Career Interview Series: Sarah Lipscy on her non-academic career path in astronomy

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, and enthusiasts. These interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals who have navigated both traditional and non-traditional paths in the field.

When Sarah Lipscy attends an AAS meeting, she needs an hour to get to each session. She might only be crossing the hall, but the five or ten-minute conversations she has with other attendees on the way light her up. “It’s one of my favorite meetings because I’m an astronomer by training. That’s my people,” Lipscy says. 

As the Director of Business Winning and International Business Development within the Space and Mission Systems sector at BAE Systems, Inc., Lipscy spends much of her day with engineers and business partners. When she has the chance to be with other astronomers, she takes the opportunity to chat, even if that means a five-minute walk takes an hour.

Lipscy has carved an interesting career path inside the business of space. Her interest in astronomy came accidentally through a summer course at the University of Colorado Boulder. She signed up for a creative writing course but found out she’d been assigned to an astronomy class instead. That random assignment turned out to be life-changing. 

Photo: Courtesy of Sarah Lipscy

At the end of the six-week course, she met with the professor, who asked what degree she wanted to pursue. Lipscy grew up in Delaware, where DuPont is headquartered. Many of her classmates had parents working as chemists; she assumed she would follow that idea and become a chemist, too. When she responded with chemistry, her advisor shook his head. 

“No, no, no, no. You should study physics. That’s the basis of everything, and you should get a minor in astronomy.” 

That is just what Lipscy did at CU Boulder. Then she pursued graduate school and got her PhD in astronomy and physics from UCLA. Once she was nearly finished with her academic studies, Lipscy found herself once again in her advisor’s office, this time at UCLA. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her degrees, but she was certain of what she didn’t want—a career in academia.

“I don’t want to be a professor,” she told her advisor. “That’s great,” he said, without missing a beat. “Let’s see what else you can do.” 

They used Yahoo jobs, popular at the time, to insert all of Lipscy’s skills, including IDL (Interactive Data Language) coding. Los Angeles hosts a number of large aerospace companies, including Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. Lipscy had the opportunity to work at all of them, but on a visit to Colorado, a friend who worked at Ball Aerospace encouraged her to apply. 

Lipscy landed a job quickly at Ball as a systems engineer and early on worked almost exclusively on Earth remote sensing programs. Instead of studying the stars, Lipscy found herself looking back at Earth, doing Earth imaging and atmospheric chemistry measurements. 

“But photons are photons, and so it was fine for me to do spectroscopy of the Earth instead of stellar atmospheres,” Lipscy said. She worked her way through various programs at Ball, picking up new skills when the chance came up. She worked her way up from systems engineer to team lead and eventually to business development director . Along the way, she got to participate in some great projects, including the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. BAE Systems built the Wide Field Instrument for Roman, a project Lipscy is proud of. 

Sarah Lipscy at Gemini South
Photo: Sarah Lipscy

BAE Systems, Great Britain’s largest aerospace company, acquired Ball Aerospace in 2024, and Lipscy transitioned from a relatively small aerospace company (~5,000 employees) to a segment within a huge international company, as the Space and Missions Systems segment is part of the American BAE Systems, Inc. portion of the company. Lipscy’s new role involves much more work within the extended company. She’s also learning, twenty-one years into her career, how to work and maneuver in such a large company. 

Part of business development for Lipscy has always been meeting with customers and partners, who include various portions of the US government. With BAE Systems, clients are now on the international side as well. In January, she attended a Middle Eastern space conference in Oman, where she met potential partners and customers from that sphere. One of the challenges in her role is assessing international clients and what BAE Systems can expect as they work together. This could mean having an enthusiastic client with little funding from their government for missions, or understanding cultural differences down to when a meeting should be held and who should sit across from whom at the table. 

“The rest of BAE does a lot of international business, so I'll be leveraging a lot of the policies and practices that they have, and then, of course, tailoring them to how they need to work for BAE SMS,” Lipscy said. 

When Lipscy first joined Ball Aerospace, she understood astronomy, but she had to learn on the job the nuances of being in business in the private sector. One of her best pieces of advice for anyone who is thinking of taking their astronomy or STEM degree outside of academia is to find ways to learn about business practices. 

“The thing that PhD school does not teach you is anything really about business: how businesses think about things and how businesses make money and how they value people's time and resources…that's just very disparate from what you get in academia. If you're in graduate school and you're thinking about industry, think about ways to bulk up your resume in business acumen methods.”

