Supporting Innovation in Astronomical Instrumentation: Q&A with Science Program Officer Gabriele Betancourt-Martinez

• Why did the Science program create the Astronova™ Fellowship?

Scientific instruments are complicated: they take a long time to develop, test, and deploy; they require interdisciplinary expertise and often large teams; and they can be expensive, fragile, and finnicky. But it is thanks to novel instrumentation—from the age of Galileo to now with missions like JWST—that we have made some of the biggest leaps in our understanding of the universe.

Still, our current academic system undervalues astronomical instrumentation as compared to its impact on scientific discovery. At the faculty level, universities can be hesitant to extend offers to instrumentalists due to the high cost of startup packages that instrumentalists require, and slower publication outputs might put instrumentalists at a disadvantage in tenure processes. This leads to a vicious cycle: few faculty-level instrumentalists mean few students being trained to become the astronomical innovators of the future. This is the pattern we hope to disrupt through the Astronova™ Fellowship.

Why now? I’ve had fellow scientists tell me they wished Astronova existed decades ago. The workforce pipeline challenge for instrumentation is not a new one, but it is one that we’re now prepared to tackle based on our experience running the 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellowship in Planetary Astronomy for ten years. While Astronova is broader in scientific scope and narrower in its instrumentation focus, we are applying our lessons learned from the 51 Pegasi b program on how to create an impactful postdoctoral experience for a career in science.

• How does the Astronova™ Fellowship address these issues? 

Through the fellowship, we seek to support outstanding scientists leading groundbreaking instrumentation projects and training the next generation of innovators. We also aim to uplift the importance of instrumentation innovation to the larger field of astronomy and astrophysics, all while enabling the conditions for future scientific breakthroughs.   

An especially unique aspect of the Astronova™ Fellowship is the Innovation Fund. We heard from instrumentation research staff and faculty members that it can be hard for students and postdocs to carve out a specific piece of an instrumentation project to have ownership over, and even harder to have the resources and agency to create an instrument concept or component of their own design. Yet, this is an invaluable addition to a faculty application or tenure package. To tackle this challenge, we created the Innovation Fund to give Astronova Fellows an extra edge to remain and thrive in the field.   

• What do you hope the Astronova™ Fellowship achieves long-term? How do you hope the Astronova™ Fellowship impacts the field of astronomical instrumentation? 

Long-term, I hope this seeds new faculty members in astronomical instrumentation, and by extension, encourages more undergraduate and graduate students to pursue instrumentation. I can’t wait for Astronova fellows to be instrument and scientific leads on the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes. I’m also really excited for the fellowship to help build a stronger community of early-career instrumentalists who can iterate together on research ideas, share career advice, and bond over the last piece of hardware that didn’t work as expected.  

• Anything else you’d like to add?  

I’m grateful that we can support both instrumentalists and the broader field of astronomical instrumentation in such a focused and meaningful way. I’m genuinely excited to see how this develops.