Dr. Christine McCarthy • From Cheerleader to Professor
(Research Professor of Geology, Columbia University || NY USA)
“My specialty is ice. I split my time between thinking about glaciers and how they flow, and moons of the outer solar system and how they generate heat from tidal energy. I am purely an experimentalist — I take samples of ice and come up with experiments that provide data for models of bigger problems. Right now I’m measuring ice friction, which helps us to better project sea level rise by predicting how ice streams move from the land out to the sea — and they move really fast!
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I was not always interested in science. I was very artsy when I was young, dancing and designing costumes. I was on my college’s national championship dance team while I got a BA in Communications. I was the first person in my family to go to college. After college I retired from professional dance and became a paralegal. There was a female attorney who I worked for, the head of the law firm, and she was such a great role model. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my life and she showed me that a woman can do whatever the heck she wants. She can own it. By this point I was no longer dancing and had started rock climbing. I was out in the world, hanging from rocks in Yosemite National Park, seeing where the glacier had carved its way through — and it all made sense to me in a way that law didn’t.
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At the age of 30, I quit my job and went back to school to get a BS in Geology. I cut off all my hair, moved to Oregon and totally started my life over. While I was there I worked as a NASA undergraduate summer researcher on planetary ices. I got to play in the laboratory and it was very intimidating, but equally exciting. Everyone was really encouraging and would help me when I had no idea what to do with a tool. When I went to grad school I begged my advisor to get funding for me to continue working on ice. That’s what I’ve been working on ever since.
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When I was younger I thought I had to be either artistic or scientific — and I chose artistic. But you don’t have to choose one or the other. You can do both.”
