Meet the Women Behind the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope

This week the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope launched perfectly and is now on its journey to Lagrange Point 2 (L2). A million miles from Earth, the telescope will begin its mission to map the universe in a wide-angle, infrared view. Named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief of astronomy and first woman executive, the telescope celebrates one of the most famous female astronomers to date. As part of that legacy, many of those involved in building and operating Roman are women. 

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope launches on a SpaceX Falcon rocket on August 30, 2026. 
Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Jackie Townsend, Roman Space Telescope Project Manager

Jackie Townsend didn't follow a straight path to NASA and the Roman project. She went to college twice, dropping out the first time to work in various jobs before rediscovering her love for space and going back to study physics. Townsend brought this penchant for problem-solving to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where she worked on Hubble missions as a materials engineer and contributed to James Webb as well. As a manager for Roman, she said, "I find it wonderful and empowering to think that everyone from a kindergarten kid to a Nobel laureate will have the same access to data to do whatever great science they have in mind." (Jackie Townsend - Roman Team - NASA)

Rebekah Hounsell, Assistant Research Scientist

Rebekah Hounsell knew she wanted to be an astrophysicist from the age of ten. She worked on data from Hubble at the Space Telescope Science Institute and found her way to Roman early in its development when it was known as WFIRST. Hounsell helped design the High Latitude Time Domain Survey, which will discover and categorize Type Ia supernovae during Roman's mission. Hounsell is excited to see Roman discover transient events as she continues her role as Co-Principal Investigator of of the Roman Supernova Project Infrastructure Team. (Rebekah Hounsell - Roman Team - NASA)

Ami Choi, Research Astrophysicist and Roman’s Deputy Wide Field Instrument Scientist

Ami Choi leads a tour stop at NASA Goddard. 
Credit: NASA/Travis Wohlrab

Ami Choi didn't find physics or math easy, but she pursued a career in astrophysics relentlessly, first through dark matter and energy and now as the deputy Wide Field Instrument scientist for Roman. Choi's curiosity drives her work, and she is looking forward to the moment Roman begins transmitting data back. (Ami Choi - Roman Team - NASA)

Sangeeta Malhotra - Research Astrophysicist

Sangeeta grew up in India, and her town's planned power outages at night gave her the opportunity to view dark skies and fall in love with the stars. She built her first telescope while in high school and never looked back. She studied dark matter while doing her PhD at Princeton and then the Hubble Constant and dark energy. She worked on the Hubble instrument NICMOS and advised using spectroscopy measurements on Hubble Ultra Deep Field planning. All of this experience led her to wonder what more could be observed from a wide-field telescope. Malhotra joined the team for WFIRST early on doing calibration and is currently working on her next mission, Habitable Worlds Observatory. (Sangeeta Malhotra - Roman Team - NASA)

Bente Eegholm - Optical Engineer

Bente Eegholm with Roman's primary mirror.
Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

Eegholm came to the United States from her native Denmark and worked as a contractor supporting the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work focused on a speckle interferometer used for stability in one of Webb's mirrors. Then she was a developmental lead for the ICESat-2 mission and participated in building both the ATLAS flight telescope and a spare one. She joined the Roman team in 2019 as optics lead on the prism assembly. Eegholm appreciates the Roman project's relatively fast timeline from development to launch, as well as the shorter development cycles for Earth-observing missions, as she sees value in going through a development and launch cycle. (Bente Eegholm - Roman Team - NASA)

Building and developing the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope was truly a team effort, with thousands of people contributing to the telescope's creation, launch, and ongoing mission. Keep up with the latest mission updates through the Roman Space Telescope blog from NASA. 

Read more about the Roman Team at Nasa.gov.

Quotes used in this blog were originally published as part of the Roman Team page at NASA.gov, through an interview series by Ashley Balzer, NASA science writer for the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.