James McAteer

“Hi, I’m James McAteer. I’m a solar physicist working for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Centre. I work with the SOHO spacecraft looking at the physics of sunspots, active regions & coronal mass ejections. I like my job because it gives me the freedom to come up with an idea and then investigate it. It also allows me to travel which I really enjoy. I recently went to Zambia for 11 days to see a solar eclipse. I like the computational side and the real-time aspect of working with SOHO. I wouldn’t really consider myself an astronomer, in fact I’ve never looked through a telescope.”

“I grew up near Belfast, Northern Ireland. At school I was very sporty. I was very good at physics, I won the gold medallion of Ireland for A level physics. For my degree I did physics and astronomy which included an honours project for which I studied the rotation period of the moon of Neptune. My PhD was in solar physics and it was after that that I came to work here. In my spare time I enjoy listening music, going to the cinema and travelling.”

You can visit my website at http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/~jma