February 2001

Random Profile: Lesley Will

Every other month, Staff Notes Monthly spotlights a stochastically chosen staff member. This month we profile Lesley Will, a student assistant with the High Altitude Observatory (HAO).

Lesley Will. (Photo by Carlye Calvin.)

A fair deal:

Lesley joined NCAR in the spring of 1999. Then a first-year major in environmental engineering, she went to a CU internship fair and discovered that HAO was looking for an undergraduate to process data. She'd never worked with UNIX or with Sun machines before, but her solid math skills and some FORTRAN experience gave her the edge. "NCAR was one of the places I'd been looking at. I definitely got lucky."

What she does:

Lesley holds the fort at the northwest end of FL2, where she monitors data arriving from HAO's two Precision Solar Photometric Telescopes, one based at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and the other at Sunspot, New Mexico. (A third PSPT, stationed just outside Rome, Italy, is overseen by the Rome Astronomical Observatory.) PSPT is part of NSF's Radiative Inputs from Sun to Earth (RISE) program, whose aim is to measure and understand variability in the sun's radiative output.

Lesley comes in often, making sure the PSPT data from Mauna Loa and Sunspot are flowing as they should and fixing problems as they occur. "It's more important for me to come in frequently and keep things running than to come in once a week for an eight-hour day." After Lesley processes the full-solar-disk PSPT images, which are each typically about four million pixels, they're archived in HAO and made available on the Web.

What are the symptoms of ailing data?

"Flat fields with circles all over them. Sunspots that look like water spots." Even a single pixel can cause trouble. "If there's just one pixel that's really bright, it throws the whole thing off and makes the sun look really dark." Lesley enjoys working with those images based on emissions in the calcium spectrum, because "you can see all the features—the supergranules [large cellular features that cover the solar disk] and the plage [bright patches that surround sunspots]."

Leader of the pack:

Lesley is the first president of CU's new student chapter of the Society of Environmental Engineers. "We're just trying to get it started. It's been a little bit of a struggle." The environmental engineering degree has only been offered at CU since Lesley's freshman year, so she will be among the first graduates to have passed through all four years of the program. With her diploma due in little more than a year, Lesley sees graduate school as "a possibility, but I need a bit of a break. I don't think I could handle another two to four years of school right away." As an environmental engineering major, "solar physics isn't exactly where I thought I'd end up," she laughs, but she adds that if a permanent position opened up in HAO, "that would be just fine with me. I like the atmosphere here—everyone's really nice."

What got her started?

Denver's brown cloud may not be good for respiration, but it served as inspiration for Lesley. Growing up in Littleton, "I was always interested in the environment and air pollution. Just looking at the brown cloud really bugged me." For Lesley, science looked to be a more appealing career route than activism: "I'm not a tree hugger . . . I'm more into practical solutions."

From keyboard to keyboard:

Lesley has been a pianist since elementary school and still enjoys it. "I like classical pieces a lot. Chopin is one of my favorites." Don't ask her to play any Ellington, though: "I've never gotten into jazz."

• BH

Edited by Bob Henson, bhenson@ucar.edu
Prepared for the Web by Jacque Marshall
Last revised: Mon Feb 5 13:36:05 MST 2001