Issue of July 08, 2022
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Alessandra Aloisi, and Sethanne Howard
[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. Be well! --eds.]
This week's issues:
1. Crosspost: Science must overcome its racist legacy: Nature’s guest editors speak
2. 2023 NASA Astrophysics Mission Design School (AMDS) Applications Due September 28, 2022
3. She cataloged the stars—and changed the face of astronomy
4. How notes from the mothers of astronomy were reclaimed in art
5. For scientists, Roe’s end raises concerns about personal safety and professional choices
6. How long before science is gender neutral?
7. Ukrainian mathematician becomes second woman to win prestigious Fields Medal
9. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
10. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.
1. Crosspost: Science must overcome its racist legacy: Nature’s guest editors speak
From: Bryné Hadnott via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com
By Melissa Nobles, Chad Womack, Ambroise Wonkam & Elizabeth Wathuti
Science is a human endeavour that is fuelled by curiosity and a drive to better understand and shape our natural and material world. Science is also a shared experience, subject both to the best of what creativity and imagination have to offer and to humankind’s worst excesses. For centuries, European governments supported the enslavement of African populations and the subjugation of Indigenous people around the world. During that period, a scientific enterprise emerged that reinforced racist beliefs and cultures. Apartheid, colonization, forced labour, imperialism and slavery have left an indelible mark on science.
Although valiant and painful freedom struggles eventually led to decolonization, the impacts of those original racist beliefs continue to reverberate and have been reified in the institutional policies and attitudes that govern the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of individuals’ participation in the modern, global scientific enterprise. In our opinion, racist beliefs have contributed to a lack of diversity, equity and inclusion, and the marginalization of Indigenous and African diasporic communities in science on a national and global scale.
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2022/07/crosspost-science-must-overcome-its.html
Back to top.2. 2023 NASA Astrophysics Mission Design School (AMDS) Applications Due September 28, 2022
From: Leslie Lowes [Leslie.L.Lowes_at_jpl.nasa.gov]
AMDS is a 3-month long career development experience to learn the development of a hypothesis-driven robotic space mission in a concurrent engineering environment. Get an in-depth, first-hand look at mission design, life cycle, costs, schedule & inherent trade-offs. AMDS is led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, collaborating with Goddard Space Flight Center.
Science & engineering doctoral candidates, recent PhDs, postdocs, & junior faculty who are U.S. Citizens or legal permanent residents (& a limited number of Foreign Nationals from non-designated counties) are eligible. Applicants from diverse backgrounds are particularly encouraged - we highly value diversity, equity, & inclusion.
Dates: January 30-April 14, 2023
AMDS has a workload equivalent to rigorous 3-credit graduate-level course. Participants act as an astrophysics mission team in the first 10 weeks of preparatory webinars, with the final culminating week mentored by JPL’s Advanced Project Design “Team X” to refine the mission concept design & present it to a mock expert review board. The culminating week is typically at JPL; it could be virtual due to on-going Covid-19 pandemic conditions.
Read more at
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/intern/apply/nasa-science-mission-design-schools
Register for the July 27 3:00 pm ET informational session at
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHvlEtUZrL0F_kETaF_bywps0PAcqhDDIdVWvroX_7dud_Qw/viewform
Back to top.3. She cataloged the stars—and changed the face of astronomy
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]
By National Geographic
"From #maidlife to #astronomerlife, single mother Williamina Fleming devoted her life to studying and discovering stars and other space phenomena. Her achievements, including mentoring other female astronomers, led her to becoming Harvard College Observatory’s first Curator of Astronomical Photographs in 1898, a position held by women to this day.
Hear from author Dava Sobel, National Geographic Explorer and astronomer Munazza Alam, and former observatory curator Lindsay Smith Zrull, on the impact Williamina Fleming’s work had on generations of women in astronomy.”
