Anneila Sargent

David Zierler:

OK. It is April 6th, 2020. It is my great pleasure to be here with Dr. Anneila Sargent of Caltech. Dr. Sargent, thank you so much for being with me today.

Anneila Sargent:

Good. Well, I’m happy to be here. [laugh]

Zierler:

Would you please tell us your title, your current title?

Sargent:

My current title is Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.

Zierler:

Wonderful, OK. So, Dr. Sargent, let’s start right at the beginning. Tell us about your birthplace and your early childhood.

Sargent:

OK. I was born in a town called Kirkcaldy. No one can really work out the origin of the name. I was born there because that was where the maternity hospital was. I wasn’t born at home, as one typically might have been in my day, because my mother was 42 at the time. I grew up in an even smaller town with a population of about, at the time, 18,000 people, called Burntisland. It’s a small town with a port, on the north shores of the Firth of Forth, where the river Forth comes to meet the sea. It’s exactly opposite Edinburgh, so I grew up with the bright lights of the big city on my horizon. [laugh]. But I was formed, I would say, in many ways, by the culture of that small northern town…

[break]

Zierler:

The last place I heard was you grew up adjacent to the bright lights of Edinburgh.

Sargent:

Correct, and as I say, I was formed by that small Scottish town in ways that I didn’t realize at the time. I will also say that, you know, Scotland was a distinctly Protestant country, but I grew up, in an Irish Catholic family. So I was a bit of an outsider in some ways, and I think that also molded me. In fact, “a bit of an outsider” is a very much British understatement. But it gave me a great many strengths that I’ve carried with me throughout my career, to have been an outsider in that way, to learn how to deal with it. Being the only woman in a science or math class was just nothing compared to being the only Catholic in a history class on the Reformation [laugh]— so you can see it had some advantages [laugh]. Anyway, it was quite relevant because, of course, there was no hiding my religion, everyone knew everyone else’s business.

I look back now on my growing up as a particularly colorful experience compared to the life of American suburbia in which I see my grandchildren, OK? [laugh] You heard about quite dreadful local happenings when you were with your mother on the High Street, and the women were all gossiping. That was also quite “interesting”. I think that overall, it gave me many strengths that became advantages.

And one of the advantages was that in Scotland, still in my day, there was such a strong tradition of moving up in the world by being educated. After elementary school, Burntisland students went to Kirkcaldy High School (KHS), which just happened to be the largest public high school in Scotland. That means about 1400 students distributed over 6 grades. In U.S. terms, it encompassed both middle and high school. For the first 3 years each class of around 150 students was distributed across 6 smaller classes, determined by performance on a standard country-wide exam, and by gender. For those like me, who were destined for university, the curriculum was pretty much constrained by the need to fulfill the entrance requirements for Scottish universities. Due to the rules about birthdates and when to start elementary school, I was just 11 years old when I entered high school so I graduated at 17. In retrospect, it seems a bit young to go off to university.

I had a wonderful education at KHS. It was a state school but, as a result of the size, the teachers were well paid and highly qualified. So I was taught physics by a physics graduate. I was taught chemistry by a chemistry graduate student. My math teachers, a marvelous woman in the early years, and later an equally charismatic man, were math graduates. The same was true in every field. My physics teacher was particularly encouraging and actually went out of his way to make the subject appealing to the girls in the class, often using music rather than car engines to illustrate a physical principle.

By that time Sputnik had flown, and there was a great push in the West to produce scientists. I probably was focused on being a scientist because I was good at it, OK? Perhaps it would be fair to say I really was very good at science when I was in school. I was not so outstanding at humanities.

[cough] Excuse me, I have allergies here, not the coronavirus [laugh] which I think I may have had a month ago [laugh]. But anyway— I’m just trying to find a way to say this. To be completely honest, if I had known of other possibilities when I was young, I think I might have taken a different career path, especially as I see the way my mind has developed as I’ve grown older.

I think I might’ve gone to law school, done something like that. But I was so good at science that people expected me to do science, and I did it, and I liked it. And, yes, there weren’t many women in science but of course, it was a very different time. And, you know, I did grow up with all these folk sayings in my head that suggested it was good for women to be well educated. For example, about 6 girls from our tiny town went to university in same year as me... Now, not all of us went on to study science. Maybe I was the only one. A number of our fathers, worked in the shipyards and the local aluminum processing plant. And it wasn’t uncommon for workmates to ask “Why are you bothering to send the lassie to university?” And the answer from all of these men was, “If you educate”— it wasn’t particularly feminist but [laugh]— “If you educate a boy, you educate a boy. If you educate a girl, you educate a family.” And I think that even although that had its limitations, it was a tremendous support. It strikes me now that no one ever mentioned exactly what we would actually become professionally other than high school teachers.

So, I went to university. I didn’t feel at all discriminated against in doing science, almost the reverse. I actually wanted to go to graduate school but couldn’t afford it. My parents really felt I needed to go to work and be completely self-reliant. They were much older and my father had emphysema, and was not at all well.

There were in fact further constraints that prevented me from finding other sources of support for graduate studies. And these did discriminate against women. For example, I was thinking about getting married to someone who might also have become a graduate student. But at that time-in fact, for another 15 years after that - the U.K. terminated government grants to women graduate students who got married, on the premise that their husbands could keep them. [laugh] I tried for a job in a government nuclear physics lab that would have supported me through graduate school but, as I discovered years later, I didn’t get that position because I was a woman. And so that was that.

So I went to work at the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO), where I had been a summer student. And I did astronomy instead of nuclear physics - which, in retrospect, was a brilliant thing to do [laugh]. It’s been a fun life I’ve had. And the area of nuclear physics I would been in became much less exciting. It wouldn’t have been such fun.

That said, I met my husband to be, Wallace Sargent, almost immediately. Wal’s Ph.D. was from Manchester but, through a whole series of fortuitous circumstances, he had been a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech. He came back to Britain when his postdoc visa expired. At that time, Caltech had very few women so he chose to work at an Observatory that had a lot of women, OK. [laugh]

Zierler:

Yeah.

Sargent:

So Wal went back to the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) with the idea of finding a wife, OK. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

And I met him [laugh] immediately I arrived there. I moaned a lot about how I wasn’t in graduate school. And eventually he said to me, “I have two offers of assistant professorships. They’re in the United States. Why don’t you apply to graduate school at University of Arizona and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)?” Arizona wouldn’t give me any financial support because I was an alien. [laugh]

UCSD in its infinite wisdom, said of course they could support my graduate fellowship because I was a faculty wife, a dependent. So that was very nice. I was not too proud to resent a tuition break even if it meant I had to accept the role of dependent. But we’d only been there for a year when Caltech reached out to Wal. It was a time you can’t imagine anymore. Caltech’s astronomy department called up one day and asked my husband if he’d like to come. They’d had a meeting; they wanted him to come back as an assistant professor. And so we went. I transferred to graduate school in astronomy at Caltech. I’d done a little more than a full year of physics by that time at San Diego for which I am infinitely grateful because I’m sure it was not quite as hard as doing that at Caltech. So I had a whole lot of physics credits. However, I don’t know, I was becoming very fed up by that time because I seemed to have been taking courses forever, so I dropped out and had two kids and… [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] Anneila, if we can rewind a little bit because I want to ask you a little bit more about your background and your upbringing in Scotland. Can you tell us a little bit about your parents and their background, where they were from?

Sargent:

Oh, yes. I’ll tell you more than you probably want to know. I came from— let me give you some background. At Edinburgh, I had to take one humanities course, to get a bachelor’s degree in science at Edinburgh. I took psychology and read all sorts of books I might never have touched otherwise. I was especially fascinated by Education and the Working Classes.

I came from the working classes, as far as I could tell. My father worked in the shipyards. My mother was a homemaker and a dressmaker. She had had a little shop, I guess, before she was married.

From this book, I discovered that I was classically from something called the fallen middle class. And I think that has actually played a huge role in my having a career. My father was from a rather well-to-do family in Dublin. His father, through a series of— I’m not even going to go into that— somehow lost all his share of the family money, and so my father could not stay in high school. This kind of thing was not uncommon at the time; parents couldn’t afford to keep their children in school beyond the age of 15. Sometimes as in my father’s case, and also my father-in-law’s, boys were so evidently clever that the headmaster would come to their house, begging the parents to scrape together some money. In fact, one of my father’s aunts (childless) offered to pay for his education if my grandmother let her adopt him. But my grandmother said no – her other two sons had already died. So that was that.

My grandfather got him a job on the Dublin Stock Exchange. But you know the way fathers and sons can be, they didn’t get along. And my father at 17 ran away from home to the shipyards in Glasgow, which were booming because of WW I, and started to make money. And eventually ended up in the small shipyard in my hometown and met my mother.

I realize now that the standards of my family were set by my father and were decidedly odd in retrospect. They were the upper middle-class values of his family, although we were poor. When I did well in school – especially in math and science - he was absolutely ecstatic. And, typical of the fallen middle-class parent, he was more supportive in encouraging me to pursue education as far as I could.

Zierler:

Now when did you start to exhibit excellence in the sciences? How old were you when people started to notice that you had these talents?

Sargent:

Oh, well, I could do math well from the start. Actually, I wanted to major in math— I thought I was a brilliant mathematician till six weeks into my first course at university. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

That was a rude awakening. Science, I’m trying to think when it became real. Well, I certainly didn’t do well in first year in high school because— for religious reasons. Don’t ask. [laugh]

Zierler:

No, I have to ask. What does that mean, “religious reasons?”

Sargent:

Well, the science teacher was a fundamentalist Christian and teaching science was certainly secondary to her proselytizing zeal, I would say. Obviously, being Catholic, I was not going to be encouraged to go her Bible classes and cozy little get-togethers. And so she just plain didn’t like me. It was one of those, you know, things. So I didn’t do well, and I can’t really remember my science classes in my second year or maybe even my third year. I know we learned physics and chemistry classes, and even occasionally biology. But biology was not considered to be very important subject at that time.

But certainly by fourth year— the equivalent of the sophomore year in high school in the United States, it was very clear that I could shine in math, and physics, and chemistry. The curriculum for students who were expected to go on to higher education was tied to the entrance requirements for the Scottish universities and vocational colleges. Our main classes were English, math, physics, chemistry, Latin, and a modern foreign language, supplemented by a less intense study of history or geography. I really wasn’t very good at Latin but nobody seemed bothered because I got very good grades in math, physics and chemistry. I enjoyed these subjects but I think it was all about getting good grades at that time.

Zierler:

Now, I wonder if you could speak to your upbringing from a national perspective. If you look at the number in history, the number of Scottish scientists who have been, you know, instrumental in their field, Scotland as a nation certainly punches well above its weight relative to its population. So there’s clearly something about Scotland and science and education. And I wonder if you felt that growing up that there was a national pride or a national—

Sargent:

Oh, yeah.

Zierler:

— imperative to pursue the sciences.

Sargent:

Yes. You know it’s a historical fact that in Scotland everyone recognized that education was the way to a better life. I think even Dr. Johnson is quoted by Boswell as saying something like, “The fairest prospect in Scotland is the high road to England.” [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

And so [laugh] I will say that even as a child— even in high school, my mother would say, “I know you’re going to go to America.” A significant number of science graduates were beginning to go to jobs in the U.S. in the 1960s, so it was certainly a possibility. But in Scotland, all of us knew that it was extremely likely that we would leave, even if we only went as far as England.

So it wasn’t entirely unexpected for me to live somewhere else, in another country. I found my English husband was more disturbed by living away from the U.K. than I was. Years later, I had to encourage a Scottish undergraduate, a young woman, to come to graduate school at Caltech. She was a real hotshot, and every— the departments that wanted to get her all trotted out their Scottish professor if they had one. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

I’m happy to say she came to Caltech. But she asked me a very sensible question. What did I do during a working week? And by that time I was already involved in what my husband called “astro-politics”. [laugh]. So I explained that I was chair of the NASA Space Science Advisory Committee, and on the NASA Council and went regularly to Washington D.C. And I described how at Caltech I did research as well as teaching and was director of Caltech’s radio observatory at Owens Valley. But I also said, “Look, I’d better admit to you now that I became an American citizen because - are you still with me?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Sargent:

OK. Sorry. If you don’t nod, if you sit still—

Zierler:

Oh, I’m here, I’m here.

Sargent:

The chair of that NASA committee sometimes has to testify on the Hill and I don’t want anyone to say, “Who the hell are you to tell us what to do?” So I have become a citizen. Her reply was hilarious, “Oh, that’s all right. I mean, you didn’t become English.”

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

Now that is what my cousins had said too. However, the prospective student continued, “I mean, it’s not as if you became English, is it?” [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

So that encapsulates the Scottish situation. We expect to leave but it is never expected that you would turn your back on Scotland.

Zierler:

Now what year did you enter the University of Edinburgh?

Sargent:

‘59 or was it ‘60? One of these years. [laugh]

Zierler:

So you got your bachelor’s in 1963?

Sargent:

Yes.

Zierler:

So you would’ve entered in 1959?

Sargent:

Yes.

Zierler:

Now what was the process of you settling on physics as a major at Edinburgh?

Sargent:

Oh [laugh] well, six weeks in, I knew that I was never going to be a mathematician. You know, my brain did not work that way. But I was already boxed in because my classes were, at this point, only mathematics, physics, and applied mathematics, not even chemistry, so I thought I—

Zierler:

And that’s from the beginning? You’re declaring a major from the beginning as an undergraduate?¬

Sargent:

Yes, well, more or less, because you had to choose among the courses required for that particular major. I would have had to add a year if I had changed to, say, chemistry. It was pretty rigid. The whole system was quite rigid from an early stage.

For example, the Scottish universities I applied to required Latin if you wanted to study the humanities – any of the humanities. At KHS, everyone who was university-bound took Latin classes for 5 years. By the equivalent of junior year in high school, it was clear that I was flailing. Still, I declined to move to the lower level (but still acceptable to the universities) Latin class because I was lazy and did not want to have adapt to the different curriculum. Not surprisingly, I failed to achieve a pass in Latin in the standardized university entrance exams. But my teachers were quite relaxed about this. Their attitude was, “Oh, well, you’re going to do science. You don’t need Latin.” Frankly, after that my path was pretty much set. It really didn’t bother me much – except that I hated to fail anything.

So I was going to do mathematics, or maybe applied mathematics - a rather wild dream in retrospect. And, as I have said, I realized after only a few weeks at university that it would not be math. But applied math had a reputation as an enormously difficult course and I really did not want to make life hard for myself. As you can see, I had no particular focus at that time. So I changed my major to physics – at Edinburgh at that time it was still called Natural Philosophy. For some reason it rather pleases me to have a degree in Natural Philosophy.

And then, in my second year at Edinburgh, there was, remarkably, a choice of courses. While still continuing with physics and math, I could substitute astronomy for applied math. Oh the frivolity of it all - an option! So, in my second year, I took an astronomy class and I just loved it, to be perfectly honest. But I suspect that one reason I loved it was that it was the only class where we actually had sensible tutorials where teaching assistants would review our homework and help us understand the concepts.

Of course we had homework assigned for all our classes but it didn’t count towards grades and if you didn’t do it, nobody seemed to care. All that counted was to pass the exams at the end of each quarter. Actually all that really counted was to pass the exams at the end of each academic year. The astronomy class was an exception. First of all it was small, maybe 7 or 9 students. It was clearly going to be noticed if homework was not done.

And then there were these weekly tutorials. They may well have been begun because much of the context for introductory astronomy is based on units first adopted by the ancient Greeks and on the use of spherical coordinate systems that few students have encountered. A lot of class time is freed up for more interesting topics if these basics are explained in tutorials. Perhaps just as important was the postdoctoral fellow who was our TA. He would wander around and explain things to us personally. And he was so amazingly encouraging and excited about the work that I suddenly felt I was learning something wonderful. Looking back, I can actually feel the new enthusiasm. It was the first time I ever wanted to know more than just what we were learning in class – although that was pretty exciting. I may even have bought an additional book or two. I was hooked. And so, in the end, something happened that seemed very weird to me. The final exam was difficult and, to my astonishment one I was the only one who passed. Well that fell right into my “I am good at this; I should do more” modus operandi. So I then really adored astronomy. In my final year we had some choices of classes again and of course I took the astrophysics option. By the time I graduated I had quite a decent background in astronomy.

Zierler:

Now, as a child, did you like to look up at the sky, and look at the stars and the planets? Was that a sort of innate interest of yours?

