Event

A Conversation with the Stars

Half a century before Hidden Figures, Harvard Observatory employed more than 200 women to classify and characterize the stars on a collection of half a million glass photographic plates. Largely forgotten by history, the work of Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt, Cecilia Payne and their colleagues forms the basis of our modern understanding of the stars and the scale of the Universe itself.

Dr. Mia Bovill is a postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, where she studies the smallest galaxies in the universe. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland in 2011, roaming to UT Austin before spending three years at the Instituto de Astrofisica at U. Catolica in Santiago, Chile. She returned to Maryland to work on simulations of the first galaxies, in preparation for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Her interest in the Harvard computers started in 2002, when she did a summer undergraduate internship at the Harvard Observatory.