Marshall Styczinski
Postdoctoral Fellow - NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
Marshall “Moosh” Styczinski is a post-doctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and he works with NASA's Europa Clipper mission. Here, Marshall talks about living with depression, pursuing one’s passion, the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, and his solar system tattoo.
I grew up in a tiny town called Portola, in California, near Lake Tahoe. I attended Portola High School.
I majored in physics at the University of California, Davis, and then joined a physics graduate school program at the University of Washington. It took me a long time to figure out that pondering the big questions, like “are we alone?” was what pushed me toward a career in science. I found a great home in the U.W. astrobiology program because astrobiology is all about studying those big questions in practical ways. Inspiring words from friends in the program helped me make the difficult decision to start over on my Ph.D. research – several years in – so that I could study something more relevant to those questions. I started working under Erika Harnett studying Europa, and I started collaborating with Steve Vance when he visited to give a presentation. Working with Steve then led me to the Europa Clipper mission.
It probably started when I was about 7 years old. The Perseid meteor shower always comes along about a week before my birthday, and it must have been an exceptionally good year because I remember being floored by how good the sky looked. My dad explained a little about what I was seeing, and that really sparked my curiosity.
I’m studying Europa’s subsurface ocean, trying to put better constraints on the way the water is distributed underneath the moon’s ice shell. I’m using data from the Galileo mission to relax [or loosen] our assumptions and say that maybe Europa’s ocean is not symmetric. The analysis should be helpful in interpreting the data we get from the upcoming Europa Clipper mission.
Your graduate field of study doesn’t have to be the same as your undergraduate major. If I had known that, I might not have studied physics in graduate school. My undergrad in physics prepared me well for subjects besides physics.
I've sometimes struggled with depression, which is quite common for grad students. I applied to grad schools with my fiancée, and we were married for basically the entirety of grad school. When she graduated, she moved away for a new job. My depression deepened, and I used video games to cope, which was not effective. Failing to properly address my depression interfered with my research, and brought about the end of my relationship. I’m pretty extroverted most of the time, and when I spent time leaning on video games, it was very isolating.
Eventually, I started going to therapy, and a couple of good friends supported me really well. I sort of widened my social circle and put down roots. Support from friends and seeing a therapist helped me to stabilize, right the ship, and get back on course. I learned some very important lessons about keeping healthy by seeking support and appropriate treatment when it's needed.
Margaret Hamilton, who programmed NASA's Apollo spacecraft. She inspires me, especially because of the incredible hurdles she had to overcome to get involved in the mission at all in that era, but also the monumental undertaking and achievement. We put people on the Moon in no small part thanks to her.
I’ve ridden a motorcycle all up and down California. Whenever the logistics are feasible and I need to drive somewhere, I try to get there on two wheels.
I really enjoy scientific writing, but my favorite part is getting all the formatting perfect, to match a given style guide.
The tattoo on my chest is an accurate logarithmic-scale diagram of the solar system; I made the diagram myself, and the planetary alignment commemorates an important date. I'm especially pleased with the asteroids – they are statistically representative of their actual distribution in the asteroid belt!
The Hubble Deep Field image. It was a dark patch of the sky, but the Hubble Space Telescope found it was full of galaxies. Images like that one are what make me 100 percent sure that we are not alone in the universe. In all of those galaxies, there have to be other life forms, and other intelligent life forms. I can’t look at that image and think that we’re alone. There’s no way.
Planetary science is a global profession.