Sara seager phd thesis

Sara seager phd thesis

Jul 06,  · Late nights, typos, self-doubt and despair. Francis Collins, Sara Seager and Uta Frith dust off their theses, and reflect on what the PhD was like for them Sara Seager Phd Thesis If you order paper now, here is how we will proceed with your assignment: Place your order and give details Sara Seager Phd Thesis about your essay. We will find a professional paper writer whose skills, education and experience will be the best fit for this particular task How to Start Sara Seager Phd Thesis an Essay: Simple and Effective Instruction. Learn how to start an essay from clear practical and theoretical advice that will help you overcome problems connected with understanding its principles

Sara Seager - Wikipedia

Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Late nights, typos, self-doubt and despair.

Francis Collins, Sara Seager and Uta Frith dust off their theses, and reflect on what the PhD was like for them. Francis Collins shakes his head in bewilderment as he flicks through the pages of his thesis. Collins was in his early 20s when he was studying for his doctorate at Yale University in New Haven, sara seager phd thesis, Connecticut, modelling how small groups of atoms interact. Then, about halfway through his studies, he decided to quit his PhD and transfer to medical school.

He ended up finishing the thesis in his spare time. The writing machines have changed, but the slog is the same. Many of those who do finish move on to careers outside academia ; even those sara seager phd thesis stay sometimes wish they'd spent more time writing papers — the currency of career progression — instead.

So what value does the thesis retain, and what lessons does completing one impart? To find out, Nature asked three prominent scientists to dig out their theses, thumb through the pages and reflect on what they — and the world — gained from them. What did they learn that could be of value to students who are writing up today? Their reflections, sometimes surprising, are recorded in three short films that accompany this article.

Collins's PhD was the start of a stellar career: he famously moved into biological research, identified the gene that causes cystic fibrosisled the Human Genome Project to completion and now, more than 40 years after writing his thesis, directs the US National Institutes of Health. But that doesn't mean that his PhD changed the world. But like others who went 'back to the thesis' for Sara seager phd thesishe thinks that what matters was not so much the subject or results, but what he learnt about the process of research along the way.

Collins keeps his PhD sara seager phd thesis a low shelf in his office, next to those from his past students. He pulls it out and places a paternal hand on the thick, leather-bound sara seager phd thesis. The road to that document started back inwhen Collins arrived in the lab of Jim Cross, a theoretical chemist at Yale. Collins was tasked with developing theoretical models to sara seager phd thesis what happens when a proton sara seager phd thesis fired at a hydrogen molecule: how does the energy of the two bodies dissipate, and could the hydrogen be coaxed into another state?

Day after day, he sat at his basement desk, tackling calculus equations and writing corresponding computer programs in Fortran. He used a machine in the university computer centre to punch the programs onto cards, then waited until after 1 a. It wasn't — something Collins came to realize during an all-nighter about halfway through his studies.

He was talking to a fellow graduate student, Jay Gralla, who was examining how molecules of RNA fold up into secondary structures. The broader aim was to understand the rules by which genetic information in RNA and DNA is used to build biological systems. Collins was blown away. Shortly afterwards, Collins decided to switch to medical school. He also didn't know if he'd actually done enough work to complete his PhD — but Cross told him to write it up anyway. Collins stayed behind in New Haven to write, while his wife and young daughter left for the family's new home in North Carolina.

He still couldn't get it done before his medical studies started. By the time of his graduation ceremony, in Mayhe was finishing his first year of medical school and expecting a second child. He didn't attend. Several years later, his medical training complete, Collins returned to Yale to work in a molecular-biology lab, and never looked back. The exactitude instilled in him by his PhD stayed with him. He had learned to assess a complex system, strip it down to its component parts and glean insights from it.

His thesis work isn't sara seager phd thesis much demand. The model sara seager phd thesis colliding particles that Collins developed was a good match with others' experimental findings, and made some useful approximations, but the work has been convincingly superseded by advances in processing power.

Reflecting on it now, Collins is glad that he took the risk of switching fields, and would encourage today's PhD students to take chances too, sara seager phd thesis. And think big, he urges. It might be risky, it might be hard, it might not work, but there are too many people spending their time on obvious next steps.

A flicker of embarrassment crosses Sara Seager's face when she is asked whether there are any mistakes in her thesis. I know where it is, unfortunately. I hate to talk about it. There is little else for Seager to regret about her thesis, sara seager phd thesis.

She is now a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and, unusually, her PhD helped to found a field. Inwhen Seager started her postgraduate studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, just half sara seager phd thesis dozen planets had been spotted orbiting distant suns, sara seager phd thesis.

