Martin Tingley was coming undone. It was late autumn 2014, just over a year into his assistant-professor job at Pennsylvania State University in State College, and he was on an eight-hour drive home after visiting his wife in Boston. He was stressed, exhausted and close to tears. As the traffic zipped past in the dark hours of the early morning, the headlights gave him the surreal feeling that he was inside a video game.
Usually, Tingley thought of himself as a “pretty stoic guy” — and on paper, his career was going well. He’d completed a master’s degree in statistics and a PhD in Earth science, both at Harvard University. With these, and four years of postdoctoral experience, he had landed a rare tenure-track faculty position. He thought he would soon be successfully combining statistics and climate science to produce the type of interdisciplinary research that funding agencies say they want.