Mehmet Alpaslan

Lattis:

My name is Jim Lattis. We’re recording on January 6, 2016, at the AAS Meeting in Florida. I’ll ask you to introduce yourself.

Alpaslan:

Sure. Hi, my name is Mehmet Alpaslan. Should I go into…?

Lattis:

We’ll talk about… mostly, I just wanted to hear you say your own name. Mehmet, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today. Our goal really here is to… I should have told you this in the preliminaries. We’re talking about astronomical careers. Normally, that does involve science at some point when we’re being astronomers. We want to get some kind of deep background from you though first. We’d really like to ask you about not only your education but your parents and even their educational backgrounds and their professions and things like that. Things that might or might not have been influential in your own career sorts of choices. So, maybe we could start by talking about that a little bit.

Alpaslan:

Sure. I’m from Turkey originally. I’m the only child of my parents who were both bureaucrats basically. They both worked for the Turkish Foreign Ministry, in fact my mother still does that, working as diplomats. So, growing up, the reason I have the accent that I have, is because I grew up going to a lot of different international schools. So, I grew up… I was born in Austria, and then we moved to Turkey when I was about three. Spent a couple of years there, then went to Italy [laughs]. Went back to Turkey, then went to Chile, where I was in high school, which, yeah, had some part to play in all of this.

Lattis:

Wow. You have been around.

Alpaslan:

And then I went to the United Kingdom for my university education and part of my PhD there as well.

Lattis:

So, your parents are diplomats, so they’re educated people.

Alpaslan:

Yeah. So, they both went to university, although with a bit of a caveat. Turkey has… university education is, to some degree, public. I would say that a lot more people… I don’t want to say that a lot more people have the opportunity to go to university because there are very difficult university entrance examinations. Having said that, I haven’t gone through that system myself, so I don’t want to speak on their behalf. But certainly there’s an expectation that everybody will go to university. So, my parents—my mother in particular—always knew from the get-go that she was going to go to university and become, I think a political scientist. For my dad it was a bit more of a struggle. He comes from the southeast of the country, from a farming family, so he decided to make it in the big city, so to speak, but they both went to university.

Lattis:

But not science backgrounds?

Alpaslan:

No, not at all. No. Absolutely not. In fact, I don’t think I ever got any help with my math homework as a kid [laughs], ever. Neither of them are mathematically inclined, scientifically inclined.

Lattis:

So, it sounds like asking you about your early education is going to get complicated fast. But maybe you could tell me then… so were you still in Austria then when you started school?

Alpaslan:

No. So, fortunately, I think that there is enough of a globe-trotting community now that schools understand that people will be moving a lot. There is one, in particular, one program called the International Baccalaureate…

Lattis:

Oh, I’ve heard of that.

Alpaslan:

…Program, which I think kicks in more in high school, but it does sort of help to standardize students as they move around. But I started school when we were in Rome, actually. I went to kindergarten in Turkey but I started school in Rome, at an international school, and that’s where I learned English. Nothing really striking to me comes from my early childhood education.

Lattis:

So, what years were you in Rome, roughly?

Alpaslan:

Oh, gosh. So, I know that it’s between the ages of five and nine, and I was born in 1987. So, something like ‘92 to ‘96. Something like that. So, I started school then.

Lattis:

So, is there a Turkish Community in Rome that you were part of, or were you just going to Rome… Italian Public School?

Alpaslan:

No, I went to an international school in Rome.

Lattis:

That’s right, you said that. So, that’s an English language…

Alpaslan:

Yeah, exactly. So, this was an English language school. For all of my education has been at these international English language schools.

Lattis:

I see. And is that always in English?

Alpaslan:

Yes. Almost always in English. Although my high school in Chile there was a bit more Spanish teaching elements which was great for me because I learned Spanish. Which is handy. If we were ever part of a Turkish community, I suspect it was more than my parents were just friends with their friends at the embassy. I think my parents were quite… they liked the idea of blending into the population of a country when you go there. I think that’s something that’s impressed on me as well because if you’re going to be living somewhere new, you might as well just really get into it.

Lattis:

When in Rome.

Alpaslan:

Exactly, right [laughs]? But I don’t remember particularly any sort of trying to stick to the Turkish community or anything like that. It’s just let’s get in there and have fun.

Lattis:

It may be too hard to trace this but what I’m looking for is in your early education, we’ll talk about your higher education later, but did you find yourself being introduced to science as something that looked like a future to you, or something that you admired?

Alpaslan:

Not really, but I can pinpoint precisely the moment when I decided I wanted to be an astronomer. So, we were flying… this was my mom’s… my mom was the one who was appointed to go to Chile, and we were flying from Turkey to Chile. And so that flight is quite a long one, and we had to fly from Turkey and then we had a stop over in Madrid. And on the flight from… and this is a detailed story because I remember it very well. From the flight from Turkey to Madrid I had finished the book I was reading and I don’t remember exactly…

Lattis:

How old were you, roughly?

Alpaslan:

I was 14, 15. And I’ve always been a bookworm. So, I finished the book I was reading and we were stuck in the airport and I needed a new book. And there happened to be, fortunately, a book at the airport that sold books in English. And so I’m browsing through these books and I saw Cosmos by Carl Sagan. And I had never heard of Carl Sagan or Cosmos before. The front cover of the book had what I now know to be a picture of globular cluster. The blurb just had reviews, so I thought, “Oh, this looks like some science fiction novel. I’ll just go through it on the plane.” And I picked it up and I read it from cover to cover, of course, in just a few days, and that was it. Until then, I don’t remember particularly being interested in science. I was good at math. I was always good at math in school, and in fact, in primary schools, in elementary school I always got good grades in math courses. But it was really the reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos that just, everything. I remember I went to my dad and I said, “Mom and Dad, I’m going to be an astronomer.” And they said, “Yeah, okay, sure [laughter].” But one of the things you do in the IB program is you pick courses to study for your final two years of high school and those then inform what courses you’re eligible to take at university, what degree programs. And so when I was 16 I was picking those. I went back and I said, “I need to take physics, math,” basically physics and math so I could go and study astronomy at university and they said, “Oh, okay. You’re serious now.” But yeah, it was just that one book that did it.

Lattis:

Wow. Well, we’ve all known Carl Sagan was influential but you’re the first person I’ve ever heard say…

Alpaslan:

Oh really?

Lattis:

“I picked up that book and that was…”

Alpaslan:

That’s funny. I would have thought that would be such a cliched answer.

Lattis:

No. Yeah, it sounds like it ought to be but I…

Alpaslan:

Yeah, no. It was and I still have that copy. I keep that copy and I took it with me when I went observing for the first time in grad school. I cherish it. It really is like a very, it was like a spark. It really just… and I didn’t know much about space before then either but that was a catalyst.

Lattis:

So, the IB courses were good preparation?

Alpaslan:

I think so.

Lattis:

Yeah?

Alpaslan:

Yeah. I think the IB fosters certainly a sense of independence in students I think and anecdotally you hear about a lot of… [INTERRUPTION]

Lattis:

We were talking about…

Alpaslan:

The IB.

Lattis:

Preparation. The IB courses, yeah.

Alpaslan:

So, IB, I mean this is again anecdotally, but I think it fosters a certain level of independence in the students, and certainly my first year of university felt a little bit easier because of that. What you end up doing is you take three courses at what’s called a higher level and three courses at a standard level. And so I took high-level physics and math, and my understanding is that at least in those physics and math courses, I was familiar with topics that were covered in my first year of university by the time I arrived. Because I’d already done them in school. Definitely with the math… the high-level math course at the time when I did it was notorious for being quite difficult.

Lattis:

High-level math. Does that mean first-year calculus?

Alpaslan:

I don’t know how well it compares to the US system, having gone to the UK for university. But my first-year calculus courses, I think I was familiar with them by the time I arrived at university.

Lattis:

So, far you talked about it abstractly, like the courses prepare you, but what were the teachers like? Did you find much in the way of encouragement or enthusiasm in the teachers?

