UMD Alum Katherine Calvin is on a mission at NASA

In January 2022, Katherine Calvin (B.S. ’03, mathematics; B.S. ’03, computer science) was named NASA chief scientist and senior climate advisor, tasked with advancing NASA’s entire science portfolio, and climate science in particular, in the years to come. Before taking on this new role at NASA, Calvin spent 14 years as an Earth scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland, exploring and analyzing the relationships between human and Earth systems in the context of global climate change. During her time there, she also worked on the Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model, which is used to analyze the past, present and future state of the Earth system. Calvin has co-authored more than 100 publications.  

In a recent interview, Calvin shared her favorite memories from her days at UMD and her thoughts on her new role at NASA and the challenges ahead. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about your new position at NASA as chief scientist and senior climate advisor—how did it come about and what are your responsibilities?

NASA has had a chief scientist position for many years and created the position of senior climate advisor in early 2021. The agency combined those two roles and I started serving in this position in January of 2022. NASA’s climate research spans the agency and includes observations, models, applied science and technology development. As senior climate advisor, my job is to help connect climate research within NASA and communicate that research externally to other agencies, international partners, and the public. As chief scientist, my job is to communicate and advance NASA science more broadly.

What are the biggest challenges you face in this position?

NASA has a lot of exciting science missions. I am fortunate that I get to talk about these every day, but it is really the work of a lot of fantastic scientists. I want to make sure people recognize the scientists behind the research in addition to the science itself. 

Why is it so important for NASA to go all in on addressing climate change now?

We know from observations made on and above the Earth’s surface that the planet’s climate is changing. 2021 was tied for the 6th warmest year on record. And collectively, the past eight years have been the warmest since modern record keeping began. Along with increases in temperature, we’re experiencing other changes in the Earth system, including declines in Arctic sea ice, increases in sea level, more heavy precipitation events, more heatwaves and more wildfires. We know from science that many of those impacts will increase with more warming. NASA’s Earth observations, models and applied science tools can help us better understand and respond to climate change.

Do you have personal goals or specific ways you’d like to make your mark in this role? 

I want to make sure people know NASA science and NASA scientists. People often know about the planetary science and astrophysics at NASA. NASA is also a world leader in climate and Earth science. I want to amplify all that we do across the entire science portfolio. The people doing the research and developing the technologies are what make NASA so great—and I want to make sure people know about them, too. 

How important is it to you to be on the cutting edge of addressing climate change?

We know from research done at NASA and elsewhere around the world that the climate is changing, and those changes have impacts on our daily lives. It is important to me that people have the information they need to make informed decisions. That is one of the things that really excites me about being at NASA—NASA has experience explaining complex science and is committed to open science, both of which are critical to informing decisions. 

How excited are you to be in this place at this time?

I have always admired NASA—its inspirational missions and amazing science. NASA shows us what happens when you bring together a team of really smart people to explore the universe and solve problems. I’m excited to be a part of that. And we have a lot of exciting missions coming up in 2022. We’re launching several Earth science missions that will help us better understand tropical cyclones, mineral dust, rivers and oceans. We’re expecting the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope this summer, which will let us look back 13.5 billion years to see galaxies formed in the early universe. And we’re launching Artemis I—the first in a series of missions to explore the moon in preparation for missions to Mars.

How have your previous positions as a scientist prepared you for this opportunity?

My research has focused on understanding how the Earth and human systems might change in the future, including developing scenarios of future climate and quantifying the effects of climate change. It spanned the range of climate science, climate impacts and mitigation. This type of research required me to learn to work across disciplines and talk to scientists with very different backgrounds than I have. I worked with physicists, hydrologists, economists, ecologists, engineers and many others. That experience helped prepare me for my role as chief scientist, where I get to interact with people across NASA’s science portfolio, including astrophysicists, planetary scientists, astrobiologists and many more.

Your educational background is in mathematics and computer science—how do you apply that expertise to the work you’re doing at NASA?

The research I was doing involved developing and using mathematical models to understand human and Earth systems. This work used both my math and computer science degrees. I helped implement mathematical equations describing energy, water, land and climate in computer code. Research at NASA also uses math and computer science—from developing models to processing satellite data. Math and computer science serve as common languages among the sciences. By writing down a problem in a mathematical equation or a block of computer code, other scientists can understand it.

You earned your bachelor’s degrees at the University of Maryland—how pivotal were those years in shaping your path for the future?

The math and computer science classes I took at UMD were the foundation for the research I have done since. I also worked part time for the Department of Energy while at UMD, where I worked on energy modeling. That was my first introduction to mathematical modeling, and it led me to pursue graduate school in management science and engineering. 

