Exoplanet Innovators Interview: Sara Seager Interviews Diana Valencia

Sara Seager: So great to see you, Diana. Thank you so much for joining me for the interview today.

Diana Valencia: Thank you for the invitation.

Sara Seager: Let's jump right in with the first question, a personal two-part question.

What words would you use to describe yourself, and how would others describe you?

Diana Valencia: I think I am intense. I play hard, work hard. I'm loyal and curious. Very curious.

Sara Seager: Those are great words. The second part of the question? Do you have any thoughts on how others perceive you?

Diana Valencia: I think people do perceive me as intense. Some might see that not always in a positive light. In regard to the question, I wonder how I am perceived, because there are expectations of being a Latin American woman, and I don't think I fit that role nicely. So I wonder how much people perceive me as out of the mold in a positive way or in a negative way.

Sara Seager: I really like this conversation so far, because I've always thought that, if you don't fit the mold, it forces you to be comfortable being outside of the norm. Scientific discoveries often happen outside of the norm.

Many of us exoplanet innovators have that personality that lends itself to outside-the-box thinking and not adhering to norms. Another way to say it is that, perhaps, it is harder to do something new when going with the norm, because it's harder to have original thoughts.

Diana Valencia: I agree. That makes sense to me. But in my case, I can't tell precisely where my original thoughts come from. Maybe because I feel okay sitting outside the norm and I'm able to take risks. But I think other things also contribute. For example, I am very good at seeing connections between what seem disparate ideas.

Sara Seager: Sometimes if you don't fit the mold, it forces you to be comfortable being outside of the norm, and this allows you to be comfortable with your own new ideas. The flip side of it is that it is a bit negative to be outside the norm.

Diana Valencia: It can be hard to sit with. It forces you to grow, but it can be hard, especially when you're growing up.

Sara Seager: Let's move on to the next set of questions. How would you describe your passion for exoplanets? Was being a professor of planetary science something you always dreamed of, and if not, how did you get here?

Diana Valencia: No, that was not something I always dreamed of. Like many people, when I was a little girl, I was fascinated by the sky, but I never even thought that you could study it as a profession. There was no such thing in Colombia; there were no astronomy departments.

I didn't even think that I liked science, but science is a lot of just asking the why of things, which is what fascinates me. I tried to go into political science at the University in Colombia because I wanted to rebel against all the engineers in my family. But really, I went back to science because that's really my thing. That's how my brain works.

And then, when I got to Harvard for graduate school, I was in seismology. So nothing to do with exoplanets, and it was one question that my advisor, Rick O'Connell, asked in one class, which was, “if the Earth had more mass, what would it look like?” That grabbed me, and I thought it was mind-blowing. Because it's the sort of thing of, “Why, why is it that we are here? Why are we that special? If, for example, the mass of Earth had deviated a little bit, would it have really changed the outcome or not?” I think that's what I've been trying to answer since then, and if I look back, I can connect the dots. However, I didn't think, “Well, I'm going to be a planetary scientist or a professor.” No! At some point, however, I realized that I liked challenges, and I wanted to see how far I could go, see how I could apply this better, how I could think about it better, how I could become a better scientist, writer… that kind of thing. So if I was going to achieve this, it would mean maintaining a research group at an institution that would give me support and resources, and that meant becoming a professor was the path to follow.

Sara Seager: Great. So your work has played a substantial role in building the theoretical foundations for exoplanet interiors. What is your proudest work achievement? What are the biggest ideas you've had?

Diana Valencia: I think I'm very proud of the “nose” I had. So when I heard this question from the person who later became my advisor, I thought it was fantastic, and I started working on an interior structure model for Earth. The main point, however, was that I was looking at Earth as one of many planets, which was a new paradigm, because at that time geophysicists were focused on individual planets.

I think that is one of the things I'm most proud of, that is, seeing those two fields of geophysics and astrophysics separately and combining them in a way that made sense. So that may have had a broader impact than what you might have been asking me about. The internal structure model and the mass-radius relationship and quantifying degeneracy and plate tectonics were all novel. But those are little things, more punctual things, I think, compared to what I'm trying to say, which has more to do with an approach. It's seeing that exoplanets for which geo- and astrophysics needed to be combined was going to be a gold mine. It was just a matter of time, and you had to lay the rigorous work right then and there, which was a result of combining geophysics and astrophysics.

Sara Seager: There was your pioneering work on rocky exoplanet mass radius relation and interior structure which you mentioned. I do think this is a big thing and not a little thing. About your work on plate tectonics and that whole debate that ensued. Can you unpack that a bit?

Diana Valencia: Yes, but it comes from the same tree, which is that people in geophysics were looking at plate tectonics or the tectonic regime of each planet separately, only comparing a little bit between Venus and Earth, and that's it. People were creating models just for Earth and some just for Mars. And my work had me taking a step back and saying, “Hey, what if we take Earth and scale it, and see what happens?” These were simple scalings, and I thought everybody was going to agree, because the simple scalings predict active plate tectonics on super Earths. As you know, another group came to the opposite conclusion, and then it turned into a debate.

This prompted geophysicists to revise their own models and me to ask myself, “What if I scale my modeling with size, as a completely new parameter to consider? What will I get?”

It turns out that how you scale matters a great deal with regard to the outcome. So this other group used constant density scaling, which is wrong. You don't scale with constant density as size increases. But that was okay as a first attempt. The main point was the mind-shift to move away from studying Earth or even the terrestrial planets as the center point to studying them as part of a population that needed to be understood.

In a way, I find this to be quite amusing, and it makes me happy that I see all these geophysicists talking now about super Earths and exoplanets. When I was a grad student, as it happened, these folks would come to me and ask, “Why are you studying this? There are no such planets.” They were not interested. So to me, as one who has witnessed how much this field has grown, I am super happy that I was part of that initial state.

Sara Seager: But you were more than part of it. You were behind the entire one.

Diana Valencia: Thank you, and, yes, you are right. I was behind it.

Sara Seager: That's why we are here, to highlight the exoplanet innovators.

I am just wondering a bit more on how you got started working on such an original topic. Your advisor asked the question about what super Earths might be like, if they exist. But then you ran with this and moved the whole subfield forward as a PhD student! This is remarkable.

Diana Valencia: Yes, that did happen. I was lucky that I had two advisors that couldn't talk to one another too much, because of their different areas of expertise; even the lingo was different. So it fell on me to lead it. And they were busy, but they were very supportive as well. So it created all the space that I needed in order to lead.

Sara Seager: Let's just pause for a second, because it's remarkable that a PhD student could literally start this whole new subfield in exoplanets at a time when people didn't think this subfield, or exoplanets as a whole, was going to go anywhere.

Sometimes I wonder if the current generation even knows about the origins of your and other exoplanet subfields.

Diana Valencia: I don't think they do. So much time has gone by.

Sara Seager: Let's backtrack for a moment and talk about the early days of exoplanet mass-radius relationships. I actually started working on mass-radius relationships independently of you, and for the whole plausible mass and radius range. I came across this paper by Zapolsky and Salpeter called, “Cold Spheres of Low Mass.” And who knows why they even wrote this paper, back in 1969 or something. I suspect they were trying to show off, and I mean that in a good way, to apply their new Equation of State at very high pressures. Interestingly, the authors had no Equation of State at low pressure or even medium pressure. They just showed that most of a planet's mass is at high pressure and left it at that. Anyway, I saw that paper and thought, “Whoa! This is awesome.”

And I started working on mass-radius relationships. But during that time, I gave birth to my second child. We all know how that goes, and he also didn't sleep well. Then my dad got cancer and died a few months after diagnosis. So my exoplanet mass-radius project took time to come together.

But sometimes—and I'm going to give you a really big compliment—sometimes, I come across an idea and say, “Wow, I should have thought of that.” This has only happened to me maybe two or three times in my entire career, and one is your work, and I think it's so important. It has had a ripple effect throughout the entire field of exoplanet characterization.

So even though I also worked on exoplanet mass-radius relationships from scratch independently, I didn't come up with this really critical thing which you did: how to fully capture the ambiguity of the planet interior composition, or even characterize it at all, given only a mass and radius. Because we want to know the bulk composition giving a mass and a radius, and therefore an average density. What is the planet made of? And you hit upon a very necessary and fundamental concept that, because we're never going to be able to attribute a unique characterization, we have to have a way to capture all the possibilities.

And you used the ternary diagram, which isn't normally used in astronomy.

I'm sure you're fully aware that the whole field of exoplanet atmosphere retrieval (that my former student Nikku Madhusudhan and I started) was motivated by your work. I got that from you. I mean, we had to use a different method. But that whole concept of how do you, conceptually and quantitatively, capture the range of underlying atmosphere compositions that fit the data? I would add that to one of your biggest accomplishments.

Diana Valencia: Thank you. When I see the ternary diagram, I feel like a mother seeing a child. Oh, and nobody knows. So thank you for saying that.

