Dara Norman

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. Dr. Norman is currently the 50th president of the American Astronomical Society. Norman received her Doctorate degree in 1999, becoming the first African American woman to earn her Ph.D. in astronomy at the university. Quotes In other science fields, you can set up an experiment, or you can get samples of rocks or samples of other things to bring back to your lab and analyze them. But for astronomers, all you get is the light that comes back from galaxies or stars. With that light, you have to try to figure out the mass of that star or the mass of that galaxy, what the temperature is. We help the broad astronomy community use both the telescopes and data Growing up in Chicago, I was always interested in being a scientist. I'm not entirely sure why. But my mother was always very interested in the sky. She was used to seeing a dark sky, and so she was really interested in the space program. So I just became really interested in astronomy and the stars, and I didn't necessarily want to be an astronomer. I wanted to be an astronaut and I wanted to do science. To look through the 16-inch telescope at Jupiter was literally life-changing for me. I just remember thinking that Jupiter actually looks like it does in the books—spot, bands, albeit in more of a gray scale. My job includes staring off into space. How awesome is that?! External links Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Living people Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Category:University of Washington alumni Category:21st-century African-American scientists Category:American astronomers Category:American women astronomers Category:American women scientists Category:Fellows of the American Astronomical Society