Sargent:

I was a boring child, scientifically.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

I mean I was always a curious child but I don’t think science was a major part of that curiosity? I don’t know. It just wasn’t in the realm of my experience, OK? Possibly my curiosity as a child was most developed in a social sense because as the child of older parents, and the youngest of many cousins, people just left me alone a lot of the time. So I sat around watching them all in the family gatherings, and situations. I think that that background helped me when I really had to socialize in a professional way, looking at/assessing different people in committees, different people in organizations. I think management skills were something I had observed and absorbed along the way. [Laugh]

Zierler:

And so what was it about astronomy that clicked for you as an undergraduate?

Sargent:

Oh, I hate to say this again, but I was good at it, OK. There’s nothing so enticing as that, and then—

Zierler:

What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to be good at astronomy?

Sargent:

I got good grades. I find it terribly boring to say that and In fact I’m ashamed to say it. But I did also enjoy astronomy. I liked it a lot. I think what I’m trying to say is that, at the same time I was conscious that I had never before enjoyed other topics in physics to that extent, to wanting to find out more than just what classwork covered. OK? In particular, I had never had a sense of what it all meant or of pulling everything I had learned together. And I think that’s why I passed the exam because there were some questions that asked you to pull together different things you had learned, and make them a whole concept. Somehow that clicked. And, you know, I’ve never thought about that until today, so thank you for asking that question. Of course by the time I took astrophysics in my last year, by that time, I saw the whole subject as very exciting because—

Zierler:

Even if you want to say it, Anneila, even if you want to say, well, you were good at it because you got good grades, what is it that those tests were measuring for which you had an aptitude?

Sargent:

Are you asking me now or what I thought then?

Zierler:

Both. What aptitude did you display—?

Sargent:

Well, in retrospect, I think I did well because I was interested – and interested to a degree that surprised me.. And that meant I read a lot around the classwork. There was a bookstore near the university— I think it still exists— where I went often because I really love books. In my last year when I took astrophysics, I found you could buy reprints of recent important scientific papers there. So I bought— it’s funny I think of it today because one of the authors, Margaret Burbidge, died at 100 yesterday, We have been good friends for years since she was a Professor at UCSD in La Jolla. Margaret and her husband Geoff were instrumental in bringing my husband and me to UCSD, and our families have always remained close. Anyway, I was enthralled by a paper from 1957 “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars,” by Margaret Burbidge, Geoff Burbidge, Willie Fowler and Fred Hoyle, always referred to now as B²FH. It remains a classic. And— now that you make me think about it - I was interested enough in astrophysics that I bought that paper in my senior year as an undergraduate, and was excited by what it discussed –though I doubt I could understand much of it at all.

And maybe it was a year and a half later there was a follow-up to this that I could never have imagined. This was when my husband-to-be and I were still at the RGO. As a postdoc at Caltech, Wal had done some nice research on the abundances of elements in peculiar stars and in 1964 was invited to Cambridge to talk to B²FH, about that and his ongoing work. We were already committed to joining Geoff and Margaret that fall and I was invited to the inevitable – and very jolly – after-work cocktails and dinner.

I can’t tell you how incredibly pleased I was and how fortunate I felt, as a newly graduated young woman of 21 to go to Cambridge with my fiancé to meet Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle. I mean, I can tell you - I was scared out of my wits.

Zierler:

These were larger than life figures in your world?

Sargent:

Oh, yes! I found Willie was terrifying. Willie was just terrifying. But Fred- well, I’m the same age as Fred’s daughter, Liz and he just treated me accordingly, which was nice. I was in awe of Margaret. She was charming but seemed so on top of everything. I wondered if I could ever be like her. Overall it was Geoff who put me at ease. He could be amazingly kind and thoughtful could Geoff. I’d say he treated me like an undergraduate – which was not far from the truth. But he was also full of – to put it mildly – mischief. I have always loved the Burbidges and although Geoff was a controversial figure, he was wonderful to me throughout his life.

So, to get back to why I became an astronomer— I think it was because it was the first scientific field that grabbed, really grabbed, my attention. Now that you ask me, I think I wanted nuclear physics to grab my attention, because at that time, it was the trendy field. I thought it was a great and even romantic kind of research. But now that you’ve made me look more carefully at it, I really was interested in astronomy from the get-go.

Zierler:

And I wonder at this point when you’re visiting these luminaries at Cambridge, are you thinking of yourself as a future colleague or, as a woman, are you thinking of yourself as the wife of a colleague?

Sargent:

I’m thinking of myself first as the wife of a colleague, and then as a fledgling scientist. And I can tell you that it’s interesting you ask me that. I’m not sure— please, I’m not sure it’s relevant to this. But when my husband died seven years ago, I thought, “Who am I now? I have been “Wal’s wife” all my life.” And I know that’s ridiculous; you know, it is ridiculous. Anybody who—

Zierler:

Have you looked at your CV lately? Are you really—?

Sargent:

I know, I know. [laugh] I knew in my mind it was ridiculous. But, the truth is I met B²FH and a lot of other significant scientists very early in my career because of my husband’s connections. I knew— I can remember - so many people from those early years who definitely had that “wife” perception of me. For example, I met on several occasions Riccardo Giacconi when he was Director General of ESO— mostly in Italy with Franco Paccini one of our really good friends. Franco was long-time director of the Arcetri Observatory in Florence. Anyway, sometime after that, when I was still a postdoc I went to an American Astronomical Society meeting, and passed by Riccardo, and said, “Oh, hi, Riccardo.” And Riccardo being Riccardo said to me, “Do I know you?”

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

I was a bit taken aback but I just said, “Yeah, “I’m Wal’s wife.” [laugh] In his defense, he was pretty embarrassed. [laugh] Later in my career, I came to know Riccardo very well, and we became good friends. But in these early days, I was definitely, you know, just Wal’s wife.

Zierler:

So then that begs the question. Clearly there’s a disconnect between your accomplishments that you made as a scientist, as a celebrated scientist in your own right, and your—and the disconnect of your own self-perception. And so then the question is: if not you, who were the influences in your life who encouraged you to do the things that you eventually went on to do?

Sargent:

Oh, OK, Margaret Burbidge, quite a few other women in spite of the times, some who helped me just by being there, and a significant number of men. Not that Margaret ever said to me, “Do this, or do that”— and I have wondered if she was surprised in later life when I did well. On the other hand. I’ve been lucky enough to know her long enough to know that she inevitably rejoiced in the successes of other women in the field.

I first became truly conscious of needing help when I went to UCSD - well, it was terrifying. Of course, I’d never done problem sets in my life as a routine thing. But I shared an office with Don Cox, who taught me the ropes. Don went on to be a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin. So there was Margaret. And there was also Maria Mayer – the famous Maria Mayer, second woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics – again I was awed. And, that was when I saw the challenging situations for women in science up close because I learned that Maria Mayer was appointed to a full professorship for the first time when she came to UCSD from the University of Chicago - at the age of 53. Maria’s husband, Joe Mayer, was chair of chemistry at UCSD and Maria Mayer was teaching nuclear physics. Gosh she was a lively and an obviously brilliant woman, but she was not a classroom teacher. [laugh] Interestingly, the university’s nepotism rules allowed both Mayers to be on the Faculty because they were in different departments. But, when UCSD wanted to hire the Burbidges, both in physics, it was a real problem.

There was already a professional link between the couples from Chicago - Maria’s work had been really important for the B²FH nucleosynthesis research. So Joe Mayer solved the nepotism problem rather neatly by hiring Margaret in the chemistry department, while Geoff was appointed in physics. It was also Margaret’s first appointment as a full professor. What was most impressive to me was that both those women had dealt with their individual situations in ways that enabled them to continue to do productive and innovative research throughout their lives. And while they acknowledged that there had been challenges in their careers and lives, but neither of them seemed at all bitter. Neither of them had chips on their shoulders. They just got on with their careers, their research, and their lives. They were charming. They were very charming, both of them. They had husbands. And they had families. They lived what seemed to me remarkably nice family lives alongside their work. So it seemed to me this was not an unattractive future to envisage, even if I knew there might be obstacles along the way.

I don’t think Margaret and I ever discussed Wal’s decision to move to Caltech in terms of its effect on me or my career. There may have been some suggestion that I stay on at UCSD and complete my Ph.D. Looking at her own career moves now, I suspect she would have made the same decision as me. She and Geoff tried for most of their careers to live and work in the same place. I don’t think she enjoyed their separations. More surprisingly, Maria asked to see me in her office before we left. She wanted to be sure I was completely aware of what it might be like to be a woman graduate student at Caltech, and to prepare me. The Institute had no female undergraduates at that time. I have appreciated her kindness for all those years. You can see she had an effect!

It took me a while to realize it but I am sure I was also influenced at Edinburgh by Dr. Mary Brück. As part of that astrophysics class in my senior year at Edinburgh, we went once a week to the Blackford Hill, hoping that we would be able to see stars and use the equipment. We never did because of the Scottish weather [laugh], but every so often we were entertained at the home of the professor of astronomy, Hermann Brück. As Astronomer Royal for Scotland and director of the observatory director he lived on site.

Professor Brück had previously been director of the Dunsink Observatory in Dublin and met his wife, Mary, when she was there as a postdoc. She was our teaching assistant at the observatory labs. She was lively, enthusiastic, and exceedingly competent but with an Irish twinkle that never quite left her eyes. For me, Mary Brück was another professional woman with a fine family life. When we were invited to their house, there would be babies in diapers crawling around the floor. I mean, it was a bit chaotic, but it seemed to enchant our Professor. So astronomy research didn’t seem an odd career to me. These women inspired me. And then there were supportive men, starting with Don, who taught me how to do problem sets based on Jackson’s Electrodynamics – a scary textbook. It was horrible. [laugh] But I learned—

Zierler:

I wonder, Anneila, if you could talk about some of the cultural differences coming from the UK to the States about how you were regarded as an up-and-coming woman in science. What were some of the cultural differences that you may have noticed coming over to America?

Sargent:

OK. Well, first of all, I was astonished at the number of male graduate students— there were 3 women in an entering class of about 30 in physics at UCSD— who were married. Because in those days, people did not just live together. [laugh] I was feeling a bit embarrassed to be a married student as it was quite rare in the UK but it wasn’t unusual. By the way, as I saw later in a wider context, many of these very early marriages ended in divorce. And often they resulted in quite a lot of troubles within departments when we all grew up a It was also the first time in my life when I think I recognized behavior towards me that could be described as gender discrimination. We had this Dutch math professor.

Briefly, he picked on me in class an openly sneering way, “what does the lady in our class think?” It was very clear that in his opinion I was unlikely to think at all. It upset me a great deal. And then I realized that actually I was much more annoyed than upset. I thought, “What is with this guy?” I didn’t think it was some defect in me.

I think this reaction was due to the culture I grew up in. That is, I had enough self-confidence from an educational background where women on a professional path were accepted - as far as I could tell. Of course, I found out later that had I had in fact faced discrimination in Britain and been denied access to the government lab job – “If we hire her, she’ll just get married and be no use to us – or, she won’t get married and then she’ll cause trouble in the lab. “But, on the whole I think I have faced very little truly harmful discrimination as a professional woman in the United States. In national newspaper, The Scotsman, when I was alumna of the year, I was quoted as saying I would never have had the career they were celebrating if I hadn’t gone to the United States. I have never changed my mind about that.

Zierler:

Why is that?

Sargent:

Because it was such an opportunity for me, a small-town girl from Scotland to actually get into graduate school in astronomy in the U.S.! When I came here, it still was not easy for women, but to be welcomed as we were into the UCSD academic milieu, thanks to the Burbidges, was an unbelievable privilege. And then, after I rather lost heart and dropped out of school and had the children, Caltech let me come back and continue where I had left off in my Ph.D. path – this would never have been allowed in the U.K. So it wasn’t just one opportunity; there kept on being opportunities. After graduate school that second time around, I was just in the right place at the right time. I think that’s basically what it was. U.S. science was trying to open up to women, and millimeter-wave astronomy, my field was no exception.

I mean, radio astronomy, which is now a much more diverse field in every way, had incredibly few women. I know they didn’t have an easy time. I’m reading Nan Dieter’s memoir right now. She was radio astronomy graduate student at Harvard in the early 1950s and later part of U.C. Berkeley’s Hat Creek Observatory research group. Her treatment at Harvard in the late 50s was so unjust as that it would be fodder for a legal suit today. I’ve been thinking about all this recently since I just gave the annual Jansky lecture at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) centers in Charlottesville, Virginia and Socorro, New Mexico.

It was probably during the traveling to and from New Mexico that I got my recent very bad flu and I wonder now if it was COVID 19. [laugh] Anyway, when I was preparing for these public lectures – more accessible to the public than your typical scientific colloquium - someone realized that I gave a talk at University of Edinburgh on Women’s Day in 2015 - I think it’s now on YouTube. It had gone down well and I was asked “Could you carry a few of these thoughts about diversity into the Jansky lecture?” I wasn’t so happy with the way that went in Charlottesville. But Socorro, was definitely a place you’d feel comfortable talking about women and minorities, and diversity in general.

I began by saying I could probably count on the fingers of at best two hands the number of women astronomers in radio astronomy when I entered the field. But as I went along my talk, I showed more and more people involved in the subject, different genders, different races, different nationalities, different colors, different everything! I could have told you [laugh], a whole slew of other differences among the people in my observatory photographs. It was wonderful.

Later, a visiting undergraduate from, I think Texas Tech, came up to me. A Latina, she’d told me when I met her earlier that she wanted to be a radio astronomer someday. Now, one of the people I thanked by name on my slides for contributing to my presentation was my former graduate student, Laura Muñoz Perez. Laura came to Caltech as a Fulbright scholar from Chile and is now an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Chile in Santiago. Her name and great job had evidently made radio astronomy research look a more possible goal to my Texas Tech friend. “Can I hug you?” she said. I was very moved.

Even though the gender distribution in radio astronomy was very different when I started, I rarely felt uncomfortable or unwanted. When I went back to graduate school at Caltech millimeter-wave - as opposed to traditional centimeter wave - radio astronomy was just getting underway. Many younger people were getting involved. I mean, my colleague, Nick Scoville, and I are among the oldest people in the field nowadays [laugh]! At Caltech, Nick preceded me as director of OVRO. So we were all young, we were all learning, making observations that hadn’t been possible until then, and somehow, if you were ready to chip in and be part of this, to argue about the science, it didn’t seem to matter whether you were male or female.

And among these graduate students and postdocs I had wonderful colleagues, quite a few of whom went on to distinguished careers. I’ve mentioned Nick but there too were France Cordova, who became the NSF director, and Fred Lo, who went on to be NRAO director, and Steve Beckwith, who was director of Space Telescope Science Institute. Sometime after we graduated, Steve and I started working together again in what was probably the most scientifically productive collaboration of our careers, combining his experience in infrared astronomy and mine in millimeter waves. I think our really good working partnership relied a lot on our early training at Caltech and treating one another as equals.

My PhD adviser at Caltech was Peter Goldreich, a brilliant theorist who told me he found it novel because he’d never— what shall I say?— supervised an observational astronomer before. But I also spent a great deal of time with Gerry Neugebauer’s infrared group. There was a lot of common ground between millimeter and infrared astronomy. Of course, it was a largely male group but I don’t think this was much of an issue for either France Cordova or me. And in fact I have become very conscious of how there have always been men that supported me at every stage of my career.

Gerry was one of those men. The only time I ever heard him refer to my gender was when he came into the lab where we were working and found the guys swearing at the equipment. “Now, now” he would say, “there’s a woman present!” But [laugh] the truth is that I knew he swore just as badly as they did. [laugh] And, in fact, for a while, the lab really did have an effect on my vocabulary. [laugh]—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

— I will say that there were so many people who I feel supported me that, if I started to name them, it would be ridiculous. And then—

Zierler:

Men who were encouraging to you? Who treated you—?

Sargent:

Yes.

Zierler:

— fairly and equally?

Sargent:

Yes, who treated me fairly. Who actually, you know, gave me opportunities. And honestly— it’s just— it was just amazing. Of course, after I was a postdoc I did have— there were some difficult situations which I prefer not really to go into. It meant I took some time to move onto the research faculty ladder at Caltech. Briefly, no one proposed a promotion for me.

I’ll always be grateful for Peter Goldreich’s help in moving that process forward for me – I know he didn’t do it lightly and looked carefully at my work first. And I’m equally grateful to a member of the Institute’s higher-level appointment committee who told me afterwards, “It was perfectly clear, when we got your CV and looked at everything, that it should’ve happened a long time ago.” That gave me so much more confidence. But, you know, these things happen.

Zierler:

Now, when you went to La Jolla, did you go knowing there it was a short-term proposition? Or were you thinking you could build something—

Sargent:

Oh, no.

Zierler:

— longer term there?

