Stargazