Coding, Open Science, and Physical Oceanography with Dr. Chelle Gentemann

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Chelle Gentemann, Senior Scientist at Farallon Institute, about Coding, Open Science and Physical Oceanography.   Read her full bio below.

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form

Showtimes:
1:58  Nic & Laura talk about Math v. English & Coding
7:20  Interview with Chelle Gentemann Starts
14:02  Open Science
21:28  Coding
33:17  Field Notes
36:52  Secret sport

Please be sure to ✔️subscribe, ⭐rate and ✍review. 

This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Chelle Gentemann at https://cgentemann.github.io/

Guest Bio:

I am a passionate advocate for open science, open source software, and inclusivity. As a physical oceanographer focused on remote sensing, I have worked for over 25 years on retrievals of ocean temperature from space and using that data to understand how the ocean impacts our lives. More recently, I am focused on Butterfly, a proposal for a new NASA mission, and advancing open science for societal benefit.

I have an open by default policy for all my research, teaching, and speaking. I try to post talks and presentations on this website and my code is all freely available, with a permissive license, online.

Music Credits

Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa

Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Transcript is auto-transcribed

[Intro]

Laura 
Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental nerds Nic and Laura. On today's episode, Nic and I discuss math, english and how they relate to the joys of coding. Get ready for that one. And we talked to you Chelle Gentemann a senior scientist at Farallon Institute about coding open science and rugby. It's really such an awesome listen. So make sure you stick around for the fun parts, which is all parts of course.

Nic 
It's all parts. Yeah, it's all fun.

Laura 
And finally, the moon is constantly moving further away from the earth and that will eventually mean that we won't have any tides. Wow, that's weird. Of course by then the sun will be a red giant so large that it will begin to disintegrate the earth. But hey, what Nic wants us to know today.

Nic  
It's a dark start.

Laura 
We can only go from here folks. Hit that music

[Shout out]

Nic  
Our shout out for today goes to Callie Veelenturf.  She was just on episode 54 of the show discussing the rights of nature in Panama and we are so thrilled to announce on February 24, 2022 that the President of the Republic of Panama signed the Rights of nature Act into law, Article One of that law states among others. Nature is the subject of rights in the state and the people have the obligation to protect and respect these rights. Some of the rights of nature have been recognized include nature's right to exist, persist and regenerate her vital cycles, among many others. It's super cool. Really, really awesome that that got through and you should go through the episode. It's a really really good one. And congrats to Callie for helping make that possible.

Laura
That's awesome.

Nic
It really is. We appreciate all of our sponsors and they will keep the show going. If you'd like to sponsor the show, please head on over to www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com and check out our sponsor form the details. Let's get to our segment.

[Nic & Laura's Segment- Math v. English & Coding]

Laura  
Coding is awesome. I love it. Because I have my GitHub page and I I'm very proud of my GitHub page that I built myself, but I didn't get any further than just making the landing page so. I'm in every round of Careers and Code that I coach, I can still sit on a classes so I keep trying and maybe in a couple years I'll get a little further.

Nic 
I mean it's funny though, because I get her brain, Chelle's brain works exactly the opposite as mine and we had that little debate about science and math versus english and it's such a good one. Like I love that like where she's like well you know math has the answers and there's no BS it's just this is the answer. And I hate that I very much love the BS part, you know. So.

Laura 
Yeah, I get down with the BS part myself.

Nic 
Yeah, her perspective is you know, that's hard for me because there's nothing Yeah, just say when I you know what the right answer is.

Laura  
That makes sense though.

Nic
Yeah it totally does,

Laura
You can't argue with that logic.

Nic 
But, you know, it's like I love trying to figure out how I can get you to get us to agree on something even though I know there's no right way to do it.

Laura 
You're full of snot.

Nic
Full of snot? What?

Laura
Well, it's not what I'm trying to I'm not saying the "s" word.

Nic 
Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. That was...full of snot? I was like, I was like, Oh my God, my nose is running or something. Right here.

Laura  
Yeah, but I will say you don't you don't really need to know math to do coding though. You need to know math to do the level of coding in the NASA stuff she's doing. You don't have to know math to be a coder. Otherwise, I would never have started on that.