Sargent:

No, I thought I would— I never thought beyond the next stage, believe me. If you look at my CV, it looks as if I maybe made a plan but... [laugh]

Zierler:

So how long were you in La Jolla for?

Sargent:

A year and a half.

Zierler:

And then so just recount again, what were the circumstances that got you to Caltech?

Sargent:

Well, one day, Bev Oke (J. Beverley Oke), who was a professor at Caltech, and evidently chair of the search committee, called up Wal and said, “Hey, Wal, we’ve had a departmental meeting, and we’d like to hire you at Caltech. Would you like to come?” Now Wal was a bit politically naïve. He just wanted to do research [laugh] and that was good because he was great at it. [laugh] When he got this call, he was so stunned that he went off to tell Geoff Burbidge. Geoff was pretty cross and the first words out of his mouth were, “Well, you better accept it, hadn’t you, because everybody would accept that.” Wal took that as Geoff’s decision. In the end, I think he may have offended people at UCSD because he never went to the department chair and said, “I have to tell you. I have an offer from Caltech.” He never let them compete for him. He just— we spent a night wide awake, you know, so shocked to have that invitation from Caltech, listening to the sound of the surf in La Jolla [laugh] - we had an apartment near the beach. And then we upped and went. I would never have got into Caltech under my own steam, believe me. I think Wal made it a condition that they let me transfer from UCD, OK?

So I went to graduate school at Caltech but in retrospect I don’t know why I found it very hard. Actually, I think it was more the family situation - my husband was terribly worried about tenure, as you can imagine. In fact, I got good grades. There was no reason to stop— I dropped out as a student in good standing. But I was bothered about how I got in – the beginning of the imposter syndrome.

Eventually, after two children, I wanted to go back to graduate school, so I talked to Jesse Greenstein, who was head of the astronomy department at Caltech - and Jesse was indeed a politician. He actually went round the department and posed the question to every faculty member, “Here she is. She wants to come back. She says this is it. She’s not going to drop out again. She’s a student in good standing. But I remind ask all of you that this is a colleague’s wife. Will you, if chosen, sit on her oral qualifying exam?” And he made sure he had agreement. He asked people in physics too. Murray Gell-Mann once asked me “Did you ever come back to graduate school?” I said, “I’m in graduate school now.” [laugh] “Oh, yeah,” said Murray, “Jesse asked everybody.” [laugh]

So that time around, I felt I got in on my own merits. I actually recalled this in a recent speech at Caltech. I was very touched when a talented young woman I had known as an undergraduate, when I was vice president, [laugh] came up and said to me, “All the alums loved it when we realized you knew about the imposter syndrome.” [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

[laugh] So—

Zierler:

That’s a very inspiring message, I’m sure.

Sargent:

I guess it was. I mean, yeah, I suppose. Anyway, there are a couple of points here. The first is that yet another man who went to bat for me so that I could go back to graduate school. The second it that I realized that my qualifications had been examined and were seen to be credible. [laugh]

Zierler:

And why did you choose astronomy and not physics? What was your thinking at this point?

Sargent:

Oh, by this time, I was really interested in astronomy. I had intended to do my thesis work on astrophysics at UCSD. I didn’t know quite what area I was interested in, but I will— I’ll be very frank with you. I didn’t want to do what my husband did because—

Zierler:

Because you’d be living in his shadow if you did?

Sargent:

Yes. And I refused to work with him, even when we would each have brought something interesting and different to the table. I think Wal was a little annoyed with me because of that. My research has mostly been on sources within our galaxy, you know. Generally I work on star and planet formation although I’ve dabbled from time to time in extragalactic studies with my colleague, Nick Scoville. And I really liked that. After the early years, Wal’s research concentrated on extragalactic astronomy.

But I do recall one incident when I recognized Wal’s irritation. He and I went to Cambridge every summer in those days, to Fred Hoyle’s Institute for Astronomy. Another regular was Phil Solomon from Columbia University, who was, like me, a millimeter-wave observer – but definitely more senior. I can still see my husband— in the car— saying to me, “I just talked to Phil today about his millimeter observations of other galaxies. You know, if you had worked with me, I would’ve had ideas like that and we could’ve tackled really interesting problems together.” And all I could think was “but who would’ve got the credit?” – that just seems a little pathetic to me now.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

So I have to say that somehow— and I don’t know quite when - I recognized that I had to make my own way if I wanted a career. In fact, making my own way was probably how I became an astronomer in the first place. You really have forced me to this realization.

Maybe I can explain a bit. There was a real decision point at the beginning of my third (junior) year at Edinburgh. Admission to the honors physics class for the next two years had various requirements. Two women were admitted to a class of about twenty. Like me, Margaret Evans (now Dr. Margaret Penston of the RGO) had spent two years having a wonderful party experience at university. Our academic advisor told each of us in no uncertain terms that, while we actually had completed every prerequisite, we would not be staying in the honors class unless we performed at a much better level throughout our third year - you know, unless we were high up there in the class rankings. For the rest of our university years, we came third-equal in the class through every exam we took. It was really very weird; we could answer different questions, but our final scores were always the same.

And at the end of our third year, as bona fide honors students, we looked for summer jobs in physics. Margaret said immediately, “We could come and work in the department; my Dad - who was on the physics faculty - will get us nice jobs.” And I thought – so very petty, small-town Scotland coming through, “You will get a nicer job than me.” [Laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

Isn’t that awful? [laugh] I feel quite ashamed now. But we were standing in front of a notice board in the physics department and suddenly I was inspired. “Look,” I said, “we could go to this student course at the RGO.” That was a turning point of my life and, as it turned out, in her life too.

Zierler:

Yeah. Now when you entered—

Sargent:

And so Margaret and I went to RGO, and there she met her future husband, the astronomer. Michael Penston, and I met mine. The numbers of British astronomers who met their spouses at Herstmonceux summer schools is hilarious. [laugh] Stanford astrophysics Professor, Roger Blandford, also met his wife, Liz, at Herstmonceux.

Zierler:

It sounds like it must’ve— there must’ve been romance in the air there for all of these relationships to begin.

Sargent:

[laugh] Hilarious, OK. But we were staying in a Castle.

Zierler:

Now when you started with the master’s degree, was your intention from the beginning to pursue the PhD, or were you looking—?

Sargent:

Oh, yes.

Zierler:

It was?

Sargent:

It was.

Zierler:

OK. Did you do a thesis for the master’s, or that was just sort of incidentally earned on the way to the PhD?

Sargent:

At Caltech, the M.S. can be earned on the way to a Ph.D. The only unusual requirement in my time was to pass a humanities course. I decided, in a random sort of way, that I would take Renaissance English Literature, although I had not had a class in English Lit. since high school but I went to the Hallett Smith, chair of the Humanities Division, and said, “I’d like to take this course.” Hallett was great. His response was, “Let’s try it.” I was nervous but apparently, I was very well prepared after 6 years of English literature in a Scottish high school. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Zierler:

Now when did you have your first child?

Sargent:

Oh, not until1970. It took me a little longer than I expected Initially, I seemed to have some problems having babies. I finally managed to become pregnant by planning a trip to Australia for three months, to be followed by flying to Vladivostok and taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad to a meeting in somewhere in Europe. The minute we organized that, I became pregnant. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] And so did you continue matriculating the whole time for the PhD? Or did you take a sort of official leave of absence?

Sargent:

Oh, I just left.

Zierler:

You left entirely?

Sargent:

Oh, I did, I left graduate school entirely. But I suppose I dabbled in astronomy by working as a research assistant for Jesse Greenstein. Actually, that research experience was part of what encouraged me to go back after our daughters were born. And I was having my great “what shall I do with my life?” crisis. You know, when I dropped out, I knew I was not as good at research as my husband and his Caltech colleagues, John Bahcall and Peter Goldreich. John and Neta, Peter and Susan, were among our close friends. So I thought I would not make it as a scientist. But after I’d sat in Greenstein’s outer office, and listened as all these graduate students tripped past me to see him, I began to think I too could get a Ph.D. That was quite a motivating factor.

Zierler:

Now, you said you entered the master’s program fully intending to get the PhD. And then after the master’s degree, you wanted to start a family, and you dropped out. So, originally, had you thought you could have it all, that you could have— you could pursue the PhD while you were raising a family? Or how did that thought process play out?

Sargent:

It didn’t cross my mind that it was something that was “either-or”.

Zierler:

So at what point did you determine that you needed to take a leave from the program to raise your children?

Sargent:

Well, I think I was tired. I was pregnant. [laugh] And then my kids were born 18 months apart.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

I would fall asleep at my desk every afternoon. Jesse would go by and just say, “Yeah, my daughter-in-law says she is asleep in the afternoons too.” [laugh] However, when I was ready to come back he was a little bit skeptical.

Around this time, at a party, I met another old friend, Gerry Wasserburg, a professor of geology at Caltech at a party. He asked “What are you doing with yourself?” I should add that when I had my second child, Gerry sent me a subscription to Mad Magazine. So you can [laugh] see his attitude. After I explained about Jesse and his doubts about me, Gerry offered to hire me, “You want to work in the Lunatic Asylum?” – He and his group did amazing work on moon rocks. When I reported back to Jesse, “It’s OK. Gerry’s going to hire me,” [laugh], he immediately said, “Oh, I’ll hire you.” [laugh]

Zierler:

So which job did you take?

Sargent:

I went to work again as a research assistant for Jesse and then returned to graduate school.

Zierler:

You did?

Sargent:

To be honest, Jesse expected me to be his last graduate student. The trouble was that I didn’t realize this. While he was carefully going around getting me back into graduate school, Goldreich, for reasons— maybe he wanted to just be helpful. I really don’t know – suddenly told me had money that could support me for 6 months so that I could study scientific papers and decide on a thesis topic.

This sounds crazy. On the other hand his postdoctoral fellow, Catherine Cesarsky, had just left for France with her husband Diego to take up jobs in France, probably freeing up money. Catherine remains one of my closest friends and we were tremendously happy to find ourselves in the same department. We have children of the same age. She is another of the women I would rank as a great influence. She herself went on to be Director General of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and then High Commissioner for Atomic Energy for France for a while. Goldreich’s offer was a wonderful opportunity to take a breath and think what thesis topic I might pursue. I didn’t anticipate that it would lead me to millimeter-wave astronomy. But I certainly wanted to study star formation, something that no one else at Caltech seemed much interested in at that time. Sadly, I didn’t realize it would upset Jesse so much. I think he didn’t speak to Peter - or to me much - until I finished my thesis and really thanked him from the bottom of my heart for teaching me how to do research in the first place. It was a difficult time.

Zierler:

What year did you formally re-enter the program? Like would it have been ‘73, ‘74?

Sargent:

Maybe ‘73— well, I’m trying to think. I can work it out by the age of my younger

Zierler:

Your first child was in 70, and then 18 months later is your second child.

Sargent:

‘72, yes, she came at the beginning of ’72. So I think I went back in - , probably ‘74, the fall of ‘74. I audited classes in the spring quarter of ’73.

Zierler:

And I have to ask, going back, what are your childcare options at this point? What are you— what’s your— how does this work out?

Sargent:

Well, my older child started in a Montessori school in fall ‘73. My younger— The younger one went with Catherine Cesarsky’s son to a home in the neighborhood where a lovely Dutch woman took care of the two children. In fact, when my daughter first spoke some words would come out with a Dutch accent. [laugh]

Zierler:

Was your husband encouraging? Was your husband encouraging of you to go back to school?

Sargent:

He was really helpful, yes, because I think he— in fact, he practically begged me never to stop working again. [laugh] And our daughters told me later when they objected at times to my being away, when they moaned about it, at some point, he said, “Just think about it this way. She’s got other people to boss around, not just you”—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

— [laugh] “or us.”

Zierler:

It sounds like he probably was motivated— he probably saw that you needed more in your own life, and he probably saw—

Sargent:

I was frustrated, yes.

Zierler:

Right, and he probably also saw that that frustration was related to the fact that you had a lot more to offer probably.

Sargent:

Maybe I don’t think— I think he would not have had these thoughts consciously. But I think he knew what he was doing, yes.

Zierler:

Yeah, and so you picked right back up where you left off with astronomy? Or had the field changed? Or did you switch focus?

Sargent:

Well, the field had changed. I mean, I had been doing spectroscopy of stars, a bit like Wal maybe when I was starting. And I had worked on the spectral line survey of faint blue stars in the galactic halo with Jesse. It was a seminal paper but it was his paper. I just did a lot of the— I’ll be honest with you, I did the grunt work.

I don’t think I wrote a word of it, and it’s a great paper. That’s why I’m saying it’s not mine. But he kindly put my name on as the second author. And he was quite sensitive about that. He actually asked, “Now you’re going back to school, do you want to use your married name or do you want to use your own name?”

Zierler:

What’d you choose?

Sargent:

Well, I didn’t know what to do, and I liked my own name. My maiden name is Cassells. I thought that was a nice name. But I talked to Catherine Cesarsky, and she said, “Oh, I think it’s nice to have your husband’s name.” So I thought OK. [laugh]

Zierler:

That was it?

Sargent:

And so there we are, yes, it was as simple as that. Anyway, when I came back, I had decided wanted to work in star formation. That meant I would probably have to do infrared observations and infrared was a relatively new field. In addition, millimeter-wave observing was just getting underway, and that looked promising. By the time I finished my thesis, Caltech physics professor, Robert (Bob) Leighton, was leading a project to build a millimeter-wavelength interferometer at the Institute’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO). This was pretty novel.

In fact, two millimeter-wave interferometers were being built. Jack Welch, a radio astronomer and electrical engineering Professor at UC Berkeley, was leading a similar project at their Hat Creek Radio Observatory. I don’t really know, but I think the idea to get higher resolution observations at millimeter wavelengths by using interferometry was originally Jack’s. He was a talented instrument builder in a very lively radio astronomy department, and radio interferometry – at centimeter wavelengths – was already a success.

Anyway, the OVRO interferometer was really the beginning of millimeter-wave astronomy at Caltech. And it was realized by the astronomy department that if Leighton’s project was successful – and Leighton was usually very successful it would be a good idea to have another faculty member who could lead astronomical research projects using the new instrument. A new hire was obviously needed.

Incidentally, Leighton came to millimeter interferometry from observational work at infrared rather than radio wavelengths. Jack Welch came from centimeter-wave radio astronomy. I think their different approaches are reflected in the different design details in the Hat Creek and OVRO interferometers, especially in terms of the telescope diameters and the number of elements.

So Caltech, in its infinite wisdom, decided to look closely at few young people who were already making names for themselves in millimeter-wave astronomy by hiring them as postdocs. Neal Evans, Gill Knapp, Mark Morris, and Nick Scoville took up appointments and. Fred Lo and Dick Crutcher may have been part of that group too – they certainly overlapped. I can’t think of a better time for me to have gone back to graduate school!

And in fact, Jesse Greenstein— I guess Jesse and I must have been on some sort of speaking terms – Jesse had actually said to me, “If you don’t want to do what your husband’s doing, why don’t you think about radio astronomy?” Actually, as leader of the astronomy department and optical astronomy at Caltech, Jesse also had the vision to get OVRO going. He recognized in the late 1950s that radio astronomy was a burgeoning field and brought one of the original stalwarts, John Bolton, from the CSIRO in Sydney, Australia to Caltech as a Professor to start the effort. And John brought with him Gordon Stanley, a New Zealander who’d been working with him at CSIRO. Really, it was Gordon who searched for a site for the observatory – a site that wasn’t afflicted by centimeter-wave interference from Los Angeles - and became its first director. So with all this radio and millimeter astronomy in the air it wasn’t as crazy as it might seem for me to turn to that field.

But I felt that the OVRO director of that period wasn’t so favorably inclined to women. That’s another story. And so I came back to flirting with infrared astronomy and hoped that I could collaborate with Neugebauer’s group, as, you know, one does. His graduate students and postdocs were a young group and, by my standards, quite aggressive. But I hung out with them and learned a lot about interacting with other scientists. There were also weekly meetings that brought in the X-ray group and the growing millimeter group. Each week one – or two – of us would give talks about what we were doing. I found that very tough and quite stressful – but oh it was good for me! It was certainly a growing experience.

And then I took my qualifying exam, ridiculously enough, within— I don’t know— within six months of going back to school. In retrospect, I can see how I close I was to that stage when I quit. And to my great surprise, I passed. By then, I knew roughly what I wanted to do, because I had actually started to do it due to a wildly unexpected opportunity. A 15 ft. diameter antenna had been constructed for some purpose in the 1960s at the American Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles. It was taken over some time later by Caltech alumnus Eugene Epstein, who was given the title of “corporate astronomer.” In the 70s, to support his proposal to NSF for support funds, he offered observing time on this instrument to all these millimeter-wave postdocs at Caltech. I think only Neil and Gill, and I used it much. Obviously I’m grateful to Eugene for that opportunity. In fact, I owe him twice over because, when I was raising money to help the Caltech effort to build CARMA, Eugene donated unusually generously.