Tell me about your time at Maryland—what are your favorite memories?

My favorite memories from UMD were related to sports and people. I went to almost every home game for both football and basketball while at Maryland. And I had a great group of friends that I met in the dorms or in classes. Those games and people made a big school feel like a community to me. I’m still friends with the people I met at Maryland.

What was the most important thing you learned in your years at UMD?

I was part of the Gemstone program while I was at UMD. In that program, we formed interdisciplinary teams to research real-world problems. It was my first real exposure to interdisciplinary work. The people on my team had a variety of majors and learning to communicate and work with them was one of the most important things I learned at UMD.

How did your academic experiences before college steer you toward mathematics and computer science and UMD?

I am originally from Maryland. In high school, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be when I grew up or even what the options were. I knew I liked math, so I declared it as a major. I had taken one computer science class in high school but didn’t add it as a second major until I got to UMD. 

I started researching climate change in grad school. I have always spent a lot of time outdoors hiking, camping, biking and boating. By spending a lot of time outside, I developed a deep appreciation for nature and an awareness of weather. Climate change was an opportunity for me to bring together my technical skills with something that mattered to me.

Is there anything that people might be surprised to learn about you?

I’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. It was a really great experience to spend several days hiking there. The views were spectacular, particularly once we got above the clouds. And we got to walk through and see several different ecosystems along the way.

Do you have a mission in your life or a particular way you want to make a difference?

It is important to me that people have the information and resources they need to make informed decisions. We know the planet’s climate is changing and this has impacts on our daily lives. But we are at a point where we need to go beyond collecting data and move towards making sure it can be easily used. One of the big things we’re working on at NASA is data accessibility. We want to make sure people can take our data and use it when they are making decisions, whether those are about climate mitigation, adaptation or planning. That to me is important.

Looking back at your career so far, what are your thoughts about all you’ve accomplished up to this point? 

At every step in my career, I’ve focused on learning all that I could and doing the best that I could. I didn’t know where it would lead, but I am very happy with where I am now. I have a fascinating job, where I get to work with a lot of amazing people. I learn new things every day and get to be a part of a team that is exploring the universe.

UMD students work across disciplines and majors on four-year research project

How can we remove bias from artificial intelligence (AI) systems designed for everything from talent acquisition to online shopping to surveillance systems? 

Ten University of Maryland undergraduates came together to answer this question for their Gemstone honors research project. One of those students was Philip Mathew, a junior mathematics and computer science double major.

“I knew I wanted to focus on AI bias because of research I’d done on diabetic retinopathy at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab,” Mathew said. “When I was a freshman intern, I learned that with diabetic retinopathy, your melanin count does play a difference in how your retinal scans look—and we saw that underrepresentation of people of color in the training data led to bias against accurate diagnoses for those people groups.”

Historical human bias—against people of color, women and other marginalized groups—causes artificial intelligence bias today. That fact became glaringly evident in 2018 when Amazon scrapped an AI and machine learning-based recruitment program after figuring out that the algorithm was biased against women.

Amazon’s AI model was programmed to vet candidates by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. But because those hired during that period had been predominantly men, the system deduced that male candidates were preferred over female candidates. This prominent example is part of what inspired the Gemstone team, aptly named Project DeBIAS, to look at hiring algorithms.

“If you train AI on data that already has this systematic disadvantage against a group of people, it’s going to find and replicate those trends,” Mathew said. “The issue is that a lot of coders will think the AI system works fine without trying to understand the distribution of their data in the way of protective attributes such as gender and race.”

Developing the Methodology

Early on, the Project DeBIAS team hypothesized that resumes for people of color are being ranked disproportionately lower on hiring websites like Indeed due to AI bias. To test their hypothesis, they collected 59 anonymized resumes that included attendance at a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and 304 resumes that did not. Then, Mathew and his teammates created an AI model to simulate how an autonomous hiring system would function, training it based on Indeed’s publicly available hiring data. 

“What we’re trying to ensure is that these systems don’t have something baked in where HBCUs are discriminated against,” Mathew said.

The team’s preliminary data analysis shows a trend that aligns with their hypothesis—resumes from individuals who went to HBCUs ranked lower in the hiring system. 

“We’re determining whether this is some sort of spurious correlation or a proper inverse correlation between what the status of your college is and what your ranking is in this Indeed resume ranking algorithm,” Mathew said. “Based on our preliminary findings, we do think we’re going to find an inverse correlation where people who went to HBCUs are ranked lower—and then we plan to find a way to solve for that in the ranking algorithm.”