Nic 
Yeah, I was gonna say she said that. She said it's more like learning a language right? So it's not necessarily math related to it isn't

Laura 
It is.  It's once you learn one because in today's world, you didn't really just like learn one programming code and then you know how to build stuff. You have to integrate with other coding languages. Like she said, I learned I added on Python at some point. And then you have to work in a lot of different ways getting them to speak to each other. But once you learn one you under, there's kind of like two different it's almost like Chinese and Spanish. There's two there's different languaging frameworks, but once you learn the Spanish type ones, you can easier learn the English ones and the ones that are related. And same with Chinese you could learn like Mandarin, and then learn some other

Nic
Cantonese ones.

Laura
You can do that with programming too. So it's it's really fun. It's kind of like a game. So if you like being able to solve puzzles, which she kind of said, once you kind of figure out that it kind of works the way math works and like X plus Y equals z, but you don't have to, like, necessarily make things add up.

Nic 
Right, right. Yeah, I think, you know, you say coming at it from different angles, and you know, you guys have different personalities and different interests, but you still both like doing it. And that means, you know, maybe more universal than people think.

Laura 
Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it's just fun. It's fun to like, put some words strings of words and letters together and go like, yeah, get that website.

Nic
Execute. Yeah.

Laura
You know, you hit a button and then 10 things happen instead of just one step at a time or whatever. It's pretty exciting. So I can't imagine how addicting that would be to get to that level.

Nic  
Yeah, and I will admit, you know, like when I was in grad school, and I did enjoy like doing that, our version of that the free program stuff, but like, it's just yeah, I mean, I knew it wouldn't be something I want to do forever. But yeah, the execute part is great. You're like, did I do this correctly? And you're like, oh, no, I didn't okay. But no, it's pretty neat.

Laura 
For me. It was like when she described the way her kids described her job. I was 20 years old and programming. I was like, I don't want to sit in front of computer 24/7 But now like fast forward, like, pretty much my day looks like her day. So, I could have.

Nic 
You talk to your friends.

Laura 
But it goes back to not having those role models. I didn't have someone like Chelle in front of me to say actually the program I worked for was a woman but she was in the source. I was in Tampa at the time, then moved to Ireland, but she was a hardcore New Yorker. She smoked. She thrived on chaos. She was She seemed like a legit crazy person. She was great. She was super nice and friendly and helpful, but she made her own world crazy. And I was like, Don't be like that. That was my role model for like, what happens to a programmer.

Nic
Reverse. Right, right, right.

Laura
Like no, no thanks. On the other hand, my dad worked for like IBM and he was always learning new technologies and different things and I don't know if he did any programming type. stuff, but he got laid off all the time. And I was like, Oh, I don't want that either. You know, the world had not really gotten to where it is now or like, tech jobs are like in crazy demand like at that point back then, you know, they were it was a different situation. So we have to get these role models out here. And that's why I think it's great to have Chelle on and I hope to have some other programmers and people doing cool, fun tech environmental jobs, because that's the future.

Nic 
Yeah, I guess we've talked long enough about that. Let's see hear from her. All right, let's let's go to the interview.

[Interview with Chelle Gentemann Starts]

Nic
Hello, and welcome back to EPR. Today we have Chelle Gentemann on the show. She is a senior scientist at the Farallon Institute, and is one of the most brilliant minds we've had on the show. She is the leading research leading research in open science, cloud computing, remote sensing and physical oceanography. Welcome Chelle.

Chelle Gentemann 
Hi, Nic. Thanks so much for having me on.

Nic  
Yeah, absolutely. Really happy to have you on here and just a little bit of background for everybody. You attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sometimes they refer to that as MIT. I don't know if you guys have heard of it. But you have a BS in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Then went on to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and received a master's in physical oceanography and then received a PhD while working full time for the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. That's pretty impressive stuff.

Chelle Gentemann  
That's a lot of years of math.

Nic 
So I mean, you know, like I say, our first very hard hitting question for you here. How did you get started on that path? Like what were you into as a kid?

Chelle Gentemann 
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. So I lived in Portland, Oregon, right outside of it with my parents and my sister and brother. And we had grandparents up in Seattle. And we just always were at the coast fishing and exploring and that's how we spent our summers up in the Puget Sound. So I had this really close connection with nature in the ocean, I think. And then I also had this immense fascination with math and science. And so from a young age, I've always wanted to be a scientist, and I was always interested in the ocean. There was a movie that came out in I think, the early 80s called Space Camp. So I did have a two year phase where the astronaut and now I've managed to combine them because I work for NASA doing earth science.

Nic
That is so cool.

Laura 
That is amazing. Who would have thought you could do that?

