In just his second year at Northwestern, Professor Brian Odom is making an impression. Last week, the 36-year-old assistant professor of physics won the prestigious Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, an unrestricted $875,000 grant awarded over five years to 16 scientists nationwide. He joins a distinguished list of recipients, including his wife, Teri Odom, a 2003 Packard Fellow and assistant professor of chemistry at Northwestern. This was on top of the Faculty Early Career Development award he won in June from the National Science Foundation. Oh, and on Thursday afternoon he was officially named a recipient of the Young Investigators award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. When he wasn’t busy being honored, North by Northwestern sat down with Odom to discuss his recent accolades, ongoing research and his relationship with faith.
$875,000 — that’s a lot of money. What’s that going to allow you to do that you couldn’t do before?
This is fantastic. $875,000 doesn’t go as far as you might think it would go. The award is for five years, so this will support two graduate students and allow me to buy a laser, that’s it. It really is hard to raise money to do research — students and equipment are expensive. But it’s not easy to come by $875K, so this is huge. It will free us up to pursue creative ideas that we might otherwise have trouble getting funded.
You also won a $600,000 Career Grant from the National Science Foundation. Sounds like a good year for you. What kind of projects will these grants fund?
Yes, it has been a very good year. We have several projects, and every agency signs up to support one project, so they’re slightly different. They’re all within the context of trapping molecular ions, but then we’ll do different things with the trapped ions.
Two other Northwestern professors won Packard Fellowships in the past two years, but they’re both in geosciences. Is it time for some interdepartmental warfare?
(laughs) Actually, the physics department has done very well historically. This is our fourth Packard award, which is pretty good, since our department is relatively small.
How will the grant change your involvement at Northwestern?
It means that I can do better research than I could do otherwise, which is a big part of the job as a professor. You teach classroom courses, but a lot of our effort goes to research, which is teaching graduate students by the apprenticeship system. That part of the job is very important for the university and for the department, and things will be much better now with this grant. We won’t be scrambling for funds, we won’t be worried that we’re going to run out and we have to play it safe to get funding. We can really be creative and see where it takes us.
Your research is about cooling molecules to sub-Kelvin levels. What is the ultimate goal?
Packard has decided to fund us to do very high precision spectroscopy on molecules. Did I use the word spectroscopy? I probably didn’t explain what that was.
I tried to pretend that I knew.
Spectroscopy is measuring quantum energy levels. We can do that with atoms, measure to 17 decimal places. We can’t do anything near that well in molecules. The best molecular spectroscopy is to 12 decimal places, something like that. We have techniques to cool atoms down and to hold them in traps, a container without walls. The atoms are held in this trap not because they bounce around and hit something and come back, but because we use electromagnetic fields, so it’s a much gentler container. But we don’t have any techniques to hold molecules in traps. That technology is just being developed.
What would you do with that?
There are two goals that I submitted in the Packard proposal. One is to see if fundamental constants change with time. That should sound strange.
I was hoping for elaboration.
We would be looking at the ratio of the electron mass to the proton mass. So you would think that constant should stay constant, it shouldn’t change in time. But a lot of speculative theories in physics, which try to unify the forces, theories of everything, predict that constants aren’t really constant. They’re more or less constant, but they change a little bit in time, or they might have been different in the early universe. It might or might not be the case, but it’s the job of physicists to go and look to see. So if we can do spectroscopy on molecules, then we can start probing for this effect to an interesting level, seeing if the electron to proton mass might be changing ever so slightly every year.
What would be the implications of that?
If you measure an effect, then there’s new physics there. One of the speculative theories of everything might gain some ground, as compared to the others.
Does it have more practical applications?
If we measure the constants changing in time, that bit of science will probably never see a technological application, because it’s so small. But when you work really hard to do an experiment like that, you have to invent new technology. And that new technology often has pay-offs that were unforeseen, spin-off projects that are technologically useful.
When I Googled you, the first thing that came up was a blog post you wrote about your relationship with God. Since the scientific community is so overwhelmingly atheist, do you ever feel like the odd one out?
At Northwestern, it hasn’t made me feel like an odd one out because we haven’t talked about it. At Chicago, [where I did my post-doctorate], when it did come up with my colleagues there, it was warmly received. It was a difference of opinion. But generally, things are changing in science. Fifty years ago, if you weren’t an atheist and you were a physicist, people thought something was wrong with you. Now we scientists in the current era are a little more humble about what we know and what we don’t know. So people like me, that have thoughts on God and maybe some spiritual experience, don’t turn other scientists off very often anymore.
Do your beliefs inform your research and vice versa?
Yes, there is interplay. My training as a scientist makes me have a certain interpretation of how the world got started. I’m not an intelligent design proponent, although a lot of people who believe in God are. So if I wasn’t a scientist, who knows, I could be a creationist, but as a scientist I believe in evolution.
The other side is a little harder to articulate cleanly. But there have been times when I’ve done research in one way rather than another because of conversations I’ve had with God on the subject. My interaction with God affects all of my life, including how I do my work, and every once in a while I behave differently because of something that happened in that interaction.