, and summer camps, and doing public observing: so on a Friday and Saturday night people would come and you would observe with them through a 1-Meter class telescope. And that environment also exposed me to the other people that worked there that were actual researchers in science, in astronomy, but also the engineers that were working there. I was able to do two more co-op terms there: the first one I did a pure science one, so I was kind of analyzing astronomy data, and then over lunch and coffee with the different people there, I realized there was an engineering side to this. Something where you could build and design instruments and push technology to come up with new ways of measuring things that would allow astronomers to have new tools and they could make new discoveries through those tools. I was like, “oh, this is awesome,” like “I really like the idea that you can be in science and be in this space of research but also be doing something hands-on.” And so that is why for my third co-op term I was able to connect with somebody who was working in the optics lab there, so I worked with fiber optics and figured out how to polish them and get them working for specific instruments they were building. Through my co-op terms I went from being like, “This is something I really enjoy, this is something cool” to really seeing all the different career aspects that you could have and you could see it as somewhere I could pursue an actual career.

Host:Alright, great. I’ll just quickly go back to the education piece: I just want to know about the difference you’ve noticed with European universities and why you specifically chose to study in the Netherlands.

Maaike van Kooten:Yeah! So I was looking specifically for a place that really fostered astronomy instrumentation. It’s kind of this niche area where you need to have that engineering background, so you need exposure to mechanical, electrical engineering, some software, and you also need to be understanding the current research that’s being done in astronomy and astrophysics, so you kind of need to be on both sides of the engineering and pure science. There aren’t that many departments that offer grad programs that allow for you to have the experience and the exposure to both of these things, and cultivate that in you. I always knew that Leiden University had a specific group that did this, and so I kind of wanted to be there and to be part of that. I guess also I am Dutch as well, so I’m Dutch-Canadian, and so it made it much more—it made it less scary, the concept of moving to Europe and to another country to pursue a degree. It’s very different there. So the first thing is as a grad student or as a PhD student you have to come in with a master’s degree. You can’t come into their grad program without a master’s. Versus like in Canada, you can go into a graduate program and you start off in your master’s and it’s very common to do a transfer—so you continue with the same group that you’re working with, and it transfers and becomes your PhD program. But there they want [those] two distinct degrees. You’re also a government employee there, so all PhDs in STEM are paid the same no matter what university you go to—you get benefits, so it’s very transparent from that point of view. Then the other side of it is, I guess, specifically Dutch society is less hierarchical. So very much you’re viewed as a collaborator. At the beginning you’re maybe someone who’s more in training, and your supervisor is definitely more guiding you, but then eventually they really take it to be that by your second and third year you’re driving your research and you’re more a collaborator or a co-creator with your supervisor towards the end project or research that you have. So it really allows for you to take on responsibility sooner and it helped me grow in that aspect. I think from just having friends in the Canadian system, it was more hierarchical, where they were always kind of below their principal investigator, their supervisor, but that really depends personally on the individual, the group, and the university.

Host:Thank you so much for telling us that, Maaike. One thing that we also wanted to expand upon was encouraging youth to participate in STEM, and how would you go about encouraging you to get involved in STEM, or any opportunities in particular like co-op that youth could do?

Maaike van Kooten:So I guess, youth do you mean undergrads or high schoolers?

Host:High schoolers like us, yeah.