Alpaslan:

Definitely, yeah. The high school I went to in Chile, the teachers were very enthusiastic about the particular courses that they were teaching. Definitely I think because you’re picking a high-level course, I think there’s a self-selection effect there where the teachers know that the students are interested. But our physics teacher at the high school—it was called Santiago College—he was very passionate about physics. You could tell because I remember one course, in particular, he had us… he was demonstrating optics, and he wanted to show people how lenses distort images, and he was dancing around in front of the lens. Yeah, he was very enthusiastic about it. And my math teacher I remember as well. He struck me as somebody who really enjoyed pure math for what it was. And so I think in both of those courses… it wasn’t just learning the material. It was sort of understanding physics and understanding the role that not just physics can play, but sort of the critical thinking that goes into being a physicist can play in sort of understanding the world a little bit better. But at the same time, they were both rigorous classes, and so I think that there were some skills you got there in terms of not just the difficulty of the class, but the homework load as well. It definitely got you ready for college.

Lattis:

Was there any astronomy content? Was there an astronomy course?

Alpaslan:

There was actually. Yeah, so in the IB physics course, there was an optional module at the end that can be the teacher’s choice. So, for us it was astronomy. Now [laughs] in my memory, I’m thinking maybe that’s because I really asked for it. I don’t remember if that’s true or not. I don’t know if that’s a false memory or not, but we did the astronomy module and that was easy. I think that was more…

Lattis:

You had already read Cosmos then.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, exactly. And I don’t want to say that the content wasn’t sufficiently advanced, but at least in terms of the… when I got to university I’m studying astronomy at a first level. There I started running into material and concepts that I hadn’t perhaps done before in high school.

Lattis:

When you’re again this… well, so you’re taking courses through this, mostly in Chile, as you’re finishing up there. How did you go about thinking… you already know you want to be an astronomer. I assume you were still committed at that point?

Alpaslan:

Yes.

Lattis:

But you got to think about universities and sounds like you probably had a wide range of choices available to you. How did you… Why the UK?

Alpaslan:

My parents’ first posting as diplomats was to London in the late 1970s. And they both fell in love with the United Kingdom. While my parents didn’t really influence what I studied, I think they both wanted me to go to the UK. I think there was some pragmatic concerns there as well, it’s closer to Turkey, in terms of travel time.

Lattis:

Than Chile.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, because they knew once they were done in Chile they’d go back to Turkey. The way it works often with these postings is you spend some time abroad and then you go back to Turkey. And the way it coincided is about eight months after I went to the UK for university my parents went back to Turkey. But also, university tuition fees are also much cheaper in the UK. That was a big consideration for them.

Lattis:

Compared to?

Alpaslan:

Compared to the US.

Lattis:

US?

Alpaslan:

Yes, much much cheaper, at the time especially.

Lattis:

So, US was a possibility but expensive.

Alpaslan:

Yes.

Lattis:

UK was obviously an option. Were there other options you considered?

Alpaslan:

No, I just looked at those. I just looked at those places. I knew that I wanted to study overseas and in English. And I knew that in terms of for studying astronomy, the United Kingdom and the US were some of the best places to go. Although I wasn’t, at the time I had no idea what the differences in graduate school programs were for example because I know…

Lattis:

So, how did you select… but just as an undergraduate how did you select one UK school over another?

Alpaslan:

I have to admit that I kind of got a little bit lucky at the end there. So, I ended up attending the University of St. Andrews, which does have a very good astronomy program and has its own telescope actually. I had a wonderful time there. But I selected St. Andrews based on its overall academic ranking. It was only once I was selected there and was offered a position there, this might sound bad, but it was only then that I realized that it had a very good astronomy program. So, that was a stroke of good fortune I’d say. I would say that my university applications process was perhaps not as well informed as it could have been.

Lattis:

Well, a lot of us can say that.

Alpaslan:

Yeah. But to defend myself a little bit, I think part of that is because I didn’t have the opportunity to go and visit these campuses. Because you can’t fly from Chile to the UK…

Lattis:

Just to do a college trip.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, so I ended up, I went to the… so the British Council is sort of an overseas body that represents the United Kingdom and different countries. And so they had a universities fair in Santiago, and I went. But it wasn’t… I don’t remember it being very well represented by a lot of different universities. So, bit of googling, bit of looking at… well, I guess it wasn’t Google at the time was it? Something else [laughter].

Lattis:

I’m not sure where we are about that one. About what year are we talking about here?

Alpaslan:

I guess this would have been… oh, no I guess Google might have been around. 2004, 2003.

Lattis:

Oh, yeah. There was Google then.

Alpaslan:

That’s true.

Lattis:

I don’t know how much St. Andrews had…

Alpaslan:

Yeah, I don’t know. But, yeah. So, this was very much and ended up being, I think just got a little bit lucky there at the end.

Lattis:

So, you ended up… was that then three-year, four-year program?

Alpaslan:

So, in the Scottish system, it actually extends to an extra year, so as far as I’m aware in the Scottish higher-education system, you can leave high school a little earlier if you’d like to, at the age of 16. So, the final two years are optional, and it’s up to each student to populate those final two years in advanced higher classes, is what they’re called. So, the first year at Scottish universities often acts as a leveler to bring everybody up to the same level before they start the formal last three or four years. I was also in what’s called an integrated master’s program where you start as a freshman, as a first-year student, and you don’t graduate with a bachelor’s. You just go straight into… you do five years of schooling with a higher course load at the end and a longer dissertation and you come out with a master’s at the end. So, it was five years for me from 2005 to 2010.

Lattis:

You did astronomy though? They had a department…

Alpaslan:

I did, yeah.

Lattis:

You majored, is that right?

Alpaslan:

The University of St. Andrews is a school of physics and astronomy. In the system there. So, my formal degree is a master’s of physics, honors in astronomy. The way it worked at St. Andrews is that there was a common core of physics courses that everybody had to take, and then while the physicists were off doing whatever physicists do, we were taking astronomy courses. It felt like a very classical astronomy and physics education.

Lattis:

At what point as a kid—if you decide you want to be an astronomer—it isn’t always apparent that what that means is, if you’re going to work as an astronomer. Just exactly what kind of… not only are you going to go to college, but you’re going to have to get a PhD, you’re probably going to do a post-doctorate too. And getting a tenure-track job. I mean, explain that to a 12-year-old. So, at what point did you begin to have a perception that there’s a path you have to be in for the long haul?

Alpaslan:

It was very gradual, I’d say. It was always the next stage that got revealed I think, so it was only once I arrived at university and probably a couple of years into it, that I began to realize that after you do a PhD you start having to do postdocs and things like that. I remember…

Lattis:

But the PhD was part of the deal as far as you were concerned?

Alpaslan:

For me, yeah, I think so, because I had looked into, at least, not necessarily how one becomes an astronomer but how generally one becomes a scientist. And I saw all these Drs. in front of people’s names, and I thought, “How does that work?” So, I remember looking into that in high school and realizing that you have to… it’s not just enough to get a master’s or a bachelor’s but you also have to then go on to do a PhD. The whole postdoc thing was more of a revelation later on but I certainly knew from the get-go. I mean, that’s one of the reasons why I did an integrated master’s course is because I knew going into it that I wanted to go on to do a PhD.

Lattis:

So, how did that… well, let’s talk just a little bit more about St. Andrews then. So, the astronomy courses there prepared you in what ways? Were there practical paths as well as the theoretical stuff that you have to study?

Alpaslan:

Yeah. So, to me it felt like a good combination of the two. The first-year and the second-year astronomy labs are very practical astronomy labs where you actually look at transparencies of old photographic plates of galaxies and make manual, hand measurements of the galaxy sizes and then in your third year and onwards it becomes a lot more computational, the lab work that you do. So, you end up coding in Fortran, or at least it was when we were doing it. Well, the computational classes…

Lattis:

I think people still use Fortran.