Sara Seager: In the early years, when you were doing all this work for the first time, were there one or two “wow” moments? Something that was surprising and that stood out as being just really unexpected?

Diana Valencia: What was surprising was the debate about plate tectonics. I really didn't think that there was going to be such a debate. I think overall I was less likely to be surprised because there was nothing to compare my research to.

The mass-radius relationship deviating from one-third. It was more of a question of how much more and why. But then looking back it easily makes sense; it's due to pressure. So to go back to your question, I don't think there were a lot of surprising things because there was nothing to compare to, so everything was there to discover.

But what surprised me was the culture.

How, for astronomers, the Earth was a dot, and all the things that geophysicists care about they thought were inconsequential, and geophysicists thought astronomers were just talking about imaginary planets. That was what was surprising to me. The two very different cultures.

Sara Seager: The culture clash reminds me of a funny story about my friend Marc Kuchner, whom I worked with on some of this in the 2000s. We plotted the Equation of States for various planetary materials on a log-log plot that spanned many orders of magnitude. And you know how on such a plot the Equation of State is kind of flat as a function of pressure until the pressure gets so high the electrons become pressure-ionized and the nuclei can squeeze closer together.

Well, before that pressure inflection point, Marc would say, “The density doesn't really change with pressure.” Although apparently true on an astronomy-favored log-log plot, this statement was incredibly insulting and offensive to the geophysicists who spent their entire career on the slope, or the function, relating pressure to density (the Equation of State). And the geophysicists had never seen a plot like that, a plot spanning so many orders of magnitude.

Diana Valencia: I have another anecdote, if you would like? I was giving a colloquium at Northwestern, and I was talking about the Urey ratio, which is the ratio of radioactive heat flow to the total heat flow, and I was making a big deal because geophysicists make a huge deal about it. People have made a career on this ratio.

And then Fred Rasio said something like, “Who cares? It is of order, unity.” And then I was like, “It is.” But, wow, you just insulted a whole field of geophysicists with this statement. So yes, everything can look different from a different lens.

Sara Seager: I love it.

Speaking of super Earths, there are so many now. Let's give that for the readers. Before we didn't know how many, but now there are thousands.

Diana Valencia: The number depends exactly on what you define as a super Earth, but broadly we have hundreds with masses and radius data. We also have thousands that only have radii measurements. To me, what's interesting are the ones that actually have masses and radii, because otherwise we don't really know the nature of the planet.

Now that we have hundreds of those, the questions that we can tackle are different. We can start comparing planets. Are there any trends? But it took more than 10 years to build this data set.

Sara Seager: Which trends are worth mentioning, or what trend is really interesting to you personally?

Diana Valencia: I see some planets that are consistent with a rocky composition, meaning that they could be rocky, but they stand above what stars' compositions would produce if they had the same rocky ratios. So these planets seem to be depleted in heavy elements like iron, and we don't have an easy way to make them. We don't have a mechanism that would deplete a planet of iron and not mantle stuff while it's being formed. So these planets are weird to form. If they are rocky. Now you can say they have an atmosphere, but some of them are so hot. Then you would have to ask what kind of atmosphere would sustain these temperatures and not be blown out. So I think that is a really great group of planets to study, because it helps us then understand the other more mundane planets.

I think that's one trend. Another one, the radius valley, which separates planets that are compact from the ones that are more puffy. And, again, related to how astronomers like to have things very neatly categorized, the question has been whether atmospheric evaporation or mass loss due to collisions shapes this valley very neatly. My sense is that it is more complicated, and you see it in the data. The two types of planets are not completely separate, so the devil is in the details. But the question is what are the details that we're going to be able to discern, because most of them are, as we talked about, plagued with degeneracy. So focusing on the extremes, I think that is the way to go.

Sara Seager: I see. What do you think of people wanting to call some of these planets so-called water worlds, 50% or more by mass water, like a scaled-up version of one of Jupiter's icy moons? What are your thoughts?

Diana Valencia: When I started doing the ternary diagram and I put water on it, I remember Mark Kuchner, because I didn't know about the work that he had done, and also Leger's work. And Marc said, “Oh, we were the first ones to study this,” and he asked that next time we reference his work, which I did. So this idea of water worlds has been around for a really really long time. I think water worlds probably do exist. I mean, we have examples of that of the icy moons of Jupiter, so I'm sure they do exist. Now, do we think life is going to be present there? That's another level of complication.

Sara Seager: I understand. I agree with you. Water worlds could be out there. Everything we can think of nature seems to make. Nature is more creative than we are. But there are some people pushing that a set of these planets that exist are definitely water worlds, and I just wanted to get your take on that.

Diana Valencia: I don't think we know enough. We have to go and probe their atmospheres. The mass and radius alone will not give you that. And then what people are using is combining this data with planet formation theories to argue plausible compositions. But that's still not going to give you a for sure.

There's this one recent plot of planets around M dwarf stars, and many of them are aligning with a 50% water line and with an Earth-like mass radius line. But when you look into the details, there really is a spread. I think that this is a problem of trying to put simple numbers to complicated questions, because then you can get hung up on how meaningful the 50% is.

Sara Seager: One of your recent papers I really like is one I also had been trying to write a very long time ago, but I just couldn't think it through. It's this: it's not even like a super intellectual paper, but it's this concept of the zero-pressure density of a planet being the key metric. People will look at the measured bulk density of a planet from its mass and radius and get confused. A planet can have a density that's like 12 grams per cubic centimeter, and people are shocked. They wonder what kind of planet is so exotic that it's a few times Earth's density.

As you know, what is going on is that material compresses more at high pressure than at low pressure. So a planet that is very massive for its size ends up having an average density that seems unusual. But if you imagine taking all the planet's material out and spreading it all out in the universe the uncompressed material would just be like 5 grams per cubic centimeter.

So I really like your paper explaining that concept because I see students getting tripped over compressed versus uncompressed density over and over again. So I just want to say I admired that paper as well.

Diana Valencia: Hmm. Yes. And not just the students, there are observers who use bulk density as a function of radius and are drawing conclusions on composition out of that, which is flawed for the reason you explained.

Sara Seager: Okay, next question is, do you think Earth is unique?

Diana Valencia: I think Earth is unique in many ways, but not perhaps in the ways that we study in astronomy. When people think about living on another planet, they probably assume it's going to be pleasant and joyful somewhere else.

But the cosmos is harsh. I think Earth is unique because the conditions have been such that it is pleasant to live here. We don't just survive; we can thrive. We've evolved in a really nice environment, very stable environment, very quiet environment. Given that the universe is harsh, I am not sure how many of those pleasant environments exist. There are probably many planets that have the same mass as Earth, there could be planets that are habitable, but the conditions are going to probably not be what we have here. So I think in that way Earth is unique.

Sara Seager: Let's change gears and move on to a different set of questions. Who, if any, are the most influential people in your life?

Diana Valencia: My mother, definitely my mother. It's so easy to underestimate her because she's tiny. She's like 153 cm. She might not like me to say that out loud. She is so kind and so loving, unassuming but tenacious.

But when you see her trajectory, it is inspiring. She is a giant. She came from the countryside. Her parents were farmers. They knew how to read and write, but they didn't get a formal education. They knew that there was value in education, so she went to university, and she was the third woman in Colombia to become a chemical engineer. Obviously, her peers were all male. It is now that I appreciate how much of a trailblazer she was. I normalized it in a way that I never questioned whether I had the ability to become good in science, or if I had the ability to become good in anything that I wanted to, because I had her as a role model since very early on and in every single aspect of my life.

Sara Seager: It's amazing to have a role model who is such a trailblazer. That's awesome.

Diana Valencia: Yes. And then, my dad I think was a trailblazer as well because he chose somebody like my mother. Remember this was a time when most women would stay at home, but my dad chose differently. And he is a thinker as well. So I think that my family in that way was very, very good to me.

But just to elaborate on the role model question. Role models in my career have been really hard to find because there are not very many women in this line of work. You were probably one of the first women I met in this line of research who had kids.

There are a lot of women in our community and in the sciences who may be doing spectacularly, but on the whole, they rarely have kids, which, of course, changes the amount of time and energy that an individual has.

I didn't have any professors who were women until one class, and that class wasn't even part of the program I took at Harvard. Her name was Sarah Stewart, and I was only auditing her class. But other than that, my professors were all males and white males at that. When I came to North America, it was so very different to find role models that I could identify with.

Sara Seager: Do you have any role models now, or are you the role model?

Diana Valencia: So mostly me? But, for example, I do look up to you. How did you do it? I mean, I know we have different circumstances, but you did have to deal with having kids, and I remember some conversations where you asked me personal questions that now, many years later, make sense to me. I was with a partner at the time, and I think you asked me, “How strong is your relationship? Is he willing to move for you to anywhere in the world?” And I thought the answer was yes, but in fact the answer was no, and it actually affected my life for a few years.

