Item 2: Neta Bahcall, Jennifer Bergner, and Maria Drout (1st, 3rd, and 5th from left) win AAS Prizes
Issue of January 19, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell
[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]
This week's issues:
1. Crosspost: Academia’s Hidden Price Tag
2. Women win major AAS Prizes
3. Congressional Visits Day
4. How a forgotten physicist’s discovery broke the symmetry of the Universe
5. Insights from four female scientists caught at the early-career crossroads
6. Citizen science can interest your students
7. Anonymization for equity and diversity in Australian research
8. Job Opportunities
9. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
10. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
11. 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 Katherine Kornei for Eos
The flexibility and freedom that some say characterize academic pursuits often come with a hidden price tag: overwork. Many academics feel pressure to put in far more hours than are healthy or even necessary for success.
In light of data linking overwork with adverse mental and physical health effects, some scientists are beginning to acknowledge—and address—the far-reaching repercussions of potentially harmful work habits. And many try to encourage their students to internalize a safer and more balanced work life, even if doing so runs counter to a mindset that’s deeply ingrained in the culture of higher education.
Read more at
https://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2024/01/crosspost-academias-hidden-price-tag.html
The American Astronomical Society has announced the recipients of some of its 2024 prizes for outstanding achievements in research and education. This year's awardees include several women among their ranks, including the Russell Lectureship and the Pierce Prize.
The 2024 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, celebrating a career of eminence in astronomical research, goes to Neta Bahcall (Princeton University) for her central contributions to determining the average density of matter in the universe and establishing the concordance model of cosmology.
The 2024 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, which is awarded for outstanding achievement in observational astronomical research based on measurements of radiation from an astronomical object, goes to Maria Drout (University of Toronto) for revealing discoveries of the evolution, influence, and end states of massive stars through the study of explosive transients and resolved stellar populations.
The 2024 Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award for astronomy writing for an academic audience, specifically textbooks at either the upper-division undergraduate or graduate level, is awarded to Viviana Acquaviva (CUNY NYC College of Technology and CUNY Graduate Center) for the textbook Machine Learning for Physics and Astronomy (2023 Princeton University Press).
This year's Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy, for outstanding research and promise for future research by a female researcher within five years after earning her PhD, goes to Jennifer Bergner (University of California, Berkeley) for her innovative astrochemical work at the intersection of laboratory experiments, theory, and observations, which has established new pathways to interstellar chemical complexity.
Read more at
https://aas.org/press/aas-names-recipients-2024-awards-prizes
Congressional Visits Day (CVD) is an annual event run by the AAS to bring in volunteers from the astronomy community to Washington, DC, to advocate with their members of Congress on federal support for the priorities of the astronomical science decadal surveys. This year CVD will take place on 15-17 April. The application to volunteer is now open and will close at 11:59 pm ET on 2 February. Volunteers will then be selected in early-mid February, followed by training webinars throughout March.
Read more at
https://aas.org/posts/advocacy/2024/01/sign-congressional-visits-day-2024
By Suzie Sheehy
When a ‘scanner’ called Minnie van der Merwe handed Rosemary Brown a photographic slide with an unusual configuration of particle tracks, the physicist knew that she was on to something. “I looked very carefully and thought: this is it,” she says.
She was looking at particle tracks in photographic emulsions that had been exposed to cosmic rays. ... Fowler was in little doubt about what she had found in what became labelled the ‘k-track’ plate — but working out the ‘why’ of her discovery occupied particle physicists for the best part of a decade. When they finally managed it, it blew apart the idea that the laws of nature adhered to certain symmetrical ways of working, with reverberations that continue to this day.
An intense period of work followed the discovery. “A lot of measurement and calculation had to be done before the finding could be published. We knew it was an important discovery so worked very hard to get everything done quickly,” says Fowler. The team wrote three papers in quick succession, including two that were published in Nature in January 1949. All three listed Fowler (then Brown) as the first author. This followed the convention that authors be listed in alphabetical order, but also recognized that she had been the one to make the discovery.
Read more at
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00109-5
By Lesley Evans Ogden
Facing challenges including parenthood, mental-health strain and financial pressures, these researchers give advice for navigating the uncertain paths before them.
Each year hundreds of early-career researchers from dozens of countries attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany. The annual event provides opportunities for junior scientists to interact with Nobel laureates within a disciplinary theme — which in 2023 was physiology and medicine. At last year’s meeting, held in June, four female researchers from three countries took time out from lectures, panel discussions and networking opportunities to tell Nature about their career hopes and challenges for the months and years ahead. Some common themes emerged. They include dealing with career uncertainty, battling financial and time pressures and prioritizing mental health.
Read more at
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00110-y
Our galaxy contains millions of missing black holes and the Black Hole Hunters project is trying to track them down. The Milky Way contains over 10 million stellar-mass black holes, formed in the supernova explosions of massive stars. Yet there are only about 70 candidates and only about 20 confirmed black holes known. That leaves a huge number of black holes hiding in plain sight. Some of the missing black holes should magnify the light from stars through gravitational lensing, and with your help we can detect this!
We're a team of astronomers from the University of Southampton and the Open University in the UK. We have previously searched the archives of the SuperWASP survey and found several interesting candidates that we're currently trying to confirm with follow-up observations. With this new version of Black Hole Hunters, with more precise data from the TESS satellite, we should find far more candidates and they should be easier to confirm. Confirming even a few candidates could be huge for our understanding of black holes.
To join the search, check out the project here:
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/cobalt-lensing/black-hole-hunters
By The Australian Government's Women in STEM Ambassador
A multi-year study, published as a preprint article led by the office of Australia's Women in STEM Ambassador investigated the impact of anonymization (removing identifying names and other information) on applications for access to research facilities in Australia. The results provide crucial insights that have the potential to reshape the landscape of equity and diversity in the research sector.
The study revealed a substantial discovery: Anonymizing applications for scientific equipment significantly benefitted early career researchers, offering them an increased chance of success, irrespective of gender.
Read more at
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-anonymization-equity-diversity-australian.html https://osf.io/preprints/osf/jyq2f
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
- Deputy Director of IAU Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD), Cape Town, South Africa
https://iau.org/news/announcements/detail/ann23044/
- Program Manager, Exoplanet Exploration Program, NASA (JPL), Pasadena, CA
https://www.jpl.jobs/job/R4877/Program-Manager-VI-Exoplanet-Exploration-Program-Office-7300
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