Alpaslan:

It was taught by Keith Horne, who I believe is still a staff member there, and he teaches a fifth-year course called astronomical data analysis, which is sort of a… it’s the trial by fire. If you can get through that course… you end up having to write cross-correlation codes and all this really basic statistical codes from scratch on your own in Fortran, which was tough but good, I think. But, anyway, in parallel to the labs, you have very theoretical courses, and these were, in the first two years, more broad, and then in the final three years… so in the UK, the first two years are your pre-honors years, and in your final three years, those are your honors courses where things get a little more challenging. So, in the final three years, you have a class on galaxies, a class on exoplanets, a class on cosmology, and those… it was very sort of building things up from first principles and doing the theory and doing proofs and demonstrations. So, in the structure of the way it was taught, it kind of felt like a physics class, where you’re still doing derivations and demonstrations and proofs, but it felt very comprehensive to me, at least. And I think I’ve… I came out of it feeling well prepared, especially on the coding side of things.

Lattis:

Yeah, I was going to ask you. You mentioned one teacher… I forgot the name already…

Alpaslan:

Keith Horne.

Lattis:

Oh, Horne.

Alpaslan:

Keith, yeah. Keith Horne.

Lattis:

H-O-R-N?

Alpaslan:

H-O-R-N-E.

Lattis:

E. Okay. So, where there any particular courses or particular teachers that you found either encouraging or discouraging in terms of how you’re thinking about your future?

Alpaslan:

I’ve always felt encouraged. I don’t mean to sound like I’m… I’m biased. I had a fantastic time at St. Andrews. It was a great program and I had a really good time there.

Lattis:

It’s okay to be biased.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, I am biased. I’m absolutely biased. It felt fantastic to me, but no... So, in third year, there’s a course that the physics department offers called Transferable Skills for Physicists, and this is where…

Lattis:

Transferable?

Alpaslan:

Skills for Physicists. And all the physicists and all the astronomers take this. And it’s a semester-long course where the whole cohort of physicists and astronomers is split into little groups of five, and you’re assigned to a faculty member. And you take that course with that faculty member, and they sort of help you. You present work to them. You don’t learn any physical physics or astronomy. Strictly speaking, it’s more how to write a telescope proposal, or how to give a talk, or how to write a general science-type essay. So, for my… I was assigned to Simon Driver, who is an extragalactic astronomer at St. Andrews at the time, and…

Lattis:

That’s D-R-I-V-E-R?

Alpaslan:

D-R-I-V-E-R, yeah. And he went on to be my PhD advisor, but anyway. With him, he did extragalactic astronomy, and I thought, “Well, this sounds pretty interesting.” He teaches the galaxies course in fourth year. So, I was familiar with him by the time I took that course. But as my Transferable Skills for Physicists class, I had to give a talk, and one of the subjects that he suggested was large-scale structure of the universe, so cosmic web type things. And so, I gave a talk on that particular topic, which I hope I never see those slides again, because I think it was pretty amateur [laughs]. But that definitely was for me sort of a hook to then pick what I then went on to study. Everything else though… there was nothing really that was discouraging, I think. Everything seemed interesting.

Lattis:

You mentioned the cohort. How many of you were there, undergrads majoring in astronomy, roughly?

Alpaslan:

The final graduating class, I think was something like 12 of us. It was very small. That’s one of the reasons why St. Andrews was so good is because I think there was—I don’t know the exact number of faculty off the top of my head—but there was maybe eight, nine, ten. So, we were very close.

Lattis:

For astronomy?

Alpaslan:

Yeah.

Lattis:

Physics is probably bigger.

Alpaslan:

Physics is much bigger. But for astronomy, it was a small group, and we all went through it together. We had great relationships with the staff. There was no concept of office hours at St. Andrews. If you had a question, and the faculty member was there at their office, you could knock on their door, and if they had time they’d speak to you. It was a very, very good relationship, I think, that really sort of fostered this familiarity with the staff members, which I think was very helpful later on when getting advice from them in terms of grad school applications or how one goes about getting an academic career, I think.

Lattis:

At what point do you start… you’re heading for a master’s there. At what point do you start thinking about PhD programs?

Alpaslan:

I was thinking about PhD programs, I’d say, in my master’s year.

Lattis:

Okay, so fairly late then.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, I think so. I did two years of undergraduate research in the years prior to that.

Lattis:

Well, I should have asked you about that, yeah. What sort of research did you do, then?

Alpaslan:

So, in my third year, I spent a summer working on modeling… I believe it was modeling the precession of the orbit of an object in the outer solar system. No, I think it was object of a planet under modified Newtonian dynamics. And actually, you asked me if I was ever turned off by anything. I think that’s when I realized that modified Newtonian dynamics isn’t something I’m interested in studying. And then in my fourth year, I did an undergraduate research position in Chile, actually, at a university in Santiago. I won a travel award from St. Andrews to be able to do that, and so I flew down to Chile.

Lattis:

Was that to work with somebody who was there, or [crosstalk]?

Alpaslan:

That was to work with… it wasn’t necessarily to work with somebody who was there. I wanted to not necessarily stay in the UK but I was thinking… I don’t think I was thinking about grad programs at the time but I was thinking about how I looked on paper. I thought it might look nice to show some initiative to go somewhere different and do that. I will admit, I had friends from high school back in Santiago that I wanted to go and see as well, so it was two birds with one stone. But it was a productive time. It was about two months of pure research for me. There were no publications that came out of it but it was, you go to the office in the morning and you sit down in front of your computer and you do research and then you go home at the end of the day. It was a very good snapshot of that.

Lattis:

These sound like the scope of both of these projects was fairly narrow…?

Alpaslan:

Very narrow.

Lattis:

Both in time and in, I guess, focused in subject…?

Alpaslan:

Absolutely, yeah. They were both very informal as well. In both cases I personally emailed the person I ended up working with and said, “Can I work with you?” And they said, “Yes.” So, there was no formal program.

Lattis:

Did you define this with them or did they just have something they could put you on?

Alpaslan:

In the first year, as a third-year student, the person there had a project for me to work on. In my fourth year, by then I knew that I wanted to… I was interested in extragalactic astronomy, so I contacted the department’s staff members who did work in extragalactic astronomy and said, “Is there anything that I could come and do?” But nothing more specific than that in those cases.

Lattis:

So, was that a required thing—the undergraduate research?

Alpaslan:

No, not at all that’s something where I knew. I feel like knowing that I probably was thinking about grad school a little bit earlier than in my final year. I think I was thinking about individual graduate school programs in my final year but, knowing that I wanted to do a PhD early on, and knowing that undergraduate research looked good in PhD applications, that was on my mind.

Lattis:

Okay. Were you getting much in your… probably not in courses but, in whatever interactions you had with faculty? Did you find yourself being coached very much about thinking like things like… did you come up yourself that some undergraduate research is going to look good when I apply for a PhD program, or are they trying to clue you in on…?

Alpaslan:

No, I think there was definitely some support there. I don’t remember a specific time when somebody sat me down and said, “This, you have to do this, this, this, and this.” But I don’t think I would have come up with the idea of undergraduate research on my own.

Lattis:

So, there’s a certain amount of career coaching going on at some level.

Alpaslan:

Absolutely, and I think that really comes back down to this really favorable situation with the small number of students and the large number of faculty, and having this really close relationship with a lot of them. You build up the ability… you can talk to these staff members in a very comfortable way. You can come and say, “What should I do? How should I do it?” And they’re more than happy to give you that information, so I definitely felt support.

Lattis:

So, what were you looking at then when it came to… where did you do your PhD in the end?

Alpaslan:

I ended up staying at St. Andrews.

Lattis:

Staying [crosstalk]…

Alpaslan:

So, Simon Driver was my master’s advisor and I enjoyed the project that I did with him and I wanted to stay and continue… I worked in my master’s project with galaxy survey data and I knew that I wanted to continue working with galaxy survey data, so I applied to a few other places and at the time there was this sort of, I don’t know exactly where this sort of thought came from, but all of us, the whole cohort, we had this sort of idea that if you stayed at your undergraduate institution for your PhD that that would kill your future career. I don’t know where we came to this idea.

