|
 She hit campus last fall with a Big
Bang—bringing
with her more than $400,000 in grant
money from a National Science Foundation
Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER)
Award. Dr. Niescja Turner, assistant
professor, also has the distinction
of being the first-ever
female regular faculty member of Florida
Tech’s department of physics
and space sciences, a department with
a large
number of female majors (more than
50% undergraduate and 33% graduate
students).
Turner grew up in northwest
Louisiana and went to high school
in Natchitoches,
La.,
famous as the setting for the book
and movie, “Steel Magnolias.” At
four years of age, after seeing the
movie “Star
Wars,” she was so enthralled
that she looked up every space-related
word
in her Young People’s Science
Encyclopedia. While in high school,
she told her dad
about the neat electromagnets and light
spectrum she was learning about in
her chemistry class. “That’s
not chemistry,” he said, “that’s
physics.” Nevertheless, she was
hooked.
She applied and was accepted to the
Louisiana School for Math, Science,
and the Arts,
a special boarding school that offered
an accelerated curriculum with the
advanced math and science courses
she longed for.
She feels it was a catapult to success
in her subsequent educational pursuits
and her positive experience with
the school inspired in her a strong
desire to teach.
After graduating
from Rice University in Houston,
Texas with a B.A. in
physics,
she earned her Ph.D.
in Astrophysical Planetary and
Atmospheric Sciences (A.P.A.S.)
from the University
of Colorado at Boulder, where she
also taught astronomy and wrote
a children’s
planetarium show called “Kids
in Space.” This popular show
still draws more than 7,000 viewers
annually.
Upon
graduation, she moved to Helsinki,
Finland to work as a geophysical
research scientist
with the Finnish Meteorological
Institute.
 |
| Niescja Turner stands in front
of the Caracol (snail), an ancient
astronomical observatory where the
Mayans studied and worshipped Venus.
It is part of Chichen Itza, which
is in the Yucatan in Mexico. Less
than one minute after this photo
was taken, Turner was admonished
and escorted away by Mexican security
officers for standing in a prohibited
area. Afterwards, they had an apparent
change of heart and gave Turner a
tour of the structure and other areas
not open to the public. |
Almost all Finns speak
English, but Turner took classes
and practiced “on the
street” in a concerted
effort to learn Finnish. She
also speaks
some Russian,
Japanese and Spanish, but the
Finnish language holds a special
fascination
for her. “It
is so unique—the closest
thing to a ‘pure’ language
I have found. It has few, if
any, derivative
characteristics.”
Turner
loved living and working in
Finland, but it was “all research
and no teaching,” so
she accepted an assistant professorship
at the University of Texas in
El Paso, where her research had
to take a back seat. “I
thought if I moved again, it
would be farther west, but Florida
Tech offered me a wonderful
opportunity—with strong
support for my research and,
of course, the opportunity
to teach.” Her CAREER award
is funding a five-year research
project, “Dynamics
and Evolution of Magnetic Storms
in Varying Solar Wind Conditions.”
Scuba
certified in Cozumel,
Mexico, Dr. Turner has also
traveled to Taiwan, Russia,
India, all
over Europe and Scandinavia
and three
times to Japan.
She’s very excited about traveling
to the southern hemisphere this February,
where she will give an invited talk on “The
Energetics of Magnetic Storms Associated
with High Speed Solar Wind Streams” at
the 2005 Chapman Conference sponsored by
the American Geophysical Union in Manaus,
Brazil. For Turner, it’s a fortuitous
convergence of everything she loves:
science, teaching, traveling, learning
and languages.
“I can’t wait! It’s
my first time in South America—and
it’s
right in the Amazon.”
She’s
currently working on her
Portuguese.
Kathie Grant |