In the end, I used the Aerospace dish a hell of a lot. I mapped out millimeter signals from what turned out to be huge molecular clouds that people didn’t even know existed. These were the kind of clouds where stars form. So everything was new, OK? We had no idea what to expect – not even the size of these structures was unknown. One cloud in the constellation Cepheus, turned out to be a reasonable size to study. The other in Perseus, I used to think, “Please, please let me find the edge of this cloud,” [laugh] you know, day after day. It seemed endless.

But for me there was another fortuitous aspect to making these observations. The Aerospace Corporation was down in El Segundo – not very far from the beach. And they gave me 8 to 10 hours a day to make observations. I had small children at home – they were about 2 and 3 – but because I was so close to El Segundo I could spend part of every day with the kids. We had a babysitter who came. Wal helped. I could have an observing program going, and yet I was still at home.

Which was just as well, because we had a drought that year. I kept praying for rain. If it was fine, I’d have to get in the car and go down and observe. But within a few months I had a ton of observations. Where else could I have gotten so much observing time? And that came to be my thesis. I spoke about my work on these data in my qualifying exam. After that it all went very fast. You know, I’d audited a couple of courses in ‘73 before I really went back to school officially and the results were accepted to fulfill missing requirements.

Zierler:

Now it seems like there’s a lot of exciting advances that are going on in the field at this time. And I wonder is that— did you understand this primarily because of technological innovations that allowed these observations to happen? Were there theoretical breakthroughs? What really propelled the field forward?

Sargent:

Oh, no, no, in the beginning, it was mostly technical breakthroughs that allowed any observations at all at these wavelengths. Receivers that were sensitive enough to allow us to detect the millimeter radiation from space were not available until the 1960’s. Things really got going around 1970 with the discovery of emission from the carbon monoxide (CO) molecule in an astronomical source. Then it was discovered there was CO emission all over the place- and sometimes there was also emission from other molecules was Understanding the presence of these molecules of course needed a combination of observations and theory to move forward. But when I began my observations, it was still all quite new. The truth is that it was— it was in fact another fortuitous circumstance for me. If I had been returning to a field that was established, I would’ve missed so much. As it was, I hadn’t missed a damn thing – or at least it was much easier to catch up.

Zierler:

Right. You were there right with it developing, you know, in the middle of it?

Sargent:

Yes, and that’s what— that is in fact one of the things that allowed me to have this time off and go back— and still have a good career.

Zierler:

Did you know this at the time? Did you know—?

Sargent:

No.

Zierler:

You didn’t?

Sargent:

No.

Zierler:

This is only in retrospect?

Sargent:

It’s only in retrospect. I was just damn lucky, you know. Well, there’s luck and opportunity – but they’re not unrelated.

Zierler:

So at what point did you know that you had a dissertation on your hands? At what point in your research did you say, “This is— I can present this?”

Sargent:

I don’t know, I really don’t know. I don’t know because the way Goldreich worked was to constantly ask me l questions about what I was seeing and how that would fit into the existing theoretical framework. Where were the birth sites of the stars? Was there any time pattern in how stars formed in different sites? How did the stars seem to move relative to the cloud? What about the effects on the environments for forming more new stars? I suppose I thought that when I had reasonable answers to all the questions – even if not completely certain answers, I would have a thesis.

I got a lot out of papers by Adriaan Blaauw, a distinguished Dutch astronomer. His 1964 review paper on O associations – groups of the most massive stars that we see - was an inspiration for me. His optical work on the proper motions of these stars - the change of position on the sky over time - enabled me to compare the distribution and movements of newly formed stars with my millimeter measurements of the dynamics and morphology of the molecular clouds where they were born. It took me a while to realize how novel my measurements were for the time – we even had a cold receiver. My advisor, Peter Goldreich was a theorist and that had other advantages but it would’ve helped to have an observational adviser. I was a bit isolated. Finally, at my first big star formation meeting I met Patrick (Pat) Thaddeus, then a professor at Columbia. Patrick was a chemist and I think drawn to millimeter wave astronomy because of the molecular line detections. In fact, he had a telescope a bit like the one at the Aerospace Corporation on the roof of Pupin – the astronomy building - at Columbia. Until then I wasn’t really aware that his group was making large scale maps of molecular clouds in the Galaxy – like me. He told me I could come and use that telescope if I wanted to do more mapping. I couldn’t work out if he really could assign observing time like that.

So I said— well, eventually, I said - “Pat, are you telling me I can turn up in your office one day, and observe for a week?” And he said yes. I thought this was very bizarre, but I went. I went, and he took me into a little office space in Pupin where one of his graduate students or postdocs was tied to the chair [laugh] – was busy – observing. Later, I mentioned to other students that I felt bad that this man was suddenly told he had to give me some of his observing time. Someone said, “No, no, he was really happy.” [laugh] That’s the first time for weeks that he got to spend time at home.” [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

So I observed almost bankers’ hours. It happened that was just the time period when my sources were high in the sky, something like, you know, 10:00 in the morning till six o’clock at night. Very civilized, and people from the department dropped into that little room, to see me, asking how things were going, discuss research. I had a lovely time.

At the weekend it snowed, which was also wonderful. I couldn’t observe, but the snow meant nobody got in from Long Island to go to the Met. So I went to see Beverley Sills – Aida - in a wonderful seat for next to nothing [laugh].

Then the snow cleared out, and of course the atmosphere was then frozen and clear, and it was fabulous for millimeter-wave astronomy. But there was another surprise. At the end of the day, Pat would say, “Now, let me see what you’ve got today. Now, what do you think it means that you chose to look here and you didn’t go there? What did you see? What do you think this means?” I began to understand the limitations of the observations, the greater uncertainties, where the measurements were less precise. And I thought, “Oh, this is what I wish had happened before.” You can see I learned on the job!

And then, it was discovered that some of my observations of carbon monoxide were strong evidence that the emission was what is called “optically thick” and could even show self-absorption. That was not commonly accepted at the time. Sadly, I didn’t make that discovery myself. My measurements were suggestive, but I didn’t have the experience to realize that if I co-added some of them I could make the case for self-absorption unambiguously. That’s what another group did. I certainly couldn’t complain. But I saw this as something that I might have thought to do if I had been better as an observer in the beginning. , because I didn’t know enough to take the obvious next step. As I say. I learned my observational skills on the job in—

Zierler:

Right, because you didn’t have an adviser to show you this?

Sargent:

Yeah, yes. But maybe, in some ways, that has been good because I’ve always—

Zierler:

You learned yourself.

Sargent:

You know sometimes when experts are so sure of what they know that they have difficulties when something extraordinary turns up. Like, Greenstein a brilliant spectroscopist didn’t immediately identify the great distances to quasars because he couldn’t accept that he was seeing the Balmer series of hydrogen lines at such high redshifts. Schmidt, on the other hand was a very careful Dutchman with less spectroscopic experience who simply eliminated every other possibility.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Zierler:

So I want to ask, the research leading up to the dissertation, what were the big questions that you were trying to find answers to?

Sargent:

I was trying to find out how massive stars formed in molecular clouds, what stimulated their birth, how the emerged from their surrounding and how the parent clouds dissipated. I was doing this by studying how star formation proceeded in OB associations. These are associations of massive stars, of spectral classes O and B, and they form in— they tend to form in associations that are made up of small groups of stars. We know that the groups are all at the same distance from us and are not merely juxtaposed on the plane of the sky. Let me tell you about the Orion OB association because it’s the clearest example. At the center of the Orion nebula, where stars are certainly forming in a molecular cloud, there is a little group of relatively new, massive stars – the Trapezium. But as you move away from the Trapezium on the plane of the sky, three separate groups of OB stars are also seen–more or less along a line – furthest away from the cloud is the oldest - quite far away from the molecular cloud, as you get closer to the cloud the stars become younger with the Trapezium showing signs of stars forming and emerging from their parent cloud. I was trying to work out how general this pattern was and what might be causing it by observing the molecular clouds associated with OB associations in the Cepheus and Perseus constellations. Eventually I found out that this problem was also being tackled by Bruce Elmegreen and Charlie Lada at Harvard, looking at a different star forming region. Bruce is a theorist and Charlie an observational astronomer and you can see the complementarity. They believed they had a pretty plausible theory of how the pattern might have produced by the compression effects of supernovae on the clouds over the lifetime of the whole OB association. So of course, my observations were very relevant.

But I didn’t know about the Elmegreen and Lada research when I started my observations until I went to an International Astronomical Union (IAU) Symposium on star formation in Geneva in 1976. Of course, when we met we recognized that we complemented each other. It was very exciting for me. And, honestly, I’ve never again been to a meeting where I learned so much, enjoyed so much, contributed— I just— I felt I’d gone to heaven in that meeting, that’s all I can say. [laugh] Because I found that there were other people doing what I did.

There had just never been much star formation research done at Caltech. In fact, I’m told that my colleague Sterl Phinney said when I was already a post-doc that nobody did star formation at Caltech [laugh] Rochus (Robbie) Vogt who was the Chair of the Caltech PMA Division at the time – he’s also a man who has really, really supported and helped me in my career –asked me— Robbie called me up and said, “Why am I reading in Scientific American, that you and these guys called Elmegreen and Lada are doing all these things in star formation when Sterl’s saying there’s no star formation research at Caltech? And then I read I just laughed, “Oh, well, he just doesn’t recognize what I’m doing.” [laugh]

Zierler:

So in what ways— given the fact that you were doing something that was so unique at Caltech so much so that you really didn’t have an adviser who knew more about this than you did, in what ways did that benefit your research and careers, and in what way was it a detriment to your research and your career?

Sargent:

Well, I think it was a bit of a detriment because I would’ve learned technical details I needed to know much faster. I mean, I would’ve learned the nuts and bolts much faster than I did. As it was, it was hit or miss sometimes. And it would have been wonderful to have earlier connections with other people in the field. It was making those connections that made the Geneva symposium such an exciting experience for me. On the other hand, it made me— when I was convinced of something, I was convinced of it, and because I had to do it myself, I had worked it through more than enough.

And so it probably made me more independent. And also Goldreich gave me such good advice sometimes— he probably doesn’t even remember it. But when I started to go to meetings and give invited presentations he said to me, “When you talk, stand up, say what you have to say, smile nicely, and sit down, and do not bullshit when people ask questions.” [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

“If you don’t know the answer, say, “Well, that’s an interesting question, and I’ll have to think about it. Maybe we could talk about it.” But don’t make up an answer.” [laugh] Whereas I have a friend from a British university whose adviser told her if she didn’t know the answer to respond as if answering another question.

So I learned to be brutally honest with myself. I learned that I didn’t know a hell of a lot, and that I would have to be humble and admit it. And so of course it sometimes backfired – it took a while to discover that you had to understand your audience, their culture. I remember giving a talk in Italy, where they obviously had different attitudes. Someone asked me a question, and I responded, “Oh, I haven’t thought about it that way. We could talk about it.” And immediately the audience themselves all talked about it.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

— because they felt bad for me. [laugh] But it was illuminating.

Zierler:

Do you remember the title of your dissertation?

Sargent:

No [laugh], I don’t even have it at home. I couldn’t look it up. [laugh] Seriously it was probably very simple, The Relation between OB Associations and Giant Molecular Clouds, something like that.

Zierler:

Who was on your committee?

Sargent:

Excuse me, who was— oh, that’s a relevant story. My committee was Gerry Neugebauer because of infrared. I mean, during the course of my thesis work I also made some near infrared observations on Mount Wilson, working with his group. Sadly, Chas Beichman, then a grad student at the University of Hawaii, called me up one day and said, “By the way, I looked at your Cepheus source the other evening, and I know you’re looking at it on Mount Wilson. Eric Becklin told me to call you up, and tell me you’re never going to see it because we can barely see it on Mauna Kea at 10 microns.” Eric was Chas’ thesis advisor but had been a graduate student with Gerry at Caltech and knew how much more difficulty I would have detecting that source from Mount Wilson at shorter wavelengths.

That kind of thing helped change my focus to millimeter-wave observations. But, anyway, Neugebauer was on the Committee, also Maarten Schmidt, Goldreich, and a new assistant professor who focused on instrumentation and millimeter-wave astronomy, Peter Wannier. Peter moved to JPL after a while and eventually left the field.

Zierler:

Did Caltech have an outside reader requirement?

Sargent:

No. We would have a Caltech professor from outside the department but within the Division. In my case the outsider was that was Neugebauer, who was in PMA but in the physics department.

Zierler:

Now, in physics, where were you on the spectrum of theoretical to experimental? Where did you see yourself like that?

Sargent:

Oh, way, way, way down in experimental. [laugh] but not instrumentation per se.

Zierler:

So in what ways was theory relevant to your research? How did you draw on theory?

Sargent:

I read and read. I mean, it was star formation. And I would say that at that point— the observations were only just beginning to be sufficiently detailed to be relevant to theory. Infrared astronomy was also a relatively young field that was needed to move the star formation research forward because forming stars are often hidden from optical view by the dust in the molecular clouds where they’re born. Do you see what I’m saying?

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Sargent:

But the resolution that we had, our limited ability to make the observations, gave us nothing detailed enough to consider how they related to the magneto-hydrodynamic theories put forward years before by people like Leon Mestel and Hoyle in Britain, .

In fact, at this Geneva meeting in 1976, the distinguished speaker who summarized the conference presentations, George Herbig - he was then a professor at Hawaii after a long career at the University of California - actually said, “Well, we know that stars form, but we really have no idea how. “Frankly, a very well-known German radio astronomer had said to my husband at one point, “It’s a pity to see so much intelligence wasted on this problem.” He was referring to my thesis. [laugh]

And, indeed, I think I didn’t find it— my thesis research— very satisfactory. I mean, there was the comparison with the Elmegreen and Lada theory – and the discoveries about the physical properties of giant molecular clouds and their locations. But I have to say that the large-scale formation of massive stars still has its issues. And, as we’ve found, it’s much easier to study star formation, by looking at lower mass stars which don’t affect their environment to the same degree, so that you can actually see evolutionary progress. It’s amusing to me that the last CARMA observational project I’m working on – led by former Caltech/OVRO postdocs who are now senior people in the field - addresses the effects of large-scale massive star formation in giant molecular clouds.

Zierler:

Now, you can answer for yourself or you can be, you know, representative of the field. But to what extent did star formation lend itself to bigger questions about the origin of the universe, and the way the universe works? To what extent what the field of star formation sort of an island in and of itself, and to what extent was it related to those bigger questions?

Sargent:

Well, I would say that since the time when I started star formation has become much more relevant and important in the study of other galaxies. Infrared surveys of the whole sky led to the discovery of ultralumious galaxies and emphasized the important role of dust observations and the implications for star formation to studies of even distant galaxies. And the study of accretion disks – similar but much more dramatic to those we see when stars form is perhaps even more important.

And star formation is of fundamental importance to one of the big new fields of research these days, the observational and theoretical studies of extra solar planetary systems. The advent of the kind of observations ALMA provides is of course moving research forward in almost every field – arguably every field – even cosmology. There was a time sub-millimeter-wave observations seemed irrelevant there. But I believe that there are now—

Zierler:

Irrelevant to what?

Sargent:

— well, it’s only recently become obvious that ALMA can enable astonishing spectral line work at cosmological distances. That’s essentially what it boils down to.

Zierler:

And why in other galaxies is this more— is this a better way to do research?

Sargent:

Oh, because in other galaxies, you’re studying larger scale processes in. just the interstellar medium. You need more detail to study these processes. This was just becoming interesting and accessible as infrared astronomy got going so I was aware very early in my thesis that you could actually follow how stars form in other galaxies. We’re still studying that. We now know, for example, that galaxies merge. We can watch the gas merging. We could see that stars merge. Now these processes can be better modeled because we have observations of the gas movement. And from infrared what happens to the dust that goes along with the gas. On a larger scale we can actually study the intergalactic medium model of galaxy formation.

ALMA is having kind of a field day because it’s providing measurements at high enough resolution that now we can do detailed comparisons of the gas and dust observations with near infrared and optical observations from t the Hubble and the large ground-based optical telescopes – the physical processes involved become that much more accessible to modeling. I think millimeter astronomy might have been seen as irrelevant because we just didn’t have the technology until now to make it obviously interesting to non-radio astronomers.

Zierler:

Now, you defended 1977, and I’m curious because this is the point at which you are now formally one-half of an academic couple where you are now within the realm of possibility of being recruited possibly away from Southern California for your own career opportunities, right. And so I’m curious what were the parameters by which you would say, “I’m going to stay at Caltech because this is where my husband is” versus “I might think about where my career might take me that may or may not be in Caltech”? How did you think about that?