Becoming Better Researchers

Mathew and junior mathematics majors Seth Gleason, Johnny Rajala and Daniel Zhu contributed their statistics know-how to understand the distribution of data and analyze the components of hiring algorithms. 

“I’m now better able to talk about and understand things from a statistical perspective, like why data is distributed in a certain way,” Mathew said. “And while it may seem obvious, linear algebra ended up being a huge help because computers use matrices, so you kind of need to know how matrices work.”

As they worked through their research work plan and received Institutional Review Board approval for resume data collection, the team worked closely with their team librarian Kate Dohe from UMD Libraries and their advisor, Steve Sin, an associate research scientist in the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at UMD.

“The Project DeBIAS team has become very agile over the last two and a half years,” said Sin, who has worked on detecting bias in emerging technologies. “One of the things they got really strong at is putting together a work plan with branches that says, if A then B. Their work plan helped them continually evaluate whether they were on track, adjusting course as needed.”

Sin noted that the students on the team have grown by “leaps and bounds” since their freshman year in sticking to timelines and collaborating across both the STEM and social sciences aspects of the project.

“Really, all of us are principal investigators on this research because every single one of the 10 of us gets a say on how we carry out the research,” Mathew said. “Not only are we getting experience working on an interdisciplinary team, we also can say that as undergrads we have shaped this research from beginning to end, which is an opportunity I’m pretty grateful for.”

Another important lesson the students learned was how to pivot when their initial research plan wasn’t working. When selecting a proxy for racial demographics, the Gemstone team initially planned to examine redlining—the systematic denial of providing financial services to residents of communities associated with a certain racial group. However, their initial research revealed that very few job applicants include their home addresses on their resumes. 

“Once we saw that redlining wasn’t offering enough data, we pivoted to looking at whether the highest level of education listed was from an HBCU,” Mathew said. “We used that as a proxy for seeing how marginalized populations get treated by these AI systems.”

In April, the Project DeBIAS team presented their research at UMD’s Undergraduate Research Day. Next, they’ll further analyze their preliminary findings, prepare their Gemstone thesis and submit their research results to a journal—and, hopefully, make a difference. 

 “Part of the goal of this whole research is to get it out there and let it add to the field,” Mathew said. “We really want to show that, yes, AI bias is an actual problem—and we might just have a way to fix it or evaluate it.” 

Written by Katie Bemb

A Brin MRC Distinguished Lecture delivered by Ofer Zeitouni will also take place in the fall.

A message from Doron Levy, Brin Mathematics Research Center Director and Department of Mathematics Chair

The Brin Mathematics Research Center (Brin MRC) was established in 2022 through a generous gift from Michael and Eugenia Brin and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation. We plan to begin hosting activities in the Brin MRC in Fall 2022. The center is located on the fourth floor of the Computer Science Instructional Center, which is within a short walk from Kirwan Hall, in space that we are in the process of renovating.

Since the Center was announced, we formed an advisory board composed of five professors from the Department of Mathematics: Sandra Cerrai, Dima Dologpyat, Dio Margetis, Bill Goldman and Richard Wentworth. We also identified an exciting lineup of activities for the center’s first year, including 9 workshops and conferences and 2 summer schools:

• Workshop on low-dimensional topology and homeomorphism (organized by three of our new faculty members: Lei Chen, Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner and Boyu Zhang)
• Two workshops organized together with UMD’s Brain and Behavior Institute
• Workshop on rare events (organized by Maria Cameron and Pratyush Tiwary)
• Two workshops on probability and stochastic partial differential equations (organized by Lenya Ryzhik from Stanford, Sandra Cerrai, Dima Dolgopyan, Yu Go and Leonid Koralov)
• Two workshops on partial hyperbolicity (organized by Amie Wilkinson from the University of Chicago, Frederico Rodriguez Hertz from Penn State and Dima Dolgopyat)
• Two summer schools are planned for summer 2023: one on partial hyperbolicity and a second school on fluid dynamics (organized by Huy Nguyen and Hussain Ibdah) 

The Brin MRC will provide many opportunities for short-term and long-term visitors who are interested in interacting with faculty members at the University of Maryland and in experiencing the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. A Brin MRC Distinguished Lecture will be delivered in Fall 2022 by Ofer Zeitouni.

This is only the beginning and it is all very exciting. We will share updates on the Brin MRC in the math department’s biannual newsletters. However, we invite you to visit the Brin MRC website and follow us on Twitter to get more up-to-date information. If you have questions about Brin MRC activities, please email .