“I think that's been really critical, and I won't say I've struggled with that, but it's certainly not something that comes naturally to me as a scientist,” Lipscy added. She acknowledged that her career path isn’t necessarily repeatable, but it is an example of finding and enjoying a career rooted in space outside of academia.

For students who are on the fence about grad school or anyone considering leaving academia for the industry, Lipscy says, “My advice is, if you think there's a chance you want to be in academia in five years, try it. I think it's hard to leave academia and then go back, but it's not hard to stay in academia and do a postdoc or two and then transition to industry.

I think the world's changed, and I think there's a place for everyone. And I think that if you are motivated and interesting, you'll do really well in industry.”

Sarah Lipscy with the rocket that carried Landsat-9 to orbit.
Lipscy's team built the camera for Landsat-9.

Career Interview Series: Meredith Rawls, Researcher with Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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, and enthusiasts. These interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals who have navigated both traditional and non-traditional paths in the field.

Meredith Rawls grew up under the dark skies of Eastern Washington, where she loved to stargaze as a child. She thought her state could do more to protect the night from light pollution, though, and wanted to do something about it. As a Girl Scout, she focused her project for the Girl Scout Gold Award on diminishing light pollution at her local summer camp. Through fundraising, she was able to purchase shields to install on the street lights closest to the camp, allowing campers to have a better view of the night sky.

Photo: Anita Nowacka

Rawls carried her love of the night sky with her when she attended Harvey Mudd College. She enjoyed many STEM subjects, but she knew she had to narrow down to one major. At the time, Harvey Mudd offered six choices: math, computer science, physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering.

 

“I liked math more as a means than as an end in itself….Chemistry kind of drove me nuts…And then computer science felt similar to math to me.” That left biology, physics and engineering.  “Honestly, if biology hadn't been quite so chemistry forward in the beginning, I might have gone biology, but it was a lot of chemistry, and I don't like chemistry that much.” Rawls had a choice between physics and engineering, and she found engineering more demanding on her time, and she wanted to take some classes outside of STEM. “One of Mudd’s things is being an interdisciplinary world person, which I think is amazing and great. All colleges should do that to some degree, if possible.” So Rawls chose physics as her major so she could have time to also pursue other interests, music in particular. 

Then she proceeded to nearly fail her first physics class. 

I had an exceptional crisis—The bad freshman year, second semester, you know. I squeaked by with a D in physics…I don’t know what it is, but any kind of test environment is just challenging… If I hadn't passed that class, then I wouldn't have been able to major in physics. And I don't know what I would have done with my life, but it wouldn't be this. 

Rawls did manage to pass, and then she realized astronomy is like a subset of physics, and it was a subject she had always enjoyed. She studied physics with a focus on astronomy, and soon realized she wanted to continue to study in the field, but first she needed to pass another test, the physics GRE. Rawls struggled again with the test environment and had to settle for a score that got her waitlisted at several schools. While other friends made plans around her during their senior year at Harvey Mudd, Rawls had to admit she was waitlisted and wasn’t sure what her future held. 

So she ran away to summer camp—the same camp she had attended as a child and raised money to install light pollution shields on the street lamps. Rawls had also purchased a telescope for the camp with some leftover funds from her Girl Scout project. While working at the camp she loved so much, where she could simply look up and see the Milky Way each night, she knew she had to figure out a way for astronomy to be in her life, even if she didn’t get into grad school.

In July, Rawls got a call from San Diego State University. They had an opening. She took it and did her master’s in two years. When it was time to apply for a PhD program, she faced the same challenge as before. Her GRE score was too low to earn a spot with being waitlisted. This time, though, she didn’t have to wait until July. By April, New Mexico State offered Rawls a spot in their program and she headed south. As Rawls finished up her PhD, she and her husband were juggling academic life with his engineering career. They both wanted to return to the Pacific Northwest, and he found a job in Portland. Rawls actually finished her last year of the program remotely. She describes how difficult it was to manage the transitions from each program as a married couple, where her husband often had to stay behind to finish work while she moved to the next location. “I give him so much credit for being willing to be dragged around and through all of this. I don't know how I would have done it if he'd also been in academia.”

Rawls applied to several different postdoc positions close enough to Portland to make it work. She was offered a three-year postdoc supporting the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory at the University of Washington. Rawls finished the postdoc, while her husband made one more move to Seattle. She explored the idea of becoming a research scientist at UW and decided to apply and was accepted. 