Lattis:

Well, it’s a common truism or something.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, having said that, the few of us stayed and of us that stayed, the two of us that stayed in academia both managed to get postdocs and are both doing reasonably well. So, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not necessarily true.

Lattis:

Yeah.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, but…

Lattis:

We should come back to that off the record later but yeah.

Alpaslan:

Okay, so yeah…

Lattis:

So, you stayed there but you were looking at what other places were on the list?

Alpaslan:

So, I applied to a lot of places. I applied to places in… I don’t remember exactly the full list that I applied to. I remember applying to the University of Gothenburg, only because they flew me out for an interview.

Lattis:

In Germany?

Alpaslan:

No, in Sweden.

Lattis:

Sweden, of course.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, so I remember specifically that one because they flew me out for an interview. I applied to Oxbridge because everybody applies to Oxbridge [laughter].

Lattis:

It’s just what you do.

Alpaslan:

Exactly. I don’t remember applying to any US institutions because I hadn’t taken the GRE, or I don’t remember taking the GRE. I applied to a large number of UK universities and then I almost got the place at the University of Gothenburg, and then I was accepted to work with Simon at St. Andrews, and then a year into my PhD there he was actually offered a position at the University of Western Australia in Perth, in Australia. So, we moved there. So, I did two years of my PhD there and then went back to St. Andrews to write up my thesis and submit.

Lattis:

So, your PhD is from St. Andrews but you spent, you said a couple years?

Alpaslan:

Two years in Australia.

Lattis:

Two years?

Alpaslan:

Yeah. There was some administrative bureaucracy that went on behind the scenes that I wasn’t privy to. I think there was some attempt to form a co-tutelle between the two universities but I don’t know what happened. I think it was kept hidden from me because it didn’t… I mean, I use the word hidden, it wasn’t willingly hidden from me. I did not need to know. I knew I had funding and I knew I had support so I didn’t…

Lattis:

What was the term you just used?

Alpaslan:

Co-tutelle. So, I’m not super familiar with this. I understand that it’s when two institutions have a joint PhD student, and I’ve never really run into this again but…

Lattis:

I’ve never even heard of that term before. Do you know how to spell it? Is it French? It sounds French.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, so it’s C-O-hypen-T-U-T-E-L-L-E. Co-tutelle.

Lattis:

I’m sorry, T-U…

Alpaslan:

T-E-L-L-E. And again, I don’t know how formally this works either, but my understanding is if that had worked, I would have had to submit a PhD thesis at both institutions, and would have a PhD…

Lattis:

Can you submit the same one?

Alpaslan:

This was always informally discussed, but my understanding was yes. I just had to change the title page and fit to formatting guidelines, and then I think I get a PhD from both. I don’t know. It never happened. It never materialized.

Lattis:

I had never heard of that. I’ll have to look it up. At least now I know how to spell it.

Alpaslan:

Eventually, the University of Western Australia never came to an understanding with St. Andrews, but they were… I felt like one of the crowd there. The university did a fantastic job in making us feel… because it was myself and another PhD student of Simon’s. We both felt like part of the crowd and we had great institutional support there. Everybody played ball really well, I’d say.

Lattis:

Again, you have a really complicated past there.

Alpaslan:

I’m sorry if it’s a little jumbled.

Lattis:

No, it’s really interesting. So, you had these… your other student that went to Australia with you. Was there any kind of a larger group of cohorts that you identified with going through the PhD program there?

Alpaslan:

So, at Australia, do you mean?

Lattis:

I mean, there being in both places.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, yeah.

Lattis:

Well, that’s the problem.

Alpaslan:

Yeah [laughs], so the PhD cohort at St. Andrews, we all remain friends to a large extent, especially those of us that stayed in academia. And the same is true for those of us in Australia. However, I’m very close to… so, Simon had at the time another PhD student in a postdoc and the three of us remain quite close friends. And all three of us along with Simon worked as part of this larger galaxy survey. And that is I would say that’s my second academic family, the members of that survey, because we meet annually and that whole survey is my sort of a… I had so many mentors there in that particular survey that helped me academically.

Lattis:

I mean for a lot of people, the cohort of people they go through a PhD program with, an awful lot happens during that period—in terms of defining your career and your ambitions and establishing who’s the really smart one [laughs] and who’s really good at one thing or another. So, I’m just kind of wondering if there was that kind of dynamic happening there when you were kind of all over the place.

Alpaslan:

I think for us, there was the observers and the theorists. As an observer, it was us and the theorists. But, no, I think that we all… there was never any… I think we all surreptitiously kept an eye out on each other’s publications [laughs]. “How many have you published? How many papers are you working on?” I think everybody’s strengths came out early on. I would say that I remember some people were good… the theorists. I’d go to them if I had a pop question with a mathematical question. And sometimes they would come to us with questions on coding, for example. But other than that, I think it was all very collegial. There wasn’t much of a… I don’t think we ever really…

Lattis:

Oh, I didn’t mean what I characterized there as being negative. Usually it’s very constructive.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, it was.

Lattis:

But again, since you were not both part of a cohort and not.

Alpaslan:

I think the advantage I had at St. Andrews was that a lot of the cohort was students who had done their undergrads there—undergraduate degrees there, and then stayed for a PhD. I already knew a fair amount of people. In Australia, where I spend more of my time, the department, the graduate students were very cohesive as a group. And in fact, every week we had a… we’d organize a thing called plot of the week where all of the grad students would bring in a plot that they had made that week, if they’d made one. And then we’d vote on the winner, and the winner would get put up on a poster board. So, we all knew what the other one was doing very well.

Lattis:

The best has to buy beer?

Alpaslan:

No. The department actually had a budget for snacks for the grad students, so you got a little, maybe slightly bigger, piece of cake [laughs]. So, I think we were very familiar with each other’s work. And so especially towards the end of grad school, everybody had their little areas of expertise, so people would come to me if they had questions about galaxies, for example. And they did other things.

Lattis:

So, once again, as you’re going through that process, you’ve got to be thinking at that next step down the road.

Alpaslan:

Yes.

Lattis:

So, how was that? How was that playing out at that point? Were you looking at appropriate postdocs or thinking about where you want to end up? I notice you’re at NASA now, but is that a way into an academic position at some point? Because you’ve got to be thinking, at a certain level, of where you want to end up and what kind of postdocs you’re going to look for.

Alpaslan:

That’s right. So, very early on, Simon and I sat down and talked and I said, “Listen. I want to be an astronomer. I want to do astronomy research.” And so he quickly explained to me that the way it works is you do postdocs. You do postdoctoral positions, and so on. And he sat us down…

Lattis:

This is still when you’re an undergrad?

Alpaslan:

No. This was very early on into grad school. And he actually delivered the—for that particular year—he gave the introduction to all the graduate students in astronomy. And he made it very clear. He said if you want to get a postdoc, you should publish X number of papers in your PhD, and do this, this, and this. And so that… I found that very useful. I was, “All right. I want to publish this many papers during my PhD. If I can do that, then maybe that will give me a good shot at getting a postdoc.” So, I knew that that was my goal, and that’s what I worked towards, along with all the other stuff of presenting at conferences and trying to build up a network. In terms of the postdoctoral positions, I don’t think… early on it didn’t strike me that there was a difference between a postdoctoral appointment and a postdoctoral fellowship, but I think I knew from the get-go that I would have to do at least a couple of postdocs to then land a longer tenure-track position, to then focus on research. As for where, that decision was up in the air for a long time. Then I met my fiancee, who’s a US citizen, and so I heavily focused my job search to the US.

Lattis:

What year did you finish your PhD?

Alpaslan:

I finished my PhD in 2015 formally. I started in September 2010, I submitted in December 2014, defended in February 2015, and then had everything wrapped up, but then the next graduation ceremony was June 2015. Formally it’s June 2015, but I was done a bit earlier than that.

