University of Oregon alum reflects on researching galaxies

Charity Woodrum grew up in Oregon. While she first explored a career in nursing, she realized that she was meant to gaze at the stars. The University of Oregon alum has interned with NASA and is now working on obtaining a doctoral degree in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Arizona. She’s also a member of the James Webb space telescope team and is researching galaxy evolution. Her journey is the focus of a documentary screening hosted by the Carlton Observatory at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville on Friday. Woodrum joins us to talk about her work and the people who inspired her along the way.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Charity Woodrum grew up in Southern Oregon. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. She then spent a few years as a nurse before realizing that she was meant to gaze at and to study the stars. So she went back to school at the University of Oregon, interned with NASA, and is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona. She’s also experienced profound loss in her life. Now, she is a subject of a documentary called “Space, Hope, and Charity” by the Oregon broadcast journalist Sandy Cummings. It’s screening this Friday evening at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville. And Charity Woodrum joins us now. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Charity Woodrum: Hello, thank you for having me.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. Can you describe your family life when you were growing up?

Woodrum: As you said, I grew up in rural Oregon in Canyonville. And neither of my parents graduated high school. From a young age, my dad would tell me if I didn’t want to end up in their financial situation, that I needed to get an education. So pretty early on I focused on my education and just grew up in the small town of Canyonville until I graduated high school.

Miller: What was school like for you? You got this message from your dad to focus on education, but it seems like you enjoyed it yourself. Is that a fair way to put it?

Woodrum: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Ever since I was little, learning has been my favorite thing to do. I’ve always loved school. In Canyonville though, I was really drawn to math, for example, in high school. But we didn’t have physics classes for example. I was also interested in science, but my science learning was pretty limited in Canyonville. So I wouldn’t say it was the best education growing up in Douglas County for me.

Miller: Why was math your favorite subject?

Woodrum: I found it amazing that math can describe the world around you. Specifically, I remember opening the page in my calculus book when I was in high school, called physics, and that was the chapter about how you can apply math to the world around you. And I just thought that was amazing. And I loved how everything you were learning, you could prove it to yourself as well.

Miller: Why was that important? The idea of proof.

Woodrum: I guess growing up in a small town sometimes people tell you how to think and what not. And I just wanted to have my own independent thoughts, if that makes sense, and to prove everything to myself.

Miller: At one point in the movie, early on you describe yourself as being a homeless roofer. What was going on in your life at that time?

Woodrum: So I was living in my car and I was roofing houses over the summer. I stepped in for my brother for a day, and then I ended up working through the summer there. And eventually got a job once the summer was over, which led to me getting a scholarship and community support to get my degree in nursing at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg.

Miller: What was nursing like for you?

Woodrum: I really loved nursing school, because again I loved the learning, and I was excited that, you know, this was a meaningful job and I was gonna help people. And so I really love nursing school and I loved all the mostly women that I was going to school with and everything. But then once the reality set in of actually working as a nurse, I realized that it wasn’t the job for me because I couldn’t handle the emotional toll that it took. Every day, practically, something sad would happen. And I would go home and think about it, and it was really having a negative impact on my life. And so even though I loved nursing school, I couldn’t handle the job as a nurse.

Miller: Can you tell us about meeting a man named Jason who would eventually become your husband?

Woodrum: So around the time that I was realizing that nursing wasn’t my career, actually, I met him the summer between graduating from nursing school and passing my board exams and starting a job, I met him that summer. Our love story is pretty crazy, and it would take a long time to explain and you kind of need to know the full story. So people will have to watch the documentary for that.

One of his coping mechanisms is to read books. He used to read hundreds of books a year. And so he said I should read books to get my mind off of the things that were happening in the hospital, for example. And so I started reading books by Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, which reignited my passion for math and this newfound passion for astrophysics, which I hadn’t really been exposed to before.

Of course, we got married, and we had a son as well, named Woody.

Miller: I want to play what one of your friends in the movie says about Jason. Let’s have a listen.

Friend [recording]: Charity, you could probably always describe her as meek before. And I think Jason gave her a voice for the first time. I think that’s really when she started analyzing where she came from, who she was, and how to kind of speak up for herself and kind of grapple with things. The first time I met him, that’s exactly what I felt, like “oh, he’s helping her.” And so I instantly liked him.

Miller: Does that ring true to you?

Woodrum: Oh yeah, definitely. I would call myself very, very shy growing up. Anyone who knows me from back then would say the same. And I think seeing how bold and how much love and passion he had for life and he was just this very intense person, it brought that out in myself as well, I would say.

Miller: Before you went back to school, you saw an academic counselor. What was that meeting like?

Woodrum: When I decided to go back to school to study physics, one of the reasons that I did that was because I was pregnant and I was trying to decide what type of mom I wanted to be for my son. And I knew that I wanted him to follow his passions, and so I had to lead by example. And so I decided I was going to pursue this passion I had for astrophysics. So I was nine months pregnant and I walked into the academic counselor’s office at the University of Oregon and told him that I wanted to get my bachelor’s degree in physics. And he was definitely confused, not only because I was waddling and my belly was huge, but also because I had a degree in nursing and that was just a very different, very interesting career change for someone in my stage of life. And so he was definitely a little bit taken aback but was supportive of the idea. He told me he looked at my grades from nursing school and said “well, you can clearly pull this off.” And so he was supportive, but certainly didn’t expect it, I guess.

