Women In Astronomy: AASWomen Newsletter for January 26, 2018

AAS Committee on the Status of Women AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of January 26, 2018
eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Cristina Thomas, and Maria Patterson

This week's issues:

1. Cross-post: CSMA Unveils People of Color in Astronomy Listing
From: Patricia Knezek via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

The AAS Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy (CSMA) has just announced the new People of Color in Astronomy Listing on the AAS website. They encourage AAS members to use the directory for finding colloquium speakers, job candidates, and peer mentors. For the complete article, see:

https://aas.org/posts/news/2017/12/csma-unveils-people-color-astronomy-listing

2. The Astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell Looks Back on Her Cosmic Legacy
From: Heather Flewelling [heather_at_ifa.hawaii.edu]

By Marguerite Holloway

"Jocelyn Bell Burnell arrived at the University of Cambridge in the mid-nineteen-sixties, just as construction was beginning on a new kind of radio telescope. For two years, as she worked on her doctorate in astronomy, she helped string wires between wooden poles, until four and a half acres of field were woven in copper filament and cable. “I came of a family that did a lot of sailing, so it wasn’t totally alien,” Bell Burnell told me recently. “I was used to posts and masts and pulleys.”"

3. Two astronomers, a hundred years apart, use stars to measure the universe
From: Heather Flewelling [heather_at_ifa.hawaii.edu]

"Our entire understanding of the universe is based on knowing the distances to other galaxies, yet this seemingly-simple question turns out to be fiendishly difficult to answer. The best answer came more than 100 years ago from an astronomer who was mostly unrecognized in her time—and today, another astronomer has used Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data to make those distance measurements more precise than ever."

4. Women in science fiction: If Mary Shelley invented the genre why are so few female sci-fi writers household names?
From: Heather Flewelling [heather_at_ifa.hawaii.edu]

By David Barnett

"Two hundred years ago, Mary Shelley sat down to write a ghost story and created science fiction. Women still pen the genre’s finest, exemplified by Ursula K Le Guin, who died this week. Yet so often they are overlooked. David Barnett asks: whither the brides of Frankenstein?"

5. The Loss of a Prominent Neuroscientist and Advocate for Women in Science
From: Heather Flewelling [heather_at_ifa.hawaii.edu]

By Ellie Schoenbaum, M.D.

"I was saddened to read that Ben Barres, M.D., Ph.D., had died recently. His obituary in the New York Timesis worth reading.

Ben was a highly respected neuroscientist and chair of the department of neurobiology at Stanford from 2008 until last year, when he got sick. But he was also a highly effective spokesperson on behalf of women and minorities in science. I had the good fortune to have met him."

6. Mary Somerville’s vision of science
From: Heather Flewelling [heather_at_ifa.hawaii.edu]

By James Secord

"In 1834 mathematician and author Mary Somerville published On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, a work that was instrumental in the making of modern physics as a discipline. Contemporaries praised the book’s clear and lucid survey of astronomy, experimental physics, and chemistry, and it became a classic of Victorian scientific writing. But Connexion also posed key questions for a rapidly expanding and largely male-dominated world at a moment of intense intellectual ferment. Could women excel at science? Were the scientific writings of a woman inherently different from those of a man? “Notwithstanding all the dreams of theorists,” wrote Cambridge philosopher William Whewell in his review of Connexion, “there is a sex in minds”—in other words, Whewell felt that Somerville’s sex would always set her writings apart from those of her male contemporaries."

7. Job Opportunities

For those interested in increasing excellence and diversity in their organizations, a list of resources and advice is here: https://cswa.aas.org/#howtoincrease

- Software Engineers, STScI, Baltimore, Maryland https://rn11.ultipro.com/SPA1004/JobBoard/JobDetails.aspx?__ID=*DD2AB581D9B700E9

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