Clara Deser

[Begin session 1]

Amico:

All right, this is Frank Amico. I’m at the Mesa Lab at National Center for Atmospheric Research, August 9 around 2pm with Clara Deser. And we’re doing a biographical interview. I guess the first question I had was, when and where were you born?

Deser:

I was born in Waltham, Massachusetts on February 26, 1961.

Amico:

And I know that your father was a theoretical physicist, and I was able to read a little bit about his biography. And your mother was an artist. But I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about what your parents were doing when you were born.

Deser:

Sure. In fact, I just lent… my father wrote his memoir, A Life in Physics, because he spanned eight decades, I would say, of physics. And I just lent his memoir to a grad student, otherwise I would’ve shown you the cover because the cover has a painting of my mother’s, and it’s my dad’s book. So, it was a really stimulating childhood because my dad was a physics professor at Brandeis University, and then my mother, after all of us kids grew up, became an artist, an abstract artist. As a child… they’re both from Europe, so I’m a first-generation American. I don’t know how much detail you want here.

Amico:

That’s perfect.

Deser:

Yeah. And my dad’s whole family was killed in the Holocaust. He’s very lucky to have his life and his parents’ lives. So, he’s an immigrant, and my mother came as an adult from Denmark. So, I have very European kind of background, and I always felt like I have one foot in America and one foot in Europe. And all my cousins are Swedish, and we would go spend three months of each summer in Sweden. It’s how I grew up. I didn’t know any different. We lived in Newton, Massachusetts, which is kind of a middle-class place, and went to public schools, and had a good childhood.

Amico:

Is Newton a suburb of Boston?

Deser:

Yes, Newton is a suburb of Boston, and it’s not too far from Waltham, which is where Brandeis University is. Yeah, it’s about ten miles from Boston.

Amico:

And was your father already working at Brandeis when you were born?

Deser:

Yes, he was.

Amico:

You’d mentioned your mother was a professional artist after you guys had grown up. So, she wasn’t a professional when you were growing up?

Deser:

Right. She had been a social worker in Sweden, and then she met my father. Actually, funny story. She’d gotten some kind of scholarship to go to a social work master’s degree maybe at Berkeley, and then she was traveling and ended up as an au pair for a family in Princeton. And my dad was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Studies. I guess she was an au pair for a physics professor, and they met that way. That’s how they met. She, then, stopped being a social worker. The traditional, in those days, kind of mom. But always had art… I think she started maybe taking painting classes when we were growing up, but then she really went full-time, had a studio in Boston. She had shows on her own, she won prizes, we were all really proud of her. So, my childhood was spent going to a lot of museums, a lot of concerts, a lot of traveling in Europe because my parents loved to do long road trips. Yeah, it was interesting. [laughs]

Amico:

How did the traveling in Europe maybe influence how you saw the world or your interest in science?

Deser:

That’s an interesting question. I don’t know. Actually, we spent at least two different sabbatical years, my father spent out in a suburb of Paris at an institute for, I think, theoretical physics. So, I went to French schools. So, I think it was in first grade and then again in sixth grade. And the sixth grade is very memorable to me because I didn’t know much French, but my parents had tried to prepare us with teaching us some. But plunged into the French school, and they were much more… I would say the curriculum for the sixth grade was way advanced compared to what I would’ve had in the US. I was really stimulated. I remember I loved the geography classes and map making. It was actually wrapped in with social studies.

And that was my first introduction to… I love maps. That is what I do in my research. And that’s really the year when I just fell in love with making these detailed maps for the social studies class in France. I had no idea it would turn into my science, and I didn’t have thoughts about being a scientist at that point. I loved math, and I was really good at it, so that also stimulated me in France in that year. Yeah, I think I always felt a little different from other kids just because I didn’t spend the summers, like, going to summer camp like all my friends. So, I always felt just a little bit different because I didn’t have that common experience with American kids.

Amico:

What kind of maps were they?

Deser:

I guess the French love probably geography. I remember tracing out of books. I think they were more for history. I mentioned social studies, but maybe it was more history. So, let’s just say we were doing a map of the Middle East, or Egypt, or something. We’d trace it. I would spend hours, like, with the tracing paper up on the window in my bedroom. And then, we’d have to carefully color different geographical features, and then put in probably cities. I forget exactly what historical milestones we put on the maps, but the teacher, she was very exacting. And I really liked that. I think she probably praised my work. But I had never had anything like that in American classrooms. So, I think, yeah, that probably really, in some way, inspired… it just fit with what I was interested. I didn’t realize, but I had that interest.

Amico:

So, these were physical maps, not just political boundaries and stuff like that.

Deser:

Right, exactly. So, it was really geography. I think we still have the map somewhere from those days.

Amico:

That’s cool. I love maps, too, so I appreciate it. When you were in France, the classes were all taught in French.

Deser:

Yes, exactly.

Amico:

And you were just learning as you were there?

Deser:

Yeah, so I think as an 11-12-year-old, it’s that time when you’re not self… or I’ll speak for myself, not self-conscious yet because you’re not quite an adolescent, and just eager to learn. And I loved learning so many different things. I even had to take a foreign language, and I took German because I know English. But it was taught through French. I loved all of this. And the math, I think, was much more advanced from what I had had. I just kind of ate it up. It was a different experience, I think, for my sisters. But for whatever reason, I liked the structure of the French school.

Amico:

And you mentioned you have some siblings. How many siblings did you have, and what were their names?

Deser:

Oh, okay. Actually, I had three sisters. One was killed very tragically in a car accident when she was 9 years old. And I was 7, and that’s kind of a big trauma in the family. So, her name was Eva. My oldest sister is named Toni, and then two years later, Eva, and then two years later, myself, and then four years later, my youngest sister, Abigail. So, there were the four of us. And then, there were the three of us.

Amico:

Did you have a good relationship with your sisters?

Deser:

I had a really strong bond with Eva, so that really was just the tragedy of the family. And then, I became kind of a mothering figure to Abby, Abigail. And Toni and I had not as close of a bond.

Amico:

So, your parents were immigrants.

Deser:

Yeah. Really, truly immigrants.

Amico:

Did they speak good English when they were here or experience any outsider feelings or hostility? And how was that for you, at least growing up in the US?

Deser:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I mentioned my father. So, he is an only child. He came from Ukraine, and they were living in Paris for a few years before World War II. So, then, he and his parents were one of the last set of people to flee Paris as the Nazis were marching in. They traveled south through France and then found this diplomat who was giving visas out. He then paid for it with his life, but his name is de Sousa Mendes. And there’s a Sousa Mendes Foundation. It’s a wonderful website, and they’ve done oral histories with all the people to whom he gave visas, so that allowed them to go to Portugal. And they spent a year in Portugal, waiting for a visa, in their case, to the US. They came to New York. I think other people went to other places. But yeah, my dad was interviewed, maybe, I don’t know, in the last ten years probably by the Sousa de Mendes Foundation.

These are all these survivors or the lucky ones who escaped. But it was really tragic because all of my dad’s parents’ families, everybody, was killed. He had an uncle who traveled with them, and he then went to Israel, so that was the other survivor. Yeah, he came to the US as a 10-year-old, I guess, and his father was a chemist. He made perfumes, and lotions, and cosmetics, I guess it was. And they had a really hard life. His parents didn’t know English. My dad picks up languages super quickly. He knew so many languages. Of course, they were devastated that the Nazis killed their entire family. So, his mother was really depressed. It was very antisemitic. It was hard for his dad to find work. So, they went from a few different cities, St. Louis, Cleveland, I forget what else, and then back to New York, to Brooklyn.

So, it colors my upbringing also. He never was a religious Jew, but cultural. Jewish identity is super strong in me and my siblings. And my dad was a genius in terms of… he got his PhD at age, I don’t know what it was, 20 probably. And he was truly amazing. That’s kind of the background on his side. So, English was no problem at all. And my mother came as an adult. She was in her late 20s when she came, as I mentioned, to Berkeley. She always had a really strong Swedish accent, and I think I kind of inherited a little bit of that. People often ask me, “Where are you from?” I have a strong identity. And she always had a strong accent.

Amico:

Did you ever feel any of that antisemitic hostility when you were growing up? Or just outsider…

Deser:

Newton was a very Jewish suburb, so on the contrary, I felt… my parents were very nonreligious, and I had many Jewish friends who, yeah, they’re going to the temple, they’re getting bar mitzvahed, etc. And my parents were just very, very secular. So, it was kind of a strange… I’ve always felt, yeah, a little… I strongly identify as a Jew. Of course, the Holocaust is part of who I am. But in terms of doing anything formal and religious, I don’t. I never have.

Amico:

Were a lot of your friends growing up from the Jewish community? Or was the public school…

Deser:

It was public school, yeah. I’m trying to remember my closest friends. I think they were a mixture. I wouldn’t say I really gravitated towards Jewish kids. I think it was a combination.

Amico:

In addition to the traveling to France, were you also just doing a lot of traveling? The summers in Sweden, but other than that?

Deser:

Yeah. Even though we were in Sweden most summers, I remember long car trips, especially the years we were in France, to just travel through Europe, and eat good food, and go to museums, like I said, and take walks, go to concerts. That was just something that my parents did. My mother, maybe I’ll mention, her father was also a very well-known theoretical physicist in Sweden, Oskar Klein, and it turned out that my father, independently, had read a lot of Oskar Klein’s work when my dad was at Harvard as a graduate student. Little did he know, he was going to marry Oskar Klein’s daughter. It’s kind of interesting for me and my sisters that my mother grew up with a famous theoretical physicist. Oskar Klein was on the Nobel Prize selection committee, so that was kind of the level of his standing. Yeah. He was a very quiet, kind person, from what I remember.

Amico:

Do you know what attracted your father to theoretical physics? He probably mentions it in his bio.

Deser:

Yeah, it’s in his book. It’s a really good book. I think he was asked… I don’t remember who asked him to write it. It could have even been AIP. I just don’t remember. But it’s in the book. Because after he met my mom, then he found a way to become a postdoc at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen because that’s where my mother was. I think they lived there probably for a year or two. That’s where Toni, my oldest sister, was born. So, my dad spanned from Niels Bohr, Einstein, all the way up to present day. If you read the biography, and of course, I knew the stories from growing up, but my father went to a public high school in Brooklyn. He kept skipping grades. But I think he hadn’t really been exposed that much to science. And then, he had a teacher at Brooklyn College, I think it was a woman physicist, and I think he hadn’t even known that there was a field of theoretical physics.

Graduate school, what’s that? That’s the way he tells it. He just loved it, and it was his vocation, and it’s what he did until the day he died. Truly. And it’s a pencil-and-paper kind of physics. But it was his life. So, it was hard to grow up with a dad like that, we’ll probably get to that, just because he’s super smart and also very widely read and cultured. Both of my parents, really intellectual parents. And quite snobby as a result. And also, the kind of science I do is really different. Like, I’m much more empirical. And it took me a long time into adulthood to realize that my approach is valuable. And my dad definitely is super proud of me, but growing up as a kid, you put your parents up on a pedestal.

Amico:

I have a couple questions from that. I wanted to just circle back real quick to when you were going on these trips, driving through the countryside, and just traveling in general. Was there anything about the experience, going out into the world and seeing this geography, that particularly influenced you as a scientist or as an individual?

Deser:

Well, that’s an interesting question. I think I’ve always felt comfortable, I would say, venturing out in new places because of that experience. Like, I feel like I can find my way. And maybe it is part of my sense of maps and spatial relationships that I feel secure in that way. But I bet the traveling also… “Okay, wow, we’re in this new city. I’m hearing different languages. I’m eating different food.” Yeah, just being exposed to new things and being challenged all the time that way. I think that was a very stimulating way to be. And I think these years in France, the schools in France, I have no doubt that that also stimulated me. I feel like my brain is… you have to be kind of flexible and versatile because I’m in a different place now. How do I learn about it?

Amico:

Yeah, that makes sense. Did you maintain any of those friendships or connections when you were in France after you left?

Deser:

Yeah, not really. My older sister did much more of keeping relationships. I was kind of a shy person. But I still keep up with my Swedish relatives. I don’t do as much as the city traveling as my parents always did, but I still like it, and it’s important to me. I like reading, and music, and art. That’s just part of my upbringing, and I still like it a lot.

Amico:

When you were growing up, did your parents raise you bilingual or multilingual?

Deser:

No, they didn’t. And it’s a regret of mine and my sisters’ because my mother could have so easily spoken to us in Swedish. And my dad picked up languages, as I mentioned, so quickly that whatever country we were in, you name it, France, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, all the European countries, even Spain, he would just speak in that language. He just picked things up really, really fast. In fact, my parents used Swedish or Danish, they’re so similar, as the language that they spoke together when they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying. But my older sister, who then became a linguist, she would tell us what they were saying because she has the language gene as well. Anyway, I speak some French obviously, and I do speak some Swedish, but I wish that I had actually grown up multilingual, but I didn’t.

Amico:

And your Swedish relatives speak English as well?

Deser:

They speak English, yeah.

Amico:

You mentioned your sister had become a linguist, and you had mentioned that your parents were almost snobby at times, intellectuals. Did you feel pressure to become either an intellectual or a scientist as just a kid?

Deser:

Yeah, I think we all did. Not to be a scientist, but yeah, absolutely. Learning was highly, highly valued. I actually thought I would be a social worker, I guess like my mom. I was in this Big Brother/Big Sister program for many, many years because I have empathy and wanted to be helpful that way. I actually didn’t even think of becoming a scientist. I guess maybe towards the end of high school, that’s what I was good at, even though I loved poetry and, like I said, helping the less fortunate. But I was better, at least academically, in math and the sciences. So, yeah, I didn’t set out to be a scientist.

Amico:

And did your siblings feel similar pressures? What did they end up going into?

