Kate Hedstrom

Kate Hedstrom

About Kate

Kate is an Oceanographic Specialist at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, Fairbanks, Alaska.

Kate lives in Fairbanks, on a hill, about 20 miles from the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. With her husband, they built a house off the grid. Their power come from solar, a wind turbine, a generator and a battery bank. For about 6 months of the year they can go on solar and wind power when it’s available. Her hobbies are Tai Chi and knitting and spinning. Both her husband and Kate teach beginning Tai Chi and belong to the local Fairbanks’ Tai Chi groups. Kate also belongs to ravelry.com, “A big Facebook for knitters.” “It’s changed the way I do knitting, how I get ideas for new projects, and how I know who is a knitter in town.” said Kate.

Kate says: “Traditionally in oceanography, people like to work alone and publish papers alone. But this kind of research I’m involved with requires big teams of people. So I’ve been co-authored on papers with up to 10 authors. We each have our own little specialization. Things are going more and more that way. Especially as models coupled with different components of the models. You need specialization between different people. ” “We need people who know how fish behave and people who have gone out and taken measurements of how many fish there are. We have a fish modeling person who understands how to take fish behavior and put it in a model, especially things like the movement. Migrating movement, spawning movement and then the people that can make it so in the code.” “And we end up with a team of 15 people when it’s all done. And one of my colleagues in this effort has gone so far to write a paper as to who to pick as co-author in a project. What do you have to do as a co-author verses just being acknowledged in the acknowledgements. And so we are changing how we feel about that and getting better at how to collaborate and maybe getting more careful at who to team up with.”

“Traditionally in oceanography, people like to work alone and publish papers alone.  But this kind of research I’m involved with requires big teams of people.”