Some of the data Lyndsay analyzes. She's looking for interrelated patterns of energy, temperature and structure in the hot gases.

After four years I got my degree and decided to stay for a Ph.D. A Ph.D. is really a rite of passage for professional scientists. This is where I moved into solar physics, because I had really enjoyed plasma physics and astrophysics, and I liked the idea of studying a star that was close enough that you had some chance of seeing what was going on. After three and a half years, during which time I was mostly convinced I would never make it, I got my Ph.D. I then left my home country and worked in Holland for five years, for the University of Utrecht and for the European Space Agency. Last year I crossed the Atlantic and started working here in Lockheed Martin.

What I do day-to-day

Most of the day I sit in front of a computer. I use it for just about everything from writing computer programs to work out mathematical models, to copying data across the Internet from a database in England. Right now I have two or three different science projects on the boil, all of which are quite different in the kind of physics they use: there are a lot of different sub-disciplines in solar physics. So if I get fed-up with one, or it's just not working, I can put it aside for a couple of days. One project is to use spectrometer data to calculate temperatures and densities and element abundances in a hot, magnetically active region in the corona. Another is to model theoretically what fast electrons do in a solar flare, and what their X-ray emission looks like.