RIP to my PhD thesis advisor, Mike Jura

It looks like the news is public now. 

RIP to my PhD thesis advisor, Mike Jura

As one of his "academic children," I will miss the support he gave to me throughout my career. I got the news from another of his "academic children" on Sunday, and I last exchanged emails with Mike on Friday late at night, only one day before he passed away. Fortunately we had a brief phone chat just a few weeks ago.   Here are some of my reflections in the moment.  

Our very first conversation occurred when I was a senior undergrad during the fall of 2000. We were riding in an elevator at JPL and talking about converting B1950 to J2000 coordinates for a large sample of stars for a Spitzer Legacy Science proposal. Later that day I'd write a script that queried SIMBAD for a list of stars and parsed the html output for the J2000 coordinates.  In our proposal team meeting of professional scientists, I watched in awe as Mike went up to a chalkboard and sketched out the theory of debris disks and infrared excess.  He was the professors' professor, and I wanted to be like him.  The proposal was ultimately unsuccessful, but it shaped the rest of my life.  In the elevator, Mike encouraged me to apply to UCLA for grad school, which I did.  Subtle but targeted recruiting!

I would graduate from Caltech and move to UCLA early and start research with Mike on July 1st, 2001.  I needed the research job to pay the rent that summer.  Mike was my bridge to my new stage of my career at UCLA.  I started with Mike modeling multi-wavelength light curves of evolved stars, before moving onto observations of debris disks (pre-Spitzer!). At the time, I was unsure of what I wanted to do for my thesis research. I had spent my undergrad years majoring in physics, taking quantum field theory and general relativity, all the while doing astronomy research with Mike Werner at JPL.  There was a disconnect there - I viewed astronomy more as a passionate hobby and a job, while all of my coursework was in physics.  UCLA was a good fit for me as a result, with strong and diverse astronomy and physics departments.  It allowed me to postpone deciding what to do for my thesis research.

I remember talking to Mike in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001 about how several of my friends were contemplating joining the military. His response was one of the few times he expressed a deeply personal opinion. He had been drafted, in the Vietnam War, and he had nothing but disdain for the experience of war.

For my first two years at UCLA, I continued working with Mike Jura.  I realized Mike was such an amazing professor to work for, and I enjoyed the research too.  However, I had flirted with going into dark matter or solid-state physics for my PhD thesis.  It dawned on me just in time: that a major part of the success of one's graduate school experience was finding a thesis advisor that you "clicked with".  I clicked with Mike Jura.  It wasn't inertia.  My astronomy "hobby" could become my career.  Three years later, I would defend my PhD on "M Dwarf Planetary Systems". Mike said I was a self-starter, that once I got going he didn't need to help me much, but that wasn't true. I was in his office on a daily basis. I liked his blend of joining theory and observation.   And he was accessible.  I wasn't lost in some professor's lab with 7 graduate students, 3 postdocs and 5 undergraduates.  No, Mike took his role as an advisor seriously, and I always felt like he invested as much time in me as I needed.   I had his individualized attention, and I cherished that.

I recall one eventful day that I was sitting in his office:  We were on the cusp of making the discovery that stellar winds could play a role in the dynamics of dust around young and low-mass stars (stellar wind drag).  Mike was a few steps ahead of me on the theory. I remember looking at one of the equations on his white board and thinking "dammit, I was almost there."  That was an important set of equations - I took it in one direction and its applicability to M dwarfs.  He would take it in the other and apply it to white dwarfs.  From one of those equations in that office that day, he gave birth to an entirely new sub-field of stellar astronomy - the study of debris disks and asteroids around white dwarf stars.  He put the connection together - that these mysterious "DAZ" polluted white dwarfs were getting metals in their atmospheres from asteroid-like material falling onto these stars.  The metals should have quickly sunk from view into the interior of the DAZ white dwarfs, but yet the metals persisted meaning they had to be replenished.  The detection of infrared excesses around white dwarf stars with the Spitzer Space Telescope would solve the mystery of DAZ white dwarfs once and for all.  A number of years later I would attend a meeting dedicated to white dwarf debris disks.  There were maybe 50 people in attendance, and all the speakers in talk after talk paid homage to the founder of their field of study - Mike.  Even though my science had moved off in a different direction, I was in awe of what became of that day in his office.

I remember Mike telling me how to read scientific papers with a critical eye (ie, don't trust everything you read) because sometimes a theory is just plain wrong.  I also remember that we did occasionally disagree, especially as I progressed through the second half of my thesis - a search for transiting exoplanets using archival 2MASS data.  I took our collegial disagreements to mean that I was maturing into the scientific field, that I had gotten to the point where I knew more about what I was talking about than he did.   Whether that was true or not, our mentor-advisor relationship was always professional and full of mutual respect.

After I left UCLA, Mike would stay a part of my life.  He tirelessly wrote over 100 letters of recommendation for me as I moved on from seeking postdoc jobs to faculty jobs.  He was always supportive, even until the very end this past Friday night when I got his last email.

Mike, you will be missed, and your legacy in astronomy will not be forgotten.  Maybe someday your remains will scatter in the atmosphere of the white dwarf star that will be left behind when our Sun dies.