Dr. Sally Oey is an American astronomer at the University of Michigan and an expert in massive, hot stars which are often precursors to supernovae. In 1999, she was awarded the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) [1] and, in 2006, was invited to give an address to the 206th meeting of the AAS. Oey is currently[ when? ] a professor [2] and is a member of the board of the Gemini Observatory. In 2023, the University of Michigan named her an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in recognition of her contributions to undergraduate education. [3]
Oey was born in Ithaca, New York, to Chinese Indonesian parents who migrated to the US in 1957.[ citation needed ] She attended Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1986. She went on to obtain a PhD in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1995. [4]
From 1998 to 2001, she worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute. From 2001 to 2004, she was an assistant astronomer at the Lowell Observatory.
Oey's research group, Feedback Activity in Nearby Galaxies (FANG), focuses on massive star feedback to the interstellar and intergalactic medium, on a local, global and cosmic scale. These feedbacks include:
Finding no star bigger than 200 solar masses, she and her colleagues at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have found evidence for a size limit in a survey of other clusters within our galaxy and in the nearby satellite galaxy, Magellanic clouds. "It is not clear whether the size is limited by the physics of star formation or by the size of the parent gas cloud. Larger stars, perhaps of up to 500 solar masses, may have existed in the early universe," Oey says. [5]
Oey's dedication to undergraduate education earned her an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship at the University of Michigan in 2023, where she was instrumental in quadrupling the number of undergraduate majors and minors over the previous decade, promoting astronomy study for interdisciplinary students pursuing majors in other fields, and incorporating approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion into her teaching. [3]
Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types. She was nearly deaf throughout her career after 1893, as a result of scarlet fever. She was a suffragist and a member of the National Women's Party.
Helen Battles Sawyer Hogg was an American-Canadian astronomer who pioneered research into globular clusters and variable stars. She was the first female president of several astronomical organizations and a scientist when many universities would not award scientific degrees to women. Her scientific advocacy and journalism included astronomy columns in the Toronto Star and the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. She was considered a "great scientist and a gracious person" over a career of sixty years.
Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey; 12 August 1919 – 5 April 2020) was a British-American observational astronomer and astrophysicist. In the 1950s, she was one of the founders of stellar nucleosynthesis and was first author of the influential B2FH paper. During the 1960s and 1970s she worked on galaxy rotation curves and quasars, discovering the most distant astronomical object then known. In the 1980s and 1990s she helped develop and utilise the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Burbidge was also well known for her work opposing discrimination against women in astronomy.
The Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy is awarded annually by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to a woman resident of North America, who is within five years of receipt of a PhD, for distinguished contributions to astronomy or for similar contributions in related sciences which have immediate application to astronomy. The awardee is invited to give a talk at an AAS meeting and is given a $1,500 honorarium. The award is named in honor of American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon.
Andrea Mia Ghez is an American astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Emma Vyssotsky was an American astronomer who was honored with the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1946.
Catharine "Katy" D. Garmany is an astronomer with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. She holds a B.S. (astrophysics), 1966 from Indiana University; and a M.A. (astrophysics), 1968, and Ph.D. (astronomy), 1971, from the University of Virginia. Catharine's main areas of research are massive stars, evolution and formation; astronomical education.
Amy J. Barger is an American astronomer and Henrietta Leavitt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is considered a pioneer in combining data from multiple telescopes to monitor multiple wavelengths and in discovering distant galaxies and supermassive black holes, which are outside of the visible spectrum. Barger is an active member of the International Astronomical Union.
The 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) took place in Washington, D.C., Jan. 3 to Jan. 7, 2010. It is one of the largest astronomy meetings ever to take place as 3,500 astronomers and researchers were expected to attend and give more than 2,200 scientific presentations. The meeting was actually billed as the "largest Astronomy meeting in the universe". An array of discoveries were announced, along with new views of the universe that we inhabit; such as quiet planets like Earth - where life could develop are probably plentiful, even though an abundance of cosmic hurdles exist - such as experienced by our own planet in the past.
Alicia Margarita Soderberg is an American astrophysicist whose research focused on supernovae. She was an assistant professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Claudia Megan Urry is an American astrophysicist, who has served as the President of the American Astronomical Society, as chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University, and as part of the Hubble Space Telescope faculty. She is currently the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Urry is notable not only for her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, including work on black holes and multiwavelength surveys, but also for her work addressing sexism and sex equality in astronomy, science, and academia more generally.
Jacqueline Nina Hewitt is an American astrophysicist. She was the first person to discover an Einstein ring. She is a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society.
Helen Dodson Prince was an American astronomer who pioneered work in solar flares at the University of Michigan.
Debra Meloy Elmegreen is an American astronomer. She was the first woman to graduate from Princeton University with a degree in astrophysics, and she was the first female post-doctoral researcher at the Carnegie Observatories.
Laura A. Lopez is an associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State University studying the life cycle of stars. She was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy in 2016, which is awarded by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) for outstanding research and promise for future research by a postdoctoral woman researcher.
Emily Levesque is an American astronomer and assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington. She is renowned for her work on massive stars and using these stars to investigate galaxy formation. In 2014, she received the Annie Jump Cannon Award for her innovative work on gamma ray bursts and the Sloan Fellowship in 2017. In 2015, Levesque, Rachel Bezanson, and Grant R. Tremblay published an influential paper, which critiqued the use of the Physics GRE as an admissions cutoff criterion for astronomy postgraduate programs by showing there was no statistical correlation between applicant's score and later success in their academic careers. Subsequently, the American Astronomical Society adopted the stance that the Physics GRE should not be mandatory for graduate school applications, and many graduate astronomy programs have since removed the Physics GRE as a required part of their graduate school applications. She is also the author of the 2020 popular science book The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers.
Judith Sharn Young was an American physicist, astronomer, and educator. The American Physical Society honored Young with the first Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for being the best young physicist in the world in 1986. Astronomer Nick Scoville of Caltech writes of her research: "Her pioneering galactic structure research included some of the earliest mapping of CO emission in galaxies followed by the most extensive surveys molecular gas and star formation in nearby galaxies."
Marcia Jean Rieke is an American astronomer. She is a Regents' Professor of Astronomy and associate department head at the University of Arizona. Rieke is the Principal Investigator on the near-infrared camera (NIRCam) for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). She has also served as the deputy-Principal Investigator on the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and as the co-investigator for the multiband imaging photometer on the Spitzer Space Telescope, where she also acted as an outreach coordinator and a member of the Science Working Group. Rieke was also involved with several infrared ground-based observatories, including the MMT Observatory in Arizona. She was vice chair for Program Prioritization of the Astro2010 Decadal Survey Committee, "New Worlds, New Horizons". Marcia Rieke is considered by many to be one of the "founding mothers" of infrared astronomy, along with Judith Pipher.
Dara J. Norman is an astronomer and the deputy director of the Community Science and Data Center at the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) in Tucson, Arizona. She is also the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Diversity Advocate at NOAO. Her research centers on the influence of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) on the evolution of galaxies. In 2020, she was inducted into the inaugural cohort of American Astronomical Society Fellows in recognition of her leadership and achievements.
Kathleen DeGioia Eastwood is an American astronomer known for her research on the formation and evolution of massive stars, and for her work on undergraduate education in astronomy. She is a professor emerita of astronomy and planetary science at Northern Arizona University.