10 Questions: Brian Kent

An inside look at unique careers in STEM

In each installment of our "10 Questions" blog series, readers will meet a staff member from AUI or one of its managed facilities, gaining insight into their career journey, what their role involves and what makes their work meaningful.

1. What is your role and what facility do you work at?

I work as the director of science communications at the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia. The NRAO operates a world-class suite of radio telescopes, including the Very Large Array (VLA) on the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, as a North American partner with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which is an array that crosses North America.

Visit the NRAO science website to learn more.

2. What drew you to this field and how did you get started?

I was always interested in studying outer space, physics and computing. Understanding our universe is a fascinating and humbling pursuit. The sky you see with your eyes is just one thin slice of a much larger picture. Radio waves reveal hydrogen gas, rapidly rotating pulsars, planetary disks that are forming, exotic molecules - phenomena that are completely invisible to other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. I earned my Ph.D. in astronomy and space sciences from Cornell University in 2008. I was a Jansky Postdoctoral Fellow, then a staff scientist, before my current position at the NRAO.

3. Can you describe a typical workday?

I lead a group of people at the NRAO to organize our presence at science conferences and write observatory publications for the science community. This includes our monthly NRAO Science Newsletter, which gives the latest science announcements, events and developments. Read the newsletter and subscribe!

4. What do you enjoy most about your job and why?

Discussing the capabilities of our facilities with new users and students. Modern science lives in a universe of possibilities. The astronomical community proposes unique and exciting projects that push the boundaries of science and instrumentation capability. Our development at the NRAO is driven by scientific inquiry - new questions to answer, and the technology needed to answer those questions.

I am also interested in 3D visualization and computer graphics - finding ways to render complex astronomical data in forms that are both scientifically rigorous and visually compelling. An example is the figure showing a three-dimensional galaxy datecube of NGC 6946 (Walter et al. 2008) observed with the Very Large Array.

5. What is your favorite part about working at this facility?

It is an exciting time to be involved in professional astronomy. The data rates, computational challenges and discovery space continue to expand. The radio-millimeter-submillimeter part of the electromagnetic spectrum is a critical part of studying astronomical phenomena, in concert with the optical, IR, UV, X-ray and higher energy regimes.

6. What is something about your job that most people do not know?

A person in a scientific field tends to specialize - I study nearby galaxies. Astronomers also specialize and focus on pulsars, the time domain, protoplanetary disks, the interstellar medium, star formation, solar physics, astrochemistry, algorithm development or instrumentation - and many more subjects in modern astrophysics. I enjoy hearing about the science and technology that I do not study in depth on a daily basis from colleagues, students and users.

8. What is a goal or dream do you have for your career?

The NRAO has had a rich history of scientific discovery for 70 years! Contributing to its innovation in science is exciting.

8. What is one thing you're excited about in the coming year at work?

Development of the Next Generation Very Large Array and the expanding capabilities of our current facilities (GBT, ALMA and VLBA). I am one of the organizers for the Astronomical Data Analysis and Software Systems (ADASS) meeting - an annual international conference on computing and software in astronomy. The NRAO is a sponsor of this meeting, and topics like high performance computing, machine learning and AI are discussed among software engineers and astronomers. We also participate in engineering meetings, like the International Microwave Symposium, and large astronomy conferences, like the International Astronomical Union General Assembly.

9. What is the best career advice you have ever received?

I remember a great talk given in graduate school by a visiting professor who said it was important to continue learning beyond your graduate education. We have many tools at our disposal such that it is possible to obtain information and instruction on anything.

Moonrise over the Very Large Array. Image Credit: Brian Kent

10. Why is it important for humanity to study the universe?

Astronomers are the cartographers and map makers of our universe. We map, study and catalog all that we observe - and as a result understand the processes that got us here.

Studying the universe is one of the most fundamentally human things we do. The events that we witness in modern astronomy are incredible. That galaxies collide and merge over billions of years in a slow cosmic choreography. That the universe is expanding, has a history and a future - and that we can actually measure phenomena with instruments built by human ingenuity on a small rocky planet orbiting an unremarkable star.

That is an astonishing fact about our situation. We are part of the universe, and yet we have developed the capacity to study it, model it and comprehend it - a continually evolving process. That is an amazing capacity about humans, and I think we have a responsibility not to squander our ability to study it. The alternative - a civilization that turns inward, that stops asking the largest questions - would be a civilization diminished in ways that are difficult to fully articulate but very easy to feel.

The universe we observe has existed for roughly 13.8 billion years. We have been asking serious questions about it for a few thousand years - with serious innovation only in the last several hundred. We are, in cosmic terms, just getting started - and that is an extraordinary prospect.

Follow Brian through Visualize Astronomy on BlueSky, YouTube, Instagram, or X. Also, view his professional website.