Miller: What was it like to be in school with a newborn?

Woodrum: That was definitely difficult, but I took it slow. At first, I just needed to refresh my memory of calculus, for example. So I just started taking math classes and getting caught up with the math that I would need to get my physics degree. And I also started taking an astronomy class with Doctor Scott Fisher, who eventually changed the trajectory of my life completely. But both Woody and Jason were also part of my academic career, because eventually I started volunteering up at Pine Mountain Observatory in Bend, and there’s a campground there. And so every weekend, all three of us would go up there, and Jason and Woody would be camping in the campsite and I’d be over running the observatory. And sometimes I would have to take breaks to go breastfeed Woody and then come back. It was definitely difficult to do as a new mom. But Jason was very, incredibly supportive and was just as passionate about me attaining my dreams as I was. And so I was able to do that because of him and how great of a dad he was.

Miller: Can you tell us more about your son, Woody?

Woodrum: Yeah. So Woody was a very smart and empathetic kid, very advanced for his age I would say, and just very funny. He loved dinosaurs in space. One of one of my favorite stories about him from when he was at the U of O daycare was there was this kid [who] would never go to the bathroom. And so Woody decided that if he sat down next to him because they had two adjoining toilets, that he would relax. And so they both would sit on the toilet together and Woody asked the teacher to tell them scary stories. And that helped the kid be able to go to the bathroom, which I thought was pretty empathetic for a three year old to do. He loved space, because he would come up to the observatory with me since he was a newborn. And eventually he thought that I was the one that turned the stars on at night actually, which was pretty cute.

Miller: I don’t want to dwell on your worst day, but for people who are not aware, in January of 2017, you lost your husband and your son. What kind of a support system did you have?

Woodrum: I had an amazing support system, honestly. Because after that happened, obviously my life just completely fell apart. I completely fell apart. I was hospitalized for a week. They were sedating me and everything. And then for quite a while I didn’t get off the couch. And every day one of my childhood best friends was there. My three childhood best friends, some of them I hadn’t spoken to in years, they were there for me waiting when I got out of the hospital, and they arranged it even though they’re all working full time and have families of their own. They arranged it to where I was never alone on the couch. They were always there with me trying to get me to eat. And they just know me so well, even though so much time had passed, they still just knew exactly what I needed. They’re the heroes of the story, they saved my life. And you do get to meet them in the film.

And then also the kindness of complete strangers was honestly shocking. For example, there was this woman that saw what happened, the tragedy, because it made national news. And she decided she wanted to help me, and she wanted me to be able to finish college, which is something that I eventually wanted as well. And so she started a GoFundMe to help me go back to school and finish my physics degree. And she also connected me with other people. And the support of strangers was life saving as well. So I would say I had an amazing support system.

Miler: One of the people you were connected to is Lynn Frohnmayer, pretty famous Oregon name. She was married to the late Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer, who died of cancer. She also lost her three daughters. What have you learned from her?

Woodrum: Oh, I would call her my grief mentor. I’ve learned so much from her, and she changed my life completely. She used to tell me that grief and joy can coexist at the same time. And at first I didn’t understand what that meant. But a lot of the lessons that she taught me in those early days, I’ve slowly learned them over these years as I advance in my grief journey. She was amazing. We first met because of this mutual friend in this Thai restaurant, and it involved a lot of public crying. But then after that, we became close friends and we would hang out every single week. And actually, I get to see her a couple times a year. She’ll be visiting me soon, actually in two months I think. So we still keep in contact. And having her has helped me substantially, and so I’m excited that she’s in the film and she can help others who are going through what I was going through, because not everyone’s going to have a Lynn Frohnmayer in their life.

Miller: In the time we have left on the show, I want to turn to science. You say in the movie that this is a particularly exciting time for astronomy because of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. What are you hoping to learn from this telescope?

Woodrum: Well, the reason that we built the James Webb Space telescope, when I say we obviously not me, but actually my PhD advisor, she built the camera for JWST and she’s been involved in this project for 30 years. And so 30 years ago, they said “we want to see the earliest galaxies in the universe, but we don’t have the technology. So what would it take for us to see the first galaxies that formed in the universe?” And it took them 30 years to finish this plan, it launched on Christmas a year or two ago. And it’s done exactly that already. Because my advisor built the camera, she has a lot of time on JWST. And so with that time, we did discover the earliest galaxy in the universe, our team did that.

And so JWST is already doing what it was built to do, among many other things. It’s looking at the atmospheres of exoplanets, and looking at stars as they’re forming, and all of these things as well as its prime original goal of seeing those first galaxies.

Miller: You have access to this extraordinary scope and images from it. But do you find yourself just looking up at the night sky on your own?

Woodrum: Oh, absolutely. Looking up at the night sky is something that I do quite often. And it’s something that makes me feel at peace, I would say. Yeah, I definitely go out and look up at the night sky, which is great to do here in Arizona and on camping trips in Oregon.

Miller: Charity Woodrum, thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate it.

Woodrum: Thank you for having me. It’s an honor.

Miller: That’s the astrophysicist Charity Woodrum. She’s the focus of a new documentary, “Space, Hope and Charity,” made by the Oregon journalist Sandy Cummings. It is screening this Friday at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville.

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