Chelle Gentemann 
It's always that movie.

Nic 
That movie Oh, that's so funny. Oh man. Yeah, I love that movie. Right in my brain Yeah. Which is just great. And I think you know, it's funny that you say you fell in love with math was that a Love Is it literally always been a love for you? Or is there ever like times you're like, you know what, I know there's an answer to this, but you know, it's driving me crazy.

Chelle Gentemann 
Yeah, I think everybody hits that point at a different point in their life. For me, I found english really frustrating and writing to be really frustrated because there wasn't this answer. I wanted to be able to say, this is for and this is right. And with English. I felt like it was so subjective. Sometimes I really struggled with that. I needed a clear answer. And so English made me think harder, I think. And so I leaned towards math, which, in some ways to me at least the way my brain works seems simpler. But I think no matter what topic you choose, at some point you reach a place of just utter loss and confusion. For me, that was when I took a class on imaginary math, and I know it doesn't sound real, but it actually is. I do, I remember just sitting there going. I don't even understand what this person is saying. I can't put it into anything that I can relate to until I reached out and I got help I reached out and I got tutors and I started talking to the professor and that was how I sort of learned how to overcome these barriers that you run into throughout your whole life is trying to find community and friends to help.

Nic  
With that, so okay, tell us how that kind of ties into your work. Now you're doing now with Farallon Institute?

Chelle Gentemann  
So like the Farallon Institute, I sort of switched on how I was doing science. I had been working for about 20 years on what we call styling algorithm development. And what that means is when you take a measurement at a satellite in space, you're actually using an instrument you know, like you pick up the thermometer to measure temperature. The instrument on a satellite measures photons, how do you turn a photon into a measurement of ocean temperature or wind speed or clouds or something that people can use to understand Earth's climate and weather. And so that's what I worked on. And that was really fun and interesting and rewarding. And I loved it. And then as I got to the Farallon Institute, I started thinking about, I'd heard about this new language called Python. And I decided to try and learn it. I guess. I'm somebody who like, you know, the minute I know something that I need to find the new things and how they work

Nic 
Yeah, absolutely. 100%

Chelle Gentemann 
So I started, I went down and took some classes and started learning how to program in Python. And then as I started getting comfortable with that, I wanted to really do big data analysis. And so I started moving on to Cloud computing, which is where you actually instead of taking data and bringing it to your local computer, you take your analysis and you bring it to a Cloud computer. It's the same thing you do with Google Drive. When you access a document on Google Drive, you're just going to the Cloud. And that sort of changed everything that I started doing at the Farallon Institute and bringing the Open Science and the Cloud computing together really crystallized a lot of thoughts about science in my head, because for a long time I had struggled to work with colleagues, because if I was at the Farallon Institute, and they were at UC Berkeley, or they were at University of Washington, how do I work with them? Because they're on a different computer system. And how do you do that? And the Cloud was actually the answer to doing that it made it easier and working in an open source and open science way made it easier to do that. But I was struggling to work with all my colleagues who I'd worked with for 20 years who were doing the algorithm development because they didn't know how to do the open science part yet. So as I've been working with the Farallon Institute, I've been working to try and connect those two groups.

[Open Science]

Laura  
Awesome. It's also a perfect segue into our next question. Um, we wanted to jump right into NASA as quickly as possible. So you're the lead researcher on the NASA's Transformed to Open Science Project, but you know, I certainly familiar with open source data, but what is open science and why do we need it?

Chelle Gentemann 
That is exactly what I was just talking about. I have there's a lot of scientists who've been doing scientist science for 20 years. And the way that we've been doing science has been very siloed. It's been very closed because we've all been working on our individual computers. And maybe those individual computers are in a big institution and you're on a institutional network. But then you only have access to work with other people at that institution. And that means that you could do that easily, but trying to work with somebody to different institutions difficult. So NASA has started a new initiative called the Transform to Open Science, and it's about trying to increase the understanding and adoption of open science practices, and broaden who's participating in science. So I defined myself as a scientist, but not everybody does things similar to what I do, maybe defines themselves as a scientist. So how do we try and really increase participation in science by all different types of people? And one way to do that is to be really transparent and open about what you're doing and how you're doing it. And that way, if somebody can see it and touch it, then maybe they reach out to you and they start collaborating with you. And they can come from a totally different background, but you can all they can see your work and ask questions and start to interact. And that's the first step to sort of increasing who's participating in science and one of the goals of TOPS is we really need we're really facing with these big problems like COVID and finding the vaccine really fast. And climate change. I mean, we're we have a climate crisis, that we have to figure out how to address and maybe start mitigating some of the impacts. So we need all of the voices at the table participating in asking questions so that we get the best solutions, because if there's only a few people at that table, they're going to find really great solutions that work for them. But the impact of the solutions isn't as big as it could be. So we have to broaden who's participating in science. And we have to do it in a way that's transparent and inclusive and open.