Lattis:

So, you’re back at St. Andrews?

Alpaslan:

Yeah.

Lattis:

But looking at postdocs heavily focused in the US?

Alpaslan:

Yes, that’s right.

Lattis:

What sort of things… were there personal connections that made certain places look good, or was it a geographic… partly it’s geographic, apparently.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, but personal connections, not to a great extent with one exception, which I’ll go into. So, GAMA… like I said, my large extended academic connection was very much built around this Galaxy and Mass Assembly survey, which I work in still.

Lattis:

Right. And I want to ask for a little more detail on that.

Alpaslan:

Yes, absolutely. Sure. I’d be happy to provide that. But GAMA is very much a European and an Australian survey without a lot of US connections, and so I didn’t have many personal connections with a lot of the US institutions that I was applying for. However, I applied for… so the reason that I’m at NASA at the moment is that I’m a fellow within the NASA postdoctoral program, which is run across all NASA centers, and when I was applying for… once I applied for the NASA postdoctoral program fellowship, I got in touch with one particular US faculty member, his name is Rogier Windhorst, he’s at ASU. So, he happened to visit the University of Western Australia because he is collaborators with Simon Driver. Simon Driver’s first postdoc was with Rogier at Arizona State. So, Rogier came to visit the University of Western Australia because he was interested in using GAMA data, in particular, the group catalog, and at the time, the author of the group catalog, Aaron Robotham, who was my PhD co-supervisor, he was a postdoc at the time.

Lattis:

Where was he?

Alpaslan:

He was also at the University of West— so, he was the postdoc from St. Andrews that came with all of us to the University of Western Australia. He was my PhD co-supervisor.

Lattis:

Okay.

Alpaslan:

He was the author of the group catalog. He happened to not be there that day, and I was the next best person who used that data, so Rogier and I sat down and talked about the data for a day and we got along really well, and later on, when I was applying for the NASA postdoctoral program position, I asked him if he would agree to write a reference for me, and I told him who I was applying for and he said that he actually knew the… so, the way the NASA postdoctoral program works is a NASA scientist will put forward a research interest. So, they’ll say, “I’m interested in this particular project or this particular subject,” and they will advertise that interest, and then you get in touch with that particular person and put together a research proposal. That then becomes your postdoc adviser. In my case it was Pamela Marcum at NASA Ames Research center who was the project scientist for SOFIA, but her other interests include galaxy evolution within different environments. So, I emailed Rogier. I said, “Listen, I’m applying for a postdoc with Pamela Marcum. Will you write me a reference letter?” And he says, “I’m actually really good friends with Pam.” And so he emailed her and said, “You should talk to this guy Mehmet,” and Pam has since told me that that email helped a lot in terms of making my email jump to the top of the pile.

Lattis:

Sure.

Alpaslan:

Which this is how these things go sometimes.

Lattis:

Yes it is.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, so I owe Rogier a lot for that, and so that was when that connection helped me out. I would say. So, sorry if that was a bit of a long-winded answer [laughs].

Lattis:

No, no. Not at all. I mean, that’s exactly the kinds of things that we want to see coming out of these. Those kinds of networks are always important in these sorts of things, and not unreasonably so either.

Alpaslan:

I agree.

Lattis:

There’s what you’ve got on paper, but from the standpoint of somebody’s looking for a research partner, it isn’t just credentials and qualifications, but it’s would I work well with a person like this.

Alpaslan:

Exactly.

Lattis:

And in that particular case, she’s got a friend who says, “Would work well with [this person?],” whatever.

Alpaslan:

Exactly. Exactly, so it works out.

Lattis:

Yeah. That’s how it should work.

Alpaslan:

Yeah.

Lattis:

Let’s see. So, you ended up… so you’ve been there about…?

Alpaslan:

A year and a half, now at Ames.

Lattis:

Oh, I see. That’s right. You went out there before you formerly finished the…

Alpaslan:

No. I submitted my application after my defense. I formerly graduated on the 25th of June of 2015.

Lattis:

Of ’15, just last year.

Alpaslan:

Yes. And then, I formerly started at NASA Ames on July 30th of 2015.

Lattis:

That’s more than six months.

Alpaslan:

I’m sorry. I’m getting my dates confused. Hang on.

Lattis:

So, we lost a year [crosstalk]?

Alpaslan:

Hang on [laughter]. I lost a year. All right, let’s go back.

Lattis:

I remember the year I got my PhD.

Alpaslan:

No, okay. So, I started in September 2010. Here we go, I submitted in December 2013. Defended in February 2014, graduated 2014. I started Ames July 30th 2014. How embarrassing.

Lattis:

Now it’s adding up.

Alpaslan:

How embarrassing.

Lattis:

You’re really good at math, too.

Alpaslan:

There we go [laughter]. This is why I’m an observer. So, let’s revise all those dates. So, yes, everything that I said 2015 is 2014.

Lattis:

Okay, yeah. We’re not doing this in order to establish your personal chronology, but I just… it just wasn’t adding up in the end.

Alpaslan:

No, and thank you for correcting me on it [laughs].

Lattis:

Just wanted to see where we were.

Alpaslan:

Oh, wow. That’s, yeah.

Lattis:

So, right. So, you’ve been there a year and a half.

Alpaslan:

Yes.

Lattis:

And what kind of observing… so I guess maybe now’s a good time if you told me a little bit about your science interests. It sounds like there’s a lot of continuity between what you were doing for your dissertation work and…

Alpaslan:

Absolutely, yes.

Lattis:

Yeah, and what your postdoc work is now.

Alpaslan:

That’s right.

Lattis:

So, tell me a little bit about that overall project.

Alpaslan:

So, my broad interests lie in understanding the large-scale distribution of galaxies in the universe. So, this is often referred to as the cosmic web of galaxies. Where, when you really zoom out and begin to make a really basic map of where galaxies are in the universe, you begin to see this really interesting network of linear structures called filaments, which intersect with each other. And all of these surround these vast empty regions called voids, where there’s very few galaxies, and so that’s what I was really interested in from the get-go. For my PhD, I worked with the Galaxy and Mass Assembly Survey, which is a galaxy red shift survey that looks at—we essentially looked at five regions in the sky: three fields on the equator and two fields in the southern sky—and used the Anglo-Australian Telescope near Sydney, Australia to obtain red shifts, so that was about 250,000 red shifts over a period of six years.

Lattis:

The red shifts of individual galaxies?

Alpaslan:

Yes, that’s right. Yeah. And that is combined with photometry and I think now it’s about 20 wavelengths?

Lattis:

This is optical, right?

Alpaslan:

So, the red shifts are… the spectra are mostly optical, but the photometry itself is multiwavelength, all the way from the UV to the far infrared, and that’s obtained by a mixture of mining existing photometric surveys that overlap with the GAMA fields and current surveys that were designed to overlap with the GAMA fields through various memoranda of understanding, for example. So, we have coverage from… we have GALEX… originally we had SDSS optical but now it’s moving to the [ST? VISTA?] Viking… sorry, the [ST? VISTA?] KiDS. Near infrared was UKIDSS, is now becoming the VISTA-VIKING, mid-infrared from WISE, and far infrared from Herschel-ATLAS and the PACS and SPIRE instruments. And eventually once ASKAP and the SKA go online we’ll hopefully get some radio data in that area too.

Lattis:

So, the red shifts come out of these various survey results?

Alpaslan:

No. The red shifts come directly from going to the Anglo-Australian telescope and measuring the spectrum that comes out.

Lattis:

So, it comes out of a spectrum?

Alpaslan:

Yeah, it comes out of the spectrum, that’s right. So, over the course of six years we spent several nights at this telescope, measuring the spectra of all of these galaxies and fitting a red shift to…

Lattis:

Lots of spectra?

