Saturday, May 26, 2012

Female Astronomers:Scientists with Beautiful Faces as well as Beautiful Minds!

Here are four of my favorite astronomer/scientists. I would find these scientists very interesting, learned and well informed even if I were blind. Thank God for my good vision; I am totally captured when I see them speak!

Dr.Pamela L. Gay

click picture for much more on Dr. Gay,
scientist, astronomer, writer, podcaster, teacher
Dr. Pamela L. Gay is perhaps best known for her work on the Astronomy Cast and Slacker Astronomy podcasts. Combining a solid background in astronomy with a sexy voice, this young astronomer is working to bring the cosmos to the masses, one download at a time. In addition to communicating astronomy to the public, Pamela works to engage people in doing science through the citizen science activities with CosmoQuest. This new citizen science community makes the public part of the scientific community, one NASA image at a time.Pamela lives in a historic house in southern Illinois with her husband, two dogs, and a lot of books and technology. When she is not online or teaching, you might be able to find her gardening or riding her horse.
Dr. Laura Danly
click picture for much more on Laura Danly

Laura Danly, Ph.D. is an American astronomer and academic. Currently, Danly serves as Curator at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Prior to her current positions, she served as chair of the Department of Space Sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.Laura Danly is a spectroscopist specializing in ultraviolet observations from space satellites.

Dr.Amy Mainzer
click picture for much more on Dr. Amy Mainzer

Amy Mainzer is currently at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Astrophysics and Space Sciences Section.
Dr. Mainzer  has earned a Ph.D. in Astronomy from UCLA, an M.S. from the California Institute of Technology, and a B.A. from Stanford University. Also, she’s one more beautiful smile to brighten the doorstep of NASA headquarters; she held a research fellowship between 2001-2003 there.
 You may have seen her on the History Channel series The Universe.
She built the First Light Camera for SOFIA (FLITECAM) and observed brown dwarfs (stars, not people) with it. She is the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) Deputy Project Scientist and principal investigator of a project to enhance WISE’s ability to find new asteroids.

Dr.Lucianne Walkowicz
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Lucianne Walkowicz studies the inscrutable faces of the stars for clues to the inner workings of their hearts. She got her taste for astronomy as an undergrad at Johns Hopkins, testing detectors for the Hubble Space Telescope’s new camera (installed in 2002). She also learned to love the dark stellar denizens of our galaxy, the red dwarfs, which became the topic of her PhD dissertation at University of Washington. Nowadays, she works on NASA’s Kepler mission, studying starspots and the tempestuous tantrums of stellar flares to understand stellar magnetic fields. She is particularly interested in how the high energy radiation from stars influences the habitability of planets around alien suns. Lucianne is also a leader in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a new project that will scan the sky every night for 10 years to create a huge cosmic movie of our Universe.

(you'll be pleasantly surprised just how many there are!)

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