Erik Tollerud is a Hubble Fellow at Yale University, and is a member of the Astropy Coordinating Committee. His research interests are centered on local dwarf galaxies and near-field cosmology, but he also has a strong interest in the development and sharing of better science software. This July, we performed the third major public release [...]
Latest Career Profile: Leslie John Sage, an astronomer turned Senior Editor for Nature. After two postdocs and a year as a visiting assistant professor, he switched into the field of publishing as an editor at Nature. He is very satisfied with his job and particularly enjoys helping people present their science in the clearest, most [...]
Latest Career Profile: Carie Cardamone, an astronomer turned Associate Director at a University-based Center for Teaching and Learning. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below or on the CSWA site. The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) and the AAS Employment Committee have [...]
Is your department welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees and students? You should care about the answer. Institutions that are viewed as unfriendly to LGBT people are at a competitive disadvantage. When LGBT scientists leave our departments to work at other institutions, our students, our scholarly communities, and our own research suffer. [...]
This is an anonymous guest post from two past members of the Hubble Fellowship committee. The Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship among the most prestigious awards in our field and is worn as a badge of honor throughout an Astronomer’s entire career. About 10–20 are awarded each year to applicants from around the world to fund a [...]
A long time ago, I borrowed a camcorder* and taped myself giving a practice talk. Then I forced myself to watch it. It was excruciatingly awkward. Every dumb pause, every verbal tic, every “literal” that’s figurative, every “uh, well, um”, gets magnified when you hear yourself. Ouch. But doing it, and repeating every few years, [...]
Latest Career Profile: Eric Rubenstein, an astronomer turned President and Chief Technology Officer for Image Insight Inc., a company he created which develops software products for radiation detection. He left academia at age 37 to work in private industry. Along the way he developed an astronomy-based procedure to detect ionizing radiation threats and began to [...]
Joan Schmelz is a solar physicist at the University of Memphis. She works with EUV and X-ray images and spectroscopy in order to address the coronal heating problem. She is also the chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and is currently serving as a rotator in NSF’s astronomy division. The [...]
This is a guest post by Robert Hurt at the Spitzer Science Center/IPAC. Robert is the Visualization Scientist, responsible for the public data renderings for many NASA missions including Spitzer, WISE, GALEX, and NuSTAR. For many years he has been leading the efforts to develop a common metadata standard for public-facing astronomical imagery. How often [...]
By EMMA PIERSON, cross-posted from FiveThirtyEight. People tell me that, as a female scientist, I need to stand up for myself if I want to succeed: Lean in, close the confidence gap, fight for tenure. Being a woman in science means knowing that the odds are both against you being there in the first place and against you staying there. Some of this [...]