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| McDonald Observatory |
“Start at the beginning. Tell me how you got involved in astronomy. When did you know this was for you?”
This is the first question I posed to Teznie Pugh in our career series interview this January. It’s always interesting to hear how people knew when they wanted to pursue careers in astronomy. Pugh, who is the Superintendent at McDonald Observatory at Fort Davis, Texas, hears this questions a lot.
“They want you to have an aha moment, and I didn’t have that.” Pugh came to astronomy through a gradual love of STEM. She grew up partially in the foster care system in the United Kingdom, and partially with her grandmother in a coal mining town. When the mine closed in 1986, it gutted the community of traditional, hard-working families. Pugh recounts that her town went from an established working-class town to a welfare-based community nearly overnight. As she lived through the change, Pugh realized she needed a good education to make her life better.
“I was quite good at math, so…if I want to make my life better, that's my pathway out of it. I was always very interested in the sciences. I enjoyed physics because I wanted to be able to answer all of the questions all of the time, which, you know, you get to graduate school and you realize that it's not actually reality, but as an elementary school kid, you want to answer all the questions.”
Pugh ended up in a nuclear astrophysics program at the University of Surrey, still unsure what she wanted to do. She worked for a year with the UK’s largest defense manufacturer but had to bow out after a serious illness during her second year at the university. Pugh used this time to reevaluate what she wanted from her education. Astronomy and optics were her two best fields by far, and she decided to pursue what she was good at. First she did some x-ray astronomy programs, but quickly learned it wasn’t for her.
"Logging on to the Chandra archive and downloading data just didn't do it for me. I wanted something a little more hands-on. So later, I transitioned into optical astronomy.” Pugh graduated from the University of York (after transferring) with a degree in physics, specializing in astrophysics.
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| Teznie Pugh presents at AAS 244. |
She was a self-funded undergrad and found the idea of attending grad school and paying for it daunting. She happened to see an ad for Canadian universities seeking interested graduate students who could teach in exchange for funding. Pugh looked for an optical program and found one at Western University in London, Ontario, and made the journey from the UK to Canada.
It was here she had her “aha” moment, although she already knew she wanted to pursue astronomy. “I loved the act of observing, so all of the courses and things were great…But what I really loved was being at the telescope and collecting data and fixing problems in the middle of the night and maintaining glass, and all of the things that went into the creation of the data…and also just being out in the expanse of the wilderness in the middle of the night, even if the sky wasn't clear. I was a graduate student, and I needed my data, so I would sit on the deck and watch thunderstorms roll by, waiting for holes in the clouds to take data on.”
Pugh’s husband came with her from the UK, and halfway through her PhD, she had her daughter. The birth of her child became another point of evaluation in Pugh’s life. She struggled with work-life balance, especially as a new mother. She thought about work at home, and chores and her daughter at work, and quickly understood she needed a solution that allowed her to walk in the door at night and only think about parenting. Still, she didn’t want to give up being involved with telescopes.
Fortunately, her PhD supervisor was the director of the local school observatory with a 1.2 meter telescope. For five years, Pugh monitored the telescope four nights a week and did all the maintenance and helped the technician. Through that experience, she found a job that wasn’t dependent on finding funding and writing research papers. She could still interact with telescopes, but she could also concentrate on her family in her off-hours.
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| Naturalization 2025 |
“I know there are people that balance that (research and funding) and I have a lot of respect for my female colleagues who make that work. I'm just not one of them…I think that's good just knowing yourself because everybody has different tolerance levels.”
Pugh notes that she could not do the job she’s doing without her husband taking on the role of caring for their daughter at home. Pugh faced the same challenges in astronomy many women do when they decide to become mothers, where an interruption in a career can significantly alter research and forward momentum.