Rawls wears two hats as a research scientist at Rubin Observatory. “One hat is data validation and verification, so making sure that the data that we're getting off the telescope is basically correct and not full of trash, that we don't have bugs in our processing algorithms so when we say there's a variable source here, it's actually a variable source.” 

Initially, Rawls was helping build the software to produce data sets from Rubin. A second part of her job emerged from a growing problem in astronomy — satellite constellation mitigation. “There’s this huge increase of Starlink and so many others… like now a million orbital data centers like, what are we doing? This has been a huge change in the last six, seven years, and just completely a fundamental change in Earth orbital environment that's obviously directly affecting ground based and low Earth orbit based astronomy.” 

In 2022, Rawls and some of her colleagues formed SatHub, within the International Astronomical Union, to analyze the problem and find solutions for the astronomy community and beyond. This venture is taking up more of Rawls’ time as the use of small sats increases. “It's a constant balance of remembering…Rubin is the thing that anchors my job, but then, in reality, there’s the chaos of new stuff interfering with astronomy.”

One of the challenges Rawls has faced is the fact that being a research scientist outside of academia has made her feel a little invisible. “Sometimes I feel like I'm not sufficiently legitimate career wise to be invited to certain tables, but I have just as much experience in certain areas, and more in some cases, than some faculty that I work with. And a few years ago, it started being weird to me that people who had gotten their PhD after me were getting faculty jobs…Now I've kind of made peace with that. And I'm fine not being faculty, because I'm fine not facing tenure and moving around more. I love living in Seattle. I'm very glad to be here. I have something close to my dream job.” 

While Rawls was on the path to Rubin, she also started a family. She had her first child when she was a postdoc, and her second as a research scientist. While trying to finish school and start her career, she agonized over the best time to have children, like many in the field. “There’s no good time. That became apparent. I’m glad I didn’t have them in grad school because that would have made my PhD six years long. The best advice I have came from the department head of UW. She told me, ‘Careers are long, and being a new parent is short…take the maximum leave available to you. Your career will be here when you come back.’ That’s not true for everybody. That’s a privilege in and of itself, but that was the gist of it.” 

Photo: Courtesy of Meredith Rawls

Rawls also feels fortunate to be able to have a hybrid work schedule that puts her at Rubin a couple days a week, making it easier to be available as a parent, although she didn’t have this arrangement with her first child. It wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic forced the staff into remote work that she was able to work remotely at first, and then agree to the hybrid arrangement. She’s also found that having other parents working at Rubin has created a more supportive environment. Rawls also admits that having a partner with a successful engineering career and living close to her parents has made childcare much easier for her research career. “If you have the opportunity to live near in-laws or grandparents who you get along with and trust…do that,” she says with a laugh. 

Meredith Rawls is a research scientist at Vera C. Rubin Observatory working on the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Data Management group to develop software for astronomical images. She also devotes time to SatHub-IAU to bring together the astronomical and wider community to increase and disseminate scientific understanding of the impacts of satellite constellations on astronomy, identify ways they can be mitigated, and publicly share expertise and tools that enable this.

Career Interview Series: Deborah Skapik Leans Into Research Skills With Her Students

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, and enthusiasts. These interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals who have navigated both traditional and non-traditional paths in the field.

Deborah Skapik traces her interest in space back to 1977, when a partial eclipse captured her interest. She built a shoebox diorama of the event on her own initiative. “I remember cutting out a circle on the side to put a flashlight. I even remember the color of the flashlight was this red plastic flashlight that my parents had, and putting that in the side of the box and hanging a styrofoam ball and making a shadow and just the visualization in three dimensions of what was going on.” 

Deborah Skapik

This wasn’t the only astronomy project Skapik tackled as a child interested in space. She also glued pastina—pasta shaped like stars—onto black construction paper and recreated the cosmos for herself. When Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos released in 1980, Skapik was mesmerized. She naturally gravitated to space and science, and felt fortunate to be in a public school system that encouraged STEM for all pupils. Her seventh grade science teacher allowed her the space to explore what it means to be a scientist as he led the class through multiple dissections that year. Skapik vividly remembers dissecting sharks outside and the smell as they dug into the process. “I didn't love that part of it, but the fact that we were so hands-on…he allowed me to explore and really do what felt like research science in seventh grade and use the tools of a scientist.” That same teacher assigned research papers, and Skapik enjoyed learning the scientific process of research as she looked up information in encyclopedias.

