Science professors are sometimes saddled with the stereotype of being reclusive and spending time with their equations but not bothering to share their work with people. Spend one minute with Dr. Jana Grcevich, a part-time astronomy lecturer, and that image will be as far from your mind as Jupiter’s moon Europa is from planet Earth. Far, as she will tell you — about five years by spacecraft if you time it right.
Grcevich has avoided the pitfall of having only one career and has instead had three. She’s an academic, with degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Michigan and Columbia University. She completed postdoctoral work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and currently teaches "Wanderers in Space" at Tufts.
She’s also a science communicator, having taught classes for future high school science teachers, hosted shows at Hayden Planetarium and co-written a book envisioning space as the next frontier for tourism. Additionally, Grcevich is a data scientist and has worked in the television industry doing advertisements for TV companies and market research analysis. Grcevich’s broad career has been propelled by a combination of curiosity, necessity and a passion for sharing science with others.
Grcevich said that she got into astronomy through “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” with some “Star Wars” on the side. She eventually cut through all the Klingon and Galactic Basic and followed her curiosity.
“I started being curious about what was real and what was not real about science fiction that I was watching on television, and that’s what brought me to the library to read more about it,” she said.
At the library, she found Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” It went over her head as a middle schooler, but the fact that she didn’t understand it was what intrigued her. As an undergraduate student, she took a first-year writing class that was focused on astronomy and got into the subtopic of dwarf galaxies because of her professor, Dr. Eric Wilcots.
“I really got into [dwarf galaxies] right away, and I kind of never stopped,” Grcevich said.
However, Grcevich took many detours on her career path. One was as a planner for space vacations.
“I was finishing my Ph.D., and a friend of mine called me up and was like … ‘somebody I know is doing this project planning space vacations. They want to work with an astronomer to do this,’” she said.
The project, called the Intergalactic Travel Bureau, engaged the public through interactive events where they would help people plan a fantasy vacation in space, were it possible. The point was to make astronomy accessible and fun to the general public.
Grcevich, at this point, flips into intergalactic travel agent mode. She asks me where I like to go on vacation and what I like to do. Before I know it, she’s recommended a ski trip to Pluto in one-tenth gravity. Her ideal space vacation is to the moon Europa, with its hydrocarbon seas and sandy landscape.
“I would love to go there and just fly around over [the] lakes and … dunes, [and] have those views,” Grcevich said.
Over the years, the project evolved from events to eventually a book, “Vacation Guide to the Solar System,” published in 2017.
After completing her doctorate, Grcevich started a postgraduate position at the American Museum of Natural History. Grcevich also led shows at the museum’s famous Hayden Planetarium, touring her live audience through the sky. The planetarium’s advanced technology allowed its scientists to show their audiences the newest findings.
“If you have a view of Jupiter that you got from a satellite, you can put that down, and actually fly around Jupiter with your audience,” she explained.
However, necessity brought her to industry after her postdoc.
“I really wanted to stay in New York City, and it was hard to find a permanent position,” she said. “So what I ended up doing was going into data science, and instead of studying the universe, I was putting advertisements on television shows using machine learning.”
Her job in data science used her skill set and knowledge of Python, but it wasn’t everything.
“It was a good experience, but it was not my true love, and I found myself really missing astronomy and interacting with the public,” she noted.
Grcevich pivoted back to Columbia by running educational programs for schools and the broader community, such as community stargazing.
“Hundreds of people would come to Columbia, and we’d do stargazing — we would take out telescopes and things like that,” she explained.
However, once it was clear that COVID-19 would cause more than short-term disruption in programming, it was time for a change. Life provided a perfect one.
“I reconnected with an old friend of mine, fell in love and ended up moving here,” she said.
Here is Somerville, Mass., across the street from Tufts University, where she’s now a part-time lecturer.
Grcevich arrived at the Department of Physics and Astronomy with homemade cookies and a refreshing teaching style. Her style is interactive and gregarious, and she tries to engage students who are not just STEM majors.
Her teaching assistant, Tess Kleanthous, a first-year master’s student, explained that Grcevich intentionally caters to different learning styles. In a recent class, she brought students to the front of the hall to demonstrate the phases of the moon, with the students representing the earth.
“She walked around them with a model of the moon that [was] half lit up by the sun. And she walked around them as if she was the moon, orbiting them so that they could see how the moonlight changes based on where it is,” Kleanthous said.
Grcevich’s enthusiasm shines through, according to teaching assistant Casey Hartman.
“It’s very evident that she's passionate about teaching this stuff,” he said.
Hartman said that when the northern lights were visible above Tufts, she took extra time to tell her students to go outside.
Grcevich said she is happy to focus on teaching here, but she also wants to emphasize connecting with the broader community at Tufts.
“In New York, it was great because we would take a telescope back to the street and people that [had] never looked through a telescope before would look through telescopes,” she said. “I was fed by their reactions and their questions, and it wasn't like we were doing them a favor. It was a way to meet people and come together around a shared love.”
Grcevich remains in awe of the galaxies she studies and feels respect for the universe, and she hopes these sentiments pass on to her students at Tufts.
“That sense of wonder and that sense of understanding of our place in a larger picture is what led me to really love astronomy,” she said.
