Scientist Highlight: Vera Rubin

I've always found that it's helpful to have role models to look up to: when I was a kid and wanted to be an astronaut, it was Eileen Collins, the fist female shuttle commander.  (Her autographed picture is still on my wall in my old bedroom!)  When I started studying astrophysics, I learned about Vera Rubin, and I've always been inspired by her.

Dr. Rubin truly broke down barriers for women in astrophysics.  She attempted to attend Princeton for graduate school, but women were not allowed in their program at the time (in the late 1940s-early 1950s). Instead of letting this discourage her, she enrolled at Cornell, where she got her masters, and later received her PhD from Georgetown, where her thesis focused on the idea that galaxies formed in groups as opposed to being distributed evenly throughout the universe.  We know this to be true now, but at the time it was not a popular idea.


Dr. Rubin is most famous for her discoveries in galaxy rotation, which led to the idea of dark matter.  While studying the speeds of stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, Dr. Rubin realized that the speeds of the outer stars were not consistent with our understanding of Newtonian gravity.  This meant that there must be more matter in the galaxy than we can see -- which was named dark matter.  Of course dark matter is still largely a mystery to cosmologists, but it was Dr. Rubin's work that provided the background for this groundbreaking and important discovery.

When I did my first summer internship in astronomy research at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, we had a welcome lunch for the interns on the first day.  I sat down next to an elderly woman and we had a wonderful conversation about astronomy and how excited I was to begin my first research project.  At the end of the lunch, I asked her name, and she told me it was Vera.  I ran back to my office and looked her up -- and indeed, I had just had a conversation with Dr. Rubin, whose office was around the corner from mine that summer.  She was 80 years old then, and still came to work every day, as I imagine she still does.  She truly exemplifies what complete devotion to and love for your work looks like.

I had the chance to talk with her a few more times that summer.  When asked how she came to work at the Carnegie Institution, she said "well, I needed a job, and a lot of people weren't hiring women.  So I just knocked on the door and asked."  That kind of tenacity and fearlessness is incredible.  Although women in astronomy are still a minority, it's people like Dr. Rubin that broke down barriers to make it much easier for us today, and for that I am thankful.