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It’s quite amusing listening to Rory Barton-Grimley describe himself as someone who “barely graduated high school,” given that he is now a NASA Research Scientist. It’s the kind of reveal that underscores the beauty of an unconventional life path, where sometimes the road less traveled is the one worth taking.
Not that Barton-Grimley intentionally chose this route; rather, he simply went with the flow. When it comes to his lackluster performance in high school, he offers a straightforward explanation: “I just wasn’t interested in school — I was more interested in skateboarding, surfing, going to the beach, stuff along those lines.” Instead of heading to a four-year university after graduating from Carpinteria High School — or even enrolling in a city college — he took a job mopping floors at a Carpinteria car shop.
Whether aware of it or not, this decision marked the beginning of something larger. It was there that he worked alongside a BMW master mechanic from Denmark whose story closely mirrored his own. The two spoke nearly every day, swapping stories and eventually becoming friends. “He got me really interested in kind of the mechanics and how things work,” Barton-Grimley recalls, “and that actually ended up starting the spark for me to want to go back to school.”
And he did. After four years at the car shop, Barton-Grimley took the next step: enrolling at Santa Barbara City College. It was there that he experienced another “Aha!” moment, this time in Astronomy 101 with Professor Erin O’Connor. “It was the first time where I felt interested in something,” he says. “It felt like it was the first time that I had an educator interact with me in a way that encouraged me to explore the things I was interested in.”
From there, things took off for Barton-Grimley as he dove headfirst into math and physics courses, mainly earning A’s and excelling at subjects out of pure fascination rather than necessity. He felt an internal drive to pursue something seriously. He frequently credits SBCC faculty support — working closely with longtime program Astronomy program head Fred Marshak and O’Connor — as pivotal to his growth. “I found that anything I asked to be involved in through those professors,” he notes, “they involved me and then encouraged me to do more.”
Shortly after discovering his newfound passion, he became a tutor for the astronomy class and helped revive the Astronomy Club. Perhaps his most notable accomplishment at SBCC was serving as a lecturer of record — an opportunity he still finds puzzling but attributes to Marshak and O’Connor. “That was an opportunity I would not have gotten anywhere but SBCC,” he says.
Suddenly, almost in the blink of an eye, he went from someone who “barely graduated high school” to lecturing Astronomy 101 once a week to students sitting where he had not long ago, all thanks to his professors who believed in him.
It was those same professors who introduced him to Professor Philip Lubin at UC Santa Barbara, leading to a position working alongside Professor Lubin in a physics lab during his final year at SBCC.
While in the lab, he learned about SBCC’s cross-enrollment program with UCSB. Approved through SBCC, he began registering for UCSB independent study credits while still enrolled — at no additional cost — allowing him to bank UC units before transferring.
After four years at SBCC, he transferred to UC Santa Barbara, where he continued his work in the physics lab. Barton-Grimely noted how SBCC’s transfer program made the transition feel natural. “So no matter how different your path can be,” he muses, “you don’t feel abnormal for it. And I definitely did not feel that.”
He graduated from UCSB in 2014 and entered the PhD program in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. There, hands-on instrumentation work deepened his interest in Earth-observing sensors. He joined a lab building laser-based instruments to study the atmosphere and climate, quickly earning opportunities to deploy his hardware in the field.
In 2015, he built an instrument to measure meltwater on the Greenland ice sheet and flew it aboard a NASA research aircraft. While at NASA, he connected with researchers who encouraged him to apply for an internship, creating a direct pathway to his full-time role as a research scientist after completing his doctorate in 2019.
Today, Barton-Grimley designs, builds, and tests laser-based instruments that fly on aircraft to measure atmospheric and surface conditions on Earth. It may sound completely hyper-scientific, but as he reminds me, “it’s not as mad-scientist-y as you might think.”
From the outside, the leap from mopping floors at a car shop to working at NASA might seem extraordinary, and it certainly is, but Barton-Grimley doesn’t see it that way. To him, his life story is simply a chain of decisions — none of which he regrets because each one played an essential role in his journey, especially his time at SBCC.
As he puts it: “I could trace back every event that got me into being a full-time research scientist at NASA to something that happened at Santa Barbara City College.”
This article was paid for by Santa Barbara City College. For more information on Santa Barbara City College and the hundreds of programs they offer, visit sbcc.edu or call (805) 965-0581. If you are an SBCC alumnus, please join SBCC Alumni Connect at sbccfoundation.org/alumni.
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