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um

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some of the ways we can look at trying

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to understand who astroviolets are is

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collecting a couple points of data on

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the first is academic age academic age

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is traditionally defined as the year in

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which a person publishes their first

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paper in a peer-reviewed journal

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for my purposes i couldn't use that so i

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looked at the year in which person got

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their phd

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next is what discipline do they come

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from

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the easiest way to do that for me was to

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look at what field they say their

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dissertations in

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and the last is

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do they continue to participate in

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astrobiology meaning when someone says

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they're an astrobiologist

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do they keep on being an astrobiologist

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or do they give up and go on to a

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different discipline and are there new

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now

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um for purposes of my study

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it was difficult to find astrobiologists

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in the wild

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because they're spread across a lot of

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different diverse disciplines right

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so the easiest way to do that was to let

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them self select and look at who shows

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up to absycon

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so i randomly selected

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the presenters of apps icon 2002 to

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through 2012.

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then i figured out when they got their

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phd and what field they got it in

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this is the distribution of fields that

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people got their phds in

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now the important thing to look at here

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is you have a few core disciplines on

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the far left

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that a lot of people were in and then

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you have a whole bunch where there was

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only one person in all of those

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this is a measure of multidisciplinarity

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and the question is how much is good for

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astrobiology to continue growing and

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then is there a point at which you get

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too much in the field fractures

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like do some of these people team up

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with some of the other ones and then you

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end up with two different things though

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astrobiology right

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you have a couple weird ones up there

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that i don't fully understand like

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neuroscience

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um

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i get

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paleobiology

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and you know geology and chemistry those

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were the two biggest

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um

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genetics yeah but

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it was also difficult because it's hard

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to come up with an ontology or taxonomy

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for science because some of these are

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clearly related but it's hard to like

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mush them together into larger

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so now we're going to talk about

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academic age so what year did the people

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get their phd

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you have

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one at 1950 which would be your oldest

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and then you have one at two in the two

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decades of the 2010s which makes sense

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because my data stopped in 2012.

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so what does a healthy feel like

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astrobiology look like

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you'd expect to find people that are

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older and people that are younger which

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is what the data shows

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this is the academic age calculated at

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the time of the conference

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and what's interesting at this is that

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you have a wide distribution

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right if astrobiology wasn't

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progressing very healthily you would see

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like a whole bunch of people

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at the bottom some people at the top but

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nobody in the middle

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meaning that

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as people get trained as astrobiologists

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they're going up the ranks

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they're getting a postdoc and going on

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to fact so on and so forth

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and then the people with negative

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numbers for academic age which is the

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sorry academic age is the blue bars

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and the orange bars of participation

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people the negative numbers means they

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got their

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phd after the conference which is also

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good because that means that the grad

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students that showed up progressed on

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and you can see the pattern holds

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now we'll look at participation

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this is the part where we talk about

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if the field is healthy people show up

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at the conference and then keep showing

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and then obviously uh 2000 and each year

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that i pick is going to be uh 20 you

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know the full 20

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um and then it's the following years

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so you see this pattern develop here

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where you know it's pretty strong people

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are showing up

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at pretty good rates

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then you get here we get more on the

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front end

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meaning that they showed up in 2008 when

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i collected their name

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and then they the participation rate was

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pretty high going on

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and you get this one

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same pattern

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this one because it's 2012 you can't

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really look at it but what that means is

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that you have new people coming into the

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field and they continue to stay at least

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for a few years

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this is you guys

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now

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what's the big problem with my study

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how do you find an astrobiologist

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obviously there's a bunch of you here

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now

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but

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how do you identify them because they're

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in all sorts of different disciplines

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i can tell you for sure that there's one

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person up there that's not an

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astrobiologist and they're not in the

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right category

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that would be me

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education

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i'm actually an information scientist

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like i said

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but how many of you think that

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you would like me to collect out on you

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and call you a planetary scientist

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or do you think it's something else

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you have something

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oh you are a planetary scientist so we

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have one one planetary scientist

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now a few okay

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but that's the problem with these sorts

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of studies is getting good data on

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academics because they bounce around and

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so forth

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and also i guess the question is how

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much multidisciplinarity do you guys

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want in the field how much do you think

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is healthy

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is it good that we have this many

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biologists showing up

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do we need more astronomy people i mean

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what's what's the mix you're after

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now obviously that's not a question that

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any individual can answer but when you

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talk about studying emerging fields

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these questions become relevant

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i think i got through that quick enough

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questions questions

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so you were studying absycon which

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obviously is an american-based

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conference how much do you think your

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data would have been affected by people

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who may have attended for a couple of

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times because they were studying in the

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us and then stopped attending because

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they had to come back to the us to

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attend like by the the presence of an

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international community a lot but

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because there was no good methodology

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that i could come up with

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that was the frankly the best i could do

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and the data is not perfect it's far

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from but that was as close as i could

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uh so i noticed that there

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you pointed out that there are a couple

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of spikes and things like that in your

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in your graphs um but how much of it do

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you think is related to how much funding

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we're getting for doing astrobiology

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research or have you not looked into

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that yeah

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well i think a lot of these spikes like

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these ones are probably related to the

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size of the conference but and it's

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probably related to how much funding

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people are getting

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but that would be an interesting data

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point i could try to pull out

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the title of your talk was health and

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robustness of our field um maybe i

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missed it did you give us an answer

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well

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just let me follow up on that i was

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wondering if you'd done similar

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evaluations of other emerging fields

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that would help us get an idea of you

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know are we robust and healthy or

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decrepit

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well

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okay so the data so far many of the

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years for academic age and participation

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show that there are people at all three

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sort of levels right so you have grad

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students uh people sort of mid-career

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and people later in the career

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that's good because it indicates the

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likelihood that people that are grad

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students have the opportunity to pursue

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this way it also means that people that

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it were around before there was much of

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a notion of astrobiology are coming into

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the field so you're getting a good mix

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of ages which is good for a healthy

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field an unhealthy field would would be

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where you have a lot of people at this

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end and a lot of people at this end

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indicating that the people at the the

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younger people are unable to get jobs

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in the field

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and there's a bunch of basically there's

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a bunch of grad students working for a

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bunch of old farts

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that would be unhealthy

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and the fact that they keep showing up

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to the conferences also indicates a

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level of interest and participation in

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are you going to compare that with the

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astrobiology conference in europe

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um well probably not because the next

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phase of this research is to pick

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another discipline

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probably one that's like how do you say

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uh

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more well developed along the lines like

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it's been around for a lot longer and

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then to see if they have a similar

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pattern or a different pattern because i

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can't really talk about uh you know do a

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lot of strong conclusions until i get

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any other questions

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yeah i'm not sure if your um your data

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can can give an answer to that but did

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you get an idea how multidisciplinary

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the field really is i mean are people

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like really just presenting

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projects from their particular field or

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how many of the projects are actually

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combination of different fields did you

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get an idea about that well that's

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actually an incredibly difficult

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question to answer because just reading

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the titles and abstracts it's hard to

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place

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what uh

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field the person's presenting it the

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only thing i could really do is let them

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tell me

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what their field was

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and i did that by looking at their cvs

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and also well digging through a lot of

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different databases but primarily cvs so

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if somebody said i graduated with a phd

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in chemistry i said okay put you on

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there for chemistry

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but it was almost impossible to do it

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from abstracts