So just to say that, in some ways even though without me knowing, you were talking to me about things that I wish somebody had sat me down and said, “You really need to think about this.” And Sarah Stewart was another person. You know she had kids when she was tenure-track, so I could see a little bit of what it entailed. But I don't interact with you on a day-to-day basis. I didn't interact with Sarah on a day-to-day basis.

And I think that is what I would like more of because it's one thing to just see successful women from afar and quite another to directly interact with them, talk with them about how we manage all this. It's really important to seek out peers. You know they can, in fact, still be mentors.

I have experienced, over the years, a lot of women with children seeking me out. But I don't see a lot of people like that at this later stage of my career. I know some people but not that many.

Sara Seager: Well, that's why you're in my interview series, because it's for the exoplanet innovators. A rare bunch.

I know the early years with kids can be so hard. Well, this is definitely a really big topic. I can only say now one thing that helped me succeed, and that is I tend to not look back and dwell on horrible things. And my youngest turned 18 yesterday.

Diana Valencia: Congratulations.

Sara Seager: But believe it or not, for some reason the tough times are getting erased from my memory. That's a good thing in a way, but it makes me a bit harder to give advice.

Recently, I went to nearly every single home and away men's varsity high school soccer team games for my son who was in his last year in high school. That's three afternoons a week. But my soccer mom career is over now, and I also have more time now that my kids are adults and have largely moved away to university.

Certainly, the whole family thing is really hard, and I'm glad you brought it up, because even though I have so far interviewed people (including one woman) with kids for this series, it wasn't a topic that popped up, and it's definitely something that makes life a bit harder.

Diana Valencia: A lot harder, at least for me.

Sara Seager: Let me give you the next question. Have you had any major setbacks, and how did you overcome them?

Diana Valencia: One major setback, and it ties to what we were just saying, is that you never know what kind of pregnancy you're going to get. You never know what kind of baby you're going to get. I had really hard pregnancies, and recovery was really hard. I also had a baby that did not sleep soundly for 9 months. He would wake up maybe 15 times a night, so I would experience only stretches of sleep of maybe 30 minutes or an hour maximum. As a result, of course, I was a zombie, and my husband Kristen was also a zombie. We were both just in a haze, and my research agenda came to a halt. Restarting, as it turned out, was really hard.

At that time, it was a humongous effort I had to put in to recover, and I was very unsure and insecure about myself about this. So I looked for resources on how to get help. As a result, I signed up for a faculty success program, which really helped as a kind of accountability group that offered support and insight into important things such as time management, organizational skills, and so on.

Under the duress of having no time, no sleep, and functioning with half a brain, one can only put her head down and do the work that one must do and manage those things one can control and not worry too much about the outcome, because if you don't have control over that, it's energy wasted. But doing this for a short period of time is one thing. I had to sustain it for many months and years. This, as it happens, is something I'm proud of for myself.

Sara Seager: I'm proud of you, too, and I hope you're on the other side now.

Diana Valencia: Yes, absolutely. I am on the other side. But I do want to talk about this to others because we don't appreciate the amount of work that comes from having to stop, because maybe there was a death in your family or something sustained for a long period of time such that your research was impacted. It's really hard to just pick up as if nothing had happened, and I don't think we have an appreciation for that at all. You're just evaluated on how many publications per year, regardless of how you've lived your life and the circumstances you've endured in your life.

Sara Seager: The next question is a bit of a similar question. What is the most important lesson you have learned over your career? Any bite-sized advice?

Diana Valencia: Bite sized? Oh, my God!

You have to do the work, and you have to apply yourself. You have to face uncomfortable feelings. Sometimes you don't want to do the work, but you just have to go and do it. And sometimes you have to speak to someone you'd rather not deal with, but you have to go and do it and sometimes put yourself in environments where you might not want to be. For example, going to conferences is where I get a lot of ideas. So with something like the pandemic I knew that I didn't want to travel, but, in time, I'm going to have to. In a nutshell, sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to reach your goal.

Sara Seager: This is a bit out of order, but let's talk about how we met. One of your PhD advisors, Dimitar Sasselov, was also my thesis advisor.

Diana Valencia: Yes, we are academic sisters. I don't know exactly when I first met you in person, but in the earlier stages of my career, you invited me to give a talk for something you were organizing with Drake Deming. I think he called me and said, “Sara and I would like you to give a talk,” and I remember saying, “Yes, but I have to ask my advisors if they'll allow me to go.” Either before or after you also invited me to give a colloquium at Carnegie. So when you were still at Carnegie, we spent a little bit more time together, and I remember you showing me your car, and there was something interesting about your car. But I'm not a car person.

