Charity Woodrum

Neither of my parents graduated high school,

And just, you know, we grew up in a very low income area.

And so I think he was seeing all of that.

There were no other scientists in that town.

A lot of the jobs would either be logging or going to nursing school.

But I had never heard about a scientist before.

At the time, I was like, OK, I don't know how to do this then.

So once I graduated high school, my biggest goal, I guess, was to escape poverty, and I became a registered nurse.

But once I started working as a nurse, I couldn't handle the emotional toll of it.

Just seeing human suffering on a daily basis, like an older person not getting visited or

Or even, you know, once a week there would be something absolutely catastrophic that you would see.

And I found myself just thinking about it all the time and it was really affecting my daily life.

So at the time, Jason, what would be my future husband, one of his coping mechanisms was to read books.

He read, you know, hundreds of books a year.

Yeah.

And, yeah, he was like, why don't you pick up some books?

Maybe that will get your mind off of it.

I started picking up popular science books by, you know, like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and started reading about those.

There's a particular image, actually, itself that's one of the main reasons that I went back to school to study physics.

It's called the Hubble Deep Field.