See the video at
Back to top.4. How notes from the mothers of astronomy were reclaimed in art
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]
By Liz Kruesi
"The print that artist Erika Blumenfeld shows me is an expanse of deep blue, a rich color that speaks of romance and night. It’s stippled with gold marks, some as lines, some as arrows, some as dots. Her art is formed by ink on paper—but it’s rooted in century-old artifacts, inspired by unsung astronomy pioneers, and animated by a quest to understand light.
At the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three floors of metal cabinets house more than 550,000 glass plates, most of them eight by 10 inches, a photographic negative format dating from the mid-19th century. These plates recorded astronomical data from telescopes trained on celestial regions and objects. One side bears the print of light from distant stars; the other side had been marked with equations, arrows, circles, letters, and other notations by women who were hired to interpret the data.
From 1885 until the 1950s, hundreds of so-called women computers studied the plates. They discovered how variations in brightness of specific stars revealed their energy output, a relationship that provided a way to measure great distances. They examined a star’s light spectrum and determined that the intensities of the star’s colors indicated its chemical composition. They counted and cataloged galaxies. With such discoveries, these women laid the foundation for modern astrophysics.
They left marks of many kinds: on some of the plates, only a few arrows or characters; on others, notes from conversations between women across decades, each striving to better understand the universe.”
Read more at
Back to top.5. For scientists, Roe’s end raises concerns about personal safety and professional choices
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]
The U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade is likely to affect the professional decisions that some scientists make, such as where to look for jobs and where they find it safe to go to a conference while pregnant.
Read more at
Back to top.6. How long before science is gender neutral?
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]
By The Naked Scientist
"Considerable efforts have been made in recent years to achieve a more even balance of men and women in science, and particularly at senior levels. So how effective have those interventions been, and if we continue along the same trajectory of change, how long will it be before we arrive at gender parity? Surprisingly, this is not well delineated, so the Broad Institute’s Lindy Barrett set out to find out…"
Read and/or listen to the interview at
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/how-long-science-gender-neutral
Back to top.7. Ukrainian mathematician becomes second woman to win prestigious Fields Medal
From: Jeremy Bailin [jbailin_at_ua.edu]
By Davide Castelvecchi
"Maryna Viazovska, who works on the geometry of spheres, is one of four winners of the coveted Fields Medal this year. Viazovska, who is based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is the second woman ever to earn the award. She is best known for her solution of the sphere packing problem — finding the arrangement of spheres that can take up the largest portion of a volume — in eight dimensions.
Another Ukrainian-born woman, Svetlana Jitomirskaya at the University of California at Irvine, won the inaugural Ladyzhenskaya Prize in Mathematical Physics — the first major prize for the discipline to be named after a woman but open to people of any gender. The prize celebrates the late Russian mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya, who narrowly missed out on her own Fields Medal in 1958. Before Viazovska, the only woman to win a Fields Medal was the late Maryam Mirzakhani, in 2014.”
Read more at
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00470-3
Back to top.8. Job Opportunities
For those interested in increasing excellence and diversity in their organizations, a list of resources and advice is here:
https://aas.org/comms/cswa/resources/Diversity#howtoincrease
- Program Scientist (AST Science Program Management), NASA, Washington, DC https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/careers-employment/program-scientists-nasa-hq
Back to top.9. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
To submit an item to the AASWOMEN newsletter, including replies to topics, send email to aaswomen_at_lists.aas.org .
All material will be posted unless you tell us otherwise, including your email address.
When submitting a job posting for inclusion in the newsletter, please include a one-line description and a link to the full job posting.
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Back to top.10. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
Join AAS Women List through the online portal:
To Subscribe, go to https://aas.simplelists.com and in the "Subscribe" area, add in your name, email address, select "The AASWomen Weekly Newsletter", and click subscribe. You will be sent an email with a link to click to confirm subscription.
To unsubscribe from AAS Women by email:
Go to https://aas.simplelists.com in the "My account and unsubscriptions", type your email address. You will receive an email with a link to access your account, from there you can click the unsubscribe link for this mailing list.
Back to top.11. Access to Past Issues
https://aas.org/comms/cswa/AASWOMEN
Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.
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