Deser:

Yeah, my older sister, the linguist, she got a PhD and worked as a postdoc for a while and got a job. And then, she found academia to just be too cutthroat and competitive, and she left academia. And then, my younger sister, I think she ended up getting a master’s degree maybe in architecture and urban planning at MIT, but she’s now a theater director, so she’s now in the arts side. My mom never even graduated from college, and she always felt less-than intellectually because here, we were all getting graduate degrees. And on the contrary, her intelligence was incredible. The two of them, my parents, would talk all night about things, and she was widely read, and all of that. But yeah, I don’t know why. Always the symbolism of an advanced degree. So, I guess there was that. I don’t know if it was a pressure, but maybe an expectation that academic learning was very valued.

Amico:

Was there ever a sense that it would be harder as a woman to achieve these intellectual accolades for you and your siblings?

Deser:

It’s an interesting thing because we were all girls. It would’ve been interesting if I had had a brother. Would my dad have treated that gender differently? I feel like he treated, at least what I understand from my sisters, me maybe differently because I was following in his footsteps, so to speak. And I was quick at… he would always be teaching me. “Learn Euclidian geometry.” I remember doing a paper on it in middle school or something, and I loved it. But it was also hard to keep up with my dad’s expectation. I was quick, but I wasn’t at his level. And I was also very much into sports. But I think he did value that he had one child or one daughter who went into the sciences.

Amico:

I wanted to ask a little bit about what kind of house you grew up in. Did your family maintain their residence in Newton throughout your whole childhood?

Deser:

Nice questions. So, yes, when I was born in Waltham, I guess that was a small house where my parents lived. And then, since I was the third kid, I think they were thinking ahead to a good school district, and Newton, I guess, had one of the best public school districts in the country, so that’s why we moved there. And we moved to a nice middle-class neighborhood. It wasn’t super fancy. There are different parts of Newton. Some are fancier than others. Mine is Newtonville, and I grew up at 45 Whitney Road in Newtonville. And it was just a two-story wooden house. Really liked it. I lived there almost all of my childhood. I guess probably I moved… I think it was before Abby was born, so probably at age 2 or 3, that’s when we moved there.

And then, after my sister Eva was killed, I think we stayed in that house, but that was the beginning for them to feel like they needed to be in a different house because of memories and whatever. So, then, we spent many a Sunday looking for a different house in Newton. And my parents never found it, but then they found a lot that they could build on, and then they had a very modern, beautiful house designed for them. So, my last year of high school, we had to live with a friend who had room for us because we’d sold our house, but the new one wasn’t ready yet. It was like, “Okay, poor planning.” [laughs] So, yeah, we lived with this neighbor in a different part of Newton for my last year.

Amico:

How would you describe the dynamics? I think you said your mom stayed at home.

Deser:

Yeah, she stayed at home. We had au pairs when I was growing up. We had a series feel them. There was a Danish one, there was an English one. They were always European. They helped my mom with all of us. My mom loved cooking. That’s how she kept herself sane, I think. That was a big thing for her whole life, actually. So, that’s a strong memory for me of my mother making dinner parties and getting frazzled, but also, I think, really, that was how she kept interested. She was super interested in things.

Amico:

And your father was busy often?

Deser:

Yeah, he was at Brandeis every day, teaching and doing his research. And he had a study in the house. It was like a beautiful room at the side of the house that looked onto our little backyard. I remember long weekend afternoons, he would be at his desk, just doing his physics. You could tell he was holding his forehead, trying to puzzle something out. And meanwhile, I’d be playing on the jungle gym right outside his window. So, I was very aware that he was working hard and using his mind. And he also played with us a lot. He wasn’t a distant father. But he worked hard, for sure.

Amico:

As a part of that, did you have a library or a lot of books in your house?

Deser:

Yeah, my parents had a lot of books. And they also listened to music every night. They would put on whatever, and this continued for their whole lives. They would put on classical music on the record player, and I would fall asleep upstairs listening to their music. And that’s a really strong memory for me. I think my love of music… I was exposed to it as a little kid, classical music. Yeah, it was very powerful. That’s what they did in the evenings. They listened to music, they read, and my mom watched TV when TV came out. My dad didn’t really, but she did.

Amico:

Were there any particular books that really resonated with you?

Deser:

That’s a good question. I did like to read. Not as much as my older sister, Toni, but yeah. I actually remember one book, I think it was a kid who died, and it was echoing my sister’s death. And I remember that was powerful. My parents couldn’t really talk about her death, so that was something that we all had to… the grief inside of us, we couldn’t really share it as a family. My parents shared it together, but they just wanted to keep some normalcy in the family, normal childhood. In the end, I don’t think that was so healthy. But they tried. That was the best that they could do. So, there was always unspoken sadness. It was kind of taboo to even mention her. That changed as part of my growing up to understand that that wasn’t healthy, and it was important to talk about her. But they couldn’t do that. So, yeah, I loved reading. I remember The Scarlet Pimpernel. I also liked adventure books, I would say. [laughs] I still like reading.

Amico:

Were there any books or other media like science magazines or TV? Or just books that particularly influenced you or that you were interested in?

Deser:

No. No. [laughs] Let me think about it. I do remember, I mentioned it, this project with… I don’t even know if it was for my math class, but I had to pick a topic, and I picked this non-Euclidian geometry, and I remember I did read some books about that. And it was kind of beyond me, but I tried. And I remember thinking really hard to try to understand, and I loved that. Your mind had to try to visualize this non-Euclidian geometry. But no, in general, I wouldn’t say I read science books, no.

Amico:

You had mentioned earlier that you’d visit a lot of museums growing up? What kind of museums were they? Were there particular ones you liked more than others?

Deser:

Yeah, my mother was very interested in modern art and abstract art. We were dragged to tons of exhibitions. And also, sculpture. A typical weekend was, we’d take a walk somewhere in the woods, and we’d go to a museum with some modern art. So, I just grew up learning about these artists and recognizing their pictures.

Amico:

Did you ever think you might want to be an artist as well?

Deser:

No, I didn’t. I liked photography at one point. I love color, I love the aesthetic. I think my maps are a little bit of a blend of science and art, actually, and the way that I do my science, the way that my mother described doing her art, not so different, really. You’re kind of feeling your way. You’re thinking, but you’re also letting just these direct sensory… I don’t know, when I look at a map of the data when I’m plotting, and I try to understand, “Oh, why does it have this pattern?” And then, it makes me think of, “Okay, maybe if I analyze something this way, what will it teach me about the physics underlying this pattern of climate variability?” And I kind of feel like my mother had a similar approach, like you can’t really articulate why you’re doing the next step that you’re doing.

She had a studio in Boston, and we would love to go there. And she had huge canvases on the walls, and it was all abstract, completely abstract, and she was self-taught. She had exhibits and a painting bought by the Museum of Fine Arts. And my dad was really just super respectful, and happy, and proud, we all were, of what she did. So, yeah, just this aesthetic sense. For me, structure is really important. Like, structure of how to write a paper, structure how to make a good map, how to give a good talk. I always have to… it’s chaos at the beginning, and then I have to find some structure. And then, I feel like, “Okay, I have a way forward.”

Amico:

That’s fascinating. I think especially kind of looking at how people think about maps as being authoritative and objective, when the creator of the map… it’s always someone’s perspective of how things are, so what you’re saying is really interesting. I wanted to ask if you had visited any science or history museums as a kid, or not so much?

Deser:

Not so much, no. I remember going as a kid, probably quite often, or not so seldom, anyway, to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. They have a beautiful collection of butterflies and all kinds of insects. And then, they have the glass flowers. They’re beautiful exhibitions. So, yeah, I think whatever city we were in… yeah, it didn’t have to just be an art museum. I think we probably did go to natural history. So, I liked those, but it was just something we did.

Amico:

How did your interest in science first start when you were growing up?

Deser:

Yeah, I think I always loved… actually, I have a photo my mom gave me of me when I was younger. I think I liked the mapmaking in sixth grade. That’s for sure kind of a big point of reference. But even before that, I think that first time when we were getting ready to go to France when I was in first grade, I think my mom had our au pair teach us some French. We were just at home, and we would get gold stars if we did well. And I loved it. Like, I just loved it. I loved learning something new. So, that didn’t have to do with science, but I think learning. My interest in science, I guess I was good at math, and after the year in France, then I came back to the US, and I was in seventh grade, which was junior high, and I guess I was put in an eighth- or ninth-grade math class because I had learned so much in France. I think it was probably algebra at the time.

And I loved it. But I remember also feeling a little awkward because I knew that my dad kind of… he skipped all these grades, so I kind of felt like I was also being pushed a little bit, and I was very aware I was younger than the other kids. On the other hand, I didn’t feel like I was a prodigy in any way. I was good at it. And then, I think in ninth grade… or whatever grade I was in, but I was taking the ninth-grade math class, and it was hard, and it didn’t come easily. And I remember feeling like, “Yeah, I’m not my dad.” [laughs] I kind of downplayed a bit my… maybe kind of a female trait of not wanting to appear smart or not believing in myself. I definitely have very strong impostor syndrome, and that’s taken a long, long time to kind of feel that I am good at what I do. [laughs] But it was a huge mental challenge for me.

Amico:

I was going to ask what your impression was of scientists growing up. I’m sure you had your impression of your dad, but also other people.

Deser:

Right. Great question. I think mostly, my impression was through my father. And this is in the 1960s and ’70s. Theoretical physics, super male-dominated and very cutthroat. Dinner conversations, he would dominate, and it would be very critical of other physicists. I think it was in those times, and it was just very sad. He was a wonderful human being and a really loving father. But I don’t know, that was the times and the culture. And he definitely, I think, would criticize others and criticize women in the field. Both my parents would always be critical after going to a dinner party or something with other physics friends. The kids didn’t go, of course, but then they would always have to criticize these people.

It was a weird feeling, like, “Hm, I’m not sure I like scientists.” Right? There’s my dad, who I love, but then the science persona was actually not very pleasant. I knew he loved what he did, so it wasn’t the true love of physics, it was more how they treated each other. I’m reading this book right now called The Exceptions. It’s about the MIT women. The main character is Nancy Hopkins, who’s a biologist. But it’s about how in the ’60s, ’70s, even ’80s, women at MIT were being ill-treated, treated much less than their male counterparts, and finally it came out in a big report. You should definitely read that. It’s eye-opening, and I’m so glad I’m reading it now.

I went to MIT as an undergrad, and I transferred there from… I went to Smith College for my first year. In high school, taking the SATs and doing well, I should’ve taken a year off because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I just kind of defaulted to… Smith College said, “We admit you early-decision if you say yes.” I didn’t want to have to grow up and figure anything out, so I just went there. And then, after that, it became evident to me during that year, probably pretty quickly, but certainly at least halfway through, that wasn’t a place I wanted to stay. It was a super protected environment. It felt very artificial to me. I took geology classes because I was interested in maybe doing field work because I loved being outdoors. So, I did geology, I took math, I took music. I loved the music class. Like, early music.

And then, I took a poetry class. And those are the main ones that I remember. So, you can tell, I have all these interests. And then, I just felt like… I don’t know. I didn’t feel like we were not being educated… like, what comes after Smith College? I didn’t see any encouragement. Smith is a fancy private school, and there were many women from really wealthy backgrounds. Anyway, it was not the place I wanted to be. So, then, I had to figure out how to transfer, and my dad encouraged me to apply to MIT. And this is 1979, I guess. MIT was probably, like, 10% women at the time, something like that. It had never crossed my mind to apply to MIT. Like I say, I was not a super gifted science-math person, and I also didn’t see myself as this… I’m going to use the term nerdy. I am nerdy, but not in quite that way. And I didn’t see myself at that level, actually, of an MIT stereotype.

So, I applied to Cornell, I applied to MIT, and then there was one other place, I think. And I had hoped to go to Cornell, but they didn’t accept me. Anyway, MIT did. So, it was, again, a little bit of a default, my dad encouraging me and getting in. And yeah, going from an all-women’s school to basically 90% male was so different. Small school, kind of coddled school to MIT, an urban school, and big classes. And my math class, the first math class I took was differential equations, and I think I got… I don’t think it was an F, I think it was a D, but it could’ve been an F, on my first test, I think the first test period at MIT. It was like, “Whoa, that’s never happened before.” And that was another moment of truth. What do you do with that? And then, I ended up getting an A in the class.

So, that was just like, “I really like this class. Wow, I’m going to have to really learn how to study and learn how to be a good student.” MIT was a mixed bag for me. I learned a lot, I met really interesting people, but it also was very intimidating. Academically, I felt like I was good at doing what needed to be done in terms of doing well enough on exams and doing a lot of rote learning. You kind of figure out how to do things well, but I didn’t learn how to think on my own until I went to graduate school. So, it was a mixed bag. I’m glad I went, no doubt, and it led to so many other good opportunities, but it was tough.

Amico:

Did you feel like Smith wasn’t challenging you in the way that you felt you needed to be challenged intellectually?

Deser:

I think so, but maybe it was also just, “Why are we being educated?” I didn’t see where the knowledge would take me, and I guess maybe I didn’t encounter peers who were… they were just interested in it for its own sake. I don’t know, I just felt it was a very artificial environment. I wasn’t in the real world, I was in some bubble.

Amico:

Interesting. We’ll circle back to that. You had this impression of your parents and your father as a scientist, and how it was sort of the mentality of a scientist or the way a scientist has to be within his field in order to be a part of it, and you were like, “Maybe this is problematic in some way.” Did you feel that other people that you interacted with who were scientists maybe weren’t publicly like that but also had to have that mentality?

