Click on Andrew Lincowski’s LinkedIn profile, and his headline jumps out: “criminal investigator and planetary scientist”. This might sound as though Lincowski is a crime-fighting hunter of aliens in a Marvel superhero film, and that interpretation isn’t far off. Until the end of last year, Lincowski worked as a police detective in Casper, Wyoming, from Monday to Thursday. And on Fridays, he looked for signs of life on planets beyond the Solar System, as part of a research team at the University of Washington in Seattle. Earlier this month, he started working as a mathematician at Eastern Wyoming College in Torrington, where he will be teaching mainly 18–21-year-old students. However, he will continue his one-day-a-week planetary science research at Washington.

Lincowski admits his career has been characterized by fairly drastic changes of direction. “I think it’s a symptom of my generation — the constant changing of your mind about what you want to do,” he says.

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In 2006, after completing a degree in business accounting at the University of Arizona, Tuscon, Lincowski worked in finance for a construction firm. When a colleague left to become a police officer, it ignited a long-held interest that Lincowski had had in law enforcement. In 2008, he joined the Tucson police department as a patrol officer, responding to routine call-outs for crimes such as shoplifting and robbery, as well as “a lot of domestics, unfortunately”.

“I really wanted to be a detective — to investigate crimes, analyse evidence and use my mind. I wanted to do the Sherlock Holmes thing rather than the kicking-down-doors thing,” he says.

“That’s not to say that driving with the lights and sirens on and all that adrenaline-filled stuff isn’t fun, but there’s a lot of personal danger,” he says.

Guns were a constant presence, for instance. “I was never threatened with a firearm, but there were numerous situations with people who were bigger and stronger than me or were high on drugs, when I felt it could go really badly,” he says.

Career rethink

After four years as a patrol officer, during which he filed more than 2,000 incident reports, Lincowski applied for a detective position, but was unsuccessful. That rejection proved to be a “sliding doors” moment, he says — a seemingly inconsequential but ultimately life-changing event — prompting him to return to the University of Arizona to pursue a four-year bachelors’ degree in physics, a subject that had always interested him at school (see ‘Quick-fire Q&A’). While enrolled there, he worked for the campus police force (in both the United States and Canada, large universities often have their own police force). That meant he could earn a salary while studying and have his course fees paid.

This was much easier than patrolling the mean streets of Tucson — on campus, most of the cases involved petty crime or, unsurprisingly, intoxicated students.

The university has a large astronomy department and state-of-the-art telescopes, so Lincowski, who had enjoyed desert trips to gaze at the stars as a child, added astronomy to his already busy schedule. The year before he graduated, he won a summer internship at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, working on the ‘Haystacks’ project. This was where his interest in exoplanets — planets outside the Solar System — was born.

“Essentially,” he says, “that project was to build a model that would simulate the Solar System as observed from the outside.” Part of it involved looking at whether an external observer would be able to distinguish Earth from the other planets and, if so, how.

It was this work that led him to the University of Washington, which offers one of the few US postgraduate programmes in astrobiology, addressing issues such as the origin of the Universe, whether there is life on other planets and even what constitutes life.

There, he joined a group led by astrobiologist Vikki Meadows, studying a planetary system, called TRAPPIST-1, that scientists think has the best conditions for the existence of life. He completed his PhD in 2020, and then continued with the team as a research scientist.

Exoplanet detection is complex work. Lincowski’s team looks for dips in the brightness of a star as a planet crosses in front of it. The researchers then use wavelength data from their observations to study the composition of the planet’s atmosphere.

“It’s very difficult data. These are small planets, they’re far away and there’s a lot of noise to get around. The stars we’re looking at are way more active than our Sun — the solar flares are gigantic, and sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between the planet and the star,” says Lincowski.

Back to service

Events much nearer to home would prompt another career shift. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, sparked widespread discussion of racism, as well as a debate on the calibre and training of front-line officers in the United States. Lincowski felt a duty to return to service — this time with the Casper Police Department — and he finally got his longed-for detective position.

“I felt I needed to come back,” says Lincowski. “It’s a high-stress job and there’s personal danger, but police officers need to have a breadth of knowledge. They also need integrity, and I don’t think that is something you can train into people,” he says.

He chose Wyoming partly because he had always wanted to live in a Rocky Mountain state and partly because he wouldn’t have to redo his basic training. He says his academic supervisor was supportive of his unconventional working arrangements, and was able to schedule remote meetings and catch up on days when he had on-call police work.

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“I was able to Zoom easily and I had a remote connection to the university’s supercomputer to run models,” he says.

Some of his police colleagues might have been intimidated by his research pursuits, but he found “these big-muscle guys” intimidating, too. “They can throw me around super easy,” he says. Diverse talents matter for dealing with a range of situations: the police will always “need someone who’s a door-kicker and can talk to bad guys” as well as people “who can really work the evidence in a crime scene”, he says.

But not all of his academic colleagues were supportive of his police work. When he was pursuing his PhD, he found that researchers sometimes reacted with suspicion when they discovered he had been a cop.

“I was surprised by this reaction. Some friends maybe dropped off a little but then came back when they realized I was the same person,” he says.

He thinks his police and academic work complemented each other and gave him transferable skills. For example, he is not fazed by giving presentations at academic conferences, because it is not unlike giving evidence in court. “I’ve testified in front of defence attorneys who are asking me tough questions and trying to throw me off,” he says. “There’s nothing more stressful than that in public-speaking terms.”

Conversely, his scientific training helped him to preserve a crime scene, collect and handle evidence and build a case. “As a detective, I investigated crimes and I had to put forth evidence in a concise and fair way. And scientists have to do the same thing. Writing a scientific paper and writing an analysis report on evidence are really not that dissimilar.”

However, being a detective takes its toll — hence the move into teaching.

“The public wants more educated law-enforcement officers, but the treatment and compensation, given the risk and stress inherent in the job, do not compare with other careers,” he says. “The burnout is real.”