Personal Story

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue43 1–31 August 2023

Hi All! I’m Elisa, another recent arrival to the mountain. In short, I’m a self-proclaimed physics nerd, sci-fi geek, PC and board gamer, sports player and a bad joke maker.

I arrived in Canberra just before winter, so with perfect timing. I’ve only lived in Australia and in coastal cities before, so I was very unprepared for the chill. My essential Canberra uniform has been acquired though, and I’ve managed to stop outwardly groaning at every small business unoriginally named “Capital <insert service>”, so I think I’m almost fully assimilated at this point.

I was previously living in Adelaide, where I was working for Defence Science in the field of optical communications. I was fortunate enough to be part of the team that performed the first optical communications downlink to the Australian continent (as far as we know). As a new postdoc here I’m bringing my experience with establishing the Defence ground station to help with the commissioning and instrumentation of our own Optical Communications Ground Station, as well as the exciting activities we have planned for it under the Moon to Mars project, among others.

Before my three year stint in Adelaide, I was studying at the University of Wollongong, near where I grew up. I completed a double degree in physics and mathematics and performed my honours working on X-Ray Fluorescence instrumentation with the Mineral Resources Division of CSIRO. Although I had been strongly drawn to this work, the fickle lab gods were not kind to me in this period. I decided to escape from under their thumb and instead try to casually save humanity by pursuing a PhD in climate science. This choice did not perform the wonders for my mental health that I had foolishly hoped. Although it did help me realise that it wasn’t going to be just more science that got us where we needed to be. The science has been established for a long time, it’s the inability to have it communicated and to change societies’ behaviours because of it that is the really sticky problem. We’re making like a tiiiny bit of progress though.

How do I deal with my existential dread? I’m glad you asked. One of my main joys in life is playing soccer. Unfortunately, I fully ruptured my ACL in early 2022 so I was unable to play for about a year, but I joined South Canberra FC as soon as I arrived here. My team finally won our first game of the season last weekend! My hobbies also include Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA), specifically the longsword, but my ACL injury also put a big dampener on that activity. I assumed Canberra would be too small to have a group for such a niche interest, but writing this made me fact check my assumption, and it turns out I was wrong! Stay tuned for a review of the excellently named Drop Bear Brigade.

I am excited to be back in the instrumentation world and look forward to meeting many more of my RSAA colleagues so please feel free to say hi! In order to help you overcome any potential social awkwardness in doing so, which I very much relate to, I shall leave you with two truths and lie. Can you guess which one of these three statements isn’t true?

* I once crashed a moped in the Bahamas

* I grew up in a cult

* I love pineapple on pizza

Elisa Jager