They were fortunate to be in Canada and be able to take advantage of generous parental leave. Pugh returned to observing after six weeks while her husband used the rest of the leave. “It worked well, but it was also a challenge. And I think it was a challenge that was only successful because we were somewhere where we could make that transition in parental leave. That meant my research programs weren't really interrupted to a degree, and I think that's something all women struggle with. Once you decide to have children, your research programs become interrupted and your career looks very different. And mine didn't have to do that because of the situation we were in, but it was still a challenge. Children are a challenge in their own way.”
Pugh’s daughter is now sixteen, but her husband still gets questions about what he does and faces awkward responses when he says he’s a stay-at-home dad. “You can see that people don’t know what to do with the response…” Pugh says, “but he’s very comfortable with who he is and how it’s progressed…it gave me the freedom to pursue my career in an organic way, which has been wonderful…I do feel, I have these sad moments where I feel like I missed out some of her childhood by not being a mum, but her and her dad are so close. They have a magical bond that I'm not going to take away.
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| McDonald Observatory Christmas Lights |
Pugh finishes her thoughts on parenthood and academia with this statement: “You see a lot of people who are both academics, co-married, and it still tends to be the female that bears the burden of the childcare and the child, so their career can stagnate, but their husband’s blossom. That's kind of sad in its own way. In the sciences, we tend to be a little more progressive, but it doesn't play out necessarily.
When Pugh finished grad school, she now knew the direction she wanted to take. She didn’t look for postdocs. Instead, she looked for jobs on the operational market, and Lowell Observatory had just started using the Discovery Telescope. She applied and started in 2007. Because the telescope was so new, Pugh oversaw the commissioning of all the new instrumentation, including five spectrographs. Once the telescope was fully operational, her job shifted to a more managerial role in nighttime operations. That position expanded into managing all of Lowell’s observing sites, and a stint as the Deputy Director for technology to cover a retirement.
Pugh enjoyed her time at Lowell, but her PhD supervisor was one of the forefathers of high resolution spectroscopy and spent two years and half a sabbatical at McDonald Observatory in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “All through my graduate school career, all he did was talk about how wonderful McDonald was. So when this position opened up, I felt like I couldn't not apply for it.”
Pugh accepted the Superintendent position at McDonald Observatory and made the move from Arizona to Texas in 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic hit. McDonald is already in a remote location, requiring those who work there to live on its campus and drive thirty to sixty minutes to reach the nearest towns and amenities.
“It was a hard transition,” Pugh admits. “They warned me in my interview our nearest Walmart was ninety minutes away. Sometimes it's a three-hour drive to go and get the windscreen of a car changed out. Everything is planned very differently, and it's a very different way of living.”
While Pugh had her work at her doorstep, it was different for her husband and daughter, and the pandemic made it difficult to adjust and get to know other people. However, once the community opened up again, Pugh’s husband and daughter were able to settle into a more active lifestyle and enjoy the observatory as much as Pugh.
As for the work itself, Pugh enjoys managing the observatory, although she admits being under a large university structure (the University of Texas at Austin) has its own operational frustrations, particularly with the bureacracy of spending state money on things.
“The rest of it is playing with telescopes and getting people to like coming to work every day. Those are the two things I try to do.
The observatory has a dozen telescopes, a water and wastewater treatment plant, its own housing, and over forty residents. Pugh likens her job to a city manager, part mayor, part admin, and part HR, and she oversees the entire operation. Not everyone on campus is an astronomer. There are administrators and custodians.
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| A double rainbow over McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas. |
“I find a lot of my job is distilling down the mission statement of the observatory and the mission statement of the university into things that will actually inspire someone who has a job, so that they can earn money, so that they can pay their bills… they care about very different things than my love of keeping telescopes going so that our astronomers can make great discoveries…All of them love the observatory, which I think is great, but they don't always understand how that piece fits into the broader puzzle of keeping the observatory running.”
Though Pugh finds a lot of her position is navigating through the bureaucracy of running an observatory, every now and again, she also takes a turn on an observing program, to remind herself of why she loves what she does.
Photos are courtesy of Teznie Pugh and used with permission.
