Million Dollar Mentorship

—    Tucson, AZ — 

A $50,000 international research grant in 2022 from Research, Innovation & Impact made the construction of a telescope in Australia possible. That telescope, in turn, helped convince NASA that U of A scientists Vishnu Reddy and Adam Battle are capable of tracking near-earth asteroids even when not visible from Tucson. In November 2024, NASA granted the team $1M to continue characterizing near-earth asteroids over the next four years. 

Battle is relishing his position as a newly minted Ph.D. with four years of guaranteed financing. "Rotational Characterization of Radar Targeted Near-Earth Objects" represents the first big proposal he has worked on. "To have just graduated and know I have the next four years figured out and funded is amazing," says Battle. 

Battle largely attributes his sweet success to mentorship from Reddy, professor of planetary science at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and director of the university's Space Safety, Security and Sustainability Center. "Vishnu has given me the big picture, which has helped me situate my career. Part of that is knowing who to talk to and work with to get certain things done. More important, is how clear he's been that this is about figuring it out myself. I'm responsible for what I want to value, the types of people I want to work with, the next steps in my research. A big part of graduate school is figuring out specifically what I believe is worth all this time and then going for it." 

To Reddy, working with Battle embodies his calling. "Research is age-agnostic. Nobody is too young or too old to do research," he says. "But there is a faculty life cycle. You are in this rat race to get tenure, then suddenly what you were working so hard toward is behind you, and you're faced with the real question: what are you doing with your life?" After wrestling with the question, Reddy woke up one morning realizing that enabling others made him happy. He consciously decided to focus the rest of his career on helping students. "I'm just getting a greater sense of clarity and purpose as I see how we're all going to the same place," he says. "Now, whenever I open my computer and there's a stack of emails from my students, it's easy to make answering them the highest priority."

"I want to pass on wisdom, knowledge and skills but do not want to create clones of myself. Only the student knows what really makes them happy. It's their job to figure out how that lines up with what the world needs of them." — Vishnu Reddy

Reddy is a firm believer in the apprenticeship model. "If you are in a university lab, you're using one of the oldest, most proven models of education there is." The idea, he says, is to provide students with a toolkit of skills that gives them a wide range of possibilities. "I want to pass on wisdom, knowledge and skills but do not want to create clones of myself. Only the student knows what really makes them happy. It's their job to figure out how that lines up with what the world needs of them." 

The apprenticeship approach, says Reddy, means there comes a pivotal moment. "Adam and I are at that fork in the path right now. I have done what I can to teach him. He came up with a research idea, and we proposed it to NASA, leveraging the resources that RII had given us. Now, he's won the opportunity to branch out and open up a new area of research, a new area of revenue for the university and a potential career path for himself. No award could give me that kind of satisfaction."