Maaike van Kooten:Okay, high schoolers. This is a very challenging question, but I think like—taking from the point of view of astronomy, if this is something that interests you, there’s the Royal Astronomical Society—so there’s usually different societies or different clubs that will participate in different aspects of STEM. So the Royal Astronomical Society, they come every single Friday and Saturday night—or they used to, they set up their own telescopes and do public observing. And as a co-op student, I was interacting with them, and I found I learned so much from just speaking to them. They had so much knowledge and—yeah, it was just so wonderful being part of that community and getting to experience it. I highly recommend if there’s a club or society, that’s a really good way in because the people there will be able to foster your interest. I also—you know, I helped with some summer schools and they’re more geared towards undergrads as well, but I think there are ones out there that are for high schoolers, but if you can get experience—especially in STEM, in physics or astronomy or engineering—having programming experience, I think that’s something where there’s a lot of online courses that will let you learn Python and stuff. So doing those types of things helps you to have—changes your way of thinking and teaches you how to problem-solve in a way that’s super useful for pursuing STEM, but it also is something that is, you know, if anyone has a computer they can learn these things, so it’s very accessible. I guess another thing is there are now programs out there that do citizen science, and I think this was an astronomy thing where we had so much data that we couldn’t all look at it, so we actually asked volunteers to look at it, so I think like Galaxy Zoo is something, and I think other fields like biology and chemistry have now taken on this model where you can be involved from anywhere in the world, no matter your age, you can be participating in it. Some of these things have even led to members of the public being on papers and stuff because they’ve discovered really cool things and they’ve connected with scientists in that way. I think with the Internet and social media, there’s lots of ways to connect and if anyone’s interested in connecting with astronomy, they can reach out to me, I guess, and I’ll help them.

Host:Thank you so much. You mentioned that part about being really accessible and open to anyone around the world. So how do you think intersectionality plays into STEM?

Maaike van Kooten:Oh, I think it’s—okay, for myself I think we definitely need to continue to make room in STEM for everyone to bring their full identities into STEM. I think that’s super important, and I think it really allows for us to have more fun doing STEM, but also to come up with creative solutions as people come from different backgrounds and different points of view and they interpret data differently, they see solutions differently. So I think STEM is going to be a better environment when we have more people and we have more diversity and everyone feels comfortable and welcome in such situations. Does that answer your question fully?

Host:Yes, thank you so much. Also, just going back to your career now—what do you think is the most groundbreaking discovery you’ve made, either scientifically or about yourself, and why?

Maaike van Kooten:I think the most groundbreaking is about myself. I’m too early in my career to have done necessarily impactful, groundbreaking things for my field. But I think one of the biggest things was kind of this idea of imposter syndrome or always thinking of the ideas I have, being young or relatively new in a field, that someone’s had this idea before or this question isn’t a good question, or these different things. You may feel really unsure or feel like you don’t belong. I think just taking part in different committees that I have to be on and different things that are part of my job, I’ve really had this opportunity to see my own questions and thoughts be validated. So for example, I take part in time allocation committees, so this is where, in astronomy you write a proposal, and a group of peers is going to say if it's worth time on a telescope or not. This was a very terrifying thing for me to start out doing. My first time doing it I was thinking, “how am I supposed to judge someone else’s science and their work?” And so being in a committee setting with many people from different experience levels and backgrounds, I was able to see internally, “I have these questions,” or “I have this initial reaction to this,” or whatnot. And see that being validated and basically seeing like, hey, actually everyone else in the room agreed with that or had that thought. And that allows for me to speak up more, and really say—hey, I belong here, my questions and opinions matter, and I don’t need to earn that, but I can just come up and say those things. I think on a personal level, tackling that imposter syndrome over the last few years.

Host:Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Okay, so in the present moment, what kind of work are you doing in your field?

Maaike van Kooten:Yep. So I work in a very niche field called Adaptive Optics, and so Adaptive Optics is, I guess—when you look at a star, you see that a star twinkles. And this is actually due to turbulence in our atmosphere, so the air blowing around actually causes the twinkling of stars. An astronomer, when they want to take a picture of a star—and from that picture we can extract information—that twinkling basically is the same thing as you taking a photo and your hand shaking, and your picture is going to get blurry. So that’s what’s happening, is the turbulence is kind of shaking the star and we get a blurry image. Adaptive optics is us correcting for atmospheric turbulence in real-time. What we do is we measure what the turbulence is doing in the atmosphere, and we have a mirror that is really really thin and also really small, about the size of a quarter, and we shrink the light down onto that mirror and the mirror changes shape, so it can change shape and become like, a potato chip or whatever you want. We can actually cancel out the effects of turbulence using this mirror, and it has hundreds to thousands of things on the backs of the mirror that we can push and pull. We can do this up to thousands of times per second. I work on pushing this technology even further: improving it for the application of directly imaging planets outside our solar system. So we want to take pictures of planets that are next to really bright objects—we have to provide a really stable correction and completely remove the effects of turbulence. I work on improving the different aspects of the technology.

