Vanderbilt astrophysicist Natalie Hinkel studies the stars and is excited learn more during the solar eclipse. Shelley Mays/The Tennessean


At parties, when Natalie Hinkel reveals she is an astrophysicist, the conversation normally stops abruptly.

Sometimes people manage to muster the awkward response:

"Oh, I never liked science." Or, "What do you believe about aliens?"

But most times, people just don't know what to say.

"I feel like a lot of times people stereotype scientists," Hinkel says. "They put me in a box of a socially awkward egotistical person who can't talk about anything."

Yes, Hinkel is wicked smart — and a self-professed science nerd. She really likes learning about what's inside of stars and how stars are made. It's her job, actually.

3-D personality and the Big Bang ban

But this Vanderbilt University planetary astrophysicist is so much more. She's a 34-year-old pseudo-hipster who likes punk rock, rock climbing and who has her own drinking and science podcast. (More on that in a minute.)

Sometimes, she has blue streaks in her pixie cut hairstyle, and she owns a dress with cacti on it (in addition to multiple pieces of space clothing, including a funky solar eclipse shirt). 

In her West Nashville home, she quiets a Pandora station of sassy artists like Elle King, Gin Wigmore and ZZ Ward while she prepares to make a point.

As a scientist, she can't stand being stereotyped. 

In fact, she's stopped watching television's "Big Bang Theory," because she can no longer take the portrayal of Sheldon Cooper — the brilliant physicist who is often rude, narcissistic and idiosyncratic.

"I am so many other things," she says. "I am a three-dimensional person."

Becoming a star woman

Hinkel's mom was a geography professor who interviewed Inuit Eskimos and kept frozen chunks of pollen in the family fridge.

Her dad was also a teacher and a geologist who would often go to the tundra of Alaska for weeks at a time.

But her grandmother was the original scientist in the family, a high school chemistry teacher at a time when it wasn't a common profession for women.

When Hinkel finished her doctorate dissertation — having compiled the largest catalog ever created of stellar compositions, which she called the Hypatia Catalog — she dedicated it to Grandma Lorraine. 

In her wallet, Hinkel still carries a small periodic table given to her by her grandmother.

When the ice cream truck didn't cut it

Hinkel's star fascination began with a telescope, a visit to an aunt and uncle's house in Miami, and a view of the rings of Saturn. The picture was so clear through that small tube that her cousin thought someone put a sticker on the end of the telescope.

Ten-year-old Hinkel was hooked.

She took extracurricular math classes in her Ohio middle school, Advanced Placement honors calculus in high school, and pursued two research internships in college funded by the National Science Foundation.

She was fascinated by galaxy formation, cosmology, star formation — "literally everything" in space. But before she committed her life to it with a graduate degree, she took a gap year and did absolutely nothing that had to do with the universe.

She sold frozen treats from an ice cream truck for about a week before abandoning the 7-miles-per-gallon hunk of metal to become a waitress and restaurant bartender and then a receptionist at a day-spa.

After a year in the real world, she knew her heart was with the cosmos. 

Fun fact: We're all living stardust

Hinkel can geek out about the Big Bang (the phenomenon, not the television show) and solar eclipses.

Her work contributes to understanding the properties of stars, how they form, and the possible connections they have with the creation and living conditions of their orbiting planets (the ever-popular exoplanets). 

Stars, she says, are the building blocks of life.

In simplistic terms, the hydrogen and helium in the very first giant balls of gas fused together in star infernos, creating all the other elements.

Without stars, we wouldn't have the iron in the ground we walk on, the carbon that comprises us, and the oxygen that we breathe.

"The stars made those raw elements," Hinkel says with a flash of excitement. "So if it wasn't for stars we wouldn't exist."

Science and drinking, in a podcast

One of Hinkel's more unique personal creations combines her love of science and drinking.

It began at Phoenix Comicon, where Hinkel and a friend dressed up in costumes (she went as a guy from the sci-fi TV series Farscape) and talked about science. 

They went out to dinner after with other friends and a new fanboy, who — after listening to Hinkel and her pals talk pulsars (and other space things) with beverages in hand — said, "You should record this. You are hilarious."

So they did. And they named it "The Science Bar," a podcast where a geologist, astrophysicist, and two comedians drink and discuss recent science news. Episodes include topics like whiskey in space, ant bathrooms and Peruvian mummies.

It wasn't a rocket to fame, but it sure was fun.

Solar eclipse gazing

Now, in Nashville, Hinkel is following new pursuits as a post-doctoral scholar.

She moved to Music City a year ago, living in West Nashville with her talkative kitty, Tatertot, and her astronomer husband, Caleb Wheeler III (who works at Fisk University and builds cool tools like cameras that can capture a star being born).

Together they camp and rock climb and run the greenways and go to concerts at Third & Lindsley. 

And they stargaze.

Hinkel will actually be somewhere else to see the eclipse when it travels over Nashville on Aug. 21. Her husband's family has a farm in Missouri that will offer prime viewing.

She is stoked about it.

"I don't get to see any of the other stars like I see our sun," she says. "It's the closest that I get to seeing my research with my own eyes."



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