Laura 
That's great.

Nic
That's the cool answer. That's awesome.

Laura
I'm gonna give a shout out to the Water Atlas, which is a group that works at at USF the University of South Florida, and this is what they do on a regional scale. But part of what they do is you know, like you said, one university, one scientist is collecting data one way on one computer, someone else you know, we all know that our Androids and our our iPhones don't play well or nice together. So if I'm using one software to collect my data and or completely different brand than someone else, then we have data that doesn't talk to each other no matter how much we want it to play nice together, so does the tops project. So if I come to TOPS project and say, am I collecting this data, you know, they've got almost 50 years worth of ambient water monitoring data in the Tampa Bay area. And you know, regionally you can get it anybody can can go download it, but if they want it to contribute to this project, is NASA or engineers, there the ones that are converting that data to make it work together or how's that working?

Chelle Gentemann 
Well, there's two ways to think about that, at least in my mind. And one is, is the data in a format that's called fair, is it findable,  accessible, interoperable and reusable and that means that the most amount of people can use it because it's in a format that is accessible that has metadata that describes what's in the file. So if it's in a good format, that makes it much easier for lots of different people to use it. So then you have to get it to a place a location where everyone can access it. That's often whoever has funded the collecting of that data. Hopefully, that funding agency has planned for a long term archive of that data that is publicly accessible, and they support that archive to increase accessibility. So what NASA has done is NASA has in earth science as well. As planetary, astro, helio and biological and Physical Sciences. So all the different divisions, our Data Archive centers that store all the NASA data that's collected. And traditionally what's happened is scientists or anyone who's interested goes to that data archive and they download the data and that sounds a little bit like what's happening with your Water Atlas data is something you have to figure out where it is you have well first of all, you have to know that it exists. And once you know it exists, you have to figure out where it is and then how you can get it. So part of the transform of open science is supporting sort of the Cyber Infrastructure not and the software that makes that easier, easier to discover data easier to access data, the more that we can sort of hide behind the curtain and be the Wizard of Oz, right. So we want to hide the format we want to hide where it is we want to hide everything about the data that we can, except what it is what it means, and then just let you access it. So part of transforming open science is also increasing the accessibility of that data and sometimes it can remain on a local archive. But often it's easier and more accessible if it's moved to a cloud platform with free egress so that people can get at it for free. And it makes sure any work you do with it if you do that it makes it more reproducible because then people can write notebooks that other people can just run.

Laura  
Yeah, that's fantastic. And like I said, makes all the data more powerful, as long as the data that's coming in is is quality. So where's the where does the quality assurance come in?

Chelle Gentemann 
That's really interesting. I've not actually seen any data that's perfect. Right? Everything has imperfections and less. That's what makes it beautiful. That's why we all have jobs. So even data from instruments can have calibration issues. And if you go out into a field and take observations, you could copy something down wrong. Or you could not realize that you're in the shadow of a tree or you know, there's all sorts of uncertainties in data. And one of the important things to capture when you create a data set is the uncertainties in your data and you can do that statistically. But you can also just do that by providing metadata that sort of records. Here's when the data is good. Here's when the data is bad. Or you could have flags in your data, the more information that you can embed in your data about how to use it accurately, the better off it's going to be when it's used by people don't have access to you to answer questions.

[Coding]
Laura 
Awesome, right? So people shouldn't be afraid to add their data and put it in there. But I would like to know too, so I would guess that you're one of those persons that when people say, "So Chelle, What do you do"? You get the follow up question. So what do you do? When people ask you what do you do? What do you tell them? You're a physical oceanographer? What's your response to, Hey Chelle, what do you do?

