Dr. C. Alex Young is the Associate Director for Science Communication in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. In this role, he oversees and coordinates the division's science communication. This includes developing tools, resources, and training for the NASA workforce to reach many audiences. He also works with the division scientists to promote and support their research and coordinates this work with the center, agency, and beyond.
In graduate school at the University of New Hampshire, Dr. Young studied the high-energy astrophysics of cosmic gamma-ray bursts and gamma-ray solar flares.
He joined the NASA/ESA SOHO mission after graduate school as a Solar Astrophysicist with the Extreme-Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT). He also served as a staff scientist for the STEREO mission and as a Chief Observer for Hinode's Solar Optical Telescope. Working in this area grew his interest in image processing, which he combined with his love of statistics and data analysis. It was this with the help of some of his colleagues that led to his establishment of the Solar Image Processing Workshops or SIPWork. Over the years, Young has helped organize and run 5 workshops and edited 3 special topic Solar Physics journal volumes on Solar Image Processing. Part of what he enjoys about data analysis topics is the sharing of knowledge with the solar and astrophysics communities. This has led to his participation with the California Harvard Astrostatisics Collaboration (CHASC) and serve as a member and current chair of the American Astronomical Society's (AAS) Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics Working Group.
Dr. Young's passion for sharing knowledge has also been fueled by giving public lectures, television and radio interviews for NASA/TV, and participation in several Discovery Channel documentaries. To further this outreach, he established the suntoday Facebook fan page and the complementary website thesuntoday.org. These link to a Twitter feed and YouTube channel.
Dr. Young co-led NASA's public engagement efforts for the 2017 total solar eclipse.
Dr. Young led the NASA Heliophysics Education Activation Team (HEAT) and its earlier incarnations from 2015 to 2021.
Dr. Young is married with cats. He enjoys running, traveling, watching movies, and playing video games in his spare time.
SHORT BIO:
Dr. C. Alex Young is a NASA solar astrophysicist studying space weather in our solar system and beyond. He serves as the Associate Director for Science in the Heliophysics science division. Dr. Young’s focus is to help make science communication approachable for the broad NASA community. He has taken his work in space weather; education, public outreach and media work for NASA; and love of science fiction to enrich his goal to help all become better communicators. Dr. Young also helped lead NASA’s national engagement efforts for the 2017 total solar eclipse and one of the agencies largest public outreach events ever.