“It seems to me that, if you want to be a scientist, then you just have to start, and put your heart into it, and immerse yourself in it as much as possible” (Dr. John Mather)

It’s not every day you get to sit down with NASA scientists to explore not only what they do, but what brought them to science. We did just that in creating the video series Science Minded, which features interviews with five leaders from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland:

• Dr. John Mather – Nobel Laureate, Senior Astrophysicist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Dr. James Garvin – Chief Scientist, Sciences and Exploration Directorate
• Dr. Robert Cahalan – Director, Sun-Earth Research Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Dr. Holly Gilbert – Chief, Solar Physics Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Dr. Compton Tucker – Senior Earth Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

This is science — as real and as human as it gets.

We hope that these five people will inspire you, as they did us, to understand that science isn’t just something that scientists do; it’s a habit of mind, an embracing of wonder, a career open to many, and a passion open to all.

These interviews are available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY), so please use them, share them — with friends, with students, with colleagues. The interviews can be viewed in sequence, but we’ve also broken them down into over ninety individual clips, so you can go right to the question you need answered.

Intro video above CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.