Sargent:

Well, I have to say I didn’t think too much because I had small children, and I had a husband. And it seemed to me it would be good to stay at Caltech. And my division chair (Maarten Schmidt at the time) offered me a job, probably for my immediate convenience— I think the division possibly paid for my postdoctoral fellowship, or at least began to pay for it. So I was a free-floater, once again in this isolated mode and I had to find projects on my own.

And one of the first things I found to do was to go visit Thaddeus’s group, as I mentioned. So that was good. I was interested in what they were doing. And then I turned a bit more to infrared studies. The NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) were preparing for the launch of IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite) at that time, and Gerry Neugebauer was the American PI. As a result, there were a lot of visits from ESA’s U.K. and Dutch IRAS teams that broadened the range of research topics discussed in the group meetings. And that led to another direction for my research.

While I was working on my thesis, I had tried to persuade the infrared astronomers who observed using the Kuiper Astronomical Observatory (KAO), to make measurements of the exciting star forming region I had discovered in the Cepheus cloud. Chas Beichman had told me it wouldn’t be detectable at Mt Wilson so I wanted to look with the KAO - a telescope set inside an airplane that could take it to high altitudes to overcome the bad effects that the Earth’s atmosphere. But they were much more interested in Orion and the Galactic Center.

But Reinder’s space research group at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands were at that time flying astronomical instruments and experiments on balloons from the NASA facility in Palestine, Texas, and had offered in Geneva, “Well, we could look at your source.” I thought that was terrific. But I also thought— again, you know, this suspicious little Scottish mind— if you don’t go to the actual telescope, you can never be sure what they’ll do it— (a) they’re not going to do your observation at all or but (b) they’ll do it but I need to know the circumstances of the observation. I need to know how they take the data. I need to know how it’s calibrated… all of this. So I went to my Division chair, and said, “I need travel money. I need to go to Palestine, Texas.” And I got it. So for five years— I eventually got a NATO grant somehow that, you know, supported this research with the Netherlands— and for five years my research relied on flying balloons out of Palestine. And, at first, I was what shall we say a freeloader. They were just being nice.

But after about a couple of flights, maybe the second time around, something happened— I don’t remember what it was, but it dawned on me “I’m an American co-investigator. That means NSF will pay for the balloon.” The Dutch-Swedish team was ecstatic— balloons aren’t cheap. I was ecstatic too because at last I had some clout in the observing decisions. You know, money talks.

Of course, this led to one of the most blatant sexist situation of my professional life. The director of the balloon base at Palestine seemed to think I was, I don’t know, a camp-follower, to put it politely, for the ESA group and denied my request for a waiver of the cost of the balloon. I say that in all seriousness. Reinder and I went to see him directly. And when we came out, Reinder, said, “Why didn’t you just punch that guy in the face?”

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

[laugh] That’s how bad it was. Anyway— I wrote to NSF and complained. In the end, it required a formal letter from NSF to the NASAS base director stating that that I was a bona fide American co-investigator and therefore entitled to a cost waiver. But it took six months, and no one needs that. On the other hand, it meant I had an effective collaboration of my own, with a NATO grant to support it. And I was beginning to start other collaborations outside Caltech.

Our division chair changed around that time and Owens Valley was going through a difficult period. In fact, the NSF supporting grant was not renewed. The observatory had not achieved as expected and, during the requisite site visit, had not satisfied the reviewers about future plans.

[unrelated conversation]

Zierler:

Owens Valley gets the grants.

Sargent:

Well, the observatory, OVRO, yes. But through the Director, who is usually a Caltech Professor. Alan Moffat, our director at the time, was a very clever radio astronomer but not as skillful in dealing with funding agencies and a bit awkward socially. So when the review team came to look over a project that wasn’t doing too well to start with, they also noticed little group cohesion or momentum. Actually, it’s a tragic story. Alan was gay, and ultimately died of AIDS. Once everybody knew that he had AIDS, he was able to become himself and a much happier person. I can only imagine how terrible his life was until— I mean, it was very sad.

Anyway, Alan was very— he didn’t understand that you have to actually thank people who give you money [laugh], if you see what I mean. And so the grant was not renewed. By this time, we had a new division chair, Robbie Vogt, a physics professor and a brilliant scientist who had already led a number of successful projects as part of his research on cosmic rays and gamma rays. He went on to carve out the beginnings of LIGO and to be Provost of Caltech, among other influential appointments. And Robbie Vogt just stepped in to this OVRO catastrophe and said, “We’re going to have to fix this,” meaning the Division, not just the radio astronomers.

But, he also said directly to me— I think I was maybe only two years into my weird postdoc position— “You cannot sit around as a postdoc with no responsibilities, and do what you like. That is not the way we work here. You are a radio astronomer. They’re building a millimeter facility. You will work for Owens Valley.” I’m sure he had to pay my salary to get Alan to accept me.

Well, I don’t know that for sure but— he did a lot for— Robbie did so much for me. One of my big heroes. So he made me part of the OVRO group, and immediately started us working to get the grant back. He decided I would be part of the science steering team. For the first time, we did the calculations to determine if the new millimeter facility might actually be sensitive enough to detect millimeter emission from another galaxy. Until then, we had hoped but not seriously considered that possibility. I mean, heaven only knows what we thought we were going to do with this instrument once it got built. It was soon established that, thanks to Bob Leighton’s brilliant forethought, we had 10 meter diameter telescopes with great surface accuracy that allowed us to make the first high resolution observations of another galaxy.

So I was part of those discussions right in the beginning. And then we began— I mean, the interferometer got going, with just two telescopes. I can’t convey the excitement when we finally had three elements working together – this was major milestone in making accurate images. So OVRO and the millimeter-wave interferometer became a big part of my life and I loved being part of the group and the project from that moment on.

I learned so much about radio astronomy in this way. There were regular meetings. In addition, Caltech had hired Tom Phillips as a professor of physics to come and run the observatory at that time. Tom had worked on detector technology and development at Bell Labs, and the millimeter-wave interferometer depended on this. It was a great boon to have a physicist of his stature and capabilities in charge, Things really began to move forward. Eventually, my postdoctoral fellowship ended and I became a Caltech staff member, a professional staff member in the OVRO group, which was OK but didn’t thrill me too much. But it did mean I had a steady job doing research, doing something I enjoyed, and I could live in the same town as my husband and children. And I could spend more time with them than would have been possible if I had been a faculty member.

Zierler:

But this is not tenure track. This is not a tenure track?

Sargent:

It was not tenure track. It wasn’t even research track. It was a professional staff job, and so I worked for the observatory. But again in one of these odd twists of fate, it was somehow fortuitous. As it turned out, I write fast, and I also take good notes. So I ended up being in some of the OVRO group meetings where took notes because I that was a learning path for me. It also meant I could watch how various projects were progressing. But nobody was taking minutes of these meetings. One day, something came up, “What did was actually decided in that meeting today?” And I whipped out my notes. That led to, and “Oh, you have notes. Could you write minutes?” So I ended up in every meeting, writing minutes of all the discussions minutes. It got to the point that when a grant update was due, I wrote a first draft of the science for the proposal. I mean, I didn’t do the budgets you know— but I became very useful to the observatory, OK? I was a research astronomer by training, I worked hard for the interferometer and I could write – I was needed. That was more satisfying. And we were trying to observe with the interferometer— really beginning to try to observe.

Sometime around the time the 3-element interferometer was coming online, I began to think that I should stop trying to understand massive stars because I could see it was not going to be very productive for me. But in those days, each member of the OVRO group tended to work on a specific topic— other galaxies, massive stars, low-mass stars, planets. It was a bit constraining— and hard to change one’s research area.

By this time, the very early 1980s, IRAS results were pouring in and we knew that some objects, some quite surprising objects, had dust around them. Given the IRAS limited spatial resolution, it wasn’t possible to see the dust distribution but there were lots of theories and a hint from ground-based follow-up observations of a star called Beta Pictoris that maybe we were seeing flattened circumstellar disks like the one that gave rise to our own solar system. At OVRO, we now had three telescopes- we could hope to make reasonable detections, maybe even a galaxy. So, one day I was working in the computer room at Caltech when I got a call from Steve Beckwith who was then an assistant professor at Cornell. We were old friends but hadn’t worked together after our graduate student days. But we talked occasionally and that day he called during a layover at LAX on his way back to Ithaca from an observing run on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. He had been working with Ben Zuckerman of UCLA and his group looking at low-mass stars where IRAS had detected circumstellar dust – like in Beta Pictoris. He told me about one star with properties like the Sun might have had when it was very young. This star, HL Tauri had shown significant circumstellar dust.

Anyway, thinking back we disagree on what happened next. I think I said, “Gee, we could look at it at OVRO.” He thinks he said, “You should look at it with your interferometer.” We’ve agreed it’s not important [laugh]. But, somehow or other, we decided that higher resolution measurements of the dust, and maybe gas around HL Tauri would be a good interferometer project. The OVRO powers-that-be must have agreed because it was one of the first stars that the interferometer would observe. And we got— well we could detect emission, but it not very interesting. Sure it was there. It was a blob, right. There was dust and there was gas present. We published a paper but it was not very inspiring in my opinion – although it did prove that the interferometer worked. But Steve and I thought about it a lot more, and we thought, you know, if the carbon monoxide (CO) emission we were detecting was optically thick, we wouldn’t be sensitive to any variations in the density at different places around the star. What if we observed at the frequency of a less abundant isotopomer of the carbon monoxide? And so I went into the Owens Valley time allocation committee with this proposal to search for ¹³CO emission from HL Tau. At that time, the whole scientific staff of OVRO was on the time allocation committee. , If you had proposals, you could discuss yours with everyone. This was helpful because the facility was so new. So when my moment came I said, “Well, you know, we got a detection when we looked at the ¹²CO line, but it was a bit unexciting. We think that if we look at ¹³CO, it’ll be better.”

Well, everybody laughed— not quite but, you know. And I have to say that that’s possibly where, being isolated and just having to work through things myself gave me more confidence. I disagreed, “No, no, if ¹²CO is heavily saturated, it’s not unreasonable to expect that we’ll see ¹³CO.” Well, they laughed. Even Nick Scoville, one of my closest friends, asked me if I knew the relative abundances of ¹²CO and ¹³CO – it’s almost two orders of magnitude. Later, when the observations were successful, only Nick, of that whole group of people, came back to say, “You were right and I was wrong. I’ll never forget that.

Eventually, the group decision was, “Look, you, you get time. You want to waste your time on this, go ahead.” But everyone was unhappy by then. Nobody—

Zierler:

So what was this on your point? This was a hunch? What was your push on this that made you feel like this was worth pursuing?

Sargent:

Oh, because Steve and I didn’t do this without some reasoning. We were convinced that there was a very good chance that we would detect 13CO emission.

Zierler:

And what was the significance of this?

Sargent:

What do you mean what was the significance of this?

Zierler:

Well, what were you— I mean, in pursuing this—

Sargent:

We wanted to establish the morphology and the dynamics of the circumstellar gas. From the first observations, we knew there was dust and it was pretty confined. The gas could be more extended due to its different absorption properties. And, as we found, the gas was extended in a flattened structure and in those early days the velocity structure looked to be compatible with Keplerian rotation – like the planets around the Sun. Maybe a protoplanetary disk.

Zierler:

So this is purely observational? You just want to see what’s going on?

Sargent:

We want to see what’s going on, yes.

Zierler:

What is the relationship between Caltech and Owens Valley?

Sargent:

Caltech owns and operates the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, supported by grants from the NSF. It’s just the same at Berkeley, which owns and operates Hat Creek Radio Observatory with NSG support

Zierler:

So everyone at Owens Valley is a Caltech employee?

Sargent:

Yes, the day-to day staff typically live in the nearby towns— Bishop or Big Pine.

Zierler:

And what kind of institutional relationships are there at this point? Are you an island unto yourself at Caltech, or are there partnerships that are going on with other observatories that you’re taking part in?

Sargent:

Oh, the institutional partnerships that finally came about with UC Berkeley, U Illinois, and U Maryland (BIMA) evolved over many years. We knew there was a finite lifetime, and it became slightly more finite when ALMA finally got going because NSF couldn’t afford to support all the university observatories as well as that huge international project. At Caltech we were prepared for this eventuality - it’s a very hard-headed institution. In fact, I wrote a report for Caltech in the early 2000s, estimating what the lifetime of the OVRO millimeter array might be. The estimated lifetime for cutting-edge science was about 2018. By forming institutional alliances as we did with BIMA and later U Chicago as well, we hoped to extend that. Actually NSF terminated support of operations in 2015. On the other hand, my colleague, Gregg Hallinan, who’s now the director of the observatory, is building a new centimeter wave array at OVRO with small telescopes all over the Valley floor. He’s doing incredible and marvelous research across a wide range of problems. And again there are broadening and supportive collaborations with other institutions. It’s great to see the OVRO moving into the future successfully— just in a different way.

Zierler:

Now, in 1996, when you became the director, I’m curious how much overlap was there between your research agenda and the overall research agenda of Owens Valley. Were there things going on that you were not involved in?

Sargent:

Yes, other colleagues had research programs that used the millimeter array. In particular Nick Scoville, who preceded me as Owens Valley Director, led a major effort in high resolution extragalactic astronomy, and other colleagues had significant programs in planetary astronomy, star formation, and stellar evolution and so on. And Tony Readhead, who preceded Nick Scoville as Director, was studying the microwave background at centimeter wavelengths with other OVRO telescopes and, with his group, building innovative instrumentation for associated cosmological observations. But the millimeter-wave array came more and more to dominate the Observatory and its budget, especially after 2000. That was when we formed the collaboration with BIMA to join the telescopes of their array at Hat Creek with those of OVRO on a higher site. Briefly, there came a point in the 1990’s when it became clear that both the OVRO and BIMA arrays had reached their sensitivity limits. We couldn’t go much further in the science we wanted to do. So we and our arch-rivals BIMA agreed to combine our 6 10-m diameter dishes with 9 of their 6-m dishes on a higher and site above Owens Valley, with better atmospheric conditions, better electronics and so on. And we did rather well with the Combined Array for Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA). I became the first director. That just sort of happened because Caltech was the main driving force to change sites and the way the NSF proposal got written, and the way private support was obtained and so on. Caltech owes a whole lot of gratitude to the Norris Foundation for our first influx of money – even before NSF awarded us funds. OK? [laugh]

Zierler:

Now, two years into your directorship of OVRO in 1998, you’re named full professor of astronomy at Caltech.

Sargent:

Yes.

Zierler:

And so this is fascinating because you’re not on the tenure track at all. And then, all of sudden, you skip all of it, and become full professor.

Sargent:

Well, no, it wasn’t quite like that. Around about the time of the HL Tauri observations, or maybe after they were published, I began to get very fed up with my position at Caltech. One day, after a colloquium, I commented to Peter Goldreich, my old advisor, that I thought that people were being promoted ahead of me in the research line who were— well, I thought I was just as deserving of a promotion to the more prestigious research track. Remember I was still a professional staff member. Essentially, I just moaned to him, not thinking much beyond that. I probably always underestimated—

Zierler:

You moaned to him as a confidante or because he was a decision-maker on these things?

Sargent:

No, I moaned to him as a friend, you know, as a colleague, a friend, just in passing. But he stopped me in my tracks and said, “Well, if you think that, I’ll read their papers and your papers, and if I think you’re right, I’ll go to the division chair.” Probably this is one of my favorite Caltech moments because it emphasizes how much science counts here – the biggest consideration. Anyway, he must have had an effect with the chair because a bit later, after a review of my work, letters of recommendation and so on—I could look up when I became a research fellow—I entered the research track, and then eventually—and quite quickly I went to the top of—

Zierler:

1988— you’re named senior research fe…

Sargent:

Excuse me?

Zierler:

1998 you’re— I’m sorry, 1988 you’re named senior research fellow.

Sargent:

Yes, that’s what happened. And then I moved up the research track reasonably quickly, and I became a senior research associate. It’s now called research professor. So I would’ve been a research professor when I—

Zierler:

So it is essentially— so a research— the research track is happening in parallel with the tenure track?

Sargent:

Yes, but people on the research track are usually supported by soft money, from grants, not by the Institute. Eventually I was mostly supported by Caltech— probably because I got job offers along the way. They were viable by this time because my children were growing up.

Zierler:

So this gets me back to my original question. From 1977 when you defended the dissertation, at some point you must be thinking an offer might come your way that’s not in Southern California.

