When
a scientist assesses her own professional contributions to science, it’s
“not always the things that other people would choose that you like the
best yourself,” Margaret Kivelson says with a soft laugh. One of the things
the geophysicist prefers to cite is her work in the 1980s on resonations in
Earth’s magnetic fields. But Kivelson’s colleagues take a more universal
view: They cite her contributions to space science with regard to the magnetic
fields of Jupiter and its moons, in addition to Earth’s, and her efforts
to encourage women in science.
Margaret Kivelson, a geophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles,
was flanked by colleagues Dan Winterhalter (left) and Howard Singer, after receiving
the Fleming medal at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December.
Image by Pamela Davis-Kivelson; courtesy of Fran Bagenal.
They also value “her charm, wit, integrity and brilliance,” said Howard
Singer, now at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space
Environment Center, who is both a co-worker and Kivelson’s first graduate
student, at the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
This year, Kivelson received the society’s John Adam Fleming medal in recognition
of her research in geomagnetism and space physics.
Kivelson majored in pure physics “at a time when physics was regarded as
the direction to go in the future,” she says, because of exciting jumps
in technology and discoveries in quantum electrodynamics. “There was no
question that this was where I wanted to be.” She recalls that even though
she loved math most in high school, she studied physics in college while also
pursuing all the coursework she might need to go to medical school, just in
case the profession caught her fancy. But science won, and she finished her
undergraduate degree in 1950 at Radcliffe-Harvard.
Kivelson says she was the only woman in her physics department, and treated
“almost like a mascot.” And though astronomy may have been more open
to women as a field, physics was her love, just as it was her mother’s,
she says. Kivelson’s mother had started an undergraduate physics degree
and had to leave school to help her family, returning to college only after
Kivelson herself went to college. Kivelson says that her family supported her
throughout her own education, as did her husband, Daniel Kivelson, a physical
chemist.
Her husband, she says, would make her sit down and work on her thesis after
she came home from her day job. “I had a wonderful husband who was very
committed to making sure I got a chance to do what I wanted to do,” Kivelson
says.
Kivelson wrapped up her theoretical physics Ph.D. work in 1957 with Nobel-prize-winner
Julian Schwinger at Harvard, after her family moved to California, where her
husband began his lifelong position as a professor at the University of California
in Los Angeles (UCLA). Her son, now a physicist at Stanford University, was
3 months old and she was 5 months pregnant with her daughter when she defended
her thesis, while working part-time at the newly established RAND Corporation
in Santa Monica, Calif.
When she started working at RAND in 1956, the company was an “exciting
place to be,” Kivelson recalls, filled with “a lot of young people
with lots of great ideas.” In addition to solving the problems the company
had been hired to address, she was able to work on plasma physics research.
Yet as her research group within the company gradually limited its focus to
weapons research, Kivelson began looking for the opportunity to reinvent herself.
While her husband spent a sabbatical year at MIT, she spent a year at Harvard,
from 1965 to 1966, through the Radcliffe Institute. She returned to Los Angeles
with her husband and immediately approached UCLA, which, with the money floating
around from NASA-related projects at the time, was “looking for somebody
to come do some space physics.” So, she says, “I turned myself into
a space physicist,” starting the space physics program with a batch of
graduate students also new to the field.
Among her various research projects, Kivelson became involved with the UCLA
group that was building particle instruments, which, she says, led to her position
as principal investigator for the magnetometer instrument aboard the Galileo
mission to study Jupiter and its moons. Among other findings, Kivelson and her
co-workers confirmed that the Jovian moon Ganymede had a magnetosphere —
a planet-enveloping magnetic field driven by an internal dynamo. Kivelson continues
her work as a part of the magnetometer team for the Cassini mission to study
Saturn and its moons.
Kivelson says that her philosophy as a teacher comes from an excellent and challenging
math teacher in high school: “He had a wonderful phrase that I often think
of: ‘Education is that which remains after the facts are forgotten,’”
she says. “When I teach, I want people to understand why, not just what
— to understand, not just to remember the facts, but to be able to go more
deeply, to understand why the processes that they are describing occur.”
“She’s very generous in terms of sharing data, sharing the credit
and giving credit to other people, and encouraging people and thinking about
the benefits to the field,” says Fran Bagenal of the University of Colorado
in Boulder, who in addition to working on similar science problems, has also
tackled the status of women in science, particularly in physics, with Kivelson.
Bagenal says that Kivelson combines “very rigorous expectations with a
friendly face that is very inspiring and really brings out the best in people.”
Naomi Lubick
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