Editor’s note: Dr. Erika Hamden will be the closing keynote speaker at GRC Conference 2023, to take place 21-23 August in person in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, and virtually. Hamden is an American astrophysicist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory. She is also a member of the Goddard Space Flight Center Cosmic Origins Science Working Group. Hamden recently visited with the ISACA Now blog to discuss her passion for exploration and innovation. The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity.
ISACA Now: Your ultimate career goal to see and measure “every atom that exists” is a tall order. How has this desire shaped your career so far, and how does it influence your day-to-day work life?
I know this goal is objectively impossible, but I love it! It’s driven me to work on projects that are really very hard! But completing something hard, something so challenging like building a telescope, is incredibly satisfying. So, the work is hard but the payoff is equally great. I also think it has motivated some of my most interesting technical work and it really motivates my technology development work. With better sensors and telescopes, it’ll be much easier to find every atom that exists! It’s also been helpful for my day-to-day work because when there are challenges or setbacks, I know why I’m working on these projects. It really helps to have a long-term goal that I can point to when I ask myself why I’m doing what I’m doing. It also makes it easier to continue all the small-scale tasks because I know where they are leading.
ISACA Now: From developing telescopes to teaching astrophysics and working with NASA, what role has innovation played in your career? How would you define innovation?
For me, innovation is everything. I actually like how every day my work is different, and every project is different with new challenges. It’s never boring. I think innovation keeps fields interesting – there are always new papers to read and discoveries to keep up with, and it makes all the work seem fresh. It’s particularly gratifying now that I've been in the field for 15 years, I can look back at ideas that seemed impossible or telescopes that I thought were so far from becoming reality, and now they are working and flying. It’s really a source of inspiration for all the work I do. I see how much progress is made because of new technology, new analysis methods, and it makes me want to be a part of that progress. Innovation is building a new way to look at the universe, and discovery always follows from there.
ISACA Now: Is there a technological development that has particularly surprised you in recent years?
From a scientific standpoint, I’ve been so impressed by the work on LIGO and gravitational wave detection in the last decade. Our ability to measure disturbances in the very fabric of spacetime is just incredible. It’s both a validation of modern physics and a celebration of precision instrumentation. I cannot stress enough just how cool it is that we can observe something like two black holes merging billions of light years away just based on how they warp spacetime.
For more normal, human matters, I’ve been surprised and impressed by tech developments like rooftop solar and the push for electrifying everything. Living in Arizona, it’s really very cool to be able to run the air conditioning in my house with solar panels on the roof that were pretty cheap and installed in less than a day. It’s a mini power-plant in my house. Just amazing.
Now that I’m writing this, I’m also really into the increased access to space with commercial spaceflight! It’s something that has been discussed for a long time, but the fact that now it’s actually happening is really exciting. Basically, I'm excited by so many things! I will have to stop or else this list will be too long!
ISACA Now: Which would you say has shaped your career more: your successes or your failures? How do they inspire you to reach or redefine your goals?
The failures, hands down! The failures are all the places where I’ve been forced to stop and really examine what I’m doing and learn from it. The failures have been points where I need to re-think my approach, or where I need to maybe delve deeper into a subject to understand it better. I find the failures, if you really examine them, can be incredibly motivating. They demonstrate the gaps between your current status and where you are trying to get to, and that illumination really helps to move things forward. If you ignore the failure, or you don’t really learn from it, then it’s easy to get trapped in the same patterns and never move forward. The successes are great, but they are not as interesting to me. They usually follow after a failure, and I’m always glad to accomplish something, but when I look back at parts of projects that I remember most fondly, it’s the really tough challenging parts that I think of.
ISACA Now: Between your aspiration to become an astronaut and your goal of earning your private pilot’s license, what is it about flying and exploration that excites you the most?
Partly, I love the view! The view is supposedly the best thing about going to space – hopefully one day I can confirm! And the view from a small plane is so much more immediate and interesting than being in a commercial aircraft. I also like the feeling of possibility that I get in a plane. I can point it anywhere! One of my favorite parts of my job and of flying is getting perspective on my life and the world. The problems that feel very big to me aren’t really so big when you consider the rest of the galaxy, or compared to the view of the desert from 7,000 feet in the air. It helps to make me feel like I’m a small, tiny part of a huge universe. It’s humbling and also amazing to be here, a part of our incredible world and universe, and I like thinking about that.
