Devin Short (he/they)

I am a PhD candidate in the History Department and a senior research scientist at the University of Washington Medical Cyclotron Facility. I have a background in physics, where among other things I wrote and operated numerical models of experimental systems. My dissertation explores both the history of scientific practice in climate modeling and the practices of historians working in the US. I am also working on a Graduate Certificate in Climate Science through the UW Program on Climate Change, and I had a summer job working with a climate modeling group here in 2019.

I began my academic career in the sciences, earning a master’s degree in low-energy experimental nuclear physics. I first took a research position in 2008 at the UW Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics, a lab built around an accelerator that has been in regular operation since 1965. If there is a better playground for a physics undergraduate with a passion for history and philosophy of science, I have yet to find it. The organic amalgamation of old and new technology there, featuring things like desktop PCs cabled to hulking detector electronics with vacuum tube displays, and the tight-knit community continually repurposing old tools for new science were object lessons in the historical and social construction of new empirical results.

By 2015 I had participated in research at national laboratories in three countries (Berkeley National Lab in the US, GSI in Germany, and TRIUMF in Canada) and I had become familiar with the global networks of people and manufacturers supporting them. I was increasingly concerned that those networks might not be sustainable in the face of radical climate change, which could catastrophically transform infrastructure and supply chains around the world. The record-breaking North American wildfires of 2016, which forced the evacuation of a city in Alberta and whose smoke reduced visibility around my Vancouver apartment to a few blocks, convinced me that I could do some good working to understand the scientific and societal scale of the climate crisis.

I am driven to create deeper knowledge about the past so that we might better navigate our present and our future in a warming world. This requires new attention to the historical construction, maintenance, and ongoing operation of climate models. I am drawing on my multidisciplinary expertise to make a novel archival database scholars can use to generate historical research questions from the vast literature on planetary science (the code for the database is available on github). This tool supports critical analyses of oral histories and laboratory archives, informing my work in the history and philosophy of science.

I currently work as a research scientist/engineer at the UW medical cyclotron, where I apply both my laboratory skills and my historical expertise operating, maintaining, and modernizing a 40-year-old accelerator facility where we deliver both radiation therapy and medical isotopes for novel cancer treatment.