Deser:

When I was a kid? Yeah, in my childhood, we would visit a lot of my dad’s colleagues. If we would be going on a trip, we would stay at their houses. So, I knew that there were friendships my dad had with other scientists. Yeah, it was a weird disconnect. You’re not going to bring your family to stay with another family unless you truly do have a personal connection, but on the other hand, they could be so critical of one another’s work. I think it’s just this competition, that somebody always has to be the one to discover. When I found my science of climate science, and my advisor, and all of that, I just saw this really different way. It just fit me very well to work with other people. You’re not thinking of yourself as the lone scientist. I need people to bounce things off of, I like learning from other people. I need to do it with others. It’s a different brand and mold from what I saw of my dad. I don’t think he was happy. It was too bad that that’s what things were like. He was at Brandeis, but his peer group was MIT and Harvard. Obviously, they’re the top ones.

Amico:

Do you think your siblings shared these kind of sentiments?

Deser:

Yes. I think my older sister especially, who, in the end, couldn’t take the competition of academia. It’s sad that it has to be like that.

Amico:

I also wanted to ask you what your impression of artists was when you were growing up, if you had a different idea and how that might have influenced you.

Deser:

I’m not sure I knew artists. Later, my mom had friendships with other artists, and I was so happy for her, it wasn’t always that the friendships had to be through the physics community, but it was from her art community. And I liked those people a lot. But I don’t think growing up… well, maybe it was not uncommon for the man to be a physicist and the wife was an artist in some capacity, like a poet. I remember one was a poet, one did art. So, I don’t think that was uncommon, but it’s not like I really knew them.

Amico:

Other science families?

Deser:

Exactly.

Amico:

That’s really interesting. I was just wondering if you had any impression of meteorology growing up or atmospheric science and how that may have influenced your interests. Climate science is maybe too specific.

Deser:

Yeah, so like I said, I wasn’t a weather weenie or anything like that. I knew I loved the outdoors, and that’s how geology became my first major, so I think I did have a sense that I wanted to… I feel like I could have done many things through my interest in maps. It could have been more in the geology realm or the cartography realm, and then it ended up that I came to it during my time at MIT. I can’t think of any moments where I knew I loved looking at cloud patterns or whatever.

Amico:

What kind of outdoor hobbies did you have? You mentioned hiking. Was that the big one?

Deser:

I loved doing that, but my parents… we didn’t do that much… we did some in the New Hampshire White Mountains. My mom grew up in more of an outdoor lifestyle in Sweden. That’s just how they are. My dad couldn’t throw a ball for anything. So, sports was kind of my thing. I played tennis all the time, just myself hitting it against a backboard. And then, when I had a friend who wanted to play, I would play with them. But you could always find me on the tennis court. [laughs] But I didn’t do, really, team sports. I think at one point, I was on the tennis team. I wasn’t that great at it. Later, I did a bunch of canoeing and hiking, but that was later on.

Amico:

Were there any other hobbies you had growing up, not just the outdoors but in general? Or even groups, teams, clubs, anything like that?

Deser:

Let’s see. Saturdays, in the winters, there was some ski bus that would take kids from junior high up to the White Mountains. I did that. I always played an instrument. That was a big deal for me, so I think I probably started with recorder, but then I played piano, and I played all my life. It’s just really important for me, a balance. When I don’t have it in my life, I’m more stressed. I just love it, and it’s really helpful. And I played different instruments in high school. I wasn’t such a good pianist that I could play with an orchestra or anything, but I wanted to play music with other people, so I tried to learn the oboe, tried to learn classical guitar. I forget what else. Then, later in life, I learned the Celtic harp. But piano is the one that’s kept through my whole life, so that was a big hobby. And I’ve sung in choruses always. I’m not singing in one now, but I did as a kid and through college. Did I do it in grad school? I forget. But even now in Boulder, I’ve sung with groups.

Amico:

What kind of music did you enjoy playing?

Deser:

Classical.

Amico:

In your bio that you sent me, some of it was about community work. You mentioned that climate communication was one of your professional passions. I was wondering if you were ever involved or aware, as a kid at least, in any of the environmental movement, activism, anything like that.

Deser:

No, I wasn’t. And I think what I sent you, I told you that someone was putting me up for an award in Germany, and he had asked me to summarize, and I think I wanted to show a little more well-roundedness. But also, I do a lot of community… I try to develop resources and tools for other climate scientists. Maybe it just dovetails. I don’t see myself as this lone scientist. I very much like to engage other people, younger people, and try to be helpful. I should say, I’m passionate about communication. I don’t give public talks. I have, but I find them very stressful. I work hard at them, and I think they go well, but I’m more of an introvert, I would say. But I developed something blending my music and my climate science.

I don’t think the exhibit is working right now, but I have this exhibit called Sound in Climate, where I found a person who does sonification to sonify the output from a climate model. That was a really cool project, a huge amount of work. And now, it’s one of the exhibits on the NCAR tours, and the tour guides always tell me how it’s a hit with the public. I’m proud of it, and I also feel like, “Wow, there could be so much more to do.” And I’ve tried to find other people to interface with to develop that further or get grants, but it hasn’t happened, which is fine. But yeah, that was a fun blending. You don’t have to do science necessarily through graphs. There can be other ways people can receive information.

Amico:

That’s really interesting. I guess I want to ask if there were any particular classes that you took in secondary school, or secondary school teachers, or individuals outside of your family who really had a strong influence on you in science and as a person.

Deser:

That’s a really good question. I really, really liked my English teacher in high school. And I also liked the math teacher I had for my last year of junior high. She was the one who I felt like I fell short of maybe my own expectation of how I did in that class. But I remember thinking, “Wow, this is a woman math teacher. Wow, she knows so much.” She was a really good teacher. So, I was influenced by her. And then, this English teacher, I liked. Not sure if I had any others who were true mentors. Maybe I’m forgetting.

Amico:

Do you remember their names by chance?

Deser:

I remember the math teacher. I don’t remember her last name. Her name was something like Ina. English teacher, can’t remember right now.

Amico:

And what was the high school that you went to?

Deser:

I went to Newton North.

Amico:

How was the high school experience?

Deser:

I felt very anonymous. It was a huge school. I don’t know if it was, like, 1,000 kids. They had consolidated different high schools. It was a brand new high school, or the building anyway. I just felt very anonymous, I was a very awkward, shy adolescent. I had a few friends, but I wasn’t really part of groups. I just felt awkward.

Amico:

Were you still taking the advanced math courses?

Deser:

I think probably. I don’t really remember. I remember taking a chemistry class and wasn’t all that enamored of it, nor was I very good at it.

Amico:

Did you experience antisemitic hostility in school much?

Deser:

No. As I said, there were a lot of kids in the Newton schools. So, no.

Amico:

Were there any people or things that you would say had the greatest influence on you in science or in general as a kid or growing up?

Deser:

I think the answer is no. I wish I had, probably, had someone. But no, I didn’t.

Amico:

I guess we can go into how you decided to go to Smith at first. Did you always expect to go to college? And how did you ultimately decide to go to Smith?

Deser:

Yeah, I think I touched on that before. I definitely expected to go to college. I didn’t want to have to make any decisions, and they sent me a letter saying, “We’ll admit you early admission based on your test scores.” And if I said yes, then that meant I didn’t have to apply to any schools.

Amico:

So, you didn’t apply there, they recruited you.

Deser:

Yeah. So, I said yes, and then I didn’t have to apply anywhere. And it was close to home, it was maybe a two-hour bus ride or something. I liked that it was in a more rural part of the state, and I liked that it was small. The fact that it was an all-women’s school, I think that did appeal to me. So, yeah, it was kind of a nondecision.

Amico:

Your older sister had already gone to college?

Deser:

Yeah, she went to Barnard, and so did my younger sister. So, they’re city people, and I’m the country person.

Amico:

When you were at Smith, you lived on campus for the first year?

Deser:

Yes.

Amico:

What would you say the campus culture was like while you were there?

Deser:

Yeah, there were these beautiful old houses. I can almost remember the name of my house, as it was called. I had a roommate, I remember she was from South Bend, Indiana, very nice person. I had some good friendships there. I think there were these weird parties. This was one the Seven Sisters schools. There were, I guess, parties with the all-men’s schools, or maybe it was more the Ivy League schools, which I hated, and I wasn’t part of at all, that part of the culture.

Amico:

You mentioned this earlier, sort of a more liberal arts. Was there a robust science curriculum or anything like that?

Deser:

I think that there was, or at least to some extent. But like I said, I think I took math, I can’t even remember. I definitely took geology because that was something I’d never taken before, and I thought, “Wow, field trips, that would be really interesting.” I can’t remember what other science I took, if any. Yep, don’t really remember. I do remember I loved poetry, I still do, and I got an F or a D on my paper about a Wordsworth poem. But it just felt terrible to me because how can you judge somebody on how they read poetry? I didn’t like that at all. [laughs] Let me just read it.

Amico:

When did you know that you wanted to transfer away from Smith?

Deser:

I don’t remember exactly, but you have to put in your applications fairly soon. I think it was after the first semester, I realized, “I don’t want to be here for four years.” It just felt too limited, too small. It was just clear to me I didn’t want to be there. And I didn’t want to be at an all-women’s school anymore either. That felt artificial and too protected.

Amico:

How did you feel about the prospect of going to an all-women’s school when you were recruited?

Deser:

I guess I felt fine about that. Again, it was a non-decision. I was fine with that.

Amico:

When you applied to MIT, were you thinking, “I’m planning to be a science major,” at that point?

Deser:

Presumably. [laughs] I don’t know at all what I wrote on the application. I think, since I had liked geology, I then went into Earth and Planetary Sciences. That was the department that I majored in. So, I must’ve written that down.

Amico:

I wanted to ask what your impressions of the campus culture at MIT was. Did it seem very chauvinistic? Because you said it was very male dominated.

Deser:

Right. I had a very good experience in terms of my living situation. They had just opened a new dorm, these small clusters that were more apartment style. And it was called French House. I knew French, and I didn’t want to be in some big dorm, I knew that. Maybe I had visited, I don’t remember. These were just cool, and new, and more apartment style. And they were small. I don’t know how many we were in French House at a time. I’m going to say 30 people, something like that. Maybe five bedrooms and a kitchen, I can’t remember. But such interesting people. You had to have some knowledge of French, but also very smart people but also had wide interests and hobbies. Like music, theater, super talented, out-of-the-box, creative people. I really liked it. I think it would’ve been really hard otherwise to be at a school as big as MIT. I’m sure there were many more men than women at French House, but it wasn’t as lopsided as the entire campus.

So, it was a very fun environment. I met my then-husband, Jonathan, at French House. That was also really nice. I’d go to a lot of concerts in Boston, classical music, and I joined the MIT Chorus, took piano lessons at the Longy School of Music. I did a lot of non-science stuff at MIT. I took a really interesting class with a pretty well-known composer, John Harbison, modern music composer. I forget what the class was called, but we had to compose our own music in certain styles. I remember we would each play it, and I would play mine on the piano because I knew the piano, and I remember he just… “Wow, why don’t you go into music? You have this in you.” I maybe could’ve gone that direction. I don’t think I’m that good of a musician, and actually, the music is really just for me, not for outward. [laughs]

But that was a cool moment, to realize that somebody was recognizing other parts of me. I don’t mean to say just in terms of belittling, but don’t look at me as a person who is just climate science. Everybody has so many dimensions to them, and I felt like that was validated at this French House experience at MIT. I met people who, yeah, they worked super hard on problem sets and academics, but we also put a lot of energy into our other vocations. And maybe I gravitated to the people who were more on the music side. That was cool. I think people didn’t even realize that MIT, especially now, but even in those early days, was really building a broader portfolio of classes. It’s not just the hard sciences.

Amico:

Were a lot of the other people in French House taking science classes, but also having these other interests?

Deser:

Yes, absolutely. That was a really good community to be in. I think if I hadn’t been in that, I don’t know if I would’ve lasted. And then, MIT, I had to find my way. I started in Earth and Planetary Sciences, and I took geology. As I mentioned earlier, I was good at memorizing, and I did great on all the geology exams. But then, it just got too… I don’t know, I remember the end of the first year, we did a lot of thin sections of rocks, and you had to identify the minerals and everything. And at that point, I realized, “It’s just not of interest anymore.” I had to figure out what to do. At MIT, it’s Earth and Planetary Sciences, it’s a big green building, it’s called the Green Building. It was the first building, I believe, that I. M. Pei designed. And I. M. Pei designed this one. It’s, like, a scary concrete tower. And this is a concrete tower, too, but it couldn’t be more different. Had very few windows.

But anyway, I started to audit classes. At the time, they just had a graduate program in meteorology, maybe it was called, I don’t know. So, it was just grad students. I can’t remember how I even knew that there were meteorology classes. I just remember, “Okay, geology’s not going to be it. Now what?” Maybe I just saw in the Green Building course advertisements. I don’t know, I don’t even remember. But I remember then starting to audit courses. And then, obviously, I must’ve liked it. One of the classes that I audited, there was some oceanography, but I think it was maybe the first meteorology class, and it was maybe half a dozen students. There weren’t many. And they were all grad students. And this professor, kind of older, kind of slight person, he comes in, and he never had any notes. He would once in a while take a little piece of paper to look up a formula out of his pocket or his suit. That was Ed Lorenz. I didn’t know anything, but it was really special.

And then, it was the summer of my junior year, so I guess I’d been there two years, or probably a year and a half when I decided I wanted to do one of the undergrad summer research opportunities, UROP. So, I found a meteorology professor, Professor Reginald Newell. He was an Englishman, a little bit eccentric and kind of known for that. And he had a problem with fluorescent lights, so you knew that he was walking into your office when he shut the lights off. I think it would disrupt his… he would get headaches or something. Anyway, he took me on, and he gave me a great project that was a strip chart recording of the amount of sunlight that was being measured on the ship. It was a research ship that was going from… it was called the Tahiti to Hawaii Shuttle.