Sargent:

So by 1988 I’m on the research ladder and my kids are starting college, OK? I guess I went to a meeting— actually it was at the end of 1988— and a colleague from another university said to me, “Well, I guess your kids are going to college now. Would you be able—would you think of moving?” And I replied “You know, I would think of moving.”

And so then there were offers over the next few years. Every time I got an offer, I would go to Caltech, and say, “I think I’m going to leave because I’ve been offered this or that”— But in the end there was always a reason that I decided the move wouldn’t work for me, maybe the science, maybe my marriage, or my family. For example when a job came up in Arizona, I realized I really didn’t want to go – Keck was coming online about then and my husband didn’t want to leave Caltech. I had thought we could commute but we—you know, it was a family decision— we didn’t think our marriage would survive that. And it helped that Caltech always offered me something that would make me stay. For example, the Institute – more precisely my Division - would cover a significant part of my salary so that I wouldn’t be a burden on the OVRO grant. That was one of my first successes– not being dependent on soft money.

Zierler:

And Wal never wanted to leave Caltech? He always was—he just wanted to stay –

Sargent:

Oh, no, no, OK. [laugh] Wal often thought of leaving Caltech– until Keck. I was usually the one who didn’t want to go. But even though eventually we would both be offered Professorships at the same place, somehow a move never happened. Wal was quite taken with one or two places but then something would come up— an appallingly high overhead rate on scientific grants for example—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

— you know, not profound scientific issues. But other people’s reactions interested me. A woman at Caltech actually told me in one case, “You do know that they’re offering your husband a job. And you’re getting a professorship because the university will provide support to the department for half of your salary, for hiring a woman. Doesn’t that bother you?”

And, you know, it really didn’t. I feel I’ve probably lost out on some things because I’m a woman. So why should I care if I get my foot in the door because I’m a woman? I felt I could show them they needed me once I was there so I didn’t feel bad about that.

I did take every offer seriously and I was really pleased— and amused – during one negotiation when the department head told me he hoped I wouldn’t take too long to make my decision “because we’re holding a slot for your husband just in case.” [laugh] In fact, my husband thought this move would have been tremendously fun. When I didn’t take it, my husband asserted he was quite sad. [laugh] But even with these offers in hand, I was not appointed to a professorship at Caltech during that period. I was told much later by more than one reliable source that the Institute offered to support a professorship for me then but that there was opposition from some people in the astronomy department. These things happen in universities.

Zierler:

How much teaching were you doing at this point? Did you have a teaching responsibility?

Sargent:

How much?

Zierler:

Teaching.

Sargent:

Oh, I didn’t teach till I was a professor.

Zierler:

OK. So you’re only starting to teach in 1998?

Sargent:

Mm-hmm. That was hard going.

Zierler:

It was?

Sargent:

Yes, that was very hard going because—

Zierler:

When was the last time you taught? Probably at graduate school, right?

Sargent:

Yes, yes, a long time before. Moreover, I had the wrong style because, by that time, I had become pretty good at giving public talks, I could do successful public talks standing on my head. But teaching is a very different kind of thing. And somehow I have never been satisfied with my teaching style— even though I worked on it like a crazy person.

If I’d already taught a course, I still practically started all over again the next time around. And in my department we changed teaching commitments a lot, I mean, we consciously teach different courses. That’s part of the department culture. That makes it very hard work.

And I will tell you one of the reasons I became emeritus— it’s not that I was doing too much— it was that I did not want to teach anymore. That meant three nights a week when I couldn’t go out to dinner, go to a concert, and see friends. It’s not that we have a heavy teaching load, it’s— I think I never got it down to be a routine.

Zierler:

And what were the circumstances of you being named director of the Michelson Science Center?

Sargent:

Of the which, sorry?

Zierler:

The Michelson Science Center.

Sargent:

Oh, that. Oh, well, I was already using radio interferometry to do research and this involved interferometry at optical wavelengths and that was a connection. But also my research was partially supported by NASA grants, and I’d become involved in the NASA science advisory structure while I was still on the research ladder but— how did I get into that?— you know, I have to tell you I’d have to think this through a bit more. It was so long ago.

I should add that because I wasn’t on the tenure track, I wasn’t on as many internal Caltech committees as my professor colleagues. So I had more time to be on national committees. And once I was on one, someone always saw a good reason to invite me to be on another. I had NSF Grants so I served on their advisory committees and was appointed to the NSF’s advisory committee to the Assistant Director for Math and Physical Sciences relatively early in my career– so long ago that other members went on to be head of Fermi Lab, President of the whole of University of California system, Secretary for Energy and so on— a committee of people who were going somewhere. I was just an astronomer. I never quite understood why I merited that appointment. [laugh]

And I also became with NASA committees, quite by chance. Well, as I said, I’ve done some infrared astronomy throughout in my career. And then Wal and I went to Paris to work one summer— Wal at the Institute d’Astrophysique and I at Saclay, with my friend Catherine Cesarsky. Catherine was leading a French team that was proposing to build a camera for ESA’s Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) mission. NASA had a similar mission called SIRTF (later SPITZER) on the books but I wasn’t involved in that.

We always tried, my family and I, to go to Europe every summer, and work at another observatory so that we could visit our families in the UK over a longish period, and not have to— you know, bring the children to the grandparents and stay for weeks at a time. So we had gone went to France that year.

When I got to Saclay, writing the proposal to ESA to build the ISO camera was in full swing and it seemed fun to help with this. And of course, I’d been involved in technical proposal writing at OVRO, so, along with the infrared work, I had a good background to be useful. And, lo and behold, sometime later, the Saclay team got the contract. In the way that things happen in space missions, ESA subsequently found they needed a second ground station for effective data acquisition and transmission. NASA agreed to provide this second station in return for some observing time. To ensure that the U.S. community views were represented, NASA requested that a U.S. astronomer sit on the science steering committee for each ISO instrument. Because I had worked on the proposal, Catherine asked that I be selected for the camera committee.] And so NASA, out of the blue, called me up and said, “Well, we’re going to have to give you a grant to enable this.” [laugh]

So I got a NASA Grant and worked on the ISO Camera steering committee, and again enjoyed an independent source of funding. In fact that grant was the beginning of my NASA committee political career. Only a couple of years later I got a rather surprising call from a NASA HQ manager saying – a bit bluntly I thought— “NASA’s been good to you, and now it’s payback time.”

Zierler:

Oh, boy.

Sargent:

Yep, “It’s payback time.” In fact, someone had dropped out of the KAO time allocation committee, the committee that reviewed proposals and recommended time to observe with the Airborne Observatory. “You’re going to work that spot.” [Laugh] So I said OK. In those days NASA sent all the proposals to you by mail. I carried a whole suitcase full of paper proposals up to NASA Ames in my checked luggage,

Anyway, I took my role on this time allocation committee very seriously and was probably a bit of a pain in the neck with questions and comments. To the point where I recall disagreeing strongly with a much more senior committee member about the relative importance of a couple of proposals – and there were other times when I was pretty opinionated. I was amazed when I got a call not long afterwards from Larry Caroff, then the NASA HQ chief for infrared, submillimeter, and radio astronomy. It was a nice invitation, “I know we’ll get honest opinions from you so I want you to be on the NASA Infrared (IR) working group.” I’m being asked to be on an advisory committee for NASA Infrared Astronomy— I was terribly pleased to join, to contribute.

That would have been around 1990, I was also doing advisory work for NSF during this time. I was actually quite interested in how funding decisions were made in the Agencies. Anyway, things kind of bubbled on from there. Other committees and reviews came up, especially in radio and infrared astronomy. And then in 1994 the NASA Administrator, Dan Goldin, called and asked me to chair the NASA Space Science Advisory Committee and sit on the NASA Council. I wasn’t sure why but I heard much later that he liked the way I had handled one of the interminable reviews of the NASA SIRTF (now Spitzer) and SOFIA missions that were then in the planning stages.

Zierler:

Now, you’re on leave? Are you working as a full-time employee of NASA? You’re on leave from Caltech?

Sargent:

No, I’m working for Caltech. These are volunteer positions.

Zierler:

OK. But it sounds like this is a major commitment on your part.

Sargent:

Oh, well, it was. But remember I was not yet on the tenure track so I was not teaching or participating much in Caltech administrative committees. My major commitments at Caltech were to OVRO and my research and a couple of graduate students. I will admit it took me a long time to agree to take on the Space Science Advisory Committee (SSAC). Quite frankly I wasn’t sure I was up to it in the beginning. When I realized I could manage SSAC, I also realized how much work it would take and I asked NASA for a personal assistant to help me – and thank heavens they agreed.

Zierler:

How much time are you spending in Washington for this work?

Sargent:

It varied. But at the peak of working on setting up the NASA Origins Program, which we did through a fantastic meeting that was chaired by Al Gore in the Indian Treaty Room—

Zierler:

What year would this have been?

Sargent:

What year would— it’s in there somewhere – yes, 1996. It’s the—

Zierler:

He would’ve been a senator at this point or vice president?

Sargent:

He was vice president. This was soon after NASA scientists suggested there might be evidence of microbial life in a rock that originated on the Moon. Dan Goldin and the Associate Administrator for Space Science, Wes Huntress, realized very quickly that they had to inform the White House of this possibility. Wes’ description of going to the White House was full of graphic detail—first telling Gore what was happening, then Gore taking them to see Bill – evidently only recently out of bed. And so on. [laugh] But after that Gore was very helpful about spreading the word about the possibilities of detecting extraterrestrial life. We wanted to help the general population see that scientific discovery was not always black and white— but was an ongoing search for the truth, even though at each stage there might be uncertainties. This led inevitably to NASA’s Origins Program - we would look for the origins of life, step-by-step in an ordered way, not just by picking out some detail from a moon rock. NASA’s SSAC and the National Research Council’s Space Science Committee, chaired by my MIT colleague Claude Canizares, joined forces to produce a briefing book that summarized our state of knowledge and possible ways forward. It culminated in Gore’s Space Symposium in 1996. And in that time, I probably went once every two weeks to Washington. I know it was a lot of travel because the airline mileage programs were just beginning at that time.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

And they hadn’t worked out the kinks. So my mileage shot up during that period much, much more than I traveled. It means I look like I now have more than five million miles. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

But actually I didn’t travel [laugh] that much [laugh]. So there’s this nice reminder.

Zierler:

Did you enjoy the work for NASA, or did you feel like it was your professional duty to be engaged in this work?

Sargent:

You know, another reason I took a long time to make up my mind to get involved was because I kept thinking, “This is a lot of work. Why should I do it?” I had similar thoughts about becoming president of the American Astronomical Society. I thought I didn’t want to do that. I went to ask the opinion of my division chair, assuming he would tell me it was a bit of a waste of my time. You know, “Do I have to do this? Do you think I should?”

And he said, “Yeah, for Caltech you should do this.” And so, in fact, a lot of my reasoning went, “Should I do this? Is it interesting? Do I like it? Should I do it for Caltech?” Honestly, in the matter of being the SSCAC chair, I got a lot of calls saying, “You should do this.” [laugh]

Zierler:

You should do it for Caltech because it’s good from what? From a political perspective, from a funding perspective? Because it’s good for the research? What’s good?

Sargent:

I think that the Institute likes to know what is happening at the national level and they like to be represented. Other universities are also conscious of this. MIT for example. It’s definitely not so that you can push your institution personally. Nor was that expected. Aside from the ethics, people who are seen to be self-serving don’t last very long. But I was expected to know what was going on. And sometimes it helped to be on top of that. I can remember coming back from DC on one occasion, probably from a meeting of the National Research Council’s Board on Physics and Astronomy, and calling up Jack Welch at Berkeley to say “Jack, you know we’ve always thought that we ought to combine the OVRO and BIMA telescopes.” It’s time to do it now.”

Zierler:

Yeah.

Sargent:

And he said, “Yeah, yeah.” And I said, “I think we have to do it.” And he said, “Why now?” And I said, “I think that we may have to”— “I think the U.S. will have to combine with Europe to get a really powerful millimeter-wave array. Our separate observatories will not be competitive much in the grand scheme of things but together we could last longer.” I mean, you know, that was reading tea leaves. I’m not even going to describe for you what we did after that. But it was quite funny in an odd sort of way.

Zierler:

Please do.

Sargent:

[laugh]

Zierler:

You have to. Now you have to describe.

Sargent:

Well, actually, it wasn’t anything really bad. We sat down and calculated what the United States alone was proposing for a national millimeter array at the time, and what OVRO and BIMA could do with a minimal amount of extra funding by joining our telescopes joined together. And we realized, “We’re competitive.” Our array could do a lot of what the national center NRAO was proposing. Of course, the operation of such an array might well have been a terrible burden for universities.

But a very good thing happened because NSF brought NRAO and the OVRO-BIMA leaders together to talk about the situation, was the recognition that building a national millimeter-wave array would require people already experienced at those wavelengths [bell rings]. Excuse me just a moment. Well, that’s OK.

It needed experienced people in millimeter-wave technology, and the National Labs didn’t have enough or didn’t have all the key people. A lot were in the universities. So, basically, I wanted to keep my staff happy. Jack Welch – actually Leo Blitz may have become director at Hat Creek by that time - wanted to keep his staff happy We made an arrangement with NRAO that allowed them to work on the novel experience of building what became ALMA. We were paid for their time. And that was a wonderful solution because that kept them on our staffs but they also got to be some of the key players in this most exciting technical project in their field. I think that the way that the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the university observatories worked together in those days was highly commendable. But these guys worked hard all round.

Zierler:

Yeah. How did your directorship of CARMA come about?

Sargent:

In some ways it came about because I was professionally annoyed [laugh]—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

— It came about because, well, I had become— let me go back a little. By that time, Nick Scoville had been OVRO director for 10 or 11 years. And for a considerable part of that time I had been associate director. Now, I wasn’t teaching and I had more time to devote to the observatory operations. But of course Nick set the stage. On the other hand he was also happy for me to do a lot of the connecting with the agencies and NRAO because he didn’t enjoy that. Briefly, I became Executive Director of Owens Valley when Nick decided to step down. I wasn’t immediately given the title of “Director” because I was not a tenured professor. There was some effort in the department to hire a new faculty member from outside Caltech to take on the directorship but that didn’t happen. Anyway, after 2 years as Executive Director, I was appointed a Professor in 1998 – possibly in response to a very attractive job offer from outside Caltech.

At Owens Valley, we had already recognized that we needed more telescopes, we needed better technology, and we probably needed to go to a better site, to improve the kind of observations we were making. And so we began to think about how to accomplish these goals. I think there may have been less focused conversations along those lines at Hat Creek, at the BIMA interferometer. But they too recognized the need for a larger array and bigger telescopes with more collecting power. Once we agreed to combine the arrays, we began to talk about sites and improved instrumentation projects, and so on. But you know, BIMA and OVRO had been in competition for years and it all took quite a while because we had to learn to trust each other. It speaks a lot to the dedication and objectivity of many of the people who were involved that the combined array was constructed – and successful.

But there’s still the question of why the proposal came out of Caltech with me as PI. In fact, we submitted four separate proposals – one each from Caltech, Berkeley, Maryland and Illinois. With the same technical and science sections but different budgets appropriate to each university. The Caltech budget was the largest—well, the choice of site was a big part of that. In the end, we found that there were a few possible sites in the Inyo Mountains on the east side of Owens Valley. It’s bounded on the west by the Sierras. That played well into our budget limits. So a lot of the site work was based out of OVRO and our staff were all very involved.

The OVRO group had also been thinking about a move to a higher site for quite a while so the mind-set was already in place. With Scoville, I had learned a lot about writing and pulling together proposals to NSF to maintain and expand the OVRO array, so this was nothing very new. Sometimes things just happen. It’s true that I was the PI who pulled it all together but, believe me, faculty and staff from all four universities contributed massively. The leader of the Maryland group, Stuart Vogel, group was critically important to me. We had known each other when he was a postdoc at Caltech so could be brutally honest with one another without our egos getting in the way. We spoke very frankly on the phone together all the time. Our first joint CARMA proposal was smiled upon by the NSF astronomy directorate (AST) but didn’t make it through the next cut in the NSF’s MPS Division.

However, AST gave us very limited funding – to find a project manager who could help us write a more convincing proposal at a technical level [laugh]. Because of the proposed location of the proposed array, the project manager would be based at OVRO—so it was sensible for me to be the PI, since he’d be a Caltech hire. So, another proposal was written and was successful – in large part because CARMA had just been ranked by the NRC’s 2000 decadal survey as the most important mid-size facility to build for astronomy within the decade. In retrospect, the successful construction project that shouldn’t be a surprise—Tony Beasley, the first CARMA project manager, has gone on to become Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

Zierler:

So as PI, you are really keeping up with the research. You’re not just involved in administrative and bureaucratic issues at this point. You’re really—

Sargent:

Oh, no, you have to be doing the research too. In those days I was still leading a group interested in star formation and protoplanetary disks. But— I would say I didn’t— my research began to suffer.

