BOULDER, Colo. -- After her sophomore year at Princeton, Deborah Jin landed a summer job with the federal government, doing research at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
"That summer pretty much settled things," Jin recalls now. "I think I knew from that point on that I was going to be a physicist."
Federal physicist Deborah Jin in a laser cooling lab on the Colorado University campus.
(Andy Cross -- Denver Post)
|
In Profile
Deborah Shiu-lan Jin
Title: Physicist, National Institute of Standards and Technology; fellow, Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.
Education: Bachelor's degree, Princeton University, 1990; doctorate, University of Chicago, 1995.
Age: 34.
Family: Married, one child.
Career highlights: Goddard Space Flight Center, 1988; Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1989; National Institute of Standards and Technology, 1995-present.
Pastimes: "I'm the mother of a 1-year-old. I don't have time for hobbies."
|
| |
_____More Players_____
•
NASA's Future Is Rising From 'the Swamp' (The Washington Post, Dec 15, 2004)
•
Resident Thinker Given Free Rein In White House (The Washington Post, Dec 13, 2004)
•
A Farm-Raised USDA Choice (The Washington Post, Dec 10, 2004)
•
Walk Softly and Carry a Rubber Stick (The Washington Post, Nov 26, 2004)
•
'Under the Radar' -- Up Till Now (The Washington Post, Nov 18, 2004)
•
Players Archive
|
| |
|
And one other career choice was settled as well, although Jin said she didn't realize it back in the summer of 1988. She would pursue her research as a federal employee, working in government labs where some of the world's most advanced work in atomic physics and super-cooled, super-conducting materials is going forward.
One could say that turned out to be a wise choice. For Deborah Shiu-lan Jin, now a fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology here, has emerged as a major force in the world of extremely low temperature physics. She has won a string of scientific awards. On Sunday, her achievements and potential were recognized in the form of a $500,000 prize from the MacArthur Fellows Program.
Jin -- who works amid a jungle of piping, gauges, hoses and computer monitors at a lab operated jointly by NIST and the University of Colorado -- said the U.S. government has proved to be a near-perfect employer for a young scientist working at the extreme leading edge of her field.
"I'm sort of isolated from the academic politics," the 34-year-old wife and mother said, "and being a federal employee frees you up from the teaching load and the other requirements they have for [university] faculty. I don't have to wait the six years to find out if I'm going to get tenure. The government just leaves you alone to do your work."
Even in a period of overstretched federal budgets, Jin said she has been able to obtain most of the equipment and research help she needs. "Frankly, the people on the university side are having more trouble than we are. The state budget crunch has been really severe."
The physicist is so wrapped up in her lab work that she is one of the few federal employees anywhere who doesn't know her pay grade. "It's a GS-something," she said. "I guess I ought to know." NIST said that Jin holds a rank of ZP-5 in the agency's specialized pay system, the equivalent of a GS-15.
Jin said she doesn't pay much attention to that because "it doesn't make much difference in a research job. I have my lab and my grad students and I work closely with my colleagues, and that doesn't really depend on what rank you are."
What does matter in a scientific field is results, and Jin's lab, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, has been producing them in spades. Her colleagues include two physicists -- Eric A. Cornell of NIST and Carl E. Wieman of Colorado -- who created a new state of matter ("the Bose-Einstein condensate") in 1995 and won a Nobel Prize for it six years later.
The Bose-Einstein work involved cooling atoms to a point extremely close to absolute zero and trapping them in a magnetic or laser field for study.
Jin is doing similar work now, reducing potassium atoms to a temperature 50 billionths of a degree above absolute zero -- the point, near 459.6 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale, at which all motion stops. At that temperature, the atoms form a vapor of sorts and "degenerate," acting more like waves than particles, a phenomenon predicted decades ago by physicist Enrico Fermi. Jin has been recognized internationally for identifying this "vaporphase degenerate Fermi gas."
Her latest award, from the MacArthur Foundation, and the no-strings-attached half-million-dollar grant that goes with it, could have "a lot of uses in my life," Jin said. "I could use it for a new laser. I could definitely use it for secretarial support, because we don't have that in this lab. Or maybe it can be college money for my daughter."
One thing the prize won't do, Jin said, is induce her to move her research elsewhere. "NIST has been a fantastic place to do the kind of work I'm involved in," she said. "I don't think I'll be leaving the government any time soon."
