Issue of December 16, 2022
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Alessandra Aloisi, and Sethanne Howard
[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]
This week's issues:
1. Beth Brown Memorial Award Winners for 2022
2. JWST's Jane Rigby leads Nature's Ten people who shaped science in 2022
3. Herschel Museum of Astronomy secures handwritten draft of Caroline Herschel’s memoirs
4. AstronomerAND: a new podcast featuring a diverse array of astronomers
5. December 8 is Latina Women's Equal Pay Day
6. Does diversity training work? We don’t know — and here is why.
7. Job Opportunities
8. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
9. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
10. Access to Past Issues
An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.
By Dara Norman
"The AAS supports a prize program at the annual meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP): the Beth Brown Memorial Awards. They honor the memory of a vigorous and engaged young astronomer who passed away at age 39 from a pulmonary embolism. Beth Brown earned her bachelor's degree from Howard University and, in 1998, became the first African American woman to earn a PhD from the University of Michigan's astronomy department. She died in 2008 just before beginning a new position as Assistant Director for Science Communication at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Although her time working in the professional astronomical community was short, she had a significant impact on our discipline, not least by serving as a role model for many students from underrepresented groups."
Read more at
https://aas.org/posts/news/2022/12/beth-brown-memorial-award-winners-2022
By Alexandra Witze
"Of all the hundreds of things that could have gone wrong with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) after it launched on 25 December 2021, Jane Rigby kept thinking of one nightmare scenario. As the US$10-billion telescope unfolded in deep space, it had to deploy a secondary mirror in front of its huge primary mirror so that it could capture and relay the precious photons back to Earth.
“That’s the one that scared me the most,” says Rigby, who is the telescope’s operations project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “I could just visualize this beautiful telescope, the gold mirrors in space, focusing the light to nothing with no secondary mirror there.”
Despite her nerve-wracking vision, the telescope deployed its secondary mirror perfectly, along with all its other components over the course of one month. Rigby then helped lead the work to assess the telescope’s performance. The mission succeeded beyond almost everyone’s expectations. From the first jaw-dropping images released in July to the discoveries of distant galaxies and exoplanet atmospheres, JWST has dominated astronomy headlines throughout 2022. And of the thousands of astronomers who worked on the telescope over decades, Rigby has been a linchpin."
Read more at
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-04185-3/index.html
By Fine Books & Collections Magazine
"The Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath has been successful in its quest to buy Caroline Herschel’s own handwritten manuscript draft of her memoir, thanks to generous funding from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), ACE/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of National Libraries, facilitated via Christie’s Private Sales.
The fascinating 57-page document represents Caroline’s life in her own words and is an enormously important addition to the Herschel Museum’s collection, not least because her many scientific achievements were historically overshadowed by those of her brother, William Herschel (1738-1822).
This Manuscript Memoir gives us a unique and personal insight into the life and formative years of one of Britain’s most prominent astronomers and pioneering women in science. Much of Caroline’s personal correspondence and writing is still held by the Herschel family, so the acquisition of this manuscript provides a rare opportunity for public access."
Read more at
A new weekly podcast, AstronomerAND, hosted by Jessica Schonhut-Stasik, features in-depth discussions with "astronomers from all over the community with a wide range of intersectionalities... or 'ands'."
Find more information at
https://www.spreaker.com/show/astronomerand
By Justice for Migrant Women
"Latina Equal Pay Day is the day that we observe the average additional months and days that Latinas have to work in order to be paid what a white, male non-Hispanic worker was paid in one year. For Latinas, it takes an average of 23 months to be paid what white, male non-Hispanic workers were paid in 12 months.
This year we will observe Latina Equal Pay Day on December 8th. Latinas were paid 54 cents to the dollar paid to white men in 2021. Latina Equal Pay Day is not a celebration. It is a day that we mark to show a grave disparity that exists for working Latinas across our nation. It is also a day of action when community members, advocates, business leaders and political leaders."
Read more at
https://justice4women.org/latina-equal-pay
By Betsy Levy Paluck
"In early June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests flowered across the United States following the murder of George Floyd, businesses and other institutions rushed to enhance their diversity efforts. Chief diversity officer hires tripled among the largest publicly traded companies, enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion offerings for which U.S. companies paid an estimated $3.4 billion to outside firms that year.
What have we achieved with all this effort? In 2022, this question has special significance, as measures to increase diversity and racial equity have come under political attack, often by people who believe those shouldn’t be goals in the first place. But even among people who believe in the basic mission, common questions about diversity training have shifted from “Which training is best?” to “Is the training even a good idea?” and “Does the training have negative effects?”
The problem is that the real answer to all three of these questions is: We don’t know."
Article requires registration; read more at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/12/diversity-training-effectiveness-psychologist/
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
- Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Astrophysics, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL
https://www.unfjobs.org/postings/22087
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