I don’t even know what research program it was part of, but it was a regular set of research cruises. And he had the hypothesis that changes in the amount of sunlight due to changes in cloud cover were what triggered El Niño events. There was a big room for grad students, and they gave me a desk. I remember sitting in the hot, humid summer of Boston. And I would literally, by hand, use something called a planimeter to integrate the area under the curve of this recording of sunlight. And I loved it. It was very repetitive, very maybe mind-numbing, but for me, it was like, “Wow, nobody else has this data. I have a question that I’m trying to answer.” I was just fascinated. I was really fascinated. Even though it was very drudgery kind of work doing this, every day, I came in and did my next set of measurements. And in the end, I knew I would have a set of data that would either tell us, “Yes, this hypothesis has some evidence, validity,” or not.

And in the end, it wasn’t correct, but we also couldn’t really fully answer it because the ship is moving all the time, so you don’t know in any one spot how the cloud cover changed. But anyway, that was my introduction to research. It was empirical research. It was not what my dad did. And I really realized, “I actually like this.” That was my first inkling of climate science and research. And then, I did a lot of oceanography courses in my last year, and I would take the bus down to Woods Hole. They have a joint program. Very theoretical classes. I remember, by the end there were a couple classes that I just knew… I was good at the math, it’s not a problem, but it’s not the way that I think. I could learn it, but it’s not the way that I think. But I obviously liked incorporating learning about oceanography, and in those days, oceanography and atmospheric science were pretty separated.

Now, departments have both. But they were really almost separate disciplines. Anyway, that led to, then, after I graduated, working as a seagoing oceanographer at Woods Hole for a year after MIT. I think at that point, I realized, “Wow, I like research. Maybe I’ve found my discipline with climate.” But I didn’t want to continue right away for grad school. I was pretty burned out from MIT, and I also, I realized, when I thought about which graduate programs to apply to, MIT was not on my list. I knew it’s not my brand of science to do it theoretically. So, it was good to have that year. I really liked having that experience of going to sea and taking measurements.

And ultimately, that led me to apply to grad school. And I decided to apply to grad school in atmospheric science, not oceanography because in those days, there wasn’t a lot of oceanographic data that was spatially complete. It was more these field measurements like buoys or whatever. And my interest in maps just didn’t suit that. Meteorology, atmospheric science, you can look at patterns because there were enough weather stations and stuff that you could make sense of things in a spatial way. So, pretty much, I would say that’s what dictated my path.

Amico:

That’s a great story. After you had done the research assistantship, you became, really, a full major in the Planetary and Earth Sciences?

Deser:

Yeah, I think I got my degree in that. I was assigned an advisor, Ed Boyle, and I think he was a chemical oceanographer. They had to assign me someone. And I remember, you would meet once or twice a year to talk about courses to take and what is needed for graduation. Obviously, since atmospheric science and oceanography were only graduate programs, that wasn’t going to be my major because I couldn’t. So, I was still in Earth and Planetary. But obviously, I was designing my own curriculum. Which was fine. I had to take all the required physics and math courses, but in the field that I was interested in, I was just sitting in on classes.

Amico:

What was your impression of the Earth and Planetary Science Department at the time? I know as undergrads, sometimes you don’t really get a sense of departments.

Deser:

That’s a great question. I guess there was something very special, I could tell, about Ed Lorenz, not knowing at all who he was. It was very interesting, rigorous. Like, “Wow, we’re applying math and physics understanding to the atmosphere or fluid dynamics of the atmosphere.” Not something I’d ever thought about. But I really liked that blending. It wasn’t theoretical, it was actually applied to the real world. In terms of impression of the department, I guess maybe I didn’t really witness how the department functioned since I was an undergrad. But I guess the summer of doing the UROP project, I met other graduate students who were in Reginald Newell’s group, and I liked them a lot.

They did different things, but maybe that was my first inkling of grad students talking to each other about their work and also just common time of life. I think that probably also made me realize, “This could be a really nice next step,” to do grad school. But it was all male professors. You have to read this book The Exceptions. And the book covers the time I was at MIT, and I think I was oblivious probably to that. But it was super male dominated. There were no women professors. But I wanted to say, when you mentioned Sharon Nicholson, and I said, “I know Sharon,” I have to tell you the story. I guess I must’ve sat in on a course that Reginald Newell taught before I did the UROP with him. Now, I’m remembering. He taught a course, and I don’t know what the name was, but probably something that had to do with paleoclimate. It wasn’t just modern-day climate, but how do we look at climate in the past, what kind of data do we have?

And I still remember, he invited guest speakers, and he invited Sharon Nicholson. And I was a second year at MIT. And she was at I think Clark University maybe in Worcester. And she came and gave a talk, maybe even more than one lecture, I can’t remember. Probably. That was when she was pioneering the Sahel rainfall and also going back in time with other kinds of data, maybe pollen. I don’t remember exactly. But that lecture, or maybe it was a set of lectures, really stood out to me, and maybe because she was a woman also, and there really weren’t other women that I’d been exposed to who were in the field. But realizing, “She’s making maps of data, and she’s learning about climate,” that was definitely an influence.

I guess it was through that class that I even thought of approaching Reginald Newell for the summer research project. So, Sharon Nicholson is a piece of my… I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a really important moment for me. It’s cool, isn’t it? I should tell her that. She probably has no idea. I’m sure she didn’t even know I was in that class or anything. But she was one of the few pioneering women. I don’t know that she was treated all that well, actually. But I could tell, just the example in front of me of Professor Newell having the utmost respect for what she was doing, and probably unconsciously, also, I picked up on that.

Amico:

That’s a cool story.

Deser:

I know. When you mentioned her, I went right to that.

Amico:

Were there a lot of other women majoring or even grad students?

Deser:

I wasn’t majoring in that. But Reginald Newell, there was this couple, I don’t know if they were married at the time or maybe they got married later, her name also maybe was Sharon, I can’t quite remember, his name was John. And they were Dr. Newell’s grad students. I think that made an impression on me also. I can’t remember who the others were, but they were really kind to me. She was especially. So, I think that was important for me also. Like, “Wow, here’s another woman.” And I think she had her struggles; she wasn’t a superstar. But actually, we can track her name down, I think, because later—I didn’t know that this was what she was working on—I think I came across some papers. Reginald Newell had written a series of papers on what’s called the stratospheric fountain. How I guess, maybe, deep convection in thunderstorms, how it lofts up into the stratosphere, and that’s part of a big circulation called the Brewer-Dobson circulation. And I think that this grad student whom I’m calling Sharon… I’ll probably look it up after this conversation. I think that’s what she was working on, which is really cool. So, yeah, just seeing this empirical approach, seeing other women, and using real data, I guess that all just appealed to me.

Amico:

When you were getting into this field, did your parents have any thoughts on it? Like, “Oh, we’re glad that you’re in science”? Or, “This isn’t the science that we…”

Deser:

That’s a great question. I don’t remember that they had any criticism. I think they were happy that I had gone through MIT. I think my dad was a little surprised I wanted to go to Woods Hole for a year because that was such a tiny place, but that’s what I wanted. He said, “Why don’t you do something more exciting, like go to Europe somewhere?” I don’t know. But again, that was him, that wasn’t me, and that wasn’t where I was at. When I applied to grad school, I think they were happy for me. They were sad I went all the way to Seattle, that’s for sure. But I think I kind of knew that I needed to find my own path, and I needed to be away from them.

Amico:

Did you ever keep in touch with any of the professors or grad students from MIT after you left the department?

Deser:

I didn’t really. I definitely encountered Reginald Newell probably a handful of times at conferences, I believe. And then, the two people who hired me as a research assistant at Woods Hole the year that I worked, especially Bob Weller, he was the younger of the two, and the other guy was named Mel Briscoe. And Bob Weller, I would see at meetings and sometimes have email exchange with. They tried to get me to apply to be a research scientist at Woods Hole after some years, but I didn’t want to. So, yeah, I kind of kept loosely in touch with them. In terms of the MIT professors, certainly not Lorenz. I didn’t have any contact with him. And then, there were a couple of oceanographers. Joe Pedlosky, he’s a very well-known oceanographer, and I took his class. We actually played music together. He played the clarinet in Woods Hole. If I saw him at meetings, I would say hi. But I was very intimidated by these more theoretical fluid dynamics professors.

Amico:

You had mentioned you definitely didn’t want to go back to graduate school at MIT. Was there anything, other than the theoretical stuff, that was off-putting about the department or the school? Was there a lot of harassment or anything that you witnessed?

Deser:

It’s a good question. I think it was really just the intense theoretical side of things. It was just not my forte. I just knew that wasn’t for me. MIT was tough. It was really hard. The classes were hard. I think I didn’t want to go back into that environment, big classes. Probably, I bet, having to do with seeing all male professors. Yeah. And I think I just knew I wanted to get out of Boston also. I needed to find my own way.

Amico:

Did you have a sense of where you wanted your career as a scientist to go at this point?

Deser:

I guess enough to feel like I wanted to go to graduate school. And then, I applied to the more well-known programs, and I came to interview. And I remember interviewing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and being really treated so respectfully. It was just such a nice feeling from the beginning, I would say, this more climate-oriented set of people. Even from the beginning of being hosted as a potential graduate student. University of Wisconsin, Madison, and then I went to University of Washington to interview. I thought there was a third one, which I can’t remember right now. And they’d all kind of offered me… well, they had flown me out. Whether they had offered me a… probably, they had admitted me. I can’t remember if they had offered me a graduate assistantship. But then, when I went to the University of Washington, and I met Mike Wallace, who then became my advisor, he had gone to MIT, and he knew Reginald Newell. That wasn’t his advisor, it was someone named Victor P. Starr, but he knew Reginald Newell.

And Mike was very much in the same vein of using data. We’re not collecting our own, we’re using existing datasets and trying to make sense, understand things to make the spatial patterns. And I remember showing him my summer research project as an undergrad and also what I had done as an oceanographer that year, and he was, again, just very respectful of me and science, had a kind demeanor, and was interested. [laughs] I really felt like he would be someone who… as I keep saying, I think I had just felt intimidated by the MIT theoretical nature, and Mike Wallace was this wonderful… very much the way I think about things, very empirical approach. And I just realized, “This is perfect. This is perfect.” I’m going to have to tell him that I’m doing this interview because I’ve thanked him so much over the years, but it really is special. And I think almost all of his students have felt the same way. Someone said to me, “Dave Thompson, he hit the jackpot.”

Amico:

Do you think we should stop here?

Deser:

Yeah. Maybe pause it for a moment.

[End of session 1]

[Begin session 2]

Amico:

This is Frank Amico back at the Mesa Lab at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It’s Monday, August 12, and I’m here with Clara Deser, continuing our oral history interview. Last time, we talked about your undergrad, and I think we mostly covered that experience. And after that, you ended up working as a research assistant at Woods Hole. I wanted to ask you how that first came about and how you got connected with that.

Deser:

Okay. I think I told you last time, I was interested in going to graduate school, but I knew I needed a break. And I wanted to stay in the Boston area. In those days, it was before email became the way to communicate. So, I wrote a letter, typed it up, and sent it to every physical oceanography scientist at Woods Hole. I remember just saying who I was, and is anybody looking for a research assistant for a year? I think I was still auditing a class, it was in the spring of ’82. And I remember going into the mail room and realizing that my letter was in every person’s mailbox. And I felt pretty embarrassed. But anyway, I’m glad I did it because of all the letters that I had sent out, I got one offer, which was amazing, to get that.

That was Bob Weller and Mel Briscoe, and they were starting a field campaign, putting a buoy out in the Sargasso Sea, which is near Bermuda. And they were looking for a research assistant who could write a technical report about the experiment and start to analyze the data. So, we did a lot of cruises, research cruises, I think once a month across the Gulf Stream and observed things as we went along, then tended to the instruments on the buoy. Probably took some of the data recorders back with us. That’s how it came about. It was really my initiative and deciding, “This is really what I want. [laughs] I’m going to try my hardest to get this position.” So, I’m glad I did it. That’s the answer, I guess, how it came about.

Amico:

The people who didn’t offer you a position, did they recognize you once you started working? Like, “Ah, I got her letter”?

Deser:

Not that I know of. I thought it was kind of a crapshoot to even get a position because there weren’t that many scientists, and they would have to have funding and have work that somebody who was an undergrad who had only audited classes was capable of.

Amico:

And you had been auditing at Woods Hole?

Deser:

Yes. They have this joint program for physical oceanography with the Atmospheric Science Department. So, yes, I’d been auditing. They provided a bus for students living at MIT so they could go down for classes, I don’t know, maybe two or three times a week. I think some graduate students lived in Woods Hole, but some chose to live in Cambridge.

Amico:

It’s a bit of a hike, isn’t it?

Deser:

Yeah, it’s a couple-hour drive.

Amico:

Daily, down and back?

Deser:

Yeah, I didn’t do daily, I probably did twice a week. I can’t quite remember, something like that. Yeah, I enjoyed that a lot.

Amico:

You said you worked with Bob Weller and Mel Briscoe, and you went on doing field work on these cruises. First, how were the cruises? What was the experience like?

Deser:

I’d never done anything like that before. Definitely got seasick. When you cross the Gulf Stream, that is pretty turbulent. I also felt it was hard to transition from being a student to being a 9-to-5 employee. It’s just not what I was used to. I had to talk to a lot of people. I had to talk to the technicians who actually built the instruments on the buoy, had to learn about how the solar radiometer measures things and what kind of accuracy it has, very technical information. It’s not my forte, and I struggled with writing this technical report at the end, but I did it. It’s on my bookshelf. After the thesis, the first bigger report that I’d had to do. But at the end, I remember near the end of that year, we were crossing the Gulf Stream, and it was probably middle of the night, and I forget if it was Bob Weller or Mel Briscoe who was on the cruise, and they said, “You know what? Clara, you can have the ship. You can direct the ship for the next three hours. It’s yours. We’re crossing this interesting Gulf Stream ring.”