Alpaslan:

Yeah. So, I spent something like 33 nights at this telescope over a course of two years when I was in Australia, which was wonderful. We ended up… actually, in the program we had observers individually placing these spectral lines, with some assistance from some code and then we had a complicated rewrite shifting program where spectra that weren’t necessarily very good were farmed out to everybody else but just recently somebody wrote a code that automates the whole process, so all of this work somehow feels more… I mean, we’re glad we did it but now it’s all automated so we’re being phased out.

Lattis:

Sorry, I…

Alpaslan:

Yeah, that’s fine.

Lattis:

That’s something I want to ask you about later for my own purposes…

Alpaslan:

Yeah of course.

Lattis:

But not the purpose of this. So, let’s see. So, you’ve got all this data.

Alpaslan:

Right.

Lattis:

Now are there… what are you going to do with it and then also, how does the observational program proceed?

Alpaslan:

Okay, so once… my particular interest with getting all the data, aside from the overall goals of the galaxy mass assembly survey, was to try and essentially use this galaxy red shift survey to build a map of this filamentary structure.

Lattis:

So, the red shift just tells you the distance [crosstalk], the 3D arrangement of all the stuff?

Alpaslan:

Precisely, precisely, yes. So, you need the red shift to be able to… and you need the spectroscopic red shift to really build these accurate maps because if you just use a photometric red shift, you smear out a lot of this fine large-scale structure. So, once the data was in hand—and a lot of it was in hand by the time I started my PhD—I can then just essentially use the positional information to start building these networks of galaxies. To do that, I ended up having to… I had a choice. I could either use an existing code to do it because there is a small community of people that does large scale structure identification and there are a number of codes in existence. I could either use an existing code or I could write my own, and I thought it would be a fun exercise to write my own partly because I thought it was an informative thing. One of the real… and without doing an injustice to the rest of the community, I would say that a lot of the studies that go into large-scale structure and identifying these filaments don’t prioritize understanding galaxy evolution in the context of large-scale structure as much as I did.

So, for me, from the get-go, it wasn’t so much why do these filaments form or how do these filaments form, it’s these filaments have formed, how are galaxies in the filaments—or if our galaxy’s in the filaments—systematically different to the galaxies in the voids? And so, from the get-go, I needed—and this becomes very pragmatic—I needed a galaxy catalog that… I mean, I needed a method that would work really well with galaxy catalogs. And so, as part of a galaxy survey, just like in the SDSS, you’ve had someone that goes and makes a catalog of stellar masses or of galaxy colors. So, you have an individual identifier for every galaxy, and with that identifier, you have an associative photometry or stellar mass or metallicity or whatever other thing. So, I wanted to write a code that could fit well into that kind of system. I wanted to be able to say galaxy A is in a filament, galaxy A is in a void, or whatever other structure. So, at the time, when I was picking what to do, a lot of the codes in existence, what they would do is take the position of galaxies and smooth them out into a density field and then perform the analysis on the density field. Those methods are very, very, very useful at doing a lot of different things, but at the time, my understanding of them was that they worked better on simulations because with the simulations, you have the full knowledge of the distribution of galaxies, and you have their full face base information, so you know their velocities and everything. Whereas, with galaxy survey data, you have to deal with the fact that it’s a dirty galaxy survey. The data’s not always clean. You have volume-limited samples to define, and things like that.

And so, I ended up writing my own code that was specifically designed to work on not just galaxy survey data, but the GAMA survey data. So, I ended up writing a code that uses, in a nutshell, an adapted minimum spanning tree algorithm. Minimum spanning trees are used in graph theory, so this is the traveling salesman problem, basically. You want to go to all these different places in the shortest possible distance, and a minimum spanning tree tells you the path that connects all these points without any closed loops that forms the shortest possible distance. And these are very useful it turns out for picking out structures and networks of galaxies. One very common method used in group finding is the friends-of-friends algorithm and, in fact, one of the results of a friends-of-friends algorithm is the minimum spanning tree of that distribution of points. It was an appropriate way of doing it, doing the particular problem, because you don’t smooth out any data. Your algorithm visits each galaxy and says, “This is in this particular structure, this is in this particular structure.”

Another benefit, is that it is significantly simpler to code than other methods and in the UK you have a finite amount of time to finish your PhD, and I started all of this is in my second year of my PhD so I knew I had about two years to do all this, to write the code, write a paper about it, get some results, write my dissertation. So, the computer science aspect of minimum spanning trees was tackled in the ‘50s. There are algorithms to find these things that were written in the ‘50s and now are so ubiquitous that they’re just functions within larger codes and so that was a secondary consideration. I thought this is going to be easy. So, I have the data and now I spent about a year writing this algorithm. It does more than just the minimum spanning tree and it classifies galaxies as belonging to three different kinds of large-scale structure. So, there’s the primary filaments which are these really large over densities in space that you really easily see. It also classifies galaxies as being very, very isolated areas. These are the voids. These are very isolated galaxies, and looking at the data we realized that there was actually a third, more interstitial population of large-scale structure, not necessarily as large and prominent as filaments but more individually linked galaxies that emerged from filaments and penetrated into voids or bridged between two filaments through a void, and so I ended up classifying some galaxies as belonging to those structures as well. And that was really the bulk of what I did with that data.

Now, in parallel, you have other people using the photometric information and the red shift information from the survey to measure other properties of galaxies, and so I think this is where the synergy of working in a galaxy survey really worked for me. Once I had my large-scale structure catalog in place, I could then very easily use the catalogs that other people had made to look at the stellar mass distribution of those galaxies as a function of their environment, for example. And a lot of other properties. I think this was a case where it was very useful to be part of a larger survey. That’s what ended up being the bulk of what I did with the observational data. The GAMA survey has actually now finished in terms of gathering the spectra. Some other fields were opened up because we had a little extra time on the telescope and some data was gathered there. My understanding now is that the next generation of the survey is being planned, but I’m no longer part of that group. I mean, I work with GAMA, but it’s Simon and his more immediate postdocs and PhD students who are working on that. I just follow along on the periphery now.

Lattis:

So, how long do you anticipate… how long does this fellowship last?

Alpaslan:

The NASA postdoctoral fellowship lasts… it’s a two plus one fellowship. In my case, I’ve got the third year, so I’ve got about another year and half left in this postdoc. I’ll be formally finishing at the end of July of—let’s get this date right—2017. Three years to the day.

Lattis:

Right before the total eclipse.

Alpaslan:

Is that right?

Lattis:

August 27th. First one in North America in quite a long time.

Alpaslan:

Oh, wow. Okay that’ll be…

Lattis:

Look on the back of the AAS calendar. They must be giving them away down there.

Alpaslan:

Okay, yeah I will.

Lattis:

It’s a nice eclipse chart. Anyway great. So, how do you foresee things going from here? Are you thinking again about that next step?

Alpaslan:

Yes, I am.

Lattis:

You must be.

Alpaslan:

Yeah. I’ve actually been to some of the career things that have been taking place here. So, yeah, I think my plan at the moment is, I mean my overall long-term plan is of course to continue within academia and focusing really on the research aspects of things. I’d like to do a little bit of teaching, particularly in… one of my side interests is data analysis because working with galaxy survey data you do data analysis and so statistics in data analysis has been an interest of mine. So, to teach some elements of that would be fun, but really my long-term goal, we talk about this five year plan, is to at least, if I’m not at a more permanent position, to at least be on the steps to getting a more permanent position and so my next step is to go in that direction. I’m hoping to land a second postdoc, hopefully another fellowship. I don’t think that it would be very realistic. I probably will still apply for them, but I don’t think it would be very realistic of me to put all my hopes in a tenure-track position out of the first postdoc, particularly having come into the United States astronomical community from overseas. I don’t have that network yet, I think. So, I expect to do another postdoc I’m very happy to be… I mean the more I can stay in academia, the happier I’ll be, but I also think that there’s…

Lattis:

Do you consider NASA academia at this point?

Alpaslan:

I think that my position…

Lattis:

I don’t know what’s your position is like here really. It doesn’t sound like academia.

