Father-Daughter Team a Rarity in Science

Boys sometimes grow into younger versions of their fathers. My older brother, for example, taught history in a high school at the same time my father taught history in a neighboring school. Baseball player Ken Griffey Jr. played on the same Seattle Mariners team as his father, Ken Griffey Sr. In Alaska lives one half of a rarer combination, a daughter who studies particulates in the air with her scientist father.

Cathy Cahill is an atmospheric scientist at the Geophysical Institute and the chemistry department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her father, Tom Cahill, is an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Davis. Cathy, 32, recently collaborated with Tom, 64, during a project in which researchers tracked the movement of a massive dust cloud across the Pacific Ocean from its birthplace in the great deserts of Asia. Tom sampled the air in China, Japan, and Korea; his daughter sampled the air in the Aleutian Islands at Adak and north of Fairbanks. They hit paydirt at all their sites, collecting particles of dust on sticky films within air samplers, and helping to determine the effects of giant Asian dust storms on other parts of the world.

So he could deploy an air sampler in China, Tom borrowed the device from his daughter in Alaska with the promise that he would later return the favor. Cathy first became acquainted with such devices during family vacations. One such outing occurred when Cathy was age 12, during a 1980 trip from the Cahill home in Davis, California, to Mt. St. Helens in Washington. The volcano had just begun rumbling, so Tom and his wife Virginia, an environmental attorney, pulled Cathy and her brother Tom, then age 10, out of school and packed them into the family’s blue station wagon. They headed for eastern Washington so dad could place some air samplers around the volatile mountain, just in case it blew. By then, the kids were accustomed to wedging themselves in the station wagon between the samplers, devices about as big as a suitcase.

Cathy remembers feeling explosions within Mt. St. Helens as the family set out the samplers on the flanks of the volcano. When her father later returned to retrieve the samplers, two were buried forever under feet of ash, but one survived the historic eruption to trap a good amount of dust. Tom found massive amounts of chlorine within that sampler, a revelation that was revealed in his paper in Science magazine, a publication that is to science what Rolling Stone is to rock n’ roll.

Family outings often were similar to the Mt. St. Helens trip, Cathy said. When she and her brother asked questions about the natural world, her parents had an answer.

“I think I knew a rainbow was a third-order optical effect before I was 10,” she said.

She rebelled against pursuing a career in atmospheric science early in college, but found her interest in air irresistible when she was a graduate student at the University of Washington. There, she analyzed air samples from over the Kuwaiti oil fires, work that led to her studying desert air in Nevada. From there, she traveled to Ireland as a Fullbright scholar near Galway, where she sampled the salty air that reaches the west coast of Ireland.

Now settled in Alaska, Cathy studies aerosols—tiny solids and liquids suspended in air—that Alaskans inhale every day. Gobi Desert dust, exhaust particles from power plants in China and Russia, and specks of carbon from forest fires all visit Alaska at different times of the year. It’s Cathy’s job to find out their origins and the route they took to get here. As she describes her many projects, the latest being the installation of an air sampler at 13,000 feet on Mt. Logan, she speaks so fast it’s hard to keep up with a pen and paper. Talking with her father on the telephone presents an identical challenge. He speaks even faster, with just as much enthusiasm for the discoveries to be made studying the atmosphere. Like father, like daughter.