On 26 September, Jonathan Cirtain, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

What made you pursue a scientific career?

When I started college, I went to play American football at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, but an accident in 1993 ended my football career. Lacking motivation, I didn't start college again until 1999 — after my dad made me promise to get a degree and stop wasting my life. He died two weeks later and I kept my promise. I started an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics, subjects I'd always enjoyed, at the University of Memphis, Tennessee. I wanted to work for NASA or an outfit that supplied NASA with instrumentation. I thought that the best way to achieve that was to get a PhD in physics.

How did you get interested in solar physics?

At a conference of the American Astronomical Society I met Piet Martens, an astrophysicist at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman, who told me that his team would be opening a slot to work on NASA's Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE), which launched in 1998. The telescope took high-resolution images of the Sun's atmosphere, and MSU was involved in mission operations. As a graduate student, I got to operate the scientific payload. I was dropped into the middle of the action.

How did you earn a predoctoral fellowship?

The Sun's atmosphere had always looked fuzzy and out of focus in observations. It turns out that the community was not achieving the best resolution for engineering reasons. During my first year at MSU, I demonstrated a physical model for the Sun's atmosphere using observations from different instruments in space, and showed how imaging instrumentation should be altered to bring the Sun's atmosphere into focus. That caught the attention of Leon Golub at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and led to a predoctoral fellowship in 2004. Since then, my work has included helping to build the next-generation telescope for TRACE.

How did you accelerate your academic career so quickly?

While calibrating the Hinode X-ray telescope in 2005 at the Marshall Space Flight Center, I got to analyse the data and demonstrate performance. I became one of the few people who really understood the ins and outs of how the instrument works. I worked on my dissertation and defended it in March 2005. So, in 5 years and 10 months, I went from no undergraduate degree to a PhD.

What are your next big launches?

In June next year, as head of the solar-physics team, I'm going to launch a telescope that will offer a tenfold improvement over any previous extreme ultraviolet instrument. It is called the High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) and it will have 150-kilometre spatial resolution. A week before I launch that, I will launch the Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Instrument (SUMI), which will be used to infer the magnitude and direction of the Sun's magnetic field.

Despite the economic challenges facing NASA, is now a good time to seek a space-related career in the United States?

Perhaps I'm still young enough that I'm naive. The challenges that NASA faces are the ones the nation faces. This is a real economic crisis in the government; I don't think NASA is particularly different from any other agency. However, there is a shortage of US citizens pursuing careers in scientific instrumentation. Most of the graduate students who are interested in this area are foreign nationals. I think that's bad for the nation's scientific competitiveness. Now is as good a time as any to go into space-based astrophysics.

To what do you attribute your career success?

I don't think I'm a genius; I work hard and make the most of opportunities I'm given. I don't know how I would have got this far without my wife, whose support and willingness to move around with me have been extremely important.