Alpaslan:

That’s right. So, the postdoctoral program is an academic. It’s a traditional academia program in the sense that my experience as a postdoc I feel is very similar to other postdocs in the sense that I’m doing pure research, I’m publishing papers, I’m working with my adviser quite closely. The only difference I’d say is that NASA is… it’s not a university department so you don’t have perhaps like some of the colloquia that you might have in a university department. We still have colloquia, but it’s just that little bit different. A bit more paperwork. Yeah, but it certainly feels like a traditional postdoctoral program. Certainly feels like a traditional fellowship and the program bills itself as the scientific postdoctoral program, and then when you sort of go into the nitty-gritty, once you become a NASA employee, you get placed into various directorates so all those postdoctoral fellows are in the science directorate for example. So, yeah, I mean that’s the next step is to probably… hopefully, get another postdoctoral position. Hopefully, a fellowship and then…

Lattis:

And are you thinking of staying in the US?

Alpaslan:

Yes, I think so.

Lattis:

Because I want to take you in a little bit different direction there. You mentioned a fiancée, and that as a factor in your being or at least looking for postdocs here. Usually this is relevant to people who are a little more advanced in their careers than you, but one of the things we like to inquire about is how do you make personal life and professional life mesh? Which academia can make complicated, especially if you’ve got dual careers. Maybe you could comment on that a little bit.

Alpaslan:

Sure, so my fiancée’s not in academia. She is not an academic. She’s actually back in school now studying. So, the way it’s actually affecting us is that she is at university, and she knows that within a year and a half we might be in another part of the country.

Lattis:

So, she’s in school somewhere near…

Alpaslan:

She’s in the Bay Area. She has to very carefully pick out how she’s going to structure her classes based on where we might end up.

Lattis:

What’s she studying?

Alpaslan:

This is her first time going to university. She’s at one of the community colleges—De Anza Community College—which she originally picked because it has a very high transfer rate into the Cal… the UC system.

Lattis:

So, she’s doing general education?

Alpaslan:

Yes, she is, but she’s focusing very highly on mathematics, actually. Which when we first met was… I think she wasn’t planning on doing that, but she took a calculus course and decided she really liked it. And I think maybe the fact that I talk about statistics all the time in the house might have influenced that decision a little bit. So, yeah, she’s under quite a lot of pressure to… she works full-time at the same time. She’s under a lot of pressure to finish or at least get a transfer degree as quickly as possible because we have no idea where I’ll end up. In fact, I was talking to her today and she was at an academic counselor, who, apparently, is very angry at me because I’m adding all this uncertainty and making it hard for her to plan her courses, so that’s how it’s affected us. However, we’re in a fortunate position that she telecommutes for work, and so we have a lot more flexibility in terms of where we end up within the United States for this next position. And if push comes to shove, then we’ll be married by the time I’ll be starting… we’re getting married in about six months, so by the time I start the next position, we’ll be married, so if we do need to leave the United States, we can. It’s not a be all and end all. I think the reason we’d like to stay is more so driven by the fact that a lot of… astronomy’s very… it’s a good place to do astronomy in the United States.

Lattis:

Glad to hear that [laughs].

Alpaslan:

Yeah, there’s a lot more jobs. And I don’t know if that’s numerically backed, but certainly the feeling is. And one of the things I often heard from a lot of faculty in Australia in particular, was, “You should at least do a postdoc in the United States.” The common understanding was if you did a postdoc in the United States and then came back to whatever other country you were sitting in, that would definitely give you a leg up. Having said that, when I first arrived, it wasn’t necessarily that it has to be the US, but now it certainly feels that way.

Lattis:

Let me think here. Let’s talk just a little bit… I mean you’re very much in the… with older astronomers, I sometimes ask whether the changing character—evolving character—of astronomy, how it’s affected or how they see it affected sometimes their own work, but the character, the feel in general. I’m thinking of things like big-data science, which you’re clearly in the midst of, but also big survey-type data. You mentioned that you love observing, but my guess is you don’t find yourself behind a telescope…

Alpaslan:

I was actually fortunate enough to be able to…

Lattis:

Am I wrong about that?

Alpaslan:

Yeah, you are. So, actually, the Anglo-Australian telescope being in… it’s funded by the Australian government. If you are based at an Australian institution, the government will foot the cost of you traveling there to observe, or at least they did at the time, and so we were able to…

Lattis:

I was counting that. So, you said you liked that, but now in your current position…?

Alpaslan:

Now I haven’t had much of a chance to observe because a lot of the work that I’m doing is on data that’s already in place. Having said that, I’m now putting in proposals to do other observations, and chances are, I won’t be leaving.

Lattis:

So, you are still pursuing active observing?

Alpaslan:

Yes. There’s a lot of follow-up observations I’d like to do of some populations of these isolated galaxies, and yes, some of them will be remote.

Lattis:

That’s right. I suspect that’s going to be more and more of the case.

Alpaslan:

I think so too. I think so too.

Lattis:

So, the question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing for astronomy?

Alpaslan:

It makes me sad. I mean I think it makes me sad. I knew I wanted to be an astronomer by the time I ended up with a telescope for the first time, but nothing, like you can’t be prepared for that in any way. Just that feeling of you’ve worked for this for so long. Especially for me, because I knew I wanted to do this for such a long time. Nothing beats the feeling of actually going to a research-grade telescope for the first time, being up all night, and drinking all the coffee, and dealing with all the problems. That’s a unique feeling, and every time I… it got to a point where I would sign up to go observing even though I was busy with other things because it gave me that boost. It just revitalizes, at least in my personal experience, it revitalized my love for the science. And I think there’s something really impersonal about sitting in your living room on your laptop watching it all happen through a computer screen. It makes me sad. I’d like to go back to a telescope, to observe. On a personal level, it makes me sad. I don’t think I’m qualified enough, or experienced enough, to say, “Oh, this will lower the quality of future students.” But on a personal note, it makes me sad. I think it’s good to be there. It’s good to see how it all works.

Lattis:

Another aspect of the changing character of astronomy is how you alluded to earlier, which you said that there’s code out there to solve this problem and solve that problem. And so that’s a good thing, that you can go out and find these pieces and put them together. Do you see any potential problems with approaches like that? How do you deal with that?

Alpaslan:

It’s challenging, and I felt it in myself, actually. When I first started my PhD I was under the… I really wanted to code everything up myself because alluding back to that astronomical data analysis I talked about in my final year of undergraduate where we coded everything up from scratch. It felt really productive to get into the nitty-gritty of it all and understand how it works. But I think as one’s career advances, there’s just less and less time to be spent on writing code. And it’s a challenge. Just recently, I needed to do some kind of analysis for a paper. And I knew the tool. And I found that there was code that did what I wanted to do. And I really didn’t want to write it from scratch. And I think that, especially when you’re working towards more complicated tasks—more statistically complicated tasks—I think after a while, I don’t know if it’s the most productive use of time to write the code.

Lattis:

And at some level, it seems like reinventing the wheel.

Alpaslan:

Exactly. Having said that, I think that it’s instructive to read the paper. I think that you should… I try to, at least… I say these things now. I don’t know what it’ll be like five years from now for me if I have less free time. But I think that people should at least try and read the paper and understand the mathematics. And if possible, if the code is open source, read through the code. I’ve at least discovered one bug in some code that somebody had written as a package. That’s instructive because you communicate with that person and get it solved. I think that I don’t know where it’s going to go, but it’s a concern for me when I’ve got the luxury of time to think about it. But at the time, when I’m pressed for time to get a responsive referee report out as quickly as possible so that I can have that next paper on my CV before I apply for that next job, I’m thankful for the code. So, it’s a changing world, and I think that I wonder if the field is almost going to split between people who are more productive as they write more code and people who are more productive as they use that code to conduct analysis. And this is very informal, but I’ve noticed within—for example other graduate students at conferences—I’ve heard them give spectacular talks about the codes that they have spent years writing. And I’ve heard other students give talks about just using code. And I feel like I’m drifting towards the camp of just use the code. But I think that successful careers can and should be built on writing the code.

