By Toni Feder, for Physics Today
She navigated barriers in Turkey and the US to become an astronomy professor.
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| Credit: IF/THEN® Collection |
Write an essay on your ideal person. That assignment in middle school set Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil on the path to becoming a scientist. Wondering who the “cleverest person in the world” was, she started reading about Albert Einstein and his science. She became especially interested in astronomy.
That interest took Mutlu-Pakdil from Istanbul, Turkey, where she grew up, to the country’s capital city of Ankara for her bachelor’s degree. She earned her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2017. An unusual galaxy she studied as a PhD student is informally named after her. Today she is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. An observational astronomer, she studies tiny, faint dwarf galaxies; she hopes they will reveal secrets about dark matter.
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