That encouragement came at just the right time. Instead of falling away from STEM, like so many can in middle school and junior high, Skapik pursued science and math. By the time she was a senior, she had taken every science and math course she could and headed to Swarthmore College with the idea of pursuing particle physics. Her first week on campus, Skapik needed to find a part-time job, and she hoped to find one related to astronomy. She knocked on the door of Sproul Observatory to ask if anything was available. A professor in a white lab coat opened the door. “He looked like Doc from Back to the Future,” Skapik recalls. 

“Can I help you?" he asked her, speaking with a German accent. Skapik asked for a job, and the professor immediately ushered her inside. “Yes, you will be working with this.”

He took her inside the dome where a 24-inch refractor telescope stood. Skapik was stunned. She had only used backyard telescopes to this point. The professor, Dr. Wolf Heinz, wanted her to observe binary stars using the telescope’s photographic plateholder. It was 1987. Skapik loaded glass plates into the plate holder to capture images. Skapik held this job throughout her college years, spending many nights in the observatory learning how to operate the 36-foot-long telescope, built in 1911. 

The next semester, when she met with the assigned class advisor, she said, “I want to do astrophysics.”

“No, you don’t,” he replied. “You want to be a physics major.”

“I don’t want to study physics,” Skapik replied.

“Yes, you do. Minor in astrophysics,” he advised her. “That was an incredibly wise piece of advice,” Skapic says. The advisor understood physics would give Skapik more flexibility and ground her well. 

While at Swarthmore, Skapik landed an REU opportunity at Kitt Peak in Arizona. “I was in love with the telescopes. I spent a lot of time at the summit, living up there, working on the 0.9-meter, doing a research project on quasar photometry, making some contacts, meeting some people, and meeting other people my age who were going into the field, but it really anchored me in knowing what I wanted to study.”

Skapik did her graduate degree in astronomy at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. She’d moved away from high energy astrophysics to quasar photometry. She also did another REU at NRAO in Green Bank, West Virginia, which taught her that she didn’t like radio astronomy. 

In Hawaii, she ran across the idea of colliding galaxies and became a research assistant studying the Butcher-Oemler Effect. While she was in the middle of this research, Skapik was also teaching and realized how much she enjoyed explaining these complicated theories to her students. At the same time, she observed how busy the professors were writing proposals to search for funding for their research and doing a lot of administrative work as well. It dawned on Skapik that she didn’t want to devote her career to that. 

She decided to take a job as an observatory supervisor, which included mentoring teaching assistants, at Williams College in Massachusetts. Skapik continued her PhD at the University of Hawaii by spending a lot of time on the phone with the telescope operator and flying out to Hawaii. Then she went to the University of Pennsylvania to help develop an astronomy education program, as well as running two observatories. She also had three children and decided she wanted to pursue education more than astronomy. Instead of finishing her PhD, she got certified to teach. She interviewed for a teaching position at Friends’ Central School and was hired to teach AP Physics, the same subject she didn’t think she wanted to pursue in college.

“Twenty-five years later, almost, here I am… I love doing research with my students. I am a researcher. I understand the tools, I understand the techniques, and I can teach them how to do it at the high school level.” Skapik’s students are currently looking at images taken on Haleakala to try to re-image an asteroid field to see if the object they previously found was actually a new asteroid. She is hopeful they can publish the data. 

Skapik’s advice on teaching, and on career paths in general, is simple: “Follow your heart and do what you love, because if you don't love what you're doing, you're not going to enjoy your life. And I know what I love doing; like I said, I get really excited doing the research. But it's not just doing the research alone—it's doing it with the students because they have so much energy. They're fifteen years old, and they're getting excited about a movement on a screen. They come back here, and they're excited to tell me about their paths that they've followed.” 

Skapik has former students at NASA and remembers one who told her how important it was to have a female role model like Skapik, even though she didn’t realize it at the time. “So I do think it's really important for women to be in these higher positions, but I think contact with students on a day-to-day basis is also really important, and showing confidence and competence, and not minimizing what astronomy educators do, or physics educators, for that matter." It’s hard, but to have a research background is so valuable because I can say, "These are the tools. This is what you have to do later. It's not all academic.’” 