Zierler:

Yeah. Now, by the time you’re PI in 2003, how far had you moved from your original research work as a graduate student? Did you feel like this was a single trajectory, and you were still on that trajectory? Or had you really moved sub-fields at this point?

Sargent:

Hard to say. I had moved— I would say that my prime research was— well, I had definitely moved away from high mass star formation, and I never really went back to it, even at millimeter wavelengths.

Zierler:

Now, was that more a personal decision on your part or was that just about where the field was and where you were in your career at that point?

Sargent:

It was more about how my research went. It was more exciting to me after Steve and I found the disk-like structure around HL Tauri. We looked for and studied other similar sources. I also started to go more into the questions of how planetary systems form. What can these disks tell us – dynamically, chemically – we weren’t too successful with chemistry observations because we didn’t have the required resolution or sensitivity back then, I mean, I drool when I look at the astrochemistry that’s coming out of ALMA about star and planet formation because they can see so much more and follow the chemical changes that accompany star formation. It’s really fantastic. But the truth is I began to concentrate more and more on the formation of lower mass stars that might be the birth sites of planets. I also dabbled in extragalactic just because it was fun. Of course, it was always fun to work with Scoville’s group. But I probably drifted out of extragalactic research when I became director. After that, I could only keep up in a certain field, and I chose to do protostellar disks because I had graduate students, and I had postdocs, especially postdocs, in that area.

Zierler:

Now, in 2004, when you were named— you had a named chair, the Benjamin M. Rosen chair.

Sargent:

Yeah.

Zierler:

How did you interpret this? Was this Caltech recognizing your achievement in the field? Was this you looking for a more senior faculty position as an off-ramp from the research work? What were the circumstances leading to this name chair promotion?

Sargent:

Well, I think it had become clear that I could be a successful observatory director – when I was hired there were doubts expressed as to whether a woman could do the OVRO job. I was PI of the NSF grant that supported CARMA construction, and I had led the successful effort to bring in private funding for CARMA to Caltech. I’d also been named CARMA director in 2003. And I’d had some impressive offers from outside. Around 2004 I was in line for another rather senior position, OK. And I don’t know whether that played in or not.

All I really know is that David Baltimore called me in to his office one day, and said, “Well, we want to give you a named chair— effectively he said, “you’ve done well” and so and on. I was very excited and happy [laugh] and it was easy to accept.

Zierler:

Was this Arizona before you were named professor?

Sargent:

Oh no! It was much more of a national leadership position that would have meant that I commuted from California— a bit of a disadvantage, though not insurmountable. Really, I suddenly realized deep in my soul that I adored having students and working with them and postdocs. I hadn’t been really aware how much I felt this way. I even liked teaching, apart from the agonies of it because I adored being in this hot house Caltech learning environment. And so that gave me more—

Zierler:

Did you appreciate how smart the undergraduates were?

Sargent:

Excuse me?

Zierler:

Did you appreciate how smart the undergraduates were?

Sargent:

Oh, much smarter. Oh our faculty all agree on that. Our undergraduates are the smartest [laugh], are smarter than most of us …well, not all of them. But there are some undergraduates smarter than us. Graduate students are more like us. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] That’s funny.

Sargent:

Yeah, so—

Zierler:

But you keep— for a few years, you keep the professorship. From 2004 to 2007, you’re wearing two hats.

Sargent:

But let me be clear, I never gave up the professorship. I was a professor until I retired in 2017 – and even then I just became a Professor Emeritus. At Caltech, even if you take on the directorship of one of the Institute’s facilities or labs, you always remain on the professorial faculty. Depending on the circumstances, you may also continue teaching. I just got a much lighter teaching load.

Zierler:

You’re director of CARMA, and you’re also— this must be a particularly busy time for you.

Sargent:

It was busy, yes, it was very busy. And, in fact, I recall a somewhat disapproving postdoc going to OVRO to observe with me around that time— and he clearly thought, “This woman isn’t pulling her weight; she always takes someone else with her these days to help.”

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

And then— well I guess he hadn’t a clue what being director demanded. OK, maybe I wasn’t doing as much research as he thought I should be doing— I don’t know. The funny thing, however, was that after a couple of days at the observatory, we are together in the control room— and yet one more person comes in to ask if they could speak to me for just five minutes. I’m there to be available to the staff as well as to observe so the staff member and I go off and sort out whatever it was.

When I came back, the postdoc just looked at me and said, “Now I understand why you always take someone observing with you – this is just incredible. [laugh]

Zierler:

Now, the vice presidency for student affairs that you’re named to in 2007, was this a long time coming or was this a surprise to you?

Sargent:

This was crazy. [laugh] This was very unexpected. I had become— what shall I say? Well, let’s remember that my becoming a professor in 1998 was not exactly straightforward. There was a movement within the department to have someone else hired for the job.

Frankly, in 1996 someone else was led to believe the job would be theirs— this someone and I have known each other for a long time and we’ve discussed it since. We are still very friendly. But I had also applied for the job and was under consideration. And, in the end, no hire was made at that time.

The follow-up to that non-hire led me to one of the most difficult decisions of my life. A couple of weeks later, the Caltech PMA division chair then asked, “Would you be?— look, we are having an on-site review of OVRO by NSF in two weeks as part of that grant renewal process. Will you be executive director? We can name you executive director of the observatory.” That was my staying awake all night moment because I really felt that I was being exploited at this point.

Zierler:

How so?

Sargent:

Because Caltech, the Division, the astronomy department, wanted everything to look smoothly running and well under control for the NSF. Actually it was going well, apart from the directorship. They wanted me to smile. The party line was that we were still looking for a new hire, and I was currently executive director. Briefly, they asked me to dissemble.

Basically, they were asking me to dissemble; I had been a candidate for the professorship/directorship but no hire had been made. That could imply that no candidate is good enough, although in this case the committee just couldn’t come to agreement. In fact, my husband and I had planned a mini sabbatical at the Arcetri Observatory in Florence that spring. But my husband said, “You want this job, you will not leave.” Of course, I stayed and was a little thorn in the flesh when it came to a decision— I was in everybody’s vision, you know. [laugh]

Anyway, I mean, it sounds awful. It was just a difficult time. I felt exploited because I was evidently not good enough to be hired as a professor, but I was good enough to appear in front of the funding agency as the leader of OVRO. And you know, if you’re the standing in, as I was being asked to do, you’re rarely hired. So, I lay awake agonizing, and what bothered me tremendously was that I’d been part of OVRO for years. I’d been associate director. The observatory staff were not just people who worked for us. These were my friends, people I respected, people I cared about. If we lost the grant, who would suffer most? The observatory staff. These were not just my— at Owens Valley—

‘

Zierler:

The people would suffer.

Sargent:

Yes. In the end it was very clear to me, “Well, this is what I have to do right now.” And so I accepted being Executive Director. But when the possibility of this senior administrative position in DC came up in the following year, you can see why I was tempted.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Sargent:

In fact, I’d been asked years before to take on an assistant director position at NSF and in the end OVRO won. The OVRO array was under construction and I just felt more excited about being involved in that. But in 1996-97 I didn’t think my prospects at Caltech were particularly good and when I was offered this other senior position, I was pretty enthusiastic about taking it. I know I was offered a professorship at Caltech to stop me from leaving.

Zierler:

Now, when you were offered to be vice president for student affairs, did you harbor the hope that you could continue with your research, or you recognized right away that the responsibilities would sort of pull you out of the observatory completely?

Sargent:

Oh, I hadn’t a clue. I had not a clue, OK. I knew I would have to give up being the observatory director. To be frank, I would willingly have stepped down before 2007 because I felt didn’t have the energy and enthusiasm that the observatory needed any more. But there had never seemed to be anyone else to take it on. I had hoped that one of our senior research people would be promoted as I had been, but that didn’t happen. Still, when I stepped down, I expected that I would still do research with CARMA. I remained a co-I on the grant. The real problem was teaching. It was hard to carry even a light teaching load and be vice president. And I would say I didn’t teach as much as I should’ve done. But even then it was hard to teach and also be vice president. But being offered the VP position was a surprise.

Zierler:

What were some of your accomplishments as vice president for student affairs?

Sargent:

I think it was something of an accomplishment to be selected for the position at all. [laugh] Let me explain why I think I got the job. I already had quite a bit of administrative and management experience through OVRO and the Michelson Science Center. And I had been exposed to a lot of management practices as part of my NASA Council and Space Science Advisory Committee service. NASA really taught me a lot in that area. Perhaps most importantly I’d internalized quite a lot about the relative responsibilities at various levels of management. So I realized from the time it was suggested I take the job that, as a vice president for student affairs it was my responsibility not just to look after students— everything from their admission to Caltech through all aspects of their well-being at the Institute. As a Caltech senior administrator, I would also have fiduciary responsibilities to the Institute.

My predecessor had previous experience as a vice president for student affairs, but not at a school like Caltech. And that made the job extremely difficult for her. At Caltech- and this may help explain the problem—the provost and the vice president for student affairs are usually selected from among the faculty and, although they become senior administrators, they remain professors. That ensures that they have a strong sense of how the Institute can best interact with its faculty and students to achieve its research and education goals. What is expected and accepted is not always what you might have in a larger university. The small size of the Caltech – roughly 300 professorial faculty members 900 undergraduates – means we tend to rely more individual interactions and less on one-size-fits-all solutions.

My predecessor brought formal management skills to the vice-presidency that may, in the past, have been weaker in the faculty appointments. But these didn’t always work at Caltech. I suppose it seemed that I might bring both faculty sensibilities and management skills to the job. But I think, from everybody’s point of view it was a strange hire. [laugh] My name was, I guess, floating around. The lead up to it was quite amusing. One of my colleagues called me up one day, and said, “I’m chair of the search committee for the vice president for student affairs. I wondered if you would come and talk to us.” And I said, “I don’t know anything about student affairs. Why do you want to talk to me?” Her reply seemed credible to me, “Oh, you’ve been at the Institute for a long time, and you’ve done a lot of things. And we’d just like to talk to you about what you’ve seen here in the blah, blah, blah.” So I went in and talked to the search committee – it seemed very informal. Apparently that was my interview. And so I [laugh]—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

But I didn’t see it that way at all, OK. [laugh] So, when the President called me, it was really a kind of a bolt from the blue– well, maybe not quite, because shortly after that I had lunch with the provost to discuss something else, and I mentioned this chat in passing. He rather jumped on me, “You talked to Julie’s committee?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “It was an interview, right?” And I said, “No, no, it wasn’t an interview. I just went and talked to them.” But he didn’t give up, “Wasn’t it maybe a bit of an interview?” “No.” “Could have been just this much of an interview?” “No.” [laugh] Then I began to wonder if it had been an interview.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

I suppose there were also rumors because the PMA division chair brought it up. Again I said, It wasn’t an interview,” and he became quite annoyed, “Are you stupid?” [laugh]. I think he may have seen me as his successor as division chair at some point and I seemed to be throwing that away And then suddenly, it seemed, the president called me in and asked, “How would you like to be vice president for student affairs?”

And I took a long time to think about it, that’s for sure, because I was aware I knew nothing about leading all those departments. Maybe that was just as well. But my immediate job— in fact the students were very disaffected at this point. So the first job was to work with students, with student groups, and bring back the sense that the Institute cared about them as people –very special people that we thought highly of – highly enough to admit them to the Institute.

Zierler:

Why do you think they were disaffected?

Sargent:

Oh, I think that the putting in place of one-size-fits all rules, and senior people in student affairs who never interacted directly with them caused problems unnecessarily. Many students thought the administration was “against” them, wouldn’t let them do this, and wouldn’t let them do that. Of course, that led to more outrageous behavior that really could not be allowed. I mean, some of their— some of the things they were annoyed about… Overall, they just felt the student point of view was not being taken into account. And at Caltech, this is very important. I was [laugh]— to put it in a nutshell, I think our students felt their voices weren’t really being heard at the levels they wanted them to be heard, OK? That was definitely part of it. I think that one of my first successes was bringing back a much better climate and relationship between the students and the Institute.

I took the job at the end of 2007. I was just finding my feet after the first, you know, six months or so, when the 2008 recession hit. So I had to completely reorganize my department and tighten my budget. And at Caltech, everything— so many things are under student affairs, you wouldn’t believe it— the Graduate and undergraduate Deans’ offices, admissions, financial aid, registrar, the athletics, music, and arts, the health center— you name it. It was a pretty broad portfolio and it wasn’t easy to downsize, especially for a novice like me.

Zierler:

Now, downsize because with the great recession, the university’s endowment took a hit? Was that the main issue?

Sargent:

Well, we had— Caltech managed in many ways better than some. But we had to tighten our belts, I would say, to ensure the future, and so each of the Institute’s senior management team was just given a specific and lower budget that they had to work with. I wanted to manage this rather awful task well because I saw it as something necessary for the long term good of Caltech. I thought, “How on earth will I do this?” And then I realized I could only do it if I created some objective priorities for about who and what just had to be kept. And so, first of all, I said, what are we? We’re an educational institutional. I will touch nothing in my budget that impinges on education. And then I will look at what are the most necessary peripherals of education that I will not touch. Apparently odd things like study abroad got some priority not just because it was a popular and successful program but because the connections that the few people in that office had made could not be recreated overnight.

Whereas care counselling, I thought we could rebuild staff as things got better, you know, sort of things like that. And then there was a third one – that’s gone right out of my head this moment. What really pleased me was that one of the more senior people in finance picked up my priority list, and used it for the institute. I was always a little bit proud of this.

But it was a difficult time. On the other hand, it was an opportunity. As a result of the cutbacks, I tried very hard, and to some extent succeeded, to make the various student affairs departments at Caltech realize that they had to work together more. There had to be a matrixed organization, no one could have their own fiefdom. I’ve been told \that student affairs departments across the country are notorious for having fiefdoms.

And so I suppose I caused a lot of— what shall I say? Among the staff, I probably was not as popular. But the beginnings of change got put in place and since I stepped down, I’ve been seeing more changes happen that I would have liked to put in place. I think I maybe got a good framework in place. I’m pleased with the way things are going.

Between me and my successor, Joe Shepherd, a Caltech professor of engineering. We managed to build a new hall of residence for students at Caltech. I started the project and he saw it to successful conclusion. Getting that started at all caused so much angst on the Caltech campus. I was heavily involved in the fund raising. But when I stepped down, I was still struggling to get agreements among the students about the way the new residence would fit into the existing residence life structure. Joe’s appointment brought new approaches—a breath of fresh air that settled the whole situation. I think, you know, sometimes a new face can come in and do something that seemed impossible.

Zierler:

Now, you had the Benjamin Rosen chair during this time, up until 2013. And then while you’re still vice president for student affairs, you change over to the Ira S. Bowen chair. So how did that chair switch happen? What was going on there?

Sargent:

Oh, that was such a sentimental moment. It turns out that Caltech has quite a few professorships which, like the Benjamin Rosen, can be given to reward achievement without younger people having to wait for someone to die. Some of these are a finite term but this was not well known at the time they began. It turned out that a number of people were rather upset when their chair terms ran out and the provost came to tell them their title would go to someone else. Some were very cross indeed. The provost occasionally gave them another named chair until their retirement.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

One of these disaffected people actually called me up once to demand that I make a complaint to the provost on his behalf because it would happen to me too. I said, “But I don’t care I was so happy to have it in the first place. That was enough. [laugh] You know, I don’t care if it goes.” He insisted that he would have more clout in the world or something like that.

Anyway, the provost may have had these complaints in mind. He came down to my office one day to tell me my Rosen professorship was coming to an end” He was giving it next to Fiona Harrison, another professor of physics, who is now our division chair. I was thrilled that it was going to Fiona.

“But I’m going to give you another one,” he said. And then he went into a long— what shall I say?— aside. His long aside was how he had the such-and-such professorship, and it had belonged to another professor whom we knew and admired. I said, “Oh, yeah, I loved Sam. Such a nice guy. The provost goes on to tell me it means a lot to him “to have Sam’s professorship.”

This all led up to, “I’m going to give you the Ira S. Bowen professorship.” Now, my husband had been the Ira S. Bowen professor for years until he died in 2012. And so I went into a complete conniption fit at that point. I certainly didn’t feel worthy. Finally the provost said to me [laugh], “Will you just shut up or I’m going to cry too.” [laugh] It was very touching.

Zierler:

Now, when your husband passed away, how did that change your identity on campus, how you saw yourself? Did you feel like—?

