An interview with Dr. Mark Halpern

Dr. Halpern is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UBC.

With those fields being something I’m very interested in, I reached out and Dr. Halpern was kind enough to answer a few questions.

1) Why are you passionate about your job?

“There are two parts to my job: teaching and research, which in my case
means trying to figure out how the Universe began.  Both of these can be
very rewarding and both of them allow me really a lot of free choices
about just what to do.

Do I explain something by working out all the math, or by analogy to a
system already understood?  Do I ‘explain’ it by asking questions which,
I hope, provoke discovery?

For cosmologists, we live in a lucky time, when the predictions of
general relativity are within reach of careful measurements, and I have
designed and built instruments which are operating at the South Pole, at
the tops of the Chilean Andes, in deep space 3 times as far away as the
moon and also in the Okanagan Valley in BC, all to try to learn about
the physics governing the earliest moments in the Universe and its
mysterious present day accelerating expansion.”

2) What obstacles have you faced to get you where you are today?

“Well, with a job this fun there is a fair bit of competition to get it.
For many careers, once you are done with your training you can choose
where to live and find a job.  Doctors, lawyers, gardeners, all can
choose a town to live in, and will have a stable working situation when
they are 30 years old if they are good at what they do.

Among research physicists, a 30-year old is still looking for work,and
needs to be willing to move almost anywhere to find a job that matches
their skills and interest.”

3) What advice would you pass on to someone interested in what you are doing?

“First, do research if you love to, if you stay awake at night trying to
solve problems, and if when you solve them you feel joy.

As for training, there are really two important things to learn well.
One is math, which is the foundation of all our scientific decisions,
and the other is how to write well.  It is incredibly important to be
able to explain what you know, even more important to explain what you do
not know, in clear well organized sentences.”

4) What is it like working with so many different people every day? Is it ever overwhelming?

“The variety of personalities and of learning styles of the young
researchers I do experiments with is one of the things which makes my
job fun.

When we advertised for a telescope operator for CHIME we got
applications from people who live on 6 different continents!  The
students and researchers in my lab now come from North and South
America, Europe, Asia and Africa.  They speak 8 different first languages.”

5) How do you ensure you never get bored of your passion if you do it as a job every day?

“You do get tired sometimes.  It is funny looking back at it, but when
our results from the WMAP experiment were first clear to me, I had this
moment of thinking ‘is that all?’.

I guess I had hoped that the experiment would show something really
stunning and even confusing, but it did not.  Then I snapped out of it:
we had measured the age of the Universe to a part in 1000, that atoms
only comprise a few percent of the Universe, that dark energy is 70%.
We had the best limits on the mass of neutrinos and seen that there was
Helium before there were any stars.  That does kind of perk you back up
again.”

6) Would you be open to further contact from Riverside students and if so, how can someone contact you?

“I think reading and talking to fellow students, working things out on
your own and then trying to convince each other is more rewarding and
better for you than asking questions of ‘experts’ would be.

If you get stuck on a problem, and your friends and teachers can not
help, feel free to send a question.”

halpern@physics.ubc.ca

That concluded the interview. I, for one, learned much more than I expected I would from just these couple questions. It also gave me a bit of an inside look on what a job in this field would be like, and if anything, I’m even more inspired now. We’re in a time of rapid change and being a part of new discoveries seems like such an exciting thing. That’s one of the many reasons a ob in this field would, in fact, be my dream job.

I also learned that sometimes you’re going to have times where there’s no progress being made. Experiments don’t end the way you wanted them to. But looking back and thinking about all those times where things did work out makes it all worth it. Doing your passion every day does get boring, but you just need to think back on the results that were exciting, or the people you worked with.

All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a more inspiring interview. Getting a sneak peek into the life of a scientist was very interesting and has made me even more excited to go into that field of research.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The CHIME radio telescope (located in the Okanagan, near Penticton) Dr. Halpern designed. The program it was used in encouraged young women to find interest in science and math.

 

Studying the formation of the universe from Antarctica.

Time lapse of the construction of the CHIME telescope.

Image taken during the construction of the CHIME telescope.

All images and videos have been sent in my Mark Halpern