Chelle Gentemann 
Depends on the audience. If you asked my kids, this was a downside. To COVID. Right? Is my kids found out my secret, they stayed home from school. And so they were able to see me work all day long. And by a few months into at homeschooling, we had this conversation where we're like, okay, it's important that you focus on school, school is important. And he's like, no school is really hard and you don't understand because all you do is sit on your computer, talk to friends, listen to music, and laugh while you code. And you have it so easy, you don't understand. So for kids, basically, my job description is I hang out on my computer. I listen to music, and I talk to friends. For scientists and other adults, I usually say that I'm the oceanographer. I study the sea from space.

Nic 
It's a cool phrase.

Laura 
That's a very great way to explain that.

Chelle Gentemann 
Because it's hard, right? If I start talking about photons and instruments and petabytes of data and software and Python, and cloud computing, it's not very accessible. And it's not very realistic because my job is to think about things and try to be adventurous and creative. And I think that's like, a really great job to have, is to just sit and ask questions. I'm like the two year old that never got over the why phase.

Nic 
Yeah, yeah.

Laura 
That's perfect. So how does a young person who's who wants to do something to fight climate change or have a responsible job like that? And maybe it's just that they enjoy math, but how how would someone identify that this may be a path that they would like to be on?

Chelle Gentemann 
I think that there's a lot of sort of mystique about coding that you have to be this genius wearing a hoodie. Sitting in the dark, typing away drinking coffee and not talking to anybody. But I think as I just described from my kids description of my job, that's not really the way it is coding is very community. And when I have questions about I can't personally that I just ask and then I get all my friends to help. It's a very friendly, collaborative process. So for people who wanted to get into like climate change and studying the earth and weather and climate or understanding what's going on in their house or in their environment, or especially using Landsat imagery, maybe of the local area to find where things are flooding or to look around at your environment. The best way to do that is to just start learning how to code and there's lots and lots of different local coding groups that you can join. And I think it's really key that when you start to learn something, if you can, even learn at school or in a club, and then you can also join other clubs or take an after school class or summer class. And it's going to seem really hard at first because it's almost like learning a new language. But there is, I think, with coding, at least for me, and I think I've seen this with a lot of other people. There's like, a couple months into it, all of a sudden you realize it's just another way of talking and then once you learn the syntax, it's like learning how to drive and so the first couple of times you're driving, you don't know where the turn signal is the brake and the accelerator, you get those mixed up and it's just confusing. And then after you've driven for a couple of weeks, all of a sudden, you don't even have to think it just seems really natural. And I think coding can be really like that for lots and lots of people. You don't have to be a mathematical genius. All you have to do is like solving problems. So if you like puzzles, if you like crosswords or just thinking about things and finding solutions and solving little problems. That's what coding is. And once you saw little problems, then you can go online, and there's all sorts of hackathons you can participate in. There's all sorts of summer schools and people posting notebooks that you can start looking at NASA satellite data yourself and downloading it. There's big space app competitions. So there's a lot of opportunities if you start Googling NASA and coding Space Apps, or even GitHub and coding allows you to interact with other scientists and also other people and kids who are learning how to code a really great way to get into science, start doing science, Twitter, or Instagram or Tiktok. And I think you should be very careful as a young person to have a separate personal account and then perhaps a more professional account. But you can there are all types of scientists that science is mostly on Twitter right now, but they're starting to be somewhat Tiktok and Instagram. And you can start following different scientists that you like and a lot of them post about resources or they post notebooks that you can then reproduce their results. And that's another fun way to start talking and thinking about doing science.

Laura 
That's awesome. That's really great advice. I see Nic is smiling  and he's like going to follow some right now.

Nic
Yeah, I'm going to do that right now.

Chelle Gentemann 
Raven the Science Maven is like one of my favorites. I don't know if you've ever followed her. She's amazing.

Nic 
It's awesome. We will now.

Chelle Gentemann 
And stay in the science Twitter. Don't go to the other side.

Laura 
Twitter. Yes, I know. Don't go to the politics side. That's awesome. So and, again leads right into the next question. So these technologies, you know, they change quickly, and they kind of subtly change quickly. Like all of a sudden we have Cloud and that changes the game for everything. And you mentioned GitHub, you can go on GitHub and start grabbing other people's code tomorrow once you figured it out. And so how do you keep up with all of the the changing technologies and know like, what to chase after and, and all that?

