About me, the long version
(4 minute read)
For my first blog post I provide some of the details about my background that provide the experience and knowledge base that I will draw upon as a school board member.
My lifelong interest in space exploration likely comes from my father’s involvement in the Apollo program. He worked for Boeing, who was the prime contractor for the bottom stage of the Saturn V rocket, built in my birthplace of New Orleans. Following the termination of the Apollo program, my father left Boeing and we moved to the Dallas area. I graduated from high school in Plano, TX, and accepted an ~80% academic scholarship to double major in Geophysics and Physics at Texas A&M University. After graduation I obtained an MS in Geophysics at night at the University of Houston while I worked full time in oil exploration. I cold called a place where I would eventually end up working, the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), and for my thesis topic was linked up with a staff scientist working with data from NASA’s Pioneer Venus mission.
I left the oil industry and went back to school full time to obtain a PhD in Geophysics working with a scientist who was part of NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus. During that time I and another member of our research group started visiting Dallas-area schools giving slide shows about planetary exploration, thus beginning three decades of conduction educational outreach. After obtaining my doctorate I returned to LPI, a think tank that also carries out a variety of services for NASA’s planetary exploration program. As a staff scientist I helped develop, and eventually managed, an educational outreach program that spanned from local to national elements. In short, we would conduct local and regional activities with students, teachers, and the general public, and then use the knowledge gained to produce products for national companies and organizations like National Science Teaching Association, Scholastic, and Science-by-Mail. I also taught as adjunct faculty at Rice University and University of Houston-Clear Lake.
A colleague from LPI took a position at UAF in the late 1990s and encouraged me to join him in Fairbanks. Eventually an appropriate position became open, and I started at UAF as a Research Associate Professor in 2004. To make the move more interesting, I bicycled up from Houston while friends separately drove my belongings up in a UHaul truck (travelogue here). In Fairbanks my educational outreach activities mostly centered around creating and overseeing a statewide traveling digital planetarium program. Between this program and our son’s school activities, I have had the opportunity to visit a good fraction of the schools in our district. I met my wife Keiko, a Fairbanks native, in 2008 and we married in 2009. Our son Griffin was born in 2013. After getting her doctorate in Biology from UAF, Keiko used her knowledge of statistics as a researcher for the Alaska Statewide Mentor Project, part of UA’s K-12 Outreach Program. ASMP’s primary role was to match new teachers in rural Alaska with mentors with extensive experience teaching in the bush. She worked with the program from 2015-2025; through it she has met many outstanding teachers across the state and learned quite a bit about our state’s education structure.
As you might imagine, my interest in our school district became elevated with our son’s entry into kindergarten. Pre-COVID I was content with our school district and our son’s elementary school. Then, in the 2021-2022 school year the first school closures occurred, accompanied by the movement of all of the sixth graders from elementary schools to middle schools. During that school year the school board and district administration conducted not a single town hall or Q&A session where the questions were not pre-screened, and parents only figured out after the fact that the movement of the sixth graders had nothing to do with saving money. Unfortunately, little has changed in terms of ethics or parental involvement since then. I became one of the parent representatives on the Board Budget Committee for the 2022-2024 school years to seek answers and to try to move things in a positive direction. Unfortunately, I learned that these external advisory committees are viewed by district administration as box-checking exercises. Their reports are steered to be intentionally vague and are cited only when they agree with decisions that have already been made.
In the early 2020s my day job was quite busy as I was involved in successful efforts to get both a NASA and a European Space Agency (ESA) mission to Venus approved for future flight, the latter with a NASA-contributed instrument. I also made worldwide news with my discovery of active volcanism on Venus, and subsequently I appeared on a NOVA episode and a History-channel show hosted by William Shatner called the UnXplained, Mysteries of the Universe. My family views having Captain Kirk refer to me by name while talking about my science as the pinnacle of my career.
Over the past few years, work and family engagements have limited my efforts to influence the school district largely to sending letters to the school board, testifying at their meetings, and submitting letters and Community Perspectives to the NewsMiner. Delays in those two Venus missions and the likely cancellation of NASA’s contribution to the ESA mission have made it possible for me to reduce my work commitment to 3/4 time (and perhaps less going forward) so that I could devote an adequate amount of time to being a school board member if I am elected. Regardless of election outcome, I look forward to meeting with parents, teachers, and the broader community to hear various viewpoints on how the Fairbanks Northstar Borough School District can be improved.
If you would like to learn more about my professional career, my UAF web page is here (no UAF endorsement implied). If you wish to see all of my past opinion pieces about the school district, please check out the Archives section of this web site.