Deborah Skapik currently teaches at Friends Central School and also teaches astronomy at St. Joseph’s University and Delaware County Community College. 

Skapik at UPenn in 2002.

Career Interview Series: How An Amateur Astronomer Turned Her Passion Into A Business.

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, and enthusiasts. These interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals who have navigated both traditional and non-traditional paths in the field.

Vicky Derksen’s journey into astronomy didn’t start with a childhood telescope or a university degree. Growing up in northern Idaho, she saw the Milky Way all the time and simply assumed everyone else did too. She took that night sky for granted until she moved to Phoenix at twenty-one and had her first serious encounter with light pollution. The stars that had always been there were harder to find, and she missed them, but life continued as Derksen began raising her children.

Vicky Derksen, Night Sky Tourist

The real spark didn't ignite until she was in her early forties and homeschooling her children. She looked up one night and realized she had a vast resource above her but no vocabulary to describe it. She realized she wanted her children to know the sky better than she did. "I had everything to look at, and I knew none of it. I could find the Big Dipper; I could find the Moon. That's it," she recalls.

Determined to change that, Derksen began teaching herself naked-eye astronomy. Her method was practical and shared; as she learned a constellation or a star story, she immediately passed it on to her kids. This personal passion soon became contagious, leading her to teach a class for homeschool students. It proved a popular topic, with parents joining in as well. As Derksen learned more about the night sky, her enthusiasm for dark sky communities grew. This grassroots interest pulled her into a larger mission: working with a group to get Fountain Hills, Arizona, designated as an International Dark Sky Community, a goal they achieved in 2018.

What started as a personal quest for knowledge evolved into a flourishing business almost by accident. The transition began when a local resort requested telescopes for their grand reopening. By now, Derksen had connected with a local astronomy group of mostly retired older men. They agreed to bring their telescopes out for the event. The resort’s marketing dubbed the group the “Star Dudes." This event led to others, and Derksen realized the strong interest in the Phoenix area for astronomy events. People wanted to look up and learn about the night sky. They just needed a little help.

Through this revelation, Night Sky Tourist was born. The astrotourism business launched into the untapped market for high-quality, personal stargazing experiences, with Derksen hiring the “Star Dudes” for the events. “They would do it for free,” she adds with a laugh. “They love it that much, but I pay them.”

Derksen at the telescope for a Night Sky event.

Phoenix hosts many business conferences, receiving travelers from all over the U.S. and even internationally. These groups are looking for unique events to offer attendees, and Night Sky Tourist is a great fit. The demand for their unique brand of entertainment has exploded, particularly as "astrotourism" becomes a travel trend. In February alone, her team handled twenty-one events in twenty-eight days. 

Derksen has carefully curated these experiences to be more than just looking through a telescope; she offers "Twilight Hikes" and "Starlight Full Moon Hikes" that connect people to the environment and the cultural history of the stars. Her favorite events include the opportunity to tell the story of the stars across cultures, using these cultural myths to connect us more deeply to the night sky and each other. People often tell her it’s these stories that stick with them after the event.

She has also been involved in the development of the International Dark Sky Discovery Center in Fountain Hills, a new facility opening in the fall of 2026 that will hold the largest telescope in Arizona, a planetarium and theater, and an exhibit on the growing dark sky movement.

In addition to the physical events, Derksen has built a digital home for sky enthusiasts through the Night Sky Tourist website and podcast. The podcast was born out of a friend’s suggestion and a "leap before you look" moment where she announced the launch on social media before she even knew how to edit audio recordings. Now, with over 130 episodes, she has found her stride in a medium that allows her to reach people far beyond Arizona.

Vicky Derksen teaching naked eye astronomy, helping others understand the night sky.

Her content is built on four intentional pillars that reflect her holistic view of the sky. She emphasizes naked-eye stargazing because she believes the barrier to entry shouldn't be an expensive telescope. She also highlights dark sky destinations, like national parks with dedicated astronomy programs, and explores cultural astronomy by sharing sacred star stories from indigenous cultures. Finally, she uses her platform for dark sky advocacy, educating listeners on the ecological importance of preserving darkness—not just for the sake of the view, but for the health of the planet.

To learn more about Vicky Derksen’s business, Night Sky Tourist, or to find a dark sky destination for your next trip, visit nightskytourist.com.

Career Interview Series: Teznie Pugh at McDonald Observatory

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.