Issue of October 31, 2025
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Sethanne Howard, Ferah Munshi, Stella Kafka, and Ben Keller
[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]
This week's issues:
1. Career Profile: April Russell, Founder and Entrepreneur, and Creative Pathways in Astronomy Careers
2. AAS Senior Vice President Dawn M. Gelino Named as NMSU Foundation Distinguished Alumni
3. National Academies 2025 Award Winners for Excellence in Science Communications
4. Jill Tarter wins California Academy of Science Medal
5. Study on women participation in french astronomy 2025
6. Astronomer Mengyuan Xiao receives "Swiss L’Oréal–UNESCO For Women in Science" 2025 prize
7. When women researchers publish, media attention doesn’t always follow
8. Most universities reject proposed policy-changes-for-funding compact
9. Call for Proposals for IAU Hands-On Workshops for scientists in developing countries
10. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
11. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
12. 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.
The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy has compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers, planetary scientists, etc. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.
April Russell has navigated a unique career path in astronomy and physics. Russell graduated from MIT in 2002 with a B.S. in Astrophysics and an M.S. in Planetary Science. Once she finished her degrees, she worked in the private sector for Raytheon, but she didn’t like working in defense technology. Not certain she wanted to pursue a path in teaching, she decided to go to law school. It only took a semester for Russell to realize law wasn’t the right path, either. She took a career break and began her family.
Read more at
https://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2025/10/career-profile-april-russell-founder.html
The New Mexico State University (NMSU) Foundation announced the recipients of its 2025 Distinguished Alumni Awards, the highest honors presented to NMSU graduates.
Among the honorees is AAS Senior Vice President Dawn M. Gelino. Gelino is the program manager for NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a pioneer in astrophysics leadership. She has overseen national research collaborations, fellowships, and workshops, and played a vital role in shaping NASA’s search for Earth-like planets. Her work contributes to advancing scientific understanding of our universe and the potential for life beyond Earth.
Read more at
https://aas.org/posts/news/2025/10/dawn-m-gelino-named-nmsu-foundation-distinguished-alumni
The National Academies Announce 2025 Winners of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications. Among them is Astronomer Teresa Paneque Carreño, who "exemplifies impactful, far-reaching science communication that is deeply rooted in community, culture, and accessibility."
Read more at
By SETI Institute
The California Academy of Sciences has awarded its highest honor, the Fellows Medal, to Dr. Jill Tarter, SETI Institute co-founder and Bernard M. Oliver Chair Emerita for SETI at the SETI Institute, recognizing her pioneering contributions to the scientific search for life beyond Earth.
Read more at
By Comission Femmes et Astronomie de la SF2A
The Commission Femmes et Astronomie of the French Astronomical Society, has conducted a statistical study aimed at mapping the current presence of women in French professional astronomy and establishing a baseline for tracking its evolution over time. We examined how the proportion of women varies according to career stage, level of responsibility, job security, and income. The results are compared to the 2021-2022 survey and appear to illustrate the well-known "leaky pipeline", with one of the main bottlenecks being access to permanent positions. The study shows that the proportion of women consistently declines with increasing job security, career seniority, qualification level, and salary.
Read more at
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17927
By Université de Genève
Mengyuan Xiao, a postdoctoral researcher at the Observatory of the University of Geneva (UNIGE), is one of four recipients of the Swiss L’Oréal–UNESCO For Women in Science 2025 Award, which recognizes excellence in female scientific research.
A specialist in the early universe, Mengyuan Xiao studies the formation of the oldest and most massive galaxies. Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the ALMA network, she led the discovery of Zhulóng, the most distant spiral galaxy known to date. This research reveals that just a billion years after the Big Bang, some galaxies already exhibited a surprisingly organized structure—a central bulge, a disk of stars, and spiral arms, reminiscent of our own Milky Way.
Read more at
By Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Media coverage can give scientists a powerful career boost, raising their visibility and signaling that their work matters beyond the lab. But a new study finds that benefit goes disproportionately to men, potentially widening existing gender gaps and shaping public perceptions of who counts as a researcher. In an analysis of 1.2 million news stories about scholarly research, men-led papers were found to receive more attention overall and were heavily overrepresented in the top 5% of most covered studies. Women-led papers, on the other hand, clustered at the bottom.
Read more at
Read the journal article at
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10755470251360187
At least six universities have rejected a government deal to offer favorable funding status in exchange for institutional changes, including changes that would directly target some women. The general theme of the rejections has centered on the schools’ beliefs the demands violated academic freedoms and their values.
Read more at
By IAU
The IAU calls for applications to organize workshops under the IAU Hands-On Workshops (I-HOW) initiative. These workshops aim at training early-career scientists from developing countries in accessing, reducing, and analysing the vast amount of data available in astronomical archives across the world, and using them for their research projects.
Proposals to organise one of these workshops shall be submitted using the application form provided on the website by email to one of the members of the I-HOW Steering Committee (see list of members on that same web page).
The deadline for applications is December 31, 2025
Read more at
https://www.iau.org/Iau/Iau/Science/Trainings---Workshops/I-HOW-Hands-On-Workshops.aspx
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.
Please remember to replace "_at_" in the e-mail address above.
Join AAS Women List through the online portal:
To Subscribe, go to https://aas.simplelists.com/aaswlist/subscribe/ and enter your name and email address, 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.
No comments :
Post a Comment