Chelle Gentemann 
Yeah. So technology is changing so fast. And the way that we do science and how we communicate about science is changing just along with that. So 10 years ago, the way in which scientists communicated their results was they would maybe go to a conference with other scientists and they would give a slide presentation. And then they would go home. And then they would write about that result into a publication and then they would publish it in a scientific journal. That was usually behind a paywall. So you couldn't access it unless you went to a university library or downloaded it at a university and you had access to it. Otherwise you had to pay. Now, the way that science communicates and the way that we keep up with technology is through social media, and through the internet. So there are sites like Medium where people are publishing results, and they're just doing it informally. And really, interactively. They're writing up what they're working on right now and publishing it and why it's exciting or some new tool they learned about and why they think you might be interested in this. So you know, blog posts, Twitter is probably where I get most of my information and people are posting their research notebooks and I often click on them and then try to see if I can reproduce the results or if there's something that's of interest to me, like people are like, Hey, do you know about this software library? Or did you know about what you could do on this platform? And so science is really starting to be communicated through software notebooks like Jupyter research notebooks. Because in these research notebooks, it's almost like a publication with the code to reproduce the result. And so when people write up these nice Jupyter Notebooks, you can use markdown language, which is just text basically. And you can describe exactly what you're trying to do. And then you have the code where you try to do it. And then you write a bunch of markdown code that says this didn't work and this doesn't work, but I'm going to try this. And then eventually you get to a result. And that's the way people are starting to communicate a lot of their science. And then they publish it on social media and everybody else learns about it. So things are changing it and it's still the journals are the respected source for when you get to a final result. But even those journals are starting to get faster and faster and having published things.

Nic 
Yeah, that's really interesting to hear, too. And, you know, science is supposed to be a collaborative process. But like you said that previous way we were doing things kind of limited who we're doing that with so when we're talking about being collaborative, you've been talking to people online, I'm sure that the scientists get information in from all kinds of different sources. Then you go back to a journalist, and you're like, Well, I got a lot of my information from these three people, and also Twitter. So I mean, how do we how do we categorize who's actually helping

Chelle Gentemann  
A lot of times when I'm working with different people, I'm working in some sort of notebook. And if I'm working collaboratively on GitHub, you can see exactly who's contributing what. When I'm working in a document. I always have a little text part of the end that if you do anything in this document, please write down your contribution, because it's hard to keep track.  And you want to make sure that you give everyone proper credit. I think it's also interesting the way that a lot of collaborations are starting to move to GitHub. So Git is the software that you use to Version Control code. GitHub is the website that you go to, to even publish your code. You can keep it on the cloud, but GitHub also has discussions and all sorts of project management. So a lot of scientists now are being really collaborative by being very open about what they're doing, publishing their code and their notebooks all on GitHub. And then other random scientist find it via a search engine, and comment on it or correct assign air and then they start this whole new collaboration on GitHub, which is really been, it used to be that when you had a problem, you would email and other scientists, and then you would start this sort of closed communication where only you and your friends could talk about that topic. When you open that up and you start having that conversation on GitHub. It means that Laura, who you and I weren't talking to Nic, Laura could like find what we were talking about, say, Hey, I think that's really interesting. They're talking about the Water Atlas, and I know about that, so I'm going to add some comments and then all of a sudden we're working with Laura, too.

[Field Notes]

Nic 
Right. Yeah, and I think that's awesome. And thank you for taking us through that. And it's such a cool, cool thing. And I love that that's where we're going. I think it's fantastic. So we do have a part of the show, we like to talk about field notes, and we have our guests tell interesting stories about things that have happened in the field. And I think for you, maybe it's more of a field story from a conference room. But you mentioned giving presentations and going to those kinds of things. But you have a funny moment about you giving a presentation to a room full of people?

Chelle Gentemann 
I feel like you might be setting me up to tell a story. You told me not to use bad words, so I won't use bad words.

Laura 
You say, you know shite, or shizzle or Smurfs or something.

Chelle Gentemann 
At one of I think it was only the second or third talk I ever given at a scientific conference. And I have these really exciting new results. And I was really nervous and I was scared about talkingin front of people. And usually you're in a small room with about 15 or 20 people and they put me in the big name session. So there were 300 people in the room. I was shaking. I was so nervous and scared and I got up to give my talk and it was also I think it was only the second time I had ever given a talk from a computer. All my talks previously had been from actual transparency slides. So for the younger generation that don't know what those are is before PowerPoint, you had a clear pieces of paper and you would write on them or you would the new advantage was you could print on them. And those that so you would get you would put each slide onto an overhead projector and that's how you would get their talk. So I moved to a computer and I didn't really know how to use it. And the first thing that happened was I put up my title slide I introduced myself and then I hit the arrow bar to go to the next slide. And it didn't go forward. And I freaked out. I didn't know what to do. And they had mics to me so there was a mic right below my chin and as I leaned over to the laptop, I said oh, and a word that starts with S, but I said it about a millimeter from the microphones. So it came out to the interview. And I remember just looking up with my eyes as big as like just thinking and everyone just bursting out in laughter, and I was so embarrassed, but it ended up being this fun thing because then everybody came up and introduced themselves afterwards. And like it was really like a great moment because I met all the different scientists at the conference and I was very approachable at that point because I had already messed up.

