By Kate Rich
The eScience Staff Spotlight is a series featuring individual members of our team and their career journey. This week’s featured staff member is Anthony Arendt, our Director of Community Engagement Programs and Senior Data Science Fellow.
Anthony knows the importance of hard earned data all too well. As a Research Professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, he often had to travel to remote fieldwork locations via private aircrafts in subzero temperatures. While traveling near the top of the Valdez Glacier in Alaska, one of the snowiest parts of North America, things did not go as planned and the helicopter suffered a broken tail rotor during the landing. Luckily, everyone survived and got rescued later that day.
Anthony reflects on this time as “an example of how we are literally risking our lives to go out and collect these observations, and one of the things that motivated me to do data science and, in particular, to build data systems is that I wasn’t seeing the equal amount of effort in my community around that…once we go out and do all these adventurous things, risking life and limb, oftentimes that data languishes in someone’s fieldbook or in spreadsheets somewhere and I always thought that was a bit of a tragedy.” He further explains “I just think this is something we ought to be attending to as a community, really making sure we monitor all the work that goes into collecting data and curating it and make sure it’s useful to other people.”
Nowadays, he brings that care for the process of data collection and how it is shared to his work at the eScience Institute as our Director of Community Engagement Programs. Here, he leads events such as eScience’s Hackweeks and helps foster a community for open science. Anthony shares that “I really value how scientists can come together and solve big challenges.” In his research in Earth Science, those challenges tend to revolve around climate change and he states that “I think a lot of these problems are so complex that I started to see the importance of communities coming together to find new ways to do our research. And so the hackweek model has been a way for me to explore that and host events where we can bring people together.”
Becoming an Earth Scientist, or more specifically a Glaciologist, was a natural fit for him given his upbringing. Anthony grew up in a family of teachers in Edmonton, the northernmost major city in Canada. Surrounded by heavy winters, he grew up loving the snow. His family frequently visited the Canadian Rockies, Jasper, and BANFF. This instilled in him a love for the environment, especially alpine regions, at an early age. He stood on top of a glacier for the first time at 8 years old and offers that “I think that was maybe what inspired me to become a glaciologist”
Growing up, he really enjoyed math and physics. Towards the end of his time in high school, climate change entered the public consciousness and he remembered reading about global warming for the first time in a National Geographic magazine. “I remember thinking that’s what I want to work on, it seems really important.”Back then, there were no environmental programs at universities like there are now. So he worked across relevant areas such as environmental engineering and geography. Engineering exposed him to more computational tools and he enjoyed a course on learning to program in Fortran. He liked it so much that he ended up serving as a teaching assistant for the course later on where he guided lab sessions. Anthony explains that “I had this opportunity early on to do some teaching together with some computational work and I like to think that’s the beginning of where I ended up today.”
He switched his major over to the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences where he was drawn to the work they were doing with earth formations and remote sensing tools. During his fourth year in college, a Glaciology professor joined his department to establish a new lab that studied the Canadian wilderness. Anthony became his field assistant and helped him conduct research on Ellesmere Island, Canada’s northernmost and third largest island located near Greenland. It was one of the most remote places he has ever been in his life and an amazing opportunity for him as an undergraduate student. As Anthony puts it, “after that, I was pretty much hooked.”
He stayed at the University of Alberta to pursue his masters in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. In his research, he focused on the relationship between the climate and glacier melting by setting up weather stations across the glaciers he was studying. In his lab, his background in Fortran coding came in use as he was able to create computer models for their research projects. As part of his research training, he was learning outdoor skills such as mountaineering and couldn’t help thinking to himself “this is the dream.” Anthony says that “just the fact that I could be outdoors a lot and not always behind a desk” was incredibly valuable to him.
He went on to get his PhD in Geophysics at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He had never been to Alaska so it was good that his advisor knew his way around and was quite the outdoorsman. His advisor also happened to be a pilot with his own single engine aircraft that he used to fly around Alaska with laser altimeters that measured glaciers. This ability to fly across the glaciers they studied offered some amazing research opportunities for Anthony since very few of Alaska’s thousands of glaciers had been measured at the time. Through their research, they learned that glaciers were melting faster than anticipated and contributing to rising sea levels. Suddenly, he was asked to give interviews for outlets like CNN and articulate his research to the public. The media attention around that work ultimately helped him to hone new skills and learn the value of effectively translating complex data into information that the public could easily grasp.
After finishing his doctorate, Anthony traded Alaskan glaciers for Greenbelt, Maryland. He loaded up his pickup truck and drove all the way across North America to begin a postdoctoral position at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. At NASA he worked on a different method for Glaciology with a satellite that tracked the changes in glaciers through gravity measurements and compared them with measurements from plane altimeters. He joined his colleagues on missions in a large aircraft originally developed for the Navy where they flew over the ice sheets on the Antarctic peninsula and parts of Greenland.
Next, he headed back to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks to be a Research Professor. This is when he became part of a global effort to encourage scientists across the world to submit their maps of glaciers to a single repository. In this early open science effort, he found that getting scientists across the world to share their data required some diplomacy skills. Different countries had different attitudes around sharing mapping data. In the end, they were able to get 18 countries to submit their datasets that helped build a comprehensive view of what was happening to glaciers across the globe. To this day, it’s one of the most referenced core datasets for running simulations of glacier changes around the world.
Seeking a tad more sunshine, Anthony came to Seattle to work as a visiting scholar at Microsoft Research. During this time, he made connections at UW with the eScience Institute and the Applied Physics Lab. Months later, he ended up accepting a Research Scientist position that split his time between the two organizations. At UW, he continues to do his own research in collaboration with colleagues from his days as a glacier and snow scientist. He helps them design code and build data systems to support snow measurements from the field.
After decades of work driven by a desire to empower environmental research through open science, coming to eScience was a fitting choice. Back when he was working in a traditional academic model that could be more individualistic and competitive, he would attend workshops with other researchers and think “if these folks worked together and shared their knowledge, we could get to somewhere much more impactful.” Anthony further explains that “because of what I care about around climate issues, there’s a little bit of urgency to that so sitting in a meeting and arguing about ‘can you use my data or not’ just didn’t seem like a good use of our time.” Due to these experiences, he “was trying to create a different way of being a scientist” where sharing data was more engrained in academic culture. So “when I discovered what eScience was all about, I actually felt really lucky.” “eScience exposed me to everything I know about open science and open software.”
Congratulations to Anthony on ten amazing years at the eScience Institute. Your passion for your work and high quality espresso beans makes the office a better place for us all!