That’s a little vortex that sheds off the current. And in those days, there weren’t that many measurements, I guess, of what the structure of these vortices looks like spatially, and in depth, and temperature, and salinity. So, I literally got to figure out, “Okay, if the current is taking us this way at a certain speed, and I want to measure this vortex over here, how do I direct the captain and tell him where to go and how often to take our water samples?” So, it was intense to do that, and I realized, “Wow, this is how the data get taken.” It was an exciting moment to do that. I later went on a longer research cruise when I was a graduate student, but I think that experience I had at Woods Hole, it was exciting to actually be taking data.

Amico:

Did you enjoy leading the ship?

Deser:

I think it was mixed. I think I did, and it was kind of daunting. A lot of responsibility. But yes, I think I did.

Amico:

How big was the ship?

Deser:

It was pretty small. I can’t quite remember. I think it was called Oceanus, if I remember right. I don’t remember how many of us were there. Maybe a dozen. I don’t think there were more than that.

Amico:

And then, some of the other folks were just crew for the ship? Or was everyone a science person?

Deser:

There was a chief scientist always, so I guess that’s what they gave me for these few hours, to be chief scientist. And probably, there was an assistant scientist. I don’t really remember.

Amico:

How were the working conditions on the boat?

Deser:

Oh, tight. Tight. [laughs] Tight quarters. Everything had to be fastened down. Everything. Plates, glasses, food, because the ship just is rocking so much, especially when you cross the Gulf Stream. And the diesel smell and all of that. It wasn’t very comfortable. But it was interesting.

Amico:

How long were these voyages usually at a time?

Deser:

Good question. I don’t think they were very long, maybe they were something like four or five days. I don’t think it was longer than that.

Amico:

Would you make port at another place or just return to Massachusetts?

Deser:

Nope, just return. Yeah. We didn’t go all the way to Bermuda. This was a buoy in the Sargasso Sea. I think it was just west of where Bermuda sits.

Amico:

What were your initial impressions of Woods Hole when you first started working there?

Deser:

Great question. I liked the quiet of Woods Hole. Woods Hole itself, one thing is, in the summer with all the tourists who go to Cape Cod and the islands, but another is the population there over the winter. And a lot of them in Woods Hole itself were affiliated with either the Marine Biological Lab or the Physical Oceanography Lab that I was part of. But yeah, I think it was fairly recent buildings, big offices that were around a common area where they had a lot of maps. I remember a lot of discussions took place in a central open area. I didn’t really know who the people were at the time, but I think I realized later somebody here at NCAR, Bill Large, he was there at that time. I even think Henry Stommel, grandfather of a lot of important oceanography, may also have been alive at the time. But I remember the sense of these scientific discussions that would take place in this common area, and I really liked that.

Amico:

Was your office near there?

Deser:

Yeah, I think all the offices were around the perimeter.

Amico:

Did people ever continue these discussions outside of work? Was there a culture of that there?

Deser:

Yeah, a little bit. I was a pretty shy person. But yeah, I was treated really well. Bob Weller and Mel Briscoe had an assistant. She was more, I would say, just the day-to-day stuff, an administrative assistant. But she really took me under her wing. And yeah, you have to make your own entertainment in Woods Hole in the winter. Mel Briscoe was teaching Scottish country dancing, and I did that, and I played in a small chamber music group with Joe Pedlosky, he was learning clarinet, and I was playing piano, and there must’ve been a violinist, I forget who that was. So, somehow, I made some connections outside of work time with these people. It was cool. It was my first time to feel… I still felt, of course, a distant hierarchy with these very renowned scientists, but less so at Woods Hole compared to MIT.

Amico:

Were there any other women working there as scientists, or administrators, or both?

Deser:

Great question. Nancy Pennington, that was the administrative assistant’s name, had been there a long time. And then, there was definitely another woman or two as “secretaries,” and I do remember thinking… I’m pretty sure I was the only non-admin or secretarial female in this physical oceanography group. I may be wrong about that. Certainly, there was Paola Rizzoli. But I don’t know, as I say, I was not kind of an extrovert where I would talk to everybody at all, so I don’t know where she was exactly at the time. Maybe she hadn’t even arrived yet. But yeah, I do remember feeling like there weren’t any other women. At least, that’s my recollection.

Amico:

Maybe not the people you worked with, but would other scientists hold you in contempt for invading their space or anything as a woman?

Deser:

No, I didn’t feel that.

Amico:

I also wanted to ask how you had settled on physical oceanography as the next step of what you wanted to study after MIT.

Deser:

As opposed to a different branch of oceanography, you mean?

Amico:

Right, or a different branch of geoscience.

Deser:

I think I had mentioned I felt like I had one foot in the atmosphere, one in the ocean. And I think having visited Woods Hole as a student to audit these classes, I just liked the small-town feeling and the smaller group, I guess, of scientists. Also, I felt like I had met some of the graduate students who were in the joint program and became friends with at least one of them, if not more. So, I think I felt more of a sense of belonging in that smaller environment, and then I wanted to stick around the Boston area for personal reasons. I think if there had been an atmospheric science place that had a similar feeling as Woods Hole, I would’ve probably equally done that. I think I talked a lot about how theoretical the classes became, the ones I was auditing as an undergrad, these graduate classes. And I think Woods Hole Physical Oceanography, of course, Joe Pedlosky and others are eminent theoreticians, but it also gave me… this was the place where you could do field work and more empirical work, and I think that was another reason why I went there, and it appealed to me.

Amico:

Would you say it expanded what you had learned at MIT beyond the theoretical?

Deser:

Yeah.

Amico:

So, it challenged the MIT approach a little bit?

Deser:

I don’t know if it challenged it, but it was very complementary. Of course, we’re making these measurements to then understand the physics behind what the data are telling us. But it wasn’t coming at it from… the end-all was not to write down equations. I wouldn’t say it challenged it, but there’s Woods Hole and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and they are the incredible hubs for physical oceanography.

Amico:

You mentioned the common area, and that was really interesting. How collaborative would you say the environment was at Woods Hole in general?

Deser:

I think it was much more collaborative. And I hadn’t even thought about the building until you’ve asked me this question, and I realized that was something that I liked about it. So, yeah, I think I really must have enjoyed the sense of collaboration that, I think, is very necessary, of course, in field work. Compared to, say, the MIT world, where you sort of work very individually, and in academia, especially. I think that also probably was what appealed to me about Woods Hole. And having these two supervisors, that’s just a good example. Mel Briscoe was the senior person. He had hired Bob Weller I think right out of graduate school, so Bob was, I don’t know, probably five years older than I was, but not more than that. That was kind of nice, also, I think, to see that. I got the sense that Mel was letting Bob be my more direct, immediate, day-to-day supervisor.

Amico:

What was their leadership style like, if you remember?

Deser:

Good question. [laughs] I don’t know, I feel like maybe I was treated a bit like a graduate student, which I think was appropriate. Meaning I don’t remember being given very specific tasks. And I certainly did flounder. [laughs] In a good way, I would say. I take that kind of approach with the postdocs that I have. Well, those are postdocs. But I knew that by the end of my year, I was expected to write this technical report about the whole field campaign and the instrumentation. This was one of the first air-sea interaction buoys, as they’re called, that were anchored to the seafloor that would take these measurements for a continuous period of time. So, I knew that was the expectation at the end of the year. And then, I remember, I had to do a lot of, “Okay, how do I approach this? First, I have to learn about the instruments, so I have to go talk to the guys who built the buoy and built the instruments.” I learned about how the instruments work, what their inaccuracies are, etc. And that was hard for me. And then, I had to think about what kind of analysis I would do on the data. I don’t remember being given a lot of detailed tasks.

Amico:

So, you worked with a bunch of the grad students as well?

Deser:

No, I didn’t work with any grad students. I worked on my own. And I had Bob Weller. I don’t remember how often I met with him, actually, at all. Nancy Pennington was probably the one I had the most interaction with. I was sort of left on my own is my recollection.

Amico:

Did you live down in Woods Hole?

Deser:

I did. Actually, it was a very fun house. I found a room in a house with graduate students, and I had a boyfriend at the time who was still at MIT, which is why I wanted to stay in the vicinity. And yeah, those grad students, one of them, Dean something, I can’t remember his name, but we kept in touch for a while, he was a marine biologist doing these beautiful illustrations of dinoflagellates, these little beautiful organisms in the sea. And his girlfriend was a poet. And we had Tom Sgouros, he worked in the physical oceanography department. He did more of their computer stuff. He became a friend, taught me how to juggle. And his girlfriend worked at the Marine Biological Lab and did pottery on the side. It was a fun group. And we cooked together. It was good.

Amico:

I wanted to ask, how did this experience change your perspective towards oceanography, or atmospheric science, or even geoscience broadly?

Deser:

I guess I realized I do enjoy being in the science world, I like doing the research, and so I knew, I think pretty quickly, that I wanted to apply to graduate school. And I liked the independent nature. A little bit like that summer research project I did with Reginald Newell, where it’s sort of between you and the data. [laughs] It’s up to you to understand things and find interesting insights on the data. But then, I think I mentioned last time that I then applied to atmospheric science departments. They still had connections with oceanography, but typically the departments were separated. Now, they’re much more integrated. But I think I told you last time that I realized it was more intuitive to me to look at things from a spatial perspective, of patterns, and that that would be very hard to do with the physical oceanography data that existed at the time. 20 years later, there would’ve been a lot of satellite base measurements, and that would’ve been a different story.

Amico:

How early on into your job at Woods Hole did you begin looking at grad school?

Deser:

Probably pretty early. I don’t remember exactly, but I imagine the applications were probably due, I don’t know, middle of the year or something. And then, I think by the spring, I was already going to these visits to meet potential advisors. I think it was pretty quick.

Amico:

Before we move into that more earnestly, I wanted to ask, were there any institutional traditions at Woods Hole that were particularly memorable?

Deser:

I think I missed a lot of it. I think, having years and years later, decades later, talked to people who had been graduate students in the joint program, that they had lots of traditions. Especially in the summer, when they would all live together in some nice houses in Woods Hole, and have cookouts on the beach, and do things together. I never was part of that. I wasn’t a grad student, and I also wasn’t very extroverted, so I wasn’t tapped into that community. I think I missed a lot of it. But I think there is a strong culture at Woods Hole. But I didn’t participate in that.

Amico:

I also wanted to ask what your impressions of the Boston intellectual community were and how they might have changed after you started working as a professional rather than just being a student.

Deser:

Hm. Good question. I’m not sure I have much to say on it. I think Woods Hole is kind of outside of Boston, figuratively and literally. I don’t really have much to say. I wanted to add one thing that popped into my mind about my time at Woods Hole. I think the last year, when I was auditing classes at Woods Hole, I became friends with a woman graduate student, Esther Brady, who I reencountered here. She had been a project scientist here for her whole career. But it was great. I really liked her. Here’s a living example, right, of a person who was interested in physical oceanography, was a graduate student, and we became friends. And the year that I was living in Woods Hole, I think we did some things together. So, that was a good example for me of a female graduate student who was doing really good work. I think her papers at the time are still some landmark papers. So, that was a nice example.

Amico:

What kind of research did she specialize in, if you remember?

Deser:

Her advisor was Harry Bryden, and they were… I don’t remember right now. I think I did encounter the work later.

Amico:

That’s okay. We talked a little bit about you applying to some of the grad schools I think you mentioned last time. But you did go on some of the campus visits. What were your impressions of some of the different schools that you visited?

Deser:

I believe I applied to three, and I can’t remember the third, which is odd. But I remember my visit to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and then the University of Washington, where I ultimately went. And I was treated so well. They were male professors who… at Wisconsin, John Houghton, I think it was, I think he was the one who hosted me and maybe would’ve been my potential advisor. But yeah, it was sort of the first time where, “Wow, I’m being recruited.” Research assistant, being paid to go to grad school. So, I’m being recruited. I was really treated extremely well. It really stands out. I never had that experience before. It was interesting to meet different people and their different styles. And as I say, with Mike Wallace, his approach to analysis of data was just very much up my alley. I remember giving him a summary of the undergraduate research project that I did, and he was interested, he asked me questions, he was very respectful of what I had done. And I don’t know, that was kind of a moment, and also at Wisconsin, that I felt like I was being taken seriously. It just felt like a very nice next step.

Amico:

Did you feel like it was more of a culture of just taking people in general seriously for what they had done? Or was it more like people maybe didn’t take women at MIT as seriously as they did at these other schools?

Deser:

I don’t know. Good question. Since I didn’t apply to MIT, I don’t know what their interview process would’ve been like, so I can’t speak to that. But I felt very valued in this graduate student visit.

Amico:

Did your family support your decision to go to graduate school?

Deser:

Yes, absolutely. But they were sad it was far away. But yes, my parents very much did. They were glad I was finding something that I was interested in.

Amico:

Had you spent much time on the West Coast or in the Midwest prior to this point?

Deser:

No, as a family, we had driven cross country when I was in my early teens, and we had actually lived for a month in Seattle. And my dad had a close physics colleague there. And I remember enjoying being there for that month. But yeah, that was the only experience that I’d had.

Amico:

Was there any sort of culture shock when you fully moved out?

Deser:

Well, I loved it from the beginning, actually. I really did. Actually, Seattle has, also, a big Scandinavian population. With my mother’s Swedish and Danish background, that was nice to visit Ballard, the neighborhood that is very Scandinavian. I even took some Swedish lessons at one point, and they had all the food and stuff. But yeah, I loved it from the beginning. It was so beautiful, so easy to do a variety of outdoor things. Hiking, we did some canoeing. But I really, really liked it. I think I was so glad to actually get out of a… Seattle was not that big of a city at the time, and it didn’t feel like Boston.

Amico:

To get out to the wilderness or the trails, how long does it take typically from campus?

Deser:

You’d go for a long weekend or something. If you wanted to go to the Olympic Peninsula, you could take a ferry. I guess we must’ve driven to places, and we would camp. Lot of bird life, incredible diversity of climate zones. The Olympic Peninsula having the rainforest, and the Cascades for their incredible, beautiful hiking. We did long backpacking trips in the summer. Did a lot of soccer. People in the department, all the grad students, they had soccer teams. They were, I’d say, a pretty outdoorsy group. And actually, one of the first things that we did in the incoming graduate student class, which I think is a tradition, is to go as a department for a hike in the Cascades, including the professors. And they were so different from the MIT professors. It was actually, I think, at one point dubbed the MIT of the west, this particular department of atmospheric science, because a lot of the faculty who were young at the time had done their degrees at MIT.

I really felt part of this group of students and that the faculty were very approachable. Top-notch scientists and very approachable. It was a really nice feeling. There were a lot of women in my class. I think we were about 50/50, which was amazing. I don’t think very many continued as professional scientists. I think probably only a few of us. But yeah, I met some really interesting people. And a couple of the women… Graciela Raga, she’s one of the ones who did continue, she became a well-known professor in Mexico City. She was really brilliant. She became a friend. And then, another friend… these women grad students. This woman, it was amazing to me, she came from—I think I have this right. There’s Madagascar, and then off Madagascar is this little island called Réunion, this French island. She came from there. [inaudible]. Tiny, little place. Amazing to me that she found her way to the best atmospheric science department in the US, and probably one of the best in the world. I just remember being amazed at that. So, these interesting people. Not like me, who grew up in academia, and graduate school was not a foreign concept. That’s not the case for so many of the others. And then, I had made a lot of good friends amongst the male grad students as well and keep in touch to this day. It was good. I really liked the environment.

Amico:

Why do you think that some of the women that you had mentioned didn’t end up continuing on in science?

Deser:

Well, the usual dilemmas of a full life. How do you do it? If you want to have a family, how do you do that with your spouse? Choices, tradeoffs, balances that you have to face all the time. I really think it comes down to that. I was really supported. First of all, I think what enabled me was, Mike Wallace, my PhD advisor, he’s one of these people that has a very, very wide circle of collaborators and, of course, students. There would be so many visiting scientists to his group, and he made sure that his students would have one-on-one meetings with these people and show their work. So, the person who I ultimately did a postdoc with, Maurice Blackmon, was a really close friend and colleague of Mike Wallace.

He had actually been a theoretical physicist. He knew of my dad’s work, and he became, I think, a bit disenchanted with the culture. He was maybe in Stony Brook. I think it was Stony Brook, if I remember right. Anyway, he apparently took a sabbatical. They had been roommates in graduate school at MIT. Maurice had been in physics and Mike Wallace in the atmospheric science department, so they knew each other really well. So, Maurice came to spend a year with Mike and ultimately changed his field to atmospheric science. This was before I was in Seattle. Anyway, Maurice then visited a lot, and I would end up having these opportunities to show him my work as things went along. So, when it was time for me to figure out postdocs after graduate school, he offered me a position here at the lab that he was just starting, it was called the Climate Diagnostic Center at the time between NOAA and NCU. I got a little off track here, but I guess my point was, Mike was extremely supportive of me, Maurice was extremely supportive of me.

I can give more details as we continue our discussion. But in terms of balance of family and career, I think without those personalities, I don’t know that I would’ve been continuing. You need people to believe in you and to give you the room to work at your own pace and to trust that ultimately, your work will be valuable and insightful. But it doesn’t necessarily proceed… you can’t shut off family commitments and all the energy that it takes to raise kids and all that stuff. I’ll get into that more, I’m sure, as you ask me more questions. But that was really, really important for me. I didn’t stay in touch with the other women. It would probably be nice to do that. But I would think that if one didn’t have that kind of support, it would’ve been much harder to continue.

Amico:

When you were a graduate student, how were you supported? Was it through the school or a grant?

Deser:

It’s a good question. I presume that it was… Mike Wallace, I think his whole career was very well and continuously funded at NSF. Jay Fein was his name, he was the program manager. And he, of course, had to write grants to get funding for graduate students and postdocs. I’m guessing that’s how I was funded the whole way through. I never thought about it. I never worried about it, I guess. I think Mike must’ve been well-funded. He had a very large group of students, especially when I was there. I think he continued to, but certainly when I was there. And he became chair of the department for a few years, so he just had a lot on his plate. [laughs]

Amico:

Did you end up working with him just because your research interests aligned at first?

Deser:

Research and personality. Without both of those, it wouldn’t have worked out. There was someone else whose research was amazing, but personality-wise, I felt more intimidated because they were just a little more theoretical. And I needed someone who I felt that I could learn from and was more empirical. I could not separate out… Mike Wallace was such a good fit for personality and approach.

Amico:

Who were the other faculty, if there were any, who might’ve made a strong impression?

Deser:

Oh, many. Dennis Hartman. He continues to be an idol for me of the research that he’s done in his career. There were two women on the faculty. One was research faculty, and one was teaching faculty. And I guess they were pretty pioneering. So, Kristina Katsaros, she was, I think, the first woman full teaching faculty member in the department. And she happened to be Swedish. And she was very kind to me. Then, Marcia Baker. She was on the research faculty. She was not in my area, but I took a class of hers. Radiative transfer is what it’s called. But yeah, I admired her a lot also. I think those were the only two, but it was nice to see, and more than at MIT.

Amico:

What sort of courses or curriculum did you end up taking before you started working on your thesis?

Deser:

That first year was intensive coursework, and we had to take applied math in the applied math department, and that was hard. [laughs] And there were the standard atmospheric sciences courses. Mike Wallace taught the introduction to general circulation, it’s called. The Wallace and Hobbs textbook, I have it on my shelf. He was the instructor for that, and I loved his teaching style, I found it very intuitive. Jim Holton taught atmospheric dynamics and wrote the textbook that we all use, so that was more theoretical, but I could understand that. I think probably cloud physics class of Peter Hobbs. These are all the people who wrote the textbooks, which is amazing. Did I have to take physics? I can’t remember. But the applied math, there was at least two semesters of it. Oh, synoptic meteorology with Dick Reed, so actually drawing weather maps.

The department had a forecasting contest, I think every week maybe, so they had a map room. Maybe I have this wrong, but every week, there would be a prize for the most accurate forecast. I can’t remember the details at all. But one time, I won the… or maybe it was at the end of the year. And I won the rainfall forecasting contest. And Dick Reed said, “Who is this person?” I would say there was a big dose of luck to have won that, but that was kind of a fun anecdote. But I liked the actual mapmaking, really, of synoptic meteorology. And I did a little bit of, I think, my own research, or maybe just a tiny bit. That first year, can’t remember too much, but I think I did a little bit. And I think it was at the end of the first year. I don’t think it was the end of the second year, I think it was the end of the first year. But you can look up the facts and correct me if I’m wrong. [laughs]

We had to take the qualifying exam, and in those days, you could bypass a master’s degree if you did well enough on the qualifying exams, you could go right to the PhD. And if you didn’t do that well, you could then get a master’s degree. It was a closed-book, three-day exam, I think, and you could have a page of notes. And it was questions from all the different courses that we had taken over the year in the atmospheric science department. So, many, many different aspects. It was really hard. And I didn’t pass it at the PhD level. And that was my summer of reckoning. These problems, they were excellent problems, and you really had to think from the first principles. At MIT, of course, I had been good at doing the tests, obviously, but I think I mentioned this earlier last time, that I didn’t really think for myself. “How do I understand things?” That was my summer of, like, “What do I want? How much do I want to get a PhD?”

And I talked to Mike Wallace after I didn’t pass, and he just sat down. He was very clear about, “If you want to direct your own research, then PhD is what you need to have. If you want to support doing research for someone else, then the master’s degree. Or a master’s degree for becoming a forecaster,” or whatever. Then, I had to envision myself, and I realized, “Actually, I really like to do my own research.” So, I was pretty clear that I wanted that, and I was also clear that I needed to do some remedial work, like, really hard work, to learn things so they made sense to me, so that I could pass this qualifying exam. So, that first summer, I did some research, and I knew I liked it, and Mike Wallace could tell that was something I enjoyed and was good at.

But I spent the summer, actually, in Madison, Wisconsin because my boyfriend at the time, that’s where he was in grad school. And I just sat with the Feynman Lectures and all my textbooks from my classes over the first year, and I just sat in this really hot little apartment room on the top floor and just worked. And then, you could retake the qualifying exam at the end of the summer, right before classes started, so probably that September. I’d probably taken it in June, and then three months later. And I passed it, and I was really happy. I was really happy and proud that I did that. So, that was a turning point for me.

Amico:

When you started the program, it was a PhD, and the qualifying exam, you could take it early if you wanted to?

Deser:

No, I guess it was maybe left unknown that first year. You knew you had to take this qualifying exam at the end of the first year. One knew that. But of course, you couldn’t anticipate if you’d pass or not. Now, it’s done very differently, and you have to get a master’s degree, and you have to show that you can do the research. I had, of course, so many very academically gifted peers in my class who passed with flying colors. But I realized research and, I’m going to say, academic knowledge, they’re not, of course, different, but how well you can do things on a test versus conducting your own research, it just takes different sensibilities or whatever. And a person who can be really good at the tests isn’t necessarily… the research isn’t as much up their alley. I think it’s so much better how it’s done now. If this is going to be your career, you better like the research. And I knew that I did. But I think the way they’re doing it now is so much better because it’ll teach each student if they liked doing the research project for their master’s. And if so, then it makes sense to go on for a PhD. It’s not just the book learning.

Amico:

When you took the courses in your first year, did your entire cohort take the same classes?

Deser:

I think so. Maybe there was a little bit of departure, but I think we all had to pretty much have to have the same courses. And then, each professor, I guess, could pose one or two questions on the qualifying exam based on the coursework we had done.

Amico:

But you were in coursework with all the same people for every class?

Deser:

I’m pretty sure. Maybe not exactly, but pretty close.

Amico:

I also wanted to ask, back to what you said about the forecasting contest, how competitive were those things? Were people really into it?

Deser:

Absolutely. So many people came from just an innate interest in weather. And that wasn’t me, so I really was very much an outsider. So, yeah, it was a test of how well you could look at these maps and your knowledge and experience of living in the Seattle climate. Dick Reed, I think, had a lot of pride, and not undeservedly. He was the master at this synoptic stuff.

Amico:

I wanted to ask a little bit about the department and how it was set up, sort of the geography of it. Did you have offices? Were there common areas where people would talk?

Deser:

Great question. It’s a pretty dark building, not one of the nicer ones on campus. I think it was, like, a six-floor brick tower, and the top floors were the atmospheric science department, maybe the top four or something. And the professors had offices on the outside, so they had windows, and it was beautiful, looking out over campus or over the waterways. And then, the grad students had, for the most part, interior offices, and we had different numbers of desks depending on the size. The one that I had in the first probably two or three years, I was in kind of a big inner office with… I think maybe there were six other grad students, and we had desks. And we were all with different advisors. I think it was all men in that particular office, and they were older than me.

I really liked them. Seemed like they did a lot of sports. And then, I remember a computer room that was next to that. It’s not like we had our own computers at our desks. It’s hard to even remember those days, how we did things. But they were like elder brothers to me, I would say. I don’t know if they would help me out with some problem sets or if I would ask them, but they were really nice to me. There weren’t common areas to hang out in. There was a room, I guess, where we had, like, tea and cookies before the seminars, so that’s where you would maybe get together. I don’t know, I guess there was maybe a Christmas event or something like that.

And there was the hiking outing I mentioned. Oh, yeah, I guess I do remember some professors would definitely have parties at their houses when a student finished up and graduated, so that was a way to kind of get to know them. Maybe they had gatherings for other occasions as well. But I also got a nice impression of collegiality. Of course, I was most familiar with Mike Wallace, but he worked so closely with Jim Holton, with I think even Dick Reed, Dennis Hartmann for sure. I could really see these friendships and collaborations were kind of evident, unfolding.

And then, all the visitors. The department had a lot of postdoc visitors. There were some from England, Japan. These went on to very illustrious careers. It’s like, “Wow, I met you when I was a beginning grad student, and they were postdocs.” And some of them, I keep in touch with and have a good connection with. It was a really special time. It was a really nice department, and I grew so much, not only this summer of reckoning with myself. But also, seeing how people can have friendships, and have outdoor lives, and do their science. It was a really nice blend.

Amico:

Who do you think was most responsible for cultivating this culture of camaraderie and collegiality?

Deser:

Well, I think what I learned from Mike Wallace was that they were very particular about who was hired in the department, and they paid attention, of course, not only to the excellence of their science, but the personality. It’s a small department, so it had to be someone who had those same values of being collegial and fit in with the spirit of the department. And I know to this day, that is the case as well. I’ve kind of kept up sometimes over the years, if they do a new hire, how they do pay attention to that aspect. So, they’ve kept that. Excellence in science and a lot of humanity, I would say, in the department. It’s really good. I encounter, at all levels, people who have gone through that department as grad students or current grad students, and you just feel this familiarity because you know the kind of culture that they’ve grown up in. And I think it became even more after I left. I think in Mike Wallace’s group, it became even more of a social network. Maybe he relaxed after a while not being chair. And times change. I think less of a kind of hierarchy and more of a collaborative feeling amongst students and faculty.

Amico:

Was he the chair the whole time you were there?

Deser:

Much of the time, no. I think it was after. He was also the director of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, JISAO. And that was a joint institute between NOAA and the University. They have sort of block funding that you have to apply to renew every certain number of years. And they could hire support postdocs that way, so I think that’s partly how there was such a rich group of visitors coming through. Mike was the head of that. And then, he also became the chair of the department. And then, we moved to a different building. So, his group and I think it was Ed Sarachik’s group. I don’t know if anyone else did, so just say if it was in a different building on campus, and we moved to the applied physics lab. And the applied physics lab on campus, I think they built instruments for arctic research and also atmospheric instruments of oceanographic fieldwork. Anyway, then we were kind of isolated from the main department because you had to walk across campus to this other… so, that was maybe my last two years of my grad student time. And it was okay, I had a nicer office, I had just one officemate, and you could really have peace and quiet for doing the thesis. But it also meant that we were a bit isolated from the rest of the department. I think that was a bit of a shame that that’s the way it was. And Mike became very busy as chair. But he made time for all of his students, and there were a lot of his students.

Amico:

When you guys collaborated on projects or just exchanged knowledge, were there formal spaces where this would be done, in labs or offices?

Deser:

Well, if it was just conversations or discussion with one student, or a couple students, or one professor, I think it was done in offices. But we had dynamics seminars, the seminar series. We had a journal club for a while, and I guess I was head of that. I don’t even remember these things. But that was fun, actually. That was maybe one of my early leadership things/. I think you asked me about leadership earlier. And I never thought of myself as a leader, actually, but there I was with the journal club, and some later told me, my former officemate in grad school, Todd Mitchell, that yeah, I seemed to really be good at that. I didn’t see myself that way, but that was fun to do. I probably did that in my fourth year or something. I can’t quite remember. So, that was done in a classroom, but we also had seminars in that room.

Amico:

And journal club, what kind of work was that?

Deser:

I think we would read papers on a particular theme. I can’t remember what the topics were. If the other students were interested, they could join. And we would read papers and discuss them. I don’t remember how we chose the papers. But yeah, that was fun to do.

Amico:

Did faculty participate in this?

Deser:

No, I don’t think so. I think it was just students, which was good. It’s kind of a common thing in departments to do that. Like, the students will self-organize, and it’s without faculty. When you read a paper, you want to talk to somebody about it. Have you understood things right? You have thoughts about, “Why did they do it this way and not this way?” So, it can be really nice.

Amico:

This is an aside, but I’m the head of my graduate student organization for our department, and I was just thinking that’s actually an interesting idea. Because we don’t do anything like that in our department.

Deser:

Yeah, it’s really nice to do it. You realize, “Okay, this body of students can come together, and learn from each other, and bounce ideas off each other.” And it’s not with the professor. It’s a good thing.

Amico:

I wanted to ask if there were particular specialties that the department really favored or elevated, or if there were subgroups or cliques within the department at all.

Deser:

It was a small department. I can’t really remember how many faculty. I’m going to say ten or something, not that many of teaching faculty. And I think they all had their specialty. Mike Wallace was atmospheric general circulation, Jim Holton was the same but more on the theoretical side, Peter Hobbs was the radiative transfer and cloud microphysics expert, Kristina Katsaros, I guess, was the air-sea interaction. And interestingly, that’s sort of the area I’ve gone into. But she was more interested in the atmospheric boundary layer and the detailed processes, and not taking this general view of climate variability, which is Mike Wallace’s kind of specialty. I think maybe some personalities… I got the feeling Peter Hobbs was maybe a difficult personality, and you could kind of pick up that maybe there were some tensions in the department. But I think that was the only one that was hard. Dick Reed being the synoptic meteorolist. They each had their forte.

And I would say they covered the main areas of atmospheric science. I forgot to say this, but it was very influential in my decision to go to the University of Washington. When I came to visit as a prospective graduate student, Mike had… maybe it was the early days of this JISAO institute, and they had offices, if you want to call it that, in a former motel. And it was right on the edge of campus. Literally, you felt like you were walking in somebody’s bedroom. That’s the way it was laid out with this two-story motel with the windows looking on the outside. First of all, yeah, what a cool thing. And then, he had been hosting a scientist from England, Peter Wright. And he was kind of an interesting personality, bit of… I don’t know, just a little bit hard to get along with. But this wonderful, hardworking, kind of empirical scientist.

And they were doing early research on making maps of relationships between El Niño and climate around the world, and they were using ship data, digitized dataset. This is early days, where they would print out maps, but Peter would… if you compute correlation coefficients between two quantities, and you have a number that gives you that quantity, he had… in this motel room… Mike took me there because he thought I might be interested to see that kind of research. There was a special printer, and Peter Wright had made these huge maps of these correlation coefficients, these numbers, and there was a special printer, and they had hung them all on the walls of this big room. And then, he was hand contouring the numbers because this is early days, when you didn’t even have contouring routines from computer programs. And I just loved it.

That was just, “Wow, I’m back to sixth grade, where somebody is trying to decipher patterns, in this case, of El Niño from the data,” hand drawing, like I would hand draw maps. And this was legitimate science. It was really eye-opening for me. And I thought, “Wow, what a wonderful place to step into.” Peter Wright continued to be there my first year. He must’ve been there, like, two years, maybe even longer. There was another student, he was a year ahead of me, Todd Mitchell. And he and I were the ones who then shared this office later at the applied physics lab. And we worked on very similar things, we used the same datasets. And at one point, it was a little tense because we really had to each carve out our own topics for our thesis.

And I was a year behind Todd, but I think we ended up finishing at about the same time. We had to make sure we each were carving out separate projects that we could each know that we would have a good thesis at the end. Todd was part of that group. And yeah, I think it was introducing me to this world of back to the maps, back to sort of thinking visually and trying to understand the data in ways that people hadn’t had this kind of data to look at things before. That was a very impactful moment when I visited. After we are done with the interview, I’m going to try to have a conversation with Mike Wallace and just say how nice it was to reflect and remember all these things. That was really cool.

Amico:

Is that how you first got interested in working on El Niño?

Deser:

Well, the summer undergrad research project happened to be this recording of the satellite to see if it had anything to do with initiating El Niño. So, there I was again. Okay. I could jump right into the research. Peter Wright had already… I think we already had the data files on the computer. A lot of my early maps that I made and analysis that I made were very much along the lines of what Peter Wright was doing. And I think we have a technical report together. I think one of the first papers I was on, Peter led it. But I was on it, and Todd, and Mike. So, yeah, that was the beginning of that work that then became my thesis, really. It was really cool. And then, I mentioned visitors that were so important and influential to Mike Wallace’s group. Another one of them besides Maurice Blackmon—and he was not in the El Niño area, he was more on atmospheric dynamics—was Eugene Rasmusson. And Rasmusson is a famous name in El Niño work, Rasmusson and Carpenter is the paper, I think 1980 maybe, where it really established kind of the documentation and morphology of El Niño events from data.

He would come to visit. It was amazing to be talking to the person who had done such foundational work. And really, my thesis became an extension, just synthesizing more data to make a more complete description of the El Niño southern oscillation phenomenon. But it very much was on the shoulders of Peter Wright and Gene Rasmusson and what they had done. And I’ll just tell you because it popped into my mind. At some point, you have to decide, “It’s time to finish up,” that you’ve done enough work that you can finish up. And it helps, then, to have a postdoc lined up or whatever is coming next. So, I decided to make a push for finishing up in the summer of 1989 and to finish up by the end of the year in December. I wrote one chapter at a time, and Mike was very responsive to read it.

And then, at the very end, just as I was getting nervous about my thesis defense, which is a seminar, and then the committee stays and asks you things, I went into his office, and I forget exactly what I said, but I felt like I hadn’t done anything worthy of a PhD. I said, “I don’t know what to show.” And here, I had written my thesis. It’s almost, like, a crazy thought. And there are two things that I want to say about that. One is that there are many kinds of ways of making progress, I would say, in science. You can be the first to discover something new or look in a different area. But then, there can be the type of work that synthesizes. Each thing is not, on its own, original, but you’ve brought a bigger picture together and have refined and built on what has come previously. And Mike Wallace, I think he’s done both kinds of research, but the synthesis is kind of a hallmark of what he does.

And that’s what he told me that I had done, and that the results speak for themselves. “Just show what you have. It’s enough.” And so, I bring that up because I thought, first of all, that is a very valid contribution, to do this synthesis, and that my own very strong impostor syndrome… a few days before the thesis defense, and I felt like I wasn’t worthy. And yeah, that’s kind of come up for me a lot over my career. And of course, it’s gotten better, less and less. And I tell a lot of people that, male and female. Who knows, maybe my background with my dad as being kind of the genius figure, how can I possibly be legitimate? So, interesting, huh?

Amico:

Yeah, absolutely. This is a little bit ahead, but did your family come out for your defense or to visit you at all while you were out there?

Deser:

My parents for sure came out to visit. Not too much, but yeah, absolutely. I remember Mike Wallace, they met him. They came to the department, and he wanted to meet them and vice versa. It was really nice. No, they didn’t come out for my defense. And I actually didn’t attend my graduation ceremony because that would’ve been in June, and I had graduated in December. And that’s kind of too bad. Recently, a few months ago, we went to my daughter’s PhD graduation at UC Santa Barbara, and it was very meaningful to see her be hooded and mark a milestone. I regret that I didn’t. And yeah, they didn’t come for the defense, but they were super proud of me.

Amico:

I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your thesis and the kind of work that you were doing for it. You had kind of said that you built off the work of Peter Wright. He’d already had some of it there.

Deser:

Yes.

Amico:

Did you end up going out and conducting your own field work? I think you might have mentioned you did, on the ship.

Deser:

Yeah, thanks for bringing that back up. These were data from merchant ships that did routine meteorological measurements, and they were compiled as part of this comprehensive ocean atmosphere dataset that had just really been released maybe a couple years before I started grad school. And it was unclear if you could get meaningful climate signals out of the data because they were not research-quality data, lots of the thermometer wasn’t working right, a lot of inaccuracies in the measurements. But you just hoped that with enough measurements and strong enough climate signals, you could make sense of it. It was fun to have this dataset that hadn’t been scrutinized that much. It was like a goldmine. I did a lot of my early work using that. I still go back to it. I actually love that kind of data.

Oh, so the field work. There I was, studying these patterns of data on El Niño that other people had collected. That was after the 1982-83 El Niño. That was one of the really strong ones. Apparently, it caught the scientists by surprises because it developed at a different time of year than is typical for El Niño events. It did lead to a lot of disruption of climate worldwide. That was the event that was sort of the impetus for a very ambitious project of putting buoys out. I think there ended up being maybe, I’m going to say, 50 of them, on that order, maybe more like 30, called the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean Buoy Array, TAO Array. To deploy these buoys in the open ocean, all the way from the coast of South America to Australia, so all across the tropical Pacific, and they were spaced every 15 degrees of longitude and every few degrees of latitude between, like, 15 north and 15 south.

So, this project, this field campaign… and these buoys are anchored to the seafloor, so four kilometers of… it had never been done on that kind of scale. It harkens back, of course, to the project I was hired on at Woods Hole. That was kind of a prototype of this kind of buoy. There it was again, but on this grand, massive scale. And the institution that was leading this whole effort was the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab, PMEL, a NOAA lab in Seattle. Stanley Hayes, I believe he was the main leader of this. Maybe there was a co-leader, I can’t remember. He actually was on my thesis committee. Very, very nice man. He died really, really tragically of cancer, I think when I was a student near the end of my grad student days. He was younger than Mike Wallace.

So, there were a lot of cruises from Seattle on there in the oceanography department. Or maybe it was based at PMEL, I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter. I think it was a NOAA research ship. What could that have been called? Maybe the Endeavor was the name of it or the Discovery. These ships have names, and people know them. These were big ships, or a big ship, and it was docked in Seattle Harbor. And so, they were deploying these buoys, and they had a lot of research cruises. And I think I just asked, “Could I go on one of them to help out? I would love to.” Because I wanted to go to the field, the area that I was studying. So, I got to go, and it was amazing. It was a five-week research cruise, and we didn’t see land the whole time. I flew down to Panama City, I guess, and that’s where I met the ship that had come down from Seattle.

And we had a pretty big crew, and we were deploying… I don’t know if we were deploying… I think probably multiple buoys, but they’re enormous, so you can’t have very many in the deck. I can’t remember. And then, there were also these bird watchers from the Monterrey Bird Observatory, so they were kind of piggybacking. They didn’t have funding for their own research cruises, but they were doing an inventory of seabirds. I should say where we went. We started at Panama, and then we just went all the way along the equator, maybe a little bit north and south of it, and then five weeks later, we end up in Hawaii, and that’s where it ended. And I had actually brought a solar radiation radiometer instrument from Kristina Katsaros. Again, these are unprecedented measurements at the time, so she wanted me to take visual observations of the cloud cover and the cloud types, and then we would have the corresponding data of how much sunlight was hitting this instrument.

And so, I said, “Yes, I would be very happy to do that.” Otherwise, I was just there to help out generally. I helped to put the buoy in, I took the CTD samples, as it’s called. Just amazing to take these data. And I learned about the birds, and I ended up, just myself, being interested. Every day at the end of the day, I would go to the bridge, where the captains are, or the officers, and I had a notebook with graph paper. Every hour, they would take barometric pressure, air temperature, humidity, all the typical measurements. And each night, I would graph them. I would add it to my graph paper. It was really harkening back to my undergrad research days. Because you fill your days. I was never bored. You’re looking at the clouds, the ocean currents, you have the data that we’re taking, we’re putting the buoys out. There was so much to learn.

Anyway, then I made these graphs, and I learned about the diurnal tide, and the semidiurnal tide, and the data. It was just really fun. And during that cruise, this was in, I think, May of 1986, maybe June, probably both, that was the onset of another El Niño event. And the PMEL had called the ship and said, “They’ve noticed that there has been this westerly wind burst of strong westerly winds, just east of Australia, and that’s expected to lead to something called a Kelvin wave in the ocean that will travel at a certain speed eastward along the equator. And that would kind of mark the beginning of this ’86-’87 El Niño event.” So, they asked us to increase our frequency of measurements of the water column, of temperature, and salinity, and other things, to look for this Kelvin wave edge. It was super exciting.