Sargent:

Well, as I told you, I was Wal’s wife. It didn’t seem to change my identity for anybody else, except that they were all sad. And I would say the only other thing that I noticed— I say this not for self-aggrandizement, I was organizing taxes in some way— was when I endowed a graduate fellowship in my husband’s name, OK.

I had talked to my daughters, we all agreed, and my daughters said, “We wouldn’t have all that we have if you guys hadn’t worked at Caltech. By then I know that funding graduate students is vital to Caltech, so I gave one in astronomy, named for Wal. But after I did that, I was surprised by the several physics professors who were older and who knew Wal well, who came to me and told me how touched they were that I did this.

And that’s when some of them would also come and tell me months, maybe a year later, often right in the parking lot, “You know, we just had that faculty meeting today. I’ve not told you before but I always miss Wal at faculty meetings. He had that trenchant wit,” you know, that kind of thing. [laugh] So I think, yeah, I guess they see me as the widow. But, on the other hand, I also had another ide…I had another identity.

Zierler:

And then your decision to become emeritus in 2018, that was mostly about teaching, you said.

Sargent:

Yes, I had stepped down as vice president in the middle of an academic year I didn’t teach that year.

Zierler:

You finished as vice president in the middle of an academic year.

Sargent:

Yes, and so I didn’t teach that year. I started teaching again the following year, and by the end I thought, I really I don’t need this, you know. I just wanted to spend more time with friends. I wanted to be able to go to dinners, concerts when I felt like it. I wanted to be free to travel. And so I decided I would retire, that was it.

Zierler:

And in what ways have you maintained your connections with Caltech? How are you still present at Caltech?

Sargent:

Well, I have an official appointment as a Professor Emeritus. I have an office in the Cahill Center for Astrophysics. I still run a grant that supports a postdoc. Until a year ago I supported a graduate student. I have discretionary research funds remaining that cover the associated computing costs and some professional expenses. Of course, I go to colloquia. I occasionally sit on a Division committee, hoping that takes some of the burden off my departmental colleagues. So I’ve sat on the time allocation, you know, for Keck and Palomar and things like that because I have more time to read the proposals. But I tend to work more at home just because I can get more done. I tend to go in in the afternoon and work at home in the morning. I find that people come to my office for advice more often, now that I have no power. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

And so people come—

Zierler:

And you’ve been around. You’ve seen a few things.

Sargent:

So people come and chitchat. And then we often have visitors. Frankly, I find I have more than enough to do. Right now I’m trying to read a paper that I’m a co-author on. It’s been sitting it arrived on Friday... I really want to read it. Haven’t got to it yet, you know.

I’m also on the National Science Board. That now takes quite a bit of time because I felt that for my first term, I couldn’t give it as much time as I wanted to— you know, I was doing these ten million things. I’m making up for that. And I occasionally go to conferences. I think there’s just enough to do. I would hate to do nothing. Like me, my colleagues Nick Scoville and Tony Readhead, also emeritus, work on various projects. We all have offices in Cahill. Mine is a weird shape and I love it, but it’s really quite small. The Caltech astronomy department moved into Cahill, a new building, while I was vice president, with a huge office in the administration building. As OVRO/CARMA director, I’d also had a lovely director’s office in the old astronomy building. When we moved to Cahill, I purposely chose a small office thinking, “When I’m emeritus, they’ll let me keep this office. And not everyone likes the shape anyway.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

And I give the occasional talk at conferences – I’m old enough that I seem to be doing the after-dinner talk at festspiels rather a lot. I loved going back to NRAO a few months ago to give the Jansky lecture. I had to do that twice – once at NRAO/Charlottesville and then at NRAO/Socorro. I loved going back to both places, saw old friends— and young people. These young people are doing such marvelous things, I mean, hearing about disks, and star formation – the amazing science that they were doing with ALMA. One younger researcher—I was just so astonished at the wide swath of properties that he was able to study simultaneously and bring together in a meaningful way, ranging from chemistry to kinematics. Few people have that ability— Oh, it was just amazing.

I’m not doing any original research anymore but I seem to be still involved in new papers. The most recent are the result of a large-scale observational star formation program that was carried out just before CARMA went offline. The Caltech PI who succeeded me was wooed away by ALMA and I ended up as PI on that grant for the second time around. It turned out I needed someone to put in a lot of time on data reduction.

There was a huge amount of data to pull together and analyze. Fortunately, there was already a loose collaboration of researchers interested in the observations. Among these was Hector Arce, once an OVRO postdoc and now a professor at Yale. He was able to step up and enable the use of the Yale supercomputer. But the dedicated work of a postdoc was still needed and, thanks to the last funding in my CARMA grant, we were able to hire a postdoc at Yale. He did just fantastic work to achieve very high dynamic range maps of an extended area of the Orion star forming cloud. It was a huge software effort, very complicated. But for me, rather satisfying scientifically, because it took me back to the kind of star formation work I’d begun with my thesis observations.

Zierler:

Well, this has brought our narrative, you know, right to the present. So I’d like to ask you, you know, for the final portion of our interview, I’d like to ask you a few retrospective questions where you can sort of survey your career. And the first one is what do you see as your primary contributions, both as a scientist and as an administrator?

Sargent:

Oh, well, I think my— I don’t know if it was my primary contribution—maybe it was. But the successful 13CO observations of HL Tauri that Steve and I made in1985, 1986— the observations that the OVRO time allocation committee said would come to nothing—I think that was a highlight of my scientific career. First, we had a detection, there was actually something there. And it was an extended disk-like-looking shape— an extended disk-like structure, very thin, and with a strong enough signal that we could measure velocities and suggest that the gas was in Keplerian rotation. I mean it was moving like the planets around our solar system.

About 5 or 6 years later, more sensitive observations by Japanese colleagues indicated that there could be another explanation for the gas velocity pattern. But our interpretation was an honest try at the time, and it certainly opened up the study of protoplanetary disks at millimeter wavelengths that is still going on today. I can’t tell you how excited I was many—30?—years later, like in 2015, when I saw the first very high-resolution images of HL Tau from ALMA. I’d put in a lot of time and effort into ALMA. I was on the ALMA board for 11 years, and chaired it twice. This was not your usual oversight board, by the way—we were very involved in a hands-on construction project and the setting up of the operations center in Chile.

My former student, Stuartt Corder, was by this time the ALMA assistant director, and he actually was one of the staff who pushed to do observations of HL Tau to provide one of the first examples of ALMA’s power at very high spatial resolution. I’ve always been pleased that, because he knew how much she could bring to the project, he asked another of my students, Laura Perez—she’s now an assistant professor at the University of Chile in Santiago—to join the team.

One of the first things I said to him after he showed me the new results was, “I would’ve told you not to look at that object. It’s so complicated.” And he answered, “I know you would have said that. That’s why I didn’t ask you.” [laugh] In fact, the new image showed millimeter emission from dust, centered on the star and surrounded by several distinct dust rings. Of course, this was much smaller and much more detail than anything even CARMA could have done. So HL Tauri, in the end, became one of the first icons for ALMA. For me it felt like coming full circle.

And I think it shows how important it was for me to have persevered in the face of the time allocation committee opinion, There’s also a lesson in scientific honesty. Steve and I believed that Keplerian rotation was strong probability, based on the data but we were willing to accept sound arguments that our observations could be interpreted in other ways. I doubt that the study of planet-forming disks would have taken off so quickly if we had not proposed that as a possibility for HLTau. There was an immediate response to find more such objects, or to show that we were wrong. [laugh] I feel good that we put it out there, and now it’s a whole field, you know.

Zierler:

And as an administrator, what do you see as your primary contributions?

Sargent:

Oh, I don’t know.

Zierler:

I mean, if you think of it in aggregate, all of the work that you did for NASA and NSF, and all of the administrative work that you did for Caltech. I mean, it was all for your field. It was all for the advancement of astronomy. So what were your contributions in aggregate doing all of that administrative work? Where is the field now as a result of all of this work that you did?

Sargent:

I don’t know. I mean, I fought for ALMA. That’s now a major NSF facility. I really wanted ALMA to happen, even though it killed CARMA. [laugh] I suppose I wanted CARMA to have a legacy. And at NASA I was very involved in the decisions that went into getting both SIRTF (now SPITZER) and SOFIA going. But at the same time I was serving on committees that were concerned about the community’s aspirations for astronomy and astrophysics— I was on the National Research Council’s Board on Physics and Astronomy, and eventually vice chair and then chair. So I brought a strong sense of what the community saw as priorities to my agency advisory work. So I suppose there was a role— but very recently, when someone said something to me about accomplishments, all I could say is, “Well, I feel surprised that it seems unusual because I just did what I had to do.”

It sounds awfully dull, but I in fact I did what I wanted to do at any given time, and maybe it all added up to something, but I’ve never given much thought to what it added up to. Because, at the time, I was thinking, first of all, “Oh, we really must get a better instrument here.” For example, there was, you know, Owens Valley. There was CARMA. There was ALMA.

When I sat on these committees, I knew the agencies wanted to help us do the best science. It was the community role to be sure that it was the best science. Then I had to think, how do I tell them what it’s the best science? Is it the best science? I was probably brutally honest—I’ve been told I was. But apparently, I could say things in a nice way. I can also say things in a pretty nasty way, and it’s the nasty ways that I remember with some shame. [laugh] I always thought maybe they just heard their old Scottish granny’s voice somewhere in there—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

— and forgave me everything, you know. [laugh] So it’s— but it’s true. All I did was think, “What do we need to do the best science?” Because that’s the simple thing. What are the exciting results you’ll get out of it? It was like when I knew as vice president at Caltech that had to cut my budget. There is a sane way to make choices— let’s not get emotions involved. Let’s be objective.

Often when I get into bed, and I’m really agonizing about something, I say to myself, and I often said it on committees, “What is this issue about? Is it about the immediate problem or is it about you?” And of course once you take yourself and your feelings out of that equation, the answer is usually pretty clear.

So, mostly you want honesty. And I had the privilege—it did cross my mind, and it has continued to cross my mind—that I had the privilege of always being able to give my honest and objective opinion. I tried very hard to make it not about me, and not about whether people liked the decisions I made. There were occasions when I thought, “Well, I am going to say this because this is the right thing to do. And if they fire me, I’ll go home, and my Wal will keep me, OK.” [laugh]

I had a privilege. I didn’t need to do these things. Some other people in similar positions have other responsibilities; jobs, families they may need to protect. I don’t know. I can’t see— I have to say I can’t see an aggregate because— maybe I just did what I did because at the time— in a way it made me feel satisfied. This came home to me when, a few years after I took on the unexpected position of vice president at Caltech, someone said to me, “I’ve never seen you so happy.” I realized that working so much with the Caltech students was one of the most satisfying things I could be doing at that stage of my career.

Zierler:

You know, your academic career is a rarity. It’s like— baseball players almost never play for the same team their whole career, right?

Sargent:

Yes.

Zierler:

And you’ve played for Caltech your whole career.

Sargent:

Yeah.

Zierler:

And so I wonder, very broadly speaking, what has Caltech given you, and what have you given Caltech?

Sargent:

Well, I hope I’ve given Caltech as much as it has given me because, all these years ago, Caltech took me in. It took in somebody who was not focused, who probably didn’t look highly qualified. Caltech made me— this is not the first time I’ve said this— Caltech made me the scientist I am. And it did that, not just by awarding me a Ph.D., but because of the culture of the Institute, the way that science is reckoned as important here. Caltech has constantly continued to challenge me as a scientist, as an administrator, and as a person.

Zierler:

I asked the question because it really seems like you nurtured the relationship with Caltech, and Caltech nurtured the relationship with you.

Sargent:

Yeah.

Zierler:

It really seems that way.

Sargent:

Yes, it was mutual. I’ve never felt that the Institute per se Caltech put obstacles in my career path. Quite the reverse. As I told you, there were individuals who made things difficult. But the senior administration was a different matter. Caltech helped enormously when I wanted to expand the OVRO array and build CARMA. I know there was an effort to make me a professor sooner. When he was Division Chair, Tom Tombrello was unbelievably supportive. He probably initiated the named professorship. As President, Jean-Lou Chameau took a chance on me to run student affairs. I haven’t— I’ve never seemed to myself to be focused on a broad goal instead, I’ve taken the next step to do something better.

Zierler:

You think that says something more about your personality or more about your style as a scientist?

[Unrelated conversation]

Zierler:

So the question was when you said you— basically what you say is that you take a tactical approach as opposed to a strategic approach, right? That you think about the next thing that’s in front of you. So my question is, with you taking that next item approach, and not thinking broader than that, is that more about your personality or is that more about your style as a scientist, was my question.

Sargent:

I don’t know. I do know my husband certainly took the broader approach in science. Is it my personality?— I think it’s my style as a scientist, because it’s t how I ask the questions in science. My husband was always thinking of the implications for much broader questions. I’m not sure I do that so much. But it’s not the same when I’m chairing a committee or thinking strategic plans through. What pops into my head then are all the ramifications of a given decision much further down the line. And often I’m bothered by these ramifications. And I’m not sure I always think that way as a scientist. You know, that’s a fascinating statement—I can’t believe it’s the first time I just articulated that for myself.

Zierler:

Very interesting.

Sargent:

And I keep wondering why people— other people don’t see what I am seeing as the inevitable implications if they continue down a specific path. But I don’t always think that way in science. Fascinating.

Zierler:

I think you’ve really hit on something there.

Sargent:

Yeah.

Zierler:

Well, I have one final question for you, and that’s the one looking forward.

Sargent:

Yes.

Zierler:

What continues to excite you? What motivates you to remain engaged in your field? What are the things that are on the horizon that you are a part of, and that you are excited about both within your lifetime and for where the field is headed decades from now?

Sargent:

Oh, I’m excited about quite a lot, there are so many unexpected discoveries these days. I find, as I told you when I talked to the young people, that the results we are getting from ALMA and from the other new telescopes are just wonderful. I mean, they’re answering questions that we wanted to answer all these years ago. And the new instruments allow much better comparisons between theory and observations— the field is just much more mature. I think there is a continuing need for surveys— over the years there have been a number of surveys of the sky at different wavelengths— the Palomar all-sky surveys, IRAS, and so on. In every case, novel and amazing objects are discovered that can be studied in detail over a wide range of wavelengths and frequencies and these continue to move the field forward. NSF, along with the Department of Energy (DOE) is supporting a new instrument in Chile, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) that will provide so much information for follow up science that it will be a challenge to cope with the wealth of data.

On the home front, I’m very excited about the wonderful new programs at OVRO. I have to tell you the new director is a young man who’s so excited about studies in so many different fields that I just love to listen to him. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

Of course, he has a very strong Irish accent, so you have to listen carefully. [laugh] And what else am I excited about? I’m excited I have time to go to concerts and operas. I’m excited to see what my grandchildren are doing. I don’t know. I think there’s almost too much— there are things I haven’t even had time to consider. It’s a bit difficult to say what I’m thinking about life in general at this particular time. But I will say that the National Science Board actually had a small retreat by Zoom last week in which we considered our vision for 2030, right. [laugh] What I am excited about, thinking of that, is I would so much like to see the educational system in this country move on to making everybody much more mathematically and scientifically literate than they are at the moment.

I mean, I think mathematical literacy— I don’t mean, you know, that everyone should do calculus. But everybody should have basic skills and that is not the case. And most importantly, I’d like to see students being taught to think critically about everything they learn and how to be objective and logical in reaching decisions.

And I think that’s one of the things that Caltech has taught me. I grew up in the “good little girl, well-behaved in school” climate of the Scotland of my time. We were all expected to be well-behaved to accept the status quo. That’s not necessarily a good scientific attitude. I had to break out of this at Caltech. All of the guys I’ve worked with taught me to argue back,] I had to be able to hold my position, and I found had to be honest and convince myself first. I thank them all. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

But there is a lot to be, yes, thankful about. And when you stop being able to appreciate the wonder of it all, I think that’s when you know that it’s probably your time, OK. [laugh]

Zierler:

Well, Dr. Sargent, it has been an absolute pleasure talking with you today. Thank you so much.

Sargent:

Well, thank you for being so patient. You’ve given me some things to think about. And I’m fascinated to see what you say [laugh] in the end. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Sargent:

I think that has worried me— I’m going to tell you my one concern.

Zierler:

Please.

Sargent:

It worried me in this oral history that my life has so many asides, and I hate to think that the fact that I’m very proud to have spent my life as a scientist may not come through.

Zierler:

It came through. I can assure you of that.

Sargent:

[laugh] That’s the only thing that I worry about that my enthusiasm makes me come across as a complete flake. [laugh]

Zierler:

Nothing could be farther from truth. And I’m going to cut here.

[End of recording]