Laura
We've all been there.

Nic 
yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, she's already embarrassed herself. Nothing I can do this worse than that. I might as well go up and say hello.

Chelle Gentemann 
Yes, exactly. We should get to know this woman and see what she does next. It's going to be a train wreck. Let's just follow her around.

Nic
Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's great.

Laura 
Those are things now that you're like, I'm glad that happened before cell phones.

Chelle Gentemann 
Yes.

Nic 
Oh, yeah. Yeah. infamy. Yeah. But you know, it's funny. I want to ask you, you know, if you do something besides research and coding for fun, but I'm worried that you do coding, and that is what you do for fun. What do you do to unwind? What else do you do?

Chelle Gentemann 
It's true. I do decoding for fun and that is my happy place. But our whole family we go mushroom hunting.

Nic
Oh, nice.

Chelle Gentemann
So we go out into the forest in the middle of the winter when it's all rainy and beautiful. And we go hunting around for mushrooms. So that's really fun. We also do a lot of hiking together. I really like the outdoors. So we do hiking and skiing and spending time with my kids and my husband outdoors. I love the outdoors.

[Secret Sport]

Laura 
That's wonderful. You also seem very soft spoken and very approachable. And all that so we discovered a little fun fact. A little birdie told us that you might have played rugby for MIT.

Chelle Gentemann
Did you suss that out?

Laura
Is this true?

Chelle Gentemann 
I was the team captain.

Laura
That's amazing.

Nic
You have to tell us about that.

Chelle Gentemann
Well, Oregon, right. You're supposed to run around and play soccer in the mud. And rugby was sort of the next extension of that you run around and you it's very social. That was what I loved about rugby. I think that's why I started playing rugby, and this was in Boston. So it was like cold and muddy and wet and we weren't that good. But we had a lot of fun. And the thing about rugby that I really I loved was, when  you play rugby you get to run around, and be athletic, and outside and it's really fun just to play a sport. But rugby has this tradition that the teams get together afterwards and hang out. And so you got to meet all these different people and then you sing rugby songs and together and maybe have a beer and it was really fun.

Nic 
It's so cool, oh man.

Chelle Gentemann
How did you find that out?

Laura 
We have a super, super research team.

Nic  
Well, I mean it's a great spot. Like I say thank you so much for spending your time here. We know you have a lot going on. So we're coming close to the end. Is there anything else you'd like to touch on before we let you go?

Chelle Gentemann 
I think I'm great. I really appreciate the time to talk to y'all and for anybody in the audience who would want to learn more about open science. They can just google NASA transformed to open science. And we have both a webpage. We have a GitHub site that you can actually ask questions on and interact with scientists. So if there's anyone who wants to reach out we're going to be having lots of hackathons and it'll be really fun. We want everyone to participate. So our tagline is, especially for open science for NASA, studying the earth studying weather and climate change. If you want to change everything, you need everyone.

Nic
That's awesome. I Iove that.

Chelle Gentemann
And that was older climate change movement. So the climate change movement sort of coined that phrase, fatigue, to change everything we need everyone and I think that holds true for everything. So if you want to try and do science and you want to do open science, we want everyone to participate.

Nic 
Yeah, absolutely. And if people want to get in touch with you directly Is there a place where they can?

Chelle Gentemann  
Yes. I have a Twitter account. My Twitter handle is just my first and last name, Chelle Gentemann, and I also have a website which is cgentemann.github.io

Nic 
Perfect. Shell thank you so much. For being on the show. It was an absolute pleasure. We had a lot of fun, like, Thank you.

Chelle Gentemann 
Thank you. This is really fun.

[Outro]

Laura 
That's our show. Thank you Chelle so much for joining us today. This was really awesome. It was so much fun to be around not only your brilliance but your great attitude and lots of laughs so be sure to check us out each and every Friday and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. Bye.

Nic
See you everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai