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Renowned OSU astronomer Scott Gaudi’s career has centered on the discovery of planets outside our solar system, looking to close the gap between life on Earth and other planets.
Tessa Berg Photos
Now, the scientist plans to use his discipline to connect gay youth with a sense of community.
Memorize the planets in order out from the sun.
It was a simple second-grade assignment, and young Scott Gaudi started by picking up his parents’ copy of “Our Universe,” a classic coffee-table book from National Geographic. The book might have been heavy reading for some 6-year-olds, but not for Gaudi, who spent much of his first five years in the Middle East where his father worked as an electrical engineer.
While peers struggled with English, Gaudi could already speak Arabic and French.
While they were obsessed with football and cartoons, he read science books.
While other boys shyly started noticing girls, Gaudi didn’t.
He was younger, smarter and far more socially awkward.
Thumping the weighty “Our Universe” on his dining room table, Gaudi gently ran his hand over the slick cover—an image of a flaming, shooting rocket soaring past planets and moons. By the time he read how alien life would need to adapt to live on planets like Mars and Jupiter, he was consumed, hooked by a sense of wonder that otherworldly solar systems exist.
After reaching the last page in one sitting, the self-proclaimed outsider knew he had found a world in which he belonged.
Today, the nearly 39-year-old Gaudi is a foremost expert in the discovery of exoplanets—planets found revolving around other suns. A tenured Ohio State astronomy professor, his revolutionary approach to finding such planets with a technique called gravitational microlensing earned him a nearly $775,000 National Science Foundation career grant and a trip to the White House in July to receive a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Gaudi’s plan is to use a portion of the grant—awarded on scientific merit and promise of community outreach to promote science—to connect with youth who do not identify as heterosexual and who might, like he did, use science to find their place in society.
“Seeing people in science who are gay and are thriving can be extremely powerful,” Gaudi says. “That’s the kind of impact I’d like to make. If I find one person excited by what I do and is interested in doing it, it’s worth my time.”
At the time Gaudi happened upon “Our Universe,” he felt as much an alien in his environment as the creatures that captivated him. When he moved to Illinois, the 5-year-old bypassed kindergarten even though he tested two grades above his age. His mother, Terry Gaudi, felt skipping one grade would be enough of a social challenge.
Gaudi, a boy with a slight build and caramel-colored hair, constantly peppered with questions his second-grade teacher, Eleanor Gregory, who assigned the planet memorization project. He pushed teachers and students past their comfort zones, Gregory recalls, always asking “why” and “how,” instead of simply completing assignments as instructed.
“He annoyed some of the teachers—but not me,” she says, adding Gaudi didn’t connect with the playground-going boys in class. “He was more interested in thinking about ideas. Not everyone at that level felt that was an important part of life.”
As a child, Gaudi played mostly by himself and spent his days reading inside, his mother recalls. Too small for, and completely disinterested in, sports, his only connections to classmates came at school where he was labeled a geek and nerd. Teachers advised him to hide his constant “A” grades, yet asked him to assist with long division and algebra.
“Kids used to tease him because he was too smart; they couldn’t relate to him, or he to them,” recalls Terry, who had a hunch her son was gay when he was in seventh grade. “I hoped it wasn’t so—not because it mattered to me, but because of the agony you know your child would go through.”
But by his sophomore year, Gaudi found a new school to call home in the form of the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a three-year residential public high school for gifted students in Aurora, Illinois. The transfer was life-changing, he admits.
“It was the first time I realized there were people who thought like me, some place I felt I could be myself,” Gaudi says.
So comfortable was Gaudi that at age 13 or 14 he was finally able to admit he was gay to a residential counselor. Although he was prepared only to write it on a piece of paper, rather than say it aloud, the relief was palpable.
“It was liberating—and scary,” he says. “This was back in 1989 or 1990. Times were a lot different. I felt somewhat relieved that I had finally told someone, but I was scared about other people finding out.”
Gaudi quickly immersed himself in science with an eye toward astronomy, a passion that carried him to Michigan State University at 17 to major in astrophysics. Four years later he headed to graduate school at Ohio State and was once again an anomaly—this time for all the right reasons, says his mentor, professor Andrew Gould, who is himself an expert in microlensing.
Gould started Gaudi on a summer research project on gravitational microlens simulations, a technique whereby a star crossing in front of another magnifies light from the distant star like a lens to become visible to astronomers. It has since become Gaudi’s main research area. The project was one of the most complicated problems Gould ever assigned, but Gaudi had no trouble getting it off the ground.
“I got very lucky with Scott,” Gould says. “Scott is at the top level of being able to figure out new things from data that everyone is staring at. He has fresh perspectives on seemingly old concepts. There is no one operating at this level across so many planetary search techniques.”
Leaving Ohio State with a doctorate in astronomy, Gaudi became a Hubble Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and followed with a Menzel postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He continued working with gravitational microlensing in an effort to find planets far beyond our own solar system. The technique was successful for others, but it wasn’t until crunching data in his Harvard office in April 2005, nearly 10 years after first embarking on his astronomical career, that using the effect catapulted Gaudi into astronomy’s elite.
After chasing data with a collaborator in Korea, Gaudi flew home not sure they had made a real discovery. He headed directly from the airport to Harvard’s campus. In his office, he scribbled formulas on the back of an envelope looking for a model that matched his data set, until there was only one conclusion left: It had to be a planet.
“At the time I was less introspective of what was going on,” Gaudi says. “I was too busy writing emails to my collaborators. But in the moment of silence, when you’re not doing any work, you’re like, ‘Holy crap—I just found a planet!’ ”
The discovery helped bring Gaudi back to Ohio State as a professor, and in 2008 he became part of another out-of-this-world achievement—the concurrent discovery of two exoplanets that are miniature doppelgangers of Saturn and Jupiter—by a worldwide team of astronomers and observers.