Again, it hadn’t been done before. And so, we did, and we found it. It was just really cool to be part of that in a real-time measurement. When I came back from that cruise, I just felt so much more connected, of course, to what that climate feels like and what’s going on in the ocean and in the atmosphere. And I haven’t repeated that kind of experience, but I think it was very important to do that and not be so abstracted from the real tangible field measurement campaign. That was a nice addition. I didn’t have to do it, it was all my own initiative to say, “You know what? I don’t want to get my PhD in El Niño without actually taking measurements.” It was cool.

Amico:

You mentioned Stanley Hayes. Was he the leader of the science on the ship?

Deser:

I don’t think he was on that cruise. I forget who the leader was. No, he wasn’t. I think I would’ve remembered if he had been. I actually don’t remember who was. Later, when I was a postdoc, maybe a third year into the postdoc, in memory of Stanley Hayes—maybe he died when I was a postdoc, I can’t remember—I decided I wanted to use data from those buoys just because of my attachment to him as a mentor. Again, this was unprecedented data that the anemometers had recorded the wind speed and direction at six-minute intervals. And so, we had this whole array of buoys in the open ocean, and it was pure curiosity, going back to my days of graphing. What would I see in the data? People had looked at land-sea breezes around islands or coastlines, and you know that there’s going to be a diurnal component. But here we were in the open ocean, and I found amazing diurnal signals and patterns that I don’t think are fully explained in some of my favorite papers that I’ve written. I don’t have to explain them, but I just show what the patterns look like, and it just came because I felt like Stanley Hayes had really… it was just opening up a whole new window with this new data.

Amico:

When you got back to school, I guess, for the next year, this experience, did you dive right ahead into the data that you had gotten from this?

Deser:

No. It didn’t form part of my thesis at all. And the thesis was based on this comprehensive ocean atmosphere dataset. I used very, very long records, also rainfall from island stations, so these were data that covered most of the 20th century. So, no, I didn’t use any of the data in my thesis. The only time I used the data was this project on the diurnal cycle of winds, and that was years later.

Amico:

And when you were on the ship, how did people pass the time if they weren’t working? Was there camaraderie?

Deser:

Yeah, I think there was. I remember we did some fishing, we went out on zodiacs, we talked. We played games, we probably played board games. People slept at different times because you had shifts, and sometimes it was the middle of the night, so it was kind of a weird space. But yeah, it was nice to see people talking in close quarters. There was a woman who got ill, that was very scary. She actually had to be… I can’t remember if we had to drop her off somewhere. But yeah, I really enjoyed the birdwatchers. The marine life and the bird life was amazing when we came to the buoys. It’s a desert out there except around these buoys, where marine life collects, and then the birds come. It’s beautiful.

Amico:

I wanted to ask a little bit more about your interest in El Niño, and what kept your interest, and how you got most fascinated with that topic as opposed to anything else you might’ve wanted to study.

Deser:

It’s such an important phenomenon. It has global climate impacts. And not that much had been known about it, just because of the scarcity of data before this comprehensive ocean atmosphere dataset. The theory for El Niño, that was cutting-edge science. And actually, one of my grad students, David Battisti, who was my year, whom I still have connection with, that was his thesis, to really develop one of the paradigms for explaining this phenomenon. There was a lot of theoretical work being done, there was then this empirical side where we could describe the morphology of the phenomenon so they knew what had to be explained. I don’t know, I didn’t even think about worrying about what my thesis would be because it was really just ready for the taking at that time.

Amico:

Were there any publications or anything that really had a big influence on your approach to your research or the science?

Deser:

Well, I think Peter Wright, his early work. And then, Rasmusson and Carpenter, where they had used the ship data, but this was before the comprehensive ocean atmosphere dataset. There were six ship tracks where there was a fair amount of data from these merchant ships. Before the Panama Canal, the ships would go from Europe around South America, and then you’d have those ship tracks. And then, after the Panama Canal was opened, then you’d have this other set. So, there were these six ship tracks that crossed the equator in the Pacific Ocean, and they analyzed the data along those tracks, plus islands in the Pacific Ocean. And that was the description at that time. And those ship tracks are still used. There’s a term called the Niño 3.4 index, sea-surface temperature index. That is the index that is still being used to describe when there’s an El Niño or La Niña event.

And a lot of people don’t know… well, Niño, obviously, why that’s that, but 3.4… And students don’t even know where it comes from. It’s the ship tracks. Rasmusson and Carpenter identified these six shipping lanes. The ships were going to Fiji from San Francisco, or they were going between Hawaii and somewhere else, so they crossed the equator at different longitudes. And there were six of them. Number three and number four were not that far apart, and they seemed to show the same fluctuations, so they combined those into a time series, and that’s the Niño 3.4 Sea-Surface Temperature Index. That is what is used by the government, NOAA, to tell us if there’s El Niño or La Niña. But foundational papers, yeah, the Rasmusson and Carpenter one was foundational, for sure.

And then, the theoretical work, trying to learn about how… there’s someone called Jacob Bjerknes, and he was one of the early ones to identify that El Niño southern oscillation is this interactive ocean-atmosphere phenomenon, it doesn’t exist in just one or the other, and it depends on the ocean and the atmosphere being in communication. So, that, again, appealed to me because I always was interested in both. It was just a really nice fit. And then, the theoretical work, in the atmosphere, we’d get huge thunderstorms in certain parts of the tropical Pacific during El Niño events, and then that sets off these atmospheric Rossby waves that then brings the information to higher latitudes, like North America. And Bjerknes, that was another very influential set of papers to even describe how this connection might take place between the tropics and the extratropics. And then, theoretical work of Adrian Gill, to really say how physically or dynamically that happens.

Amico:

When you presented your ideas to Rasmusson, was he receptive to them?

Deser:

Absolutely. I wouldn’t say I had necessarily ideas, I was just filling in the picture. Oh, absolutely. And he was so down to Earth. He came from this Kansas farming family, and he’d had his own journey and became high up in the NOAA climate center. But very down to Earth and loved talking just straightforwardly about data, and how to analyze it, and what we’re learning from the data. And he was really supportive of my career. Yeah, wonderful person.

Amico:

When you were a grad student in the 1980s, the political attacks on climate science, is that something you felt or people in your circle in the department? Was that something that people talked about much or sort of just existed?

Deser:

Yeah, great question. I don’t remember talking about it. Mike Wallace, in the ‘80s, I think was a little bit hesitant to say, from the data, how much global warming and human influence on climate was taking place. So, we were very much in this studying climate variability and not thinking so much about the human impact on climate. Of course, that changed. Starting in the ‘90s, it was really clear. Of course, Jim Hansen’s work, all extremely crucial and eye-opening. But I don’t remember discussing that and also skepticism of climate change too much when I was a grad student.

Amico:

I wanted to ask if you had attended many major conferences when you were in grad school.

Deser:

Great question, I’m glad you asked that. I did. And again, these were pivotal, really important milestones for me as a grad student. I forget which one was the first conference, but AMS, American Meteorological Society, they still have it, it’s a conference called Climate Diagnostics Climate, I think. Maybe it’s not AMS, maybe that is NOAA, actually. Anyway, it wasn’t one of the big meetings, but it was wonderful climate variability. And it was in Boston. It was like, “That’s perfect, I’ll stay with my parents.” And I was super nervous to give the talk, and I did, and I did really well, and people really enjoyed my talk. And I remember Gerry Meehl, who is a scientist here in this lab here at NCAR, he came up to me after, and he really was interested in my work. That was just very positive.

And then, I went to different conferences. I went to one, Mike Wallace couldn’t go, it was in Brazil in Sao Paolo at an institute there. He couldn’t go, and I had just written my first paper, or maybe I was in the middle of it, looking at a certain type of El Niño event. So, I went, and I got to travel with Gene Rasmusson. We sat next to each other in the airplane, and I had his undivided attention, and we could just talk. It was really special. That was because Mike Wallace couldn’t go, and he asked if I wanted to go. Those are the two conferences that stand out. Oh, yeah, maybe I had just finished, then there was a conference called TOGA COARE, and it was in Hawaii. It was a very big conference to bring together people studying tropical air-sea interaction. El Niño obviously was a big topic.

And I gave a talk, and it was really good. And I remember Peter Webster, he’s one of the key people to try to understand the theoretical explanation for El Niño, he came up to me after, and he said, “So, what numerical model did you use for your results?” And I looked at him and said, “It wasn’t a model, it was the data.” And I felt so happy that he had been fooled to thinking it was a model. This was at the end of my thesis, and as I said, the synthesis was important and to bring some clear kind of schematic picture of what I was finding. And that he had paid attention, first of all, and listened to me, and then was fooled into thinking it was a model. So, that kind of stood out.

So, I think, as a grad student, as I gave these talks early on… and I mentioned before my thesis, where I felt like I didn’t have anything to show, and Mike said, “Let the work speak for itself.” And we had worked endlessly on the diagrams. That’s something Mike is just amazing at. And I love refining figures and making them as good as I can. He said, “Let the figures speak for themselves,” and that’s been my mantra and the way that I prepare talks. As I make a PowerPoint presentation these days, in those days, it was transparencies, as you’re putting it together, that’s my whole thought process, “How can I boil this down, not to oversimplify, but to simplify in a good way?” And I think people have always appreciated the clarity of my talks. Even theoretically minded scientists really do. And that has meant so much to me. Again, it’s the different ways that we each bring just our different talents.

Or doesn’t have to be a talent, just our different ways of doing things. I found that I had this good way of making very clear talks. And I worked super, super hard at it, but I like that process. It’s like the research process, it’s another piece of it, to me, where you’re just trying to… “Okay, what is extraneous information? How can I really boil this down?” And that’s the kind of research process that I do, refine, and refine, and refine. [laughs] That felt really good to me that I had that ability. When we talked about my childhood, I mentioned that I like structure, and I like a visual structure. And I think that’s how I build my presentations; I think a lot about that.

Amico:

Did you think that people at these conferences were generally pretty friendly and receptive to what people were saying? Or were they like, “I’m here to kind of tell people off”?

Deser:

I would say, for the most part, very friendly and very supportive. And I really enjoyed that. And especially when it was witnessing it between others, but also when it came to me. That was wonderful. I don’t think I would’ve survived if it had been cutthroat and kind of putting down people. But there was some of that amongst others. No specifics come to mind right now, but there were times when I have witnessed, at conferences, and not recently, but a couple decades ago, where some scientist could really put down and demean another scientist’s work, and that was not okay. [laughs] And that, I think, was maybe more my dad’s realm, at least at that time. And I was so glad that that wasn’t what I experienced, for the most part.

Amico:

I guess, lastly, I wanted to ask kind of a two-part question. Generally, what was your impression of the field or of the AMS, or both, as you were in grad school? And did you feel that the different disciplines that collaborated on your research, ocean, atmosphere, maybe different groups within these Earth sciences, did you get a sense that they had different mentalities or sensibilities?

Deser:

Yeah, great question. I do think so. I think they had different sensibilities, and I think oceanography… my impression in those days was, it was more tied to either fluid dynamics, so theory, or understanding kind of these very localized datasets from field campaigns. An atmospheric scientist could take this very global view of patterns. And those were very different sensibilities, actually. And then, as a postdoc, I and my good friend and longtime collaborator, Mike Alexander, we met as postdocs, and he’s down the hill at NOAA, he and I kind of teamed up and realized, “Wow, we could take this spatial approach or mindset, and there are now enough oceanographic data, at least for temperature measurements, that we could apply the same kind of analysis approach of making maps and looking at patterns to this oceanographic data.”

And I think at the beginning, we sort of stepped on a little bit of hard toes from some oceanographers. I don’t know why, it may be stepping on their toes or something, but it was really fun to begin to blend the two realms. And you can use, now, the same approach and look both at the atmosphere and the ocean and look at the ocean in the same way that we have been looking at the atmosphere in terms of these large-scale patterns. I would say the work that I do… I sometimes say that it’s not quantitative, it’s kind of qualitative, and people correct me. And that’s not entirely true, I am quantitative. But my interest is more on these qualitative spatial patterns. And I think for the oceanographers, it was just a different way of looking at their data. And I think in the beginning, we had a little bit of rubbing. So, I think there was a different sensibility at that time.

Amico:

Were there oceanographers in the department at Washington, or was it separate?

Deser:

It was a separate department and separate part of the campus. So, that physical distance, I think, there was a disconnect. I must’ve taken at least one oceanography class. I actually don’t remember, but I’m sure I did. And I know that there were oceanography grad students to take Mike Wallace’s introduction to general circulation. So, we did have grad students coming up or going to the other department for one or two courses. But there wasn’t any common meeting room, or building, or even just for the grad students from those two departments. And in fact, one of the oceanography students, she was my year, but she was in oceanography, Susan Lozier, she’s now gone on to be the head of the American Geophysical Union, a huge thing, and she’s a dean at Georgia Tech. She’s a fantastic oceanographer. She’s studied a lot about the Atlantic thermohaline circulation. But she reminded me when I saw her recently that she had come to take Mike Wallace’s course. And I remembered her, but it was so tangential. And yeah, that’s a shame. Presumably, these days, there’s more cohesion or integration between the two departments, but I’m not quite sure.

Amico:

That’s really interesting. It seems like these disciplines have become more intertwined, but at least the instruction of them is separate.

Deser:

Yeah, exactly. I believe that is true, at least at the University of Washington. I guess MIT may be still a bit separate. Maybe you can look into that. I think some departments are probably combined at this point. But I’m not sure.

Amico:

It’s a good question. Well, I think it seems like a good time to stop.

Deser:

I agree. Sounds perfect.

[End]