Sigma Xi Honoree Hanson s Career Spans Galaxies and Publishing

It’s a grateful Margaret Hanson who hangs up the phone. A colleague has discovered how to provide wireless internet access for the annual meeting of the editorial team of The Astronomical Journal. Hanson serves as associate editor-in-chief for the prestigious journal, and she is coordinating the annual meeting, which will take place at the University of Cincinnati, where she is professor of physics.

“We do a lot of brainstorming at these meetings,” Hanson said. “We have to. Our journal has been published since 1849 but technology has changed publishing completely. The paper copy is not the journal of record anymore – it’s the online version, where you have access to extra features like better images, software, and additional data.”

Editing a scientific journal requires a lot of Hanson’s time, but there are rewards as well. In addition to the prestige it brings to the department, an editorial posting provides amplified opportunities for networking.

“The connections are unbelievable,” she said. “You get to work with almost everyone in the field.”

As she discusses the journal’s production, it’s clear that Hanson has, over the course of a relatively brief career, mastered the operations of the scientific research enterprise, including how to secure grant funding, how to get published, and how to recruit graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to the research team. Hanson shares her expertise by leading grant-writing workshops for colleagues.

“It’s a very demanding style of writing,” she said of the grant application. “You’ve got to make your case very compelling and extremely clear.”

To maintain her grant-application skills, Hanson regularly serves as a grant reviewer.

“It’s an eye-opening experience,” she said. “There are very, very few proposals denied because they are poorly prepared, because the applicant doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing. Mostly, it comes down to choosing among large numbers of very well prepared proposals.”

While Hanson has been markedly successful in managing her own research enterprise – she has secured nearly $2 million in grants since joining UC’s faculty in 1998 – it’s the scientific inquiry that continues to drive her.

Hanson has invested her career in an effort to improve our understanding of galaxies. She has been building this understanding by studying clusters of stars in our own galaxy – the Milky Way – and nearby galaxies. Specifically, she analyzes the light from these stars and what that tells us about the age and movement of the stars in these clusters to understand galactic dynamics.

Starlight peels apart in a spectroscope like sunlight spreading into a rainbow as it passes through a prism. A close examination of the spectroscopic “rainbow” reveals the chemical composition of the star. That is a key to its age. It can also tell whether the star is moving toward or away from the Earth, and at what speed.

“I’m really good at making spectroscopic measurements,” Hanson said. “I sometimes say it’s my one marketable skill.”

Hanson has used her skill at spectroscopy to contribute to a long-running debate about the nature of our home galaxy.

“Is the Milky Way normal? That’s what got me started,” Hanson said.

As a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Hanson wasn’t satisfied with the standard explanation that the Milky Way was somehow abnormal because it lacked certain types of star clusters, particularly very massive ones.

“We can’t say it’s abnormal because we have such difficulty telling what’s actually in the Milky Way,” Hanson said.

Over the years, Hanson has examined a number of impediments to a true understanding of our home galaxy and has taken a strong interest in selection effects. A lot of astronomy today involves the compilation and analysis of large amounts of data – but what if that data isn’t really representative of the universe we observe? 

In some cases the environment itself favors certain kinds of data. Embedded as we are in the Milky Way, we can’t see around dust clouds and other obstacles. In other cases, the viewer makes assumptions about the kind of data he’s looking for, and that affects the accuracy of the data.

Astronomers have increasingly relied on computer models in which a large amount of observations are statistically analyzed to build hypotheses about the universe. Hanson and her team have been looking at one such model developed to predict the distribution of star clusters.

“It turns out it showed a significant number of false positives – stellar clusters that weren’t really clusters. It had a selection bias,” Hanson said. “I began thinking about what it wasn’t showing. Where were the false negatives? Where were the star clusters our models were not detecting? What are we missing by doing these simulations?”

That quest has taken her to observatories around the globe, including Antofagasta, Chile, where the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescopes are located. This fall, she’ll be at the Siding Spring Observatory at Coonabarabran, Australia. The days of the astronomer walking to the observatory next-door are largely over.

“You need great viewing,” Hanson said, “but great viewing rarely comes with a great place to live. They have it in Hawaii, and I might not mind that someday.”

But for now, there’s a meeting to plan for, and a journal to edit.

Hanson will give the Young Investigator of the Year Lecture on "Improving mass and age estimates of unresolved stellar clusters" at the UC Myers Alumni Center at 5:00 p.m. Tuesday October 12. Hanson is a noted UC faculty member who was nominated and selected by the Fellows of the UC Graduate School on behalf of Sigma Xi.