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The walls of Gelinas's cubicle in Morse Hall are filled with pictures of cats. She has three, Wilbur, Charlotte and Duncan. "I wanted to be a vet for about a minute when I was a kid, until I found out that you had to dissect cats," she laughs. She got Wilbur and Charlotte from the Humane Society when they were 6 weeks old. Neither have tails. Wilbur is all black and weighs 17 pounds. "Basically, he's a sphere," Gelinas notes. In her dissertation acknowledgements, she thanks them for being silly, for sitting in her lap, and for not asking her any hard questions.

Buried among the feline photos is a xeroxed copy of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "A Psalm of Life," which reads, in part:

Sounding rockets range from small single stage rockets to this four-stage Black Brant XII, which stands 65 feet tall.

Life is real—life is earnest—
And the grave is not its goal:
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

"I discovered the poem through Suzy Burke, a folk singer who put it to music," she explains. When asked why it is on her wall, she shrugs, "I just like it."

Also from her dissertation acknowledgements: "I appreciate all the offers of dust that I've received over the years, but I'd like to remind everyone that I'm only in the market for real 'space dust,' not the stuff that is all over the living room."

"I really feel like I've got to come up with a different phrase," Gelinas says, speculating on how to successfully answer the 'So, what do you do?' question. Especially when your profession is rocket science, commonly stereotyped as one of the most difficult jobs there is. "If I just say, 'I'm a scientist,' that seems to stop the conversation, too. Most people don't know what to answer. What are they going to say, 'Oh, yeah, I've analyzed rocket data, too?'"

Kristina Lynch, having had more time to practice, has a simple answer: she just says, "I study the Northern Lights." But the fact is that both women were drawn to the profession because of its difficulty. "Most research physicists get where they are in one of two ways: through astrophysics—wanting to study the stars and the moon—or through Radio Shack—wanting to mess around with electronics," Lynch explains. "As a kid, I was really fascinated with space, although I've been getting lower and lower in altitude ever since. But once I got to high school, the challenge of physics was what interested me. I liked it because it was hard."

Gelinas agrees. Her father is a mechanical engineer and designs printing presses. When Gelinas was a child, he would occasionally take her to work with him and let her draw circles on the CAD stations. "In high school, I really liked the difficulty of physics, of how you'd work for a long time and then you'd all of a sudden understand something," she says. "There is a real adrenaline rush in that. It was like an epiphany: 'Hey, I really can do this, can't I?'"

Gelinas began her undergraduate career at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she struggled. "At RPI, every kid in the school is taking introductory physics, and it's kind of a 'sink or swim' atmosphere. I was getting Bs and Cs, and I knew that wasn't good enough for graduate school. So I needed to go somewhere where I would get more personal attention. My dad used to commute to New Hampshire on business a lot, so I was familiar with UNH through him. UNH has smaller classes, and a less competitive atmosphere. It immediately felt so much better."

Lynette Gelinas '90, '99G, right, space science graduate student, and her mentor, Kristina Lynch, '90G, '92G, associate research professor.

In general, UNH space science students get to help a professor design, build and launch an instrument into space, and then analyze the data. But there's usually hands-on research in the education of UNH's other science and engineering students, as well. Gelinas first started building hardware as an undergraduate in nuclear physics. She earned a master's degree in nuclear physics, and began her Ph.D. work there. "I was having so much fun in the lab," she remembers. "I was building scintillators, which measure particles with photon detectors. That's your apprenticeship. Students build stuff. That's how you know what will work once you become a real scientist."

Eventually she realized she wasn't really interested in the physics part of nuclear physics. She answered Lynch's advertisement for a student to work on a dust detector for a sounding rocket, and that project became her dissertation.

"Lynette is a graduate student advisor's dream," says Lynch. "She already had a great work ethic when she came to me, and she had a lot of laboratory skills. I've really felt all along that I wasn't training her, but that we were working together."

Gelinas sees it differently. "She was the one that I went to with any dumb, general questions, like 'Can I do this?' or 'Who would I talk to about this?' She really guided me through getting my dissertation done, and told me how to go about designing the detector." And it was Lynch who advised her on the less scientific but equally tricky issue of finding a job in a male-dominated field. "She encouraged me to ask what the atmosphere is like for women when I was preparing to interview for jobs. She didn't want me to be in an environment where I would be the token woman. She told me, 'You want to go somewhere where they want a rocket scientist.'"

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