Lattis:

But you actually think there’s a growing distinction between those who generate the code and those who apply it?

Alpaslan:

I don’t necessarily want to make a firm statement on that, but I get that feeling.

Lattis:

You get...

Alpaslan:

I get that feeling. I think there is. I think there is. And I don’t know if it’s a generational thing.

Lattis:

Well, you can see it as maybe a natural direction of specialization. We constantly have emerging specialties.

Alpaslan:

Exactly, and I think that coding is getting easier to access as time goes by. It’s relatively straightforward now compared to before. I don’t need to carry around a book of punch cards. I can just grab my laptop and write some code, and a lot of code is becoming open source now through things like Python and R. There’s websites like Github where you can put your code and people can collaborate on it and so I think it’s becoming easier to get into coding and do your coding. So, I think it’s, yeah, I think it’s more of a natural consequence of…

Lattis:

Yet, the peril there, of course, is that if you’re applying chunks of code that somebody else has developed, you could, well there’s I guess a number of perils, but you could apply it in a situation that maybe isn’t appropriate for whatever approximations or assumptions were made…

Alpaslan:

That’s exactly right.

Lattis:

So, if the specialization emerges and maybe it’s inevitable, what do you do about that? Do you need to have, I don’t know what it would be. Somebody already publishes an article, hopefully, about the code and explains what these assumptions are but have they anticipated everything? Do we need to have some kind of peer review or cross-checking of…

Alpaslan:

Right. Well, so I think that a lot of the big software suites that are coming out now, and I’m talking in my personal experience, I use the language R, which is a more or less statistical language.

Lattis:

Is that the letter R?

Alpaslan:

Yeah, it’s just the letter R. R has its own repository of packages, and when you submit a package to that repository, it does get vetted to some basic level, just to see if the code compiles and the code works, but there isn’t a strict vetting of whether or not the mathematics of the code is correct—for example. I think that one way of avoiding this kind of a situation is like you said having at least some sort of internal check and balance where the code that is submitted to a central repository and made available is somehow cross-checked. In the case of code for astronomy, I think that the best way to avoid these kinds of situations is that a paper is published that accompanies the code and ideally the code is made open source. I understand the need to keep code private, so that you can publish data on it just like when you keep observational data private to publish on it first. But, I think that it almost is parallel to observational data sets. I wonder if we should have a process where code is made public and people can look at it, and people can point out flaws in it, and it can be improved because this kind of transparency I think can only benefit us. Because it is dangerous… some code are black boxes. I’ve used some… I don’t want to name any names but there’s some code that you don’t know what it does.

Lattis:

That’s interesting to hear you say that. I’m glad to hear you’re sensitive to that anyway. I’ve heard some old timers who are really worried about this. They go to a colloquium and they hear some young guy give a talk. And he says, “Well, I’m calculating the temperature with that guy’s code and whatever.” And they’re all there sitting there saying, “Yeah, but where does that come from? How do you know that…?”

Alpaslan:

I’ve actually fallen into that pitfall myself. I’ve gone to a talk and said, “Okay, will I use this group catalog?” And then somebody at the end of the talk says, “Well, how did you get that group catalog?” And I say, “Oh, it was a friend’s of friend’s algorithm that was used.” And somebody will say, “Well, how does that algorithm work?” And so it’s almost recursively going back and deeper. I don’t know how you tackle it. I don’t know.

Lattis:

It’s tricky, and again, it’s a natural part of things. You have the same thing at the hardware level. “Yeah, I measured the voltage.” “Well, where did you get the voltmeter? And how do you know that one’s [crosstalk] right?” “Well, I don’t know.” At a certain point, these things get to the point where we trust them because they haven’t betrayed us…

Alpaslan:

Exactly.

Lattis:

…before.

Alpaslan:

Exactly. And you hope the peer review system works.

Lattis:

And there’s still a couple mirror ends up. We thought we knew how to do that.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, I guess you try and trust the peer review system, right?

Lattis:

Yeah, open source has got to be a big part of it. I’m not being very careful here. Making sure we stay on topic, although we really… what I want to ask you, is there anything that we haven’t talked about coming in here when you offered to come in here and talk that you thought you might be talking about or ought to talk about that we haven’t?

Alpaslan:

No, I think it’s been very comprehensive actually. I always thought it would be a discussion of start to finish and potential future plans. Yeah, so I think it’s been reasonably…

Lattis:

I know the future is still out there.

Alpaslan:

It’s murky.

Lattis:

If you’ve got more to say about how you see the future, then you should. I think you might want to read this again in 20 years.

Alpaslan:

I guess one of the things that I think about often is we talk about how it’s… this is impressed on us from more senior people that you shouldn’t bank on staying in academia. Not everybody’s going to get a tenure track job, but… and I think that I see people at my level not necessarily discouraged by this, but complaining about it. And I think that you have to at some point accept that it’s a tough field. You have to accept that this job situation is as hard as it is. And I think at some point it’s worth the work, if that makes sense. Without of course sacrificing your personal life. I think if you’re fortunate enough to achieve some level of work-life balance, I think it’s worth the challenge of doing it because it is a difficult thing, but I don’t think you can get this far in astronomy without loving astronomy. It’s a privilege to do it. I get paid to look at galaxies that I think are… I sell it when I apply for jobs. I say, “Well, this is important because of such and such,” but deep down, I do what I do because I think it’s cool. I get to look at the largest structures in the universe. I just went to a career thing this morning when I was told not to be emotional about what I do, but this is not a job interview so it’s okay [laughter]. I do what I do because I think it’s really cool—is the simplest way of saying it. I don’t know if I’ll get that next postdoc, but I think it’s okay and I think we shouldn’t expect things to be easy as postdocs. I think it’s okay for them to be hard. I think that we should work to remove things like institutional biases against minorities or increased funding for the sciences and so on and so forth. But at some level, there will always be more people applying for a job than there are jobs. I don’t think that spending time complaining about how hard it is as valuable use of time as just doing the work. Maybe this sounds a little cold.

Lattis:

We’re recognizing that the competition and sifting out is the nature of the beast. You’re in the game. I think you’re exactly right that you have to… if it’s personally fulfilling for you, then you’ve got to be glad you have the opportunity and reconcile yourself to the possibility that you might have to find… a lot of people are on plan B.

Alpaslan:

Yeah, they are [laughs].

Lattis:

Lot of people are on plan C.

Alpaslan:

I don’t have a plan B [laughs].

Lattis:

But it doesn’t hurt to think about one.

Alpaslan:

Exactly. I think that they’ll have to take me kicking and screaming from academia I think.

Lattis:

Well ,there are still many routes to success.

Alpaslan:

That’s right.

Lattis:

If your goal was this one chair at Harvard or something then…

Alpaslan:

That’s maybe a bit too narrow of focus. But I think there…

Lattis:

But there are many other routes.

Alpaslan:

I guess while were talking about… I mean what I’d like for the future, going into my ambition—if I can be personal about it for a little bit—my ambition has never been chair of the department at [some] University. If I can land a secure job at a university that allows me to do the research that I want to do, I will be happy. I don’t care if the name of the university is immediately recognizable to people. If I have security and I’m allowed to do what I’m interested in, and live, not be affluent but be comfortable, then I’m happy. But at least people in my immediate field know, “Oh hey. Mehmet, he’s the guy that does that. He’s pretty good at that.” That’s all I really want, it doesn’t have to be the most prestigious fellowship at the most prestigious place. As long as there’s security and enough money for food on the table and some recognition within an immediate circle and that’s enough for me. And I think that’s where I’ve made my compromise in terms of accepting it’s a challenging job field. It’s good enough for me and I’ll be happy with that. More would be great but I certainly wouldn’t complain if that’s all I got.

Lattis:

All right, good. Well, that sounds like a good note to end on.