My former student, Aditya Sood (Pom ’97), gave a wonderful talk to our undergraduate researchers at Caltech on the second day of our Caltech Summer Undergraduate Astronomy Institute. Aditya took my Astronomy 1 course at Pomona many years ago, and it was part of his development as a broadly educated liberal arts student – which eventually placed him in a role as a Producer of The Martian. Aditya’s journey is a wonderful testament to the power of liberal arts education – where courses in science for non-majors have a profound impact and enable cross-connections that can have large societal impact. In Aditya’s case, he was able to produce a movie that provided a compelling image of science as solving problems in a collaborative way – and that brought the full diversity of a team to bear on saving a stranded astronaut. The beauty of the movie includes not only its dazzling panoramas of Mars, its gleaming space hardware, but the way in which it portrays a future in which humans are working together to build a positive future that is based on exploration and on science. I am immensely grateful to Aditya for producing this movie and inspiring millions – and for his great talk to our undergraduates at Caltech! Aditya in an earlier talk at Pomona College described his Pomona College astronomy class with me long ago:
“The greatest thing about Pomona was taking classes in any field. I’d always wanted to be an astronaut for the first 12 years of my life and so I took Bryan Penprase’s astronomy class my first year, which was great,” says Sood.
The image below is from the press release at Pomona during his 2015 talk – and shows both Aditya and Matt Damon, the star of the movie. Below are some images from Aditya’s talk at Caltech. Thanks again to Aditya – and keep doing great work to inspire others about science!
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Below are some photos of Aditya addressing our group of Caltech and Pomona students at our ZTF Summer Undergraduate Astronomy Institute – June 20-24, 2016.
