#WebbTelescopeWomen Nora Lützgendorf

Nora Lützgendorf, ESA scientist for Webb’s NIRSpec instrument and study scientist for the ESA LISA mission

What is your role in Webb?

I help to ensure that Webb’s NIRSpec instrument is in its best shape for doing science with, once we are in orbit.

Why are you excited about Webb?

Everything! Webb will answer so many questions. I’m mostly interested in black holes – the big ones and the small ones – and Webb will observe the most massive and the oldest black holes in the Universe. It will study how they grow and interact with their environment. But I’m even more excited about the things we will discover with Webb that we haven’t even thought of yet.

What has been the highlight of your career so far?

The cryo-vacuum test campaigns for NIRspec. In those we stick either the instrument or the entire telescope in a big cryo-vacuum chamber. This is basically a gigantic fridge that creates a vacuum to simulate space-like conditions. We then conduct functional tests on the instrument and those tests go 24/7 over several months. It’s a very stressful but exciting time and we faced many challenges over the years, like big snowstorms and even a hurricane. But you feel like Jodie Foster in “Contact” with your headset and your workstation monitoring your telemetry on a big screen. We might not be hunting for aliens (yet!) but it is a very interesting part of my work.

Did you have a mentor during your career, and if so, how did they inspire you?

I was lucky enough to have had (and still have) many great mentors and role models over the course of my career. It started with my PhD supervisor who taught me so many things about science but also about managing workload and work-life balances, and it went on with many great scientists I got to work with over the years and female role models managing family and career. Still today I have amazing people in my team, men and women, and get inspired by all of them. Our team has a great gender balance and I think that is one of the reasons why it works so well.

What advice could you offer to young people thinking of pursuing a career in STEM?

When I decided to study physics, I had some people (even in my own family) telling me that this might be too hard, and that many people fail. Don’t listen to things like that. If you don’t try you will never know if you are actually good at it or not. And if you are interested and fascinated by a certain topic, chances are high that you are also good at it! It is not the easiest career path you can choose, I also had to work hard for it, but I love what I do so much that it was 100 percent worth it. One more advice is to find yourself a good study group, allies and mentors early on in your career and keep them close. I had an amazing study group during my first years of university and I don’t know if I would have gotten that far without them.

The 2021 International Women’s Day theme is “Choose to Challenge”. What are the biggest challenges you’ve fought to overcome in your career?

I think it is dealing with disappointments and rejections. Whether it is from a job that you really wanted to get or the recognition that you thought you deserved. That is something I had to learn over the years that this is part of the process, that this is nothing personal and that the best way of dealing with this is to shake it off because this was not the way for me and another way will come. I started to see it this way: if I don’t get rejections from time to time I know I’m not ambitious enough.