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 Bryna Hazelton, our Director of Research Programs and Senior Research Scientist.
Given her upbringing, some might find it unsurprising that Bryna developed a passion for research. She grew up in a family of scientists in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. Her mother, a medical doctor, taught her about mendelian genetics around the age of seven. At age eight, she was fascinated when her physicist father told her about the Big Bang. That same intellectual curiosity drew Bryna to a variety of subjects in school ranging from Biology to Literary Criticism.
There was, however, one subject that particularly stood out when she attended college at the University of California, San Diego. Bryna was drawn to the way Physics was taught and enjoyed the smaller class sizes. She was surprised when she found that she was often the only woman in her undergraduate Physics classes since her personal life was full of women in science. Thankfully, one of her professors held a regular women in Physics luncheon where she learned a great deal from the experiences and research of women faculty and graduate students in her field.
The pull she felt to Physics eventually led her to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she studied Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs). TGFs are very short (~100 microseconds to a few milliseconds) bursts of x-ray and gamma-rays from thunderstorms. In her dissertation, she used data from the RHESSI satellite, the first satellite to have thorough information about the energies of the gamma-rays from TGFs, to understand more about where, when, and how TGFs were produced in thunderstorms. In other words, her work explored how and when lightning happens, which can help us better grasp the potential dangers of planes flying above thunderstorms.
After obtaining her doctorate, Bryna’s next stop was a postdoctoral researcher position at the University of Washington. While working in the Physics Department, she ventured into astrophysics and cosmology by focusing on precision radio astronomy. This experience made her realize that she could get excited about a variety of research topics, especially when she enjoyed the people she worked with. As she puts it, “The most important thing is who you work with, not what you work on.”
Back then she was taking steps to become a professor of Physics, but she grew attached to the Seattle area during her postdoc and started to build a community here. Luckily, the eScience Institute offered a unique opportunity for her to continue her research at UW just a few floors above her lab. As a research scientist with split appointments at eScience and the Physics Department, she pursues her own research agenda while simultaneously empowering other researchers across the university through eScience programming. More specifically, she leads the Data Science & AI Accelerator program that pairs UW researchers in all fields with our experts to make sense of large datasets.
Bryna finds this work interesting because, as she offers, “I find that I can get interested in lots of different problems” and “can make a real impact on other peoples’ research” by giving them novel resources. While she brings her own data science expertise to the table, she finds it particularly exciting work with researchers from domains very different from her own. She explains that “good data analysis requires understanding the details of how the data were taken, which is why I find it so important to collaborate with experts in the field. They know these kinds of things, which I do not. Some of the worst examples of epistemological trespassing occur when people analyze data without understanding how it was taken and what effect that had on the data.”
It is Bryna’s consistent desire to both understand and collaborate with a wide range of academic perspectives that makes her such an impactful member of the eScience community. Congratulations to Bryna on recently celebrating a decade of uplifting UW researchers at the eScience Institute. We are incredibly lucky to have her!