Andrea Ghez

Professor Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles dates her initial interest in astronomy back to the first moon landings. Though she imagined herself pursuing a variety of careers when she was a girl (including becoming a ballet dancer), she always enjoyed science, which seemed to her like "a game or puzzle". "I liked the process of solving things," Ghez explains. Ghez believes that her parents' high expectations for her, and their faith that she would succeed, played an important role in shaping her ambitions; from a very young age, she assumed that she would earn a Ph.D.. Her mother provided an excellent role model of a successful working woman. She was also influenced by a great chemistry teacher, who was the only female science teacher she had throughout her education. She earned her bachelor's in Physics from MIT in 1987, and her doctoral degree from California Institute of Technology in 1992, and is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including a Sloan Fellowship, the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator award, and teaching awards from Caltech and UCLA.

Ghez has two principal areas of research. First, she studies how stars form and under what conditions they do or do not form planets. This will help determine how many other planets like ours exist in the universe. Second, she is trying to prove that there is a super-massive black hole at the center of our Galaxy. If proven, this "tantalizing theory" which has been debated for years will potentially help us to understand how our Galaxy and other galaxies formed and what conditions might effect the evolution of their central regions. To address these issues and others, Ghez works at a variety of different telescopes observing sources primarily at infrared wavelengths. Ghez relishes the freedom to define what problems she works on, and the opportunity to travel to interesting places like Hawaii to use their telescopes. In the beginning, Ghez confronted a certain amount of prejudice as a woman working in a male dominated field, but she has found that once her male colleagues know her "as a person" and know her work, "this tends not to be a problem." Her advice to young people interested in this field is to take as many math and physics courses as possible. She encourages those who are interested to pursue a career in astronomy because "this field is a lot of fun," and emphasizes world-travel as one of the prime benefits. In addition to science, Ghez is passionate about swimming, which she does with a master's swim team: "I do it to keep my head screwed on straight and to meet people who don't think about science all day long. It keeps things in my life balanced."