It was Gaudi’s data analysis that confirmed the planet pair, and that feat led him to serve as first author of the academic paper on the finding, which had nearly 80 co-authors.
The finding did more than solidify his place among the world’s most renowned astronomers—in 2009 he earned the Helen B. Warner Prize, the American Astronomical Society’s highest award for young astronomers. It also helped earn him the much-coveted National Science Foundation Early Career Development Grant in 2011, a prize intended to propel outstanding young scientists by financially supporting academic research and outreach endeavors like mentoring high-school students in robotics or recruiting high-school teachers to help with air-quality research.
“Scott is one of very few individuals in this country that can actually help us determine our place in the universe,” says Daniel Evans, program director of the NSF’s division of astronomical sciences. “That’s a pretty profound thing.”
In his application for the early career grant, Gaudi proposed using science to reach out to what he saw as a scientifically underserved population—youths who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning or intersex. It was a pitch they hadn’t heard before, Evans recalls. “Scott’s idea was particularly attractive to the panel. It was something new and fresh, and Scott really showed he had a lot of energy to run with it,” he says.
It’s a passion born of Gaudi’s childhood.
“In rural Illinois, I was feeling very much an outcast,” admits Gaudi, who came out to his friends and family as a college sophomore. “I was academic and gay. That was a struggle for me, and science was an outlet and a distraction—someplace I could feel good about myself. With the outreach component of this grant, I am going to try and give back, to try and fill the role in other people’s lives—young people—that [science] filled for me.”
Gaudi plans to introduce astronomy through star-viewing events at Camp Sunrise, a week-long summer getaway for youth who have HIV or whose lives are touched by the disease. He intends also to reach out to other adults and youth in Ohio who are gay or affected by HIV, although those plans are yet to be finalized.
And in 2014, Gaudi will head back to the high school that changed his life to teach a weeklong pre-term course to students who could one day follow his same path on a subject he knows well: the search for life in the universe.
Until recently, being gay was not a big part of Gaudi’s workplace identity, says graduate student Calen Henderson. But after Gaudi was given tenure, Henderson noticed his professor chose to reach out more and be more vocal about his sexual orientation.
“I feel like by taking on these challenges he has released some of the burden on himself and he can help people in a position he was in when he was growing up and make it easier—easier than it was for him,” Henderson says. “[Being gay is] not a personality-defining characteristic, and it shouldn’t in any way scare someone away from math and science.”
Henderson is working with Gaudi on the American Astronomy Society’s Working Group for LGBTQI Equality. The group of roughly 30 members looks at equality and quality-of-life issues for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, questioning and intersex people in astronomy programs across the country.
“As an out astronomer who is fairly prominent in my field, my responsibility is to try and be a role model for other graduate students or young astronomers,” Gaudi adds. “We have no idea how big that population is, but we know they are out there and they need support.”
Gaudi hopes to begin outreach efforts later this year. He spent the first year of his grant focused on scientific pursuits, like helping graduate students discover their first exoplanet—as he did in June 2012 with Ohio State doctoral candidate Thomas Beatty—and going to Washington, D.C., to pick up his Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from Barack Obama at the White House, after being nominated by the NSF.
He has also embarked on a leadership role in the astronomy community, chairing NASA’s Exoplanet Program Analysis Group and serving on the NASA Advisory Council Astrophysics Subcommittee.
Despite such lofty accomplishments, he says many of his days are astonishingly boring, filled with emailing collaborators, gathering data with grad students and running simulations to see whether that collected data has revealed a new secret of the universe.
“We run statistical tests and set models to see if the data we collect is trying to tell us it’s a planet, or maybe another star, or not even a real signal,” he says. “It’s like a detective skimming through evidence to say, ‘Does this implicate this as a planet?’ ”
That desire to help those who follow in his astronomical footsteps is what drives Gaudi to even greater heights. No matter how high he climbs, Gaudi vows never to forget the path he took to get here, nor will he stop striving to make that path smoother for others.
“If you can do something … you’re really excited about, and (can) be proud of,” he says, “it won’t prevent the negative aspects of society’s prejudice toward GLBT or HIV-positive individuals, but it will provide a sense of inner strength and a shield to help you deflect it.
“You are not alone.”
Freelance writer Nicole Kraft teaches journalism at Ohio State University.
Looking for Life
When new acquaintances find out Scott Gaudi studies the stars for a living, one question soon follows: Is there life out there?
“All sorts of people have had that late-night, after-a-few-glasses-of-wine discussion about whether we have life out there,” Gaudi says. “They want to know how we got here. Is it a cosmic accident? Is there life like us? That’s a question that’s been with humanity a very, very long time.”
By the middle of the 20th century, Gaudi says all the key pieces of knowledge were in place to pursue the answer to that question. Scientists knew Earth and our solar system were not in the center of the universe. They also knew that the universe and everything in it could be understood by one set of physical laws, and those laws apply here and in space.
“We can study things we could never touch or move or manipulate, just by looking at the light coming from them,” he explains. “We know the universe is very old and we are very young as human beings. We know the universe is very big and there are many, many stars like our own.”
Among the questions astronomers can now answer are:
Yes, there are planets around other stars.
Yes, there are solar systems that resemble our own.
And yes, there are Earth-like planets.
The next step: Figuring out whether those planets have life.
“Twenty years ago we knew answers to none of these questions,” Gaudi says. “All of us alive today live in an extremely unique time in human history. It’s the first time in our history that we are able to pursue the answer to that question of, ‘Is there life out there?’ and pursue the answer in a scientific manner.”