Host:Alright, thank you. I was thinking—does the hesitancy of iconoclasm affect progress from happening. So, for example, Cecilia Payne introducing her groundbreaking thesis on how stars were composed and how they needed hydrogen and helium, and her thesis getting immediately rejected—do you think that affects the field of astronomy and how so?

Maaike van Kooten:So I think there’s kind of two sides to that. So I guess in the theoretical side of astronomy, for sure, I think there’s some tension when you challenge something that is assumed. And, you know, you have also different personalities involved, and you have seniority and hierarchy and stuff, but on the—one thing I really like about my side is that in instrumentation, where we are kind of trying to push it, we need those new ideas. We thrive off of that. We need somebody to be like “hey, let’s try this crazy thing,” and so we all get very excited about that. I’d like to think as a community, the astronomy instrumentation specifically—the adaptive optics community—is very open to these rocking-the-boat kind of ideas and we really like that. We recognize that’s how we’re going to push technology and push the direction, and get instruments that allow the scientists to do crazier, better science. I think in instrumentation it’s slightly less of a problem.

Host:Okay, thank you so much. Just talking about—I don’t know—what is the biggest challenge that you’ve experienced in your career or in your life so far?

Maaike van Kooten:I don’t know. I’ll pick a recent one. It’s actually—it feels like it’s the biggest challenge right now. Sometimes the ones that are the most recent are fresh in your memory so you feel like they are the biggest. On Sunday and Monday, actually, I was commissioning—so that means installing and testing and getting the first time light passes through a new camera on a telescope about a two-hour drive from here, and you know, we thought we had thought about everything, we had talked to all the people and then on Sunday, we had it installed, and everything was working, and we went for dinner. We came back from dinner and things weren’t working the way we thought it was! And it was actually a network, so a communication—how we were talking to the computers and whatnot—and this actually resulted in Sunday night, we weren’t really able to observe, and it took about twenty-four hours to actually solve this and so you’re basically on the mountain, scrambling to try and fix this, you’re trying to call people who you think can help you, but you’re also alone in terms of—in the end, you have to figure out how to get it to work. Despite spending three hours on Zoom the next day with different IT experts and software engineers to help troubleshoot this, they weren’t able to help me, and it wasn’t until breaking again for lunch and spending a few more hours working on it that we had the undergrad I was working with—we were about to give up, and then we had a crazy idea, “what happens if we do this?” and that kind of solved it. In that moment, that twenty-four hours, feeling the pressure of ‘it has to happen Monday or we won’t get a chance to get this to work again,’ and then having the difficulty where you don’t really understand, I’m not an expert in networking, so you’re just trying to come up with solutions.

Host:So how did that collaboration help with your process, and just in general collaboration?

Maaike van Kooten:Collaboration is a huge part of my job. Everything I do is in collaboration: I get to collaborate with all types of engineers and scientists, so, you know, on a weekly basis, interacting with mechanical, electrical, software engineers a lot, and then also collaborating with grad students and undergrad students. This past summer I was mentoring—the last two summers I’ve been mentoring an undergrad college transfer student, and it really teaches me how to break down tasks. Sometimes, you know, you get used to your own work but you have to be able to explain what you need done to other people, and you have to be able to break it down into smaller components and milestones. Especially working with an undergrad to make those manageable, and to help someone through time management, but also to make sure you’re being super clear in the goal and how to get there, and the motivation for why we’re doing this—that’s super important. I think it’s really fun to collaborate and work with other people, but it really keeps me—communication skills have to be good, you have to really value the people you’re collaborating with, their time is really important, so you don’t want to waste their time. You really want to treat your engineers, your professionals, really well, so I think communicating clearly and also communicating your appreciation to them is something that really allows for collaboration to thrive.

Host:Based on that—giving positive feedback, and just giving them good experiences, was there a particular mentor that helped you during your studies or your career?

