One of my favorite memories
as a kid was just these beautiful, very, very dark nights.
It's amazing to be able
to see the Milky Way, but also be able to see faint aurora
as a dance across the sky and things like that.
I remember as a teenager sitting with friends and looking up
at the dark sky and asking yourself the question of what's out there.
It's just such a big, wide open space for exploration.
Hi, my name is Joe Westlake and I'm the director
for the Heliophysics Division at NASA.
I think the biggest thing to be excited about in my new
role is working with the wonderful Heliophysics team.
That vibrant community really enables so many amazing things
and I'm really excited to be able to engage with
all these people that are just so energetic about the
science that we're doing.
Heliophysics as a discipline is blossoming.
We're in a position now where there are so many missions,
so many instruments, so many technologies that are coming out of Heliophysics
right now
and NASA in general, that we need to be able to support
our people so that they can be excited to come to work every day
so they can be a part of these impactful missions.
Throughout my career, especially when I was an undergraduate
and as a graduate student, my mentors have been the people that I rely on.
I spend a lot of time working closely with people who have lots of experience
in the field. And in the end, that path, that journey that I took was not linear.
It's one of these, you know, random walks to figure out
what I liked, what I wanted to do, what inspired me.
And that's something that I think, you know, the entire community finds.
You find yourself going from mission to mission, or going from topic to topic
and figuring out what excites you, what lights a spark, what
what do you enjoy, and what gives you that sense of inquiry.
The sense of, you know, newness and excitement.
I had an opportunity to be a
part of the Heliophysics community first in the MMS mission.
In that time I was an instrument scientist, so I took great
care in understanding how the instrument
performed. Producing quality data sets, producing things that the community
could actually do the science that needs to be done
and producing the products that needed to get done in order
for scientists to ask the questions.
And so as part of that MMS experience, I was able to take instrumentation
from when it was on the ground,
to when it was placed on the spacecraft, to when it was in space and be able
to understand the data that came from it and turn it into scientific results.
That experience and that - that time that I spent,
you know, carefully looking after what was in the instrument,
gave me the background to understand instruments in general,
but also to understand how instruments interface with spacecraft,
understand how science drives what we do in heliophysics,
and that gave me the experience
that I needed to be the project scientist for IMAP.
That’s a mission that's asking really big unanswered questions.
What is our place within the local space environment?
What's our solar home look like?
What's the neighborhood? That experience from MMS and the experience of being able
to, you know, be a part of an instrument, being part of a team in that way
gave me what I needed to be in a leadership role
and to be able to lead a group of scientists, to be able to lead
a group of engineers, and really a large multidimensional team.
So when I think about how we as a team can work together,
I think it's important
for us to understand the human side of science. That underpins
and is at the core of us being able to work together as researchers.
We really have to be compassionate for each other. Compassionate
for everyone who makes up our teams.
And I think that being able to be there
for the people that are working on all of these amazing products,
all these amazing, you know, NASA missions is one of my central roles.
I'm going to work very hard to be there for everyone in the community
and to really ensure that people have the support
and the things that they need to be successful as heliophysicists.
Our impact
on society, on everyday life is known and it's big.
So we're at a point now where we, we as heliophysics just need to start
asking really big questions. What are we going to do?
What is this team going to do?
What questions are we going to ask?
What does our future look like?
I want that vision to be our shared vision as heliophysicists.
I want to be able to be there and try and ensure
that everybody who's a part of the team feels valued and feels to be engaged
and included within our community.
Being impactful as a researcher, having high quality scientific results,
being impactful as an engineer, having the amazing technology
that comes out of our NASA missions is why we do this.
And if you think of our scientific understanding
as being raised up by each of these individuals knowledge,
and each piece of that diverse community comes together
to build this sort of beautiful picture that we need to develop for the world.
It's a huge impact that that team has.
Every person alone has a piece of that,
and no one person alone can make the entire picture.
Let me try and bridge these different places and figure out ways
to enable our teams, to enable our heliophysicists to do great work.
Let's do awesome stuff.