They could be detected only indirectly, mostly by capturing the 'wobble' that an orbiting planet caused in the movement of a star. And the signals were noisy — some astronomers didn't believe that exoplanets were real. Seager was encouraged to enter the field by her supervisor at Harvard, Dimitar Sasselov, who was keen to take a different approach. Sasselov encouraged Seager to study the atmospheres of exoplanets to find ones that might harbour interesting chemistry or indicate life.

This seemed unlikely to work when the planets themselves were so difficult to detect, sara seager phd thesis. Seager built a theoretical model suggesting that it should be possible to see starlight bouncing off a planet that was orbiting its star closely, and sara seager phd thesis analysing that light would reveal a fingerprint of the planet's chemical constituents, temperature and pressure 1.

Shortly afterwards, during her postdoc, she predicted that it should be possible to spot clouds in the atmosphere, and that one of the easiest elements to detect would be sodium 2, sara seager phd thesis. It was tough going. She derived equations to represent the components of a planet's atmosphere and then, after teaching herself to code, plugged them into the computer models she was building.

Her hours were long and isolated, and she would often hit programming bugs that threatened to derail her work. Meanwhile, ex-students from her department were calling from Silicon Valley: their companies were seeking people like her. He describes her as a fierce intellectual and recalls how annoying she found any imperfection. And once her work was finished, she didn't have to wait long for her predictions to be tested: insara seager phd thesis, astronomers including Charbonneau detected the first exo-atmosphere 3and found that it contained the sodium signature, albeit at a slightly lower level than Seager had sara seager phd thesis. Since then, the field has flourished: 3, exoplanets have now been confirmed, and the study of their atmospheres has bloomed.

The material in Seager's PhD has been used by astronomers to request time on the Hubble Space Telescope, Keck observatory and other instruments. Sara seager phd thesis although Seager can't erase the sole typo from her thesis, she points out that the papers she published from it are free of mistakes, sara seager phd thesis.

Did Seager enjoy her PhD? Seager now tries to make sure that those in her lab have the space to think too. They have to, or they won't find their own way, sara seager phd thesis. As for the thesis itself — a slim, red volume with gold lettering — it's not something she feels sentimental about, sara seager phd thesis.

The book, bound in sky-blue cloth, nestles on a low shelf, right next to a science-fiction encyclopaedia. She dusts it off with a cloth and opens it to the typewritten title page. That's really my immediate impression. I did want a short and an interesting title, sara seager phd thesis. The title is as brief as Frith's PhD was: she had only two years of funding, starting in Septemberand at the end of she duly turned in the thesis: pages, typed up by a secretary from her handwritten manuscript.

The bibliography is concise, just 10 generously spaced pages. Today, the developmental disorder is the subject of several thousand publications each year. Frith came to London from her native Germany in to attend a course in abnormal psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry. She also met her future supervisors, psychologists Beate Hermelin and Neil O'Connor.

At that time, autism spectrum disorders were poorly understood and carried a stigma. Those diagnosed were usually only the severe cases, children with profound intellectual and linguistic difficulties. The mainstream view in psychiatry was that autism was a product of a child's upbringing and environment and that distant, unloving parents — particularly mothers — were to blame.

Frith refused to subscribe to that view. The question that interested Frith was whether the children might process information sara seager phd thesis from other kids. To investigate this, she showed children a simple box containing green and yellow counters that were arranged in a specific pattern. She then covered up the box and asked the child to build the sequence from memory. She sara seager phd thesis travelled to hospitals to test children with autism, as well as to nurseries and schools to assess children in her control group.

Frith turns to the later pages of her thesis to remind herself of what she found, well aware of how dated — even naive — it might sound. What nonsense can it be? Children in the control group tended to follow the pattern too strongly — perhaps placing three green counters together instead of two. Those with autism, however, placed the counters in their own simple pattern, such as green, yellow, green, yellow. Frith proposed that these children impose very strict patterns on the outside world, too, and this idea seemed to correlate with the behaviours that clinicians at the time considered characteristic of the condition — obsessions with particular objects, for example, sara seager phd thesis, or disliking change.

Frith saw logic in the children's responses, and felt that they were not necessarily inferior to those of others. Frith is aware that she was studying at a golden time. Psychology was thriving in the United Kingdom; she had the undivided attention of two supervisors; and, sara seager phd thesis, just as she was coming to the end of her PhD, she was offered a full-time job at a Medical Research Council MRC unit where one of her supervisors had just been appointed director.

The post led to a year career with the MRC and University College London, during which Frith showed that children with autism have deficits in their 'theory of mind', the cognitive capacity to understand that others have their own beliefs and ideas. Frith knows that today's PhD students have a much tougher time: funding is tight and academic jobs scarce.

But she remains a fan of the PhD as an apprenticeship in research. She learned from scratch how to formulate hypotheses, design experiments and analyse data.

I haven't sara seager phd thesis it.

Prof. Sara Seager of Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Extraterrestrial Life and Venus

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Personal Biography - Sara Seager

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