Title: Museum Specialist at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5696-4333
Website: https://naturalhistory.si.edu/staff/freya-goetz
NoCTURN Involvement: Open Science Committee
“NoCTURN is wonderful because it is aimed at improving approaches to CT and open science. The group is collaborative and incredibly welcoming”
Introduction and Career Journey
Today, we are featuring Freya Goetz who is currently a Museum Specialist at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington D.C. Freya obtained her BA and BS in Marine Biology from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
After undergrad, she completed two internships. The first involved controlling an invasive worm on a mudflat without using chemicals. The second took her to Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California. At MBARI, Freya characterized the bioluminescence of two deep sea chaetognaths. This internship also taught her molecular methods. She brought these skills to her next position as a full-time technician at Brown University. It was at this position that Freya realized she wanted to shift her focus to animal morphology rather than generating molecular data for Tree of Life studies. So, she took a position at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) as a Museum Technician.
As a current Museum Specialist at the NMNH, Freya examines the morphology of invertebrates and provides technical imaging expertise for curators in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology. She also is a histology technician and runs the histology lab where cellular organization level questions are investigated. Once a month, she is allotted time on the CT scanner which she uses for research questions that can be answered at the tissue level. She also participates in outreach activities and enjoys teaching the public about invertebrates.
Freya is passionate about invertebrates and extreme diversity in body plans. She believes that CT is an awesome tool to look at animal tissue level organization and internal anatomy. According to Freya, combining histology and CT is “a powerful way to look at the internal anatomy in 3D context”.
NoCTURN Involvement
Freya was already involved with CT scanning at the museum when she joined a free, virtual ToScA meeting. Through ToScA, she heard about NoCTURN. She attended the first in-person NoCTURN meeting in Austin and was sold immediately. According to Freya, “I was excited that there was a collaborative group of people that use the same tools and are trying to figure out how to standardize things”.
Since joining NoCTURN, Freya has been a member of the Open Science Committee and designed a CT career path flow chart. The flow chart is a quick guide to different job opportunities in CT based on education level and organization (e.g. industry, museums, academia, etc.) She has since used the same flow chart as a template for museum careers to assist colleagues at the Smithsonian with finding new positions in the museum field.
Hobbies
Outside of work, Freya enjoys gardening, knitting, crocheting, ceramics, and scuba diving.
Advice for Researchers
Freya’s advice for established researchers is to treat your support staff well. Support staff have valuable technical expertise that is crucial to conducting robust research.
For emerging researchers, she suggests thinking hard about what kind of involvement in science you want to have. Do you want to oversee the whole project, or do you want to generate the data? Sometimes people think they need to go to graduate school, but it turns out that it is not necessary to be fulfilled in worklife. They can be involved in science in other ways. For example, work for a while as a technician before deciding whether to go to graduate school.
Final Thoughts
Freya hopes that people will value science again in the future.