Working in a meaningful job
Former Master student Michelle Tigchelaar
In 2010, I graduated with a MSc from IMAU after looking back 37 million years ago with Henk Dijkstra and Anna von der Heydt on the climatic changes at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. Afraid that 4 years of PhD at IMAU would get me seriously burned out on the Minnaert kantine, I started looking for programs abroad and soon found myself on a plane to Honolulu. I was going to study Oceanography at the University of Hawaii!
Living in Hawaii was quite a new experience: sun always burning, trade winds blowing, lush green mountains in the backdrop of a concrete jungle, and people and food from all around the Pacific. I continued to work on paleoclimate – this time the glacial cycles of the Quaternary with Axel Timmermann – because it allowed me to think about oceans, atmosphere, biosphere, and cryosphere at the same time. I got to travel even further when a collaboration with the Atmosphere Ocean Research Institute at the University of Tokyo allowed me to live in Japan for half a year. This made me really aware of the importance of language at work – lunch conversations in Japanese proved quite the challenge!
While the climates of earth’s past are fascinating, after my PhD I wanted to get more experience with research that applies more directly to societal problems. I am currently a postdoc with David Battisti at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I combine climate data and projections with records of crop yields to evaluate scenarios of how global food production and price volatility will change in a warmer climate. In addition to my research, I have also been working on bringing science to the general public: I share my work at Meet-A-Scientists events at the local science museum, a team of us is developing a climate conversations app, and I am part of a speaker’s bureau that discusses the impacts of climate change and carbon policy with local labor audiences. Through these activities, I learned how important it is to relate scientific findings to people’s personal values and experience.
Despite not being able to vote in this country, I aim to make a positive contribution to my community, especially in this hyper-charged environment that is Trump’s America. American workers don’t get the protections and benefits we get in the Netherlands, so at the moment I am working with a team of other postdocs on starting a labor union. In the past months, I have talked with over a hundred postdocs about their work and experiences, and have gotten to learn a lot about state law as we are getting ready to win collective bargaining rights for the 1,100 postdocs at UW. It feels exciting to build power in a country that regularly denies science.
So what’s next? I am looking to combine my analytical and science communication skills outside academia to make meaningful change there, perhaps at an NGO that works on environmental and climate justice issues. It would be great if I could stay in Seattle – which is an exciting city surrounded by gorgeous mountains – a little longer, but I also miss the down-to-earth Dutch. Stay tuned!