Profile of Claire L. Parkinson

Abstract

When people think of research at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), sea ice may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Yet Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, has spent 4 decades studying sea ice. Parkinson’s use of satellite data has revealed clear and sometimes unexpected long-term changes in Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice coverage. Meanwhile, as project scientist for NASA’s Aqua satellite, she oversees the collection of data used by scientists around the world. Parkinson has received numerous honors for her accomplishments, including election to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. Claire Parkinson speaking at the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center. Image courtesy of Steve Graham (photographer). Claire Parkinson near Thule Air Base, Greenland, in March 2018. Image courtesy of Jeremy Harbeck/NASA. Parkinson spent the first 12 years of her life on Long Island, New York, after which her family moved to central Vermont. She recalls not knowing any scientists while growing up, particularly when she lived in Vermont, where there was no university nearby. Parkinson’s early love of mathematics started her on the path to a scientific career. She admired how math could “turn something that sounds like a really complicated problem into something so simple, simply by putting it in an appropriate symbolism.” Her teacher in the fifth and sixth grades encouraged her math studies. Building on this early interest, Parkinson majored in math at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. At the same time, political events in the wider world, such as the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, instilled in her a desire to do something of value to society. Shortly before graduating college, she participated in an act of organized civil disobedience, for which she spent …