Michelle Thaller, former assistant director for science communication at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will unveil how we can use infrared energy to see “hidden light” of the universe during the fourth annual Christmas Lecture on Friday, Dec. 6 at South Bend’s Century Center.

Her talk, “The Hidden Reality: Exploring the Invisible Universe with the James Webb Telescope,” will engage the young and old alike. This marks the first time the Christmas Lecture is presented outside the Notre Dame campus, and will begin at 6:30 p.m. after the tree lighting during Downtown South Bend’s (DTSB) holiday celebration. The Century Center is located at 120 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Thaller, who holds a doctorate in astrophysics, said she loves science, but enjoys it most when she can describe it within a story. Being a science “whiz” isn’t a requirement for anyone wanting to get into the field.

“I actually didn’t do particularly well in my science classes,” said Thaller, who earned her undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Harvard University. “If I can’t put a piece of knowledge into a narrative structure, it kind of slips out of my mind.”

She has made science storytelling central to her career. In addition to her role at NASA, Thaller hosted Discovery Science Channel’s How the Universe Works from 2007-2015 and the podcast Orbital Path from 2015 to 2018. For NASA she worked with scientists on how to appropriately describe their work to many different audiences, and helped others write for the non-scientist crowd.

During her interactive, high-energy talk, Thaller — who hosted the release of NASA’s first images from the James Webb Space Telescope — will share some of the beautiful images from that instrument. She will also demonstrate how infrared instruments help astronomers “see” into the depths of the Universe.

She enjoys working with middle school children, and fully remembers her sense of awe and wonder when she watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series by age 10.

“Carl Sagan’s show was all about stories,” she said. “Science wasn’t just standalone knowledge. It was these wonderful narratives about discovery, from how stars were made to what Einstein was doing as a teenager.”

This love for storytelling shaped her approach to science communication, leading her to emphasize the human side of astronomy. “The personalities in astronomy — Albert Einstein, Cecilia Payne, and countless others — have incredible stories,” she said, highlighting Payne’s pivotal discovery that stars are made of hydrogen.

Thaller likes to stress to her younger audience members that it takes a variety of different approaches to learning in order to be a scientist. Girls, especially, may feel or be told that they aren’t “good” at math, and that can be damaging.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from Harvard University, she completed her doctoral degree at Georgia State University. She once earned a D in a course on differential equations, but became competent by continuing to work at it.

Thaler also learned that because her brain works a little differently than some of her colleagues, people turn to her to solve different types of problems.

“I put together unrelated ideas better than I think a lot of my colleagues do,” she said. “They would come to me and say they’re writing this proposal, and we need to bring in these different ideas and we’re not sure how to link them, and I was able to show them how there’s a story here and that one part leads to another."

She landed her job at NASA in a circuitous way. A specialist in massive stars in binary systems — systems in which two objects orbit around a common center of mass — she sometimes studied stars in the southern sky, which led her to telescopes in Australia and South America.

In Australia, she met and fell in love with another astronomer, who would become her future husband, and “he and I were trying to figure out how to be on the same continent,” she said. After her postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Montreal, both astronomers were offered jobs at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. She began in the infrared astronomy group’s public outreach program, and soon realized that communicating about astrophysics was the job she was meant to have.

Thaller, who has started a new job as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is looking forward to sharing all the amazing sights that the James Webb telescope can “see.”

“When I was a practicing research astronomer, things that we sort of surmised were going on, with stars being born and dying, are something we can see with the James Webb,” she said. “I never thought I’d actually literally see them!”

Modeled after the Royal Institution’s Christmas Lecture series, the Christmas Lecture aims to inspire general audiences with the curiosity and wonder of scientific inquiry. Her talk will be accompanied by specialty cookies, a hot chocolate bar, and will be followed by a Q+A between her and Kate Biberdorf, aka Kate the Chemist, who gave the 2023 Christmas Lecture. Guests will want to stay for the entire event, because there’s a special surprise at the end!

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on November 21, 2024.