Maaike van Kooten:Yes. So actually I have a few, but specifically that very first co-op job that I took. My boss that hired me, essentially, it turned out his partner at the time—or wife, now—she was also a researcher in the exact same field as me. Kind of the two of them have been people that I can talk to and speak to and actually ask for advice on a career side and all these different things. They have been a couple that’s been supportive of me but also being people that I can speak to and voice concerns or ask for direction, and I can really trust what they’re saying to me. Always when you’re going through grad school you have advisors, so people that are directly guiding research and trying to teach you how to do research. Hopefully you have a good relationship with them, and I was very lucky that I did in my cases, and so those were definitely people that are mentors to me whether it’s teaching me how to write better, teaching me the scientific process—how do you tackle a question, how do you solve it for the first time, how do you ask good questions—all these different things that have been taught to me by mentors.

Host:Okay—for those who are uncertain, they don’t even have a mentor in the first place, what would you say to them: they want to pursue STEM, but they’re not entirely sure what to do?

Maaike van Kooten:Yeah, so I think the very first thing is at least being—when you get to university it’s a lot easier, because you’re going to have profs that are teaching you in all these different things—don’t be scared to go up to people. I think you’ll hear when you have a teacher that you really like, don’t think you’re not worth reaching out to them. If you think you’re like, “oh, this person, I really like how they explain things” but maybe you also hear about their research or things you’re interested in, they might have office hours or opportunities where if you’re in someone’s class, you’ll be able to go meet with them. They’re kind of an open-door policy where you can come and ask questions. Often you assume that it’s with the course material. You can [also] go and ask about their research or anything, and also sending emails to people and saying like, “hey can I meet,” but give them sufficient information and background and motivate why you’re reaching out to them, but I think, like, every time someone’s reached out to me I don’t react negatively, it’s really nice, it’s an honour, and I either say that I unfortunately don’t have time but reach out to this person, or talk to this person—you know, communicate with them. I think that’s something. It can be scary to think about, but don’t worry about that. Find clubs at universities or maybe at your current high school and your own teachers at high school, like they went and did degrees somewhere, so they have a lot of knowledge and connections as well. Don’t feel pressured to have to figure it out. I definitely didn’t go into my undergrad knowing what was going to be on the other side of finishing my undergrad, and sometimes we put a lot of pressure, when you start in first year, that you’ve made your decision, and that’s the direction you’re going to go. But don’t be scared to take other classes or to go out of your comfort zone, or to change something: changing a degree, or even taking a break from something—that’s not failure, that’s just you understanding yourself well and actually realizing things sooner than later. I don’t know if that fully answers the question.

Host:No that’s okay, you answered it, thank you so much. Referring back to that night where you had to fix the telescope, and that intense situation—would you say astronomy is usually a high-pressure field and how do you cope with that amount of pressure?

Maaike van Kooten:Yes, so there are periods where it’s very high-pressure, but I think especially in academia, so being kind of in the—right now I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, and after your PhD you can try and go into industry, maybe, or if you want to continue in research you might want to find a position at a government research facility, or a lab, or something, but oftentimes between getting your PhD and kind of making that next step there’s this temporary position which I’m in. That’s very much a high-pressure situation because they are temporary contracts, and you often want to produce results, and the way that we measure results, at least in science, is through peer-reviewed papers. Astronomy is definitely one of the fields—sub-fields are slightly different within astronomy, but there’s definitely [a culture of] “you should be publishing” and that creates your value within the field. In instrumentation it’s very hard to publish because you’re not necessarily doing. You’re building something, and that’s not always a paper that’s novel. It’s really hard to balance that, so from that point of view, where your value or your worth is sometimes measured in these peer-reviewed papers, that can be a very stressful thing. And then when you have deadlines, when you’re putting something on a telescope, that’s also a lot of stress because you will have a certain number of nights: you get this amount of time with the telescope and if you don’t finish it in that period of time, it’s over. But otherwise, on a day-to-day basis, my goals for what I want to do for the day and all these different things, it’s much slower and much less pressure because I’m creating my own schedule, I’m putting on my own pressure, so it’s very self-driven from that point of view. All the projects and how quickly I move through them—my boss might have some demands, but usually it’s very collaborative to figure out deadlines and stuff. A lot of the deadlines are self-imposed. But of course you just want to have good performance, so the quicker you can do things, the more things you can do, and then the more papers you can write, so the better you can appear on paper, kind of. You just have to balance it: you have to see value in other things besides your life in STEM. I have to see value in my family, in the extracurricular activities I like to do, and I just have to say “no.” You have to just say “actually, I want to have a life outside of my job,” and saying 9-5 and then maybe on the Sunday and Monday, that was one of the extreme circumstances where I was trying to install something so I worked more hours and I’ll take more breaks this week, to balance it out and keep a work-life balance.

Host:Alright, thank you. And what do you say inspires you or excites you about the field of astronomy?

Maaike van Kooten:Oh, I think just like—understanding what’s happening up there. I’ve always been in awe and wonder of nature and everything. From a young age, I—when I was in Grade 6 I was in French immersion, and our French immersion teacher, over Christmas, because we were doing science in French as well—this was the first year I was in French immersion. He said “when we come back from Christmas break, everyone is going to take turns teaching the class on a topic they chose.” So [we] got to prepare a lecture. And I think at that time there were kind of words in the news about nuclear [fission] and how that’s the future, and I discovered that the sun was doing nuclear [fusion], and I was like “this is the coolest thing ever!” So I went and did my project on the life cycle of stars, and I think just the amazement and wonder that I had over what was happening inside of stars, and how many stars there are up there—that really drives it. The beauty of it all really drives it for me.

Host:Okay. And I think—I don’t know, Sophie, one more question? Or how many?

Sophie [V.O]:You can ask as many questions as you want. I did actually have my own question: I was wondering—I don’t know too much about astronomy, but I was wondering if light pollution and other issues from things like climate change and large amounts of population kind of affect your work, or sort of impede it in any way?

Maaike van Kooten:Yeah, those are really good questions. So light pollution is a huge deal in astronomy. For example, some of the smaller telescopes that maybe you’ve seen, depending on where you’ve travelled to—so I think the telescope I’m working on is just outside of San Jose, the Bay Area, or Silicon Valley. That one definitely has—you see light pollution and that limits how faint we can go, or how faint of a star we can look at. Some observatories have gone from something that is used for science to not being used for science because of light pollution. So we really like dark skies, it’s really important for astronomy, and then climate change: that’s something we’re trying to understand a bit more. One of my interests is not only “how do we correct for turbulence” but “how do we describe turbulence for astronomy?” and “how do we know what’s happening in our atmosphere?” I’ve kind of been trying to look at, “can we see a trend in the amount of turbulence in our air?” There was a Nature paper, a few years ago, that was looking at planes travelling from North America to Europe, and they found that you would experience more turbulence—the plane bouncing around. You would also potentially see that it would require more fuel to do that trans-Atlantic flight. They’re starting to notice that trend and that’s due to climate change and turbulence. That was like “oh, what’s happening in astronomy then?” because we care about turbulence too. It’s a slightly different kind of turbulence. We’re trying to understand that, but we need more data to do that, and so we think it’s a big deal, but we don’t fully understand it yet in astronomy.

Sophie [V.O]:Okay, I think that’s it for our questions—Anders, do you have any more questions?

Host:Sure, I was just going to jump in with this question: what do you want your legacy to be?

Maaike van Kooten:Oh, my legacy! I guess for me, it’s very interpersonal. I just really hope that the people I work with and the students that I get to work with, that they have a really fun time, that they learn a lot but they also learn about themselves. And that at some point, they gain maybe one useful skill from interacting with me! Then, you know, on a more professional level, it would be really cool to have an instrument that enables new science. So to really build something that astronomers can do something new with, and yeah, I think in the next few years, I hope that will be a reality.

Host:Okay. I think that concludes the interview. I just want to thank you for coming to this today, and thank you so much for coming on Unlocking STEM!

Maaike van Kooten:Thank you both for having me! It was nice to meet you both.

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