Sara Seager: It was probably my yellow Subaru WRX outback, with big “bug eyes” for headlights. It was so cute.

Okay, and then later on you came to MIT as a Hubble Fellow, but unfortunately I had a personal disaster which required my focus, and I feel like we didn't really interact very much.

Diana Valencia: I had my own personal tragedy also.

Sara Seager: But then a really weird thing happened that led us to reconnect. In 2022, I was at my summer cottage, which is sort of obscure, an hour and a half north of Toronto. It's my husband's family's cottage in Ontario, Canada. It is on Georgian Bay, which is a part of the Great Lake, Lake Huron.

You know I always post on Facebook about my dog Leo, and how beautiful the lake is, and I guess we're connected on Facebook

Diana Valencia: I can't remember whether it popped up in your feed or it popped up in my feed, but it said that you were at your cottage near Wasaga Beach. And I thought, I'm just going to send her a little message, even if she's on vacation, “Hey? I'm around. What side of Wasaga are you?”

Sara Seager: And then it turns out that we're like 7 minutes away from each other, and we got together on the beach. I was so excited when I got your message, and it turned out you not only have a house up there, but you also are friends with my sister's friend who also lives up there.

Diana Valencia: After all that I did end up meeting your sister. So yes, just a very small world.

Sara Seager: Absolutely very small world.

Okay, I have just a few more questions. What are your plans for the future? Perhaps you could just say something brief about your working on planet formation and AI?

Diana Valencia: I am trying to use exoplanets and the composition of exoplanets as a different access to understanding planet information in general, including our solar system. So Mercury, is it really that weird or not? Are there any pathways that that can reliably produce something like a Mercury? So just understanding planet formation with the axis of composition, because now we can get good composition estimates for rocky exoplanets. I have other plans in AI, possibly with these large-language models.

Sara Seager: Your Mercury-type planet question is really interesting. It also points to this concept of how just having one example in science doesn't necessarily lead to good science, right? Because there are biases. There seem to be super Mercuries out there, and we have no idea how they formed.

Diana Valencia: True. But then we can reverse that question again. We really need better observations, because the thing with current error bars is that you really change the nature of the planet really easily. So while there appear to be super Mercuries, I would like to see more data and more precise data as well, to see how prevalent they actually are, because we are biased to detecting them.

Sara Seager: Okay, let's move to some closing questions. What is the most beautiful idea in astronomy or planetary science to you?

Diana Valencia: My goodness, this is a super hard question, Sara. The fact that we can discover exoplanets in our lifetime. The fact that we can study them is a privilege. And the fact that we can put back into perspective our own biases, and how it is that we do science, and how it is that we think about us being so special. We get to put a mirror back into our knowledge and also see the limits of what we can say, you know, going back to degeneracy, going back to us trying to build understanding from very, very scarce data compared to many other astronomy fields. It's very little what we can get for a single planet or for many planets. And so it's just trying to get very creative at the same time, knowing that maybe we won't ever be able to say for sure that this planet or that planet has life. Maybe we're going to have to live with a probability and understanding that that's our limitation. And if that's not the case, what else can we do to overcome that?

Sara Seager: I forgot to ask you something important. When you start out pioneering something, it is so brand new, and the field is wide open. But, as more and more people work on it, the endeavor matures. It gets clogged up. Exoplanets is a very different field of research now, because it is maturing, and it is getting overcrowded. How do we navigate?

Diana Valencia: That's why I couldn't elaborate on the future very easily, because of precisely what you're saying. The field has matured enough that all the big, low-hanging fruit has been taken, so the amount of work needed to reach creative solutions or creative ideas is different.

Sara Seager: Yes, I understand. You now have tenure. You have received a Guggenheim fellowship for your sabbatical this year. Congratulations! So I wish you all the best in the upcoming year to create.

Could you share a final piece of advice that you would give to your younger self or a student?

Diana Valencia: You have to have good people in your corner. Take the time to build that group of people, significant or not. There are going to be some difficult moments, because it's not an easy path. So you need a group of people who can help you, and I don't just mean emotionally, but who can bounce ideas off of that challenge, set a high standard for you, so that you can achieve a high standard for yourself, and at the same time they pick you up when needed. That is my advice.

Sara Seager: Well said. Thank you very much for a great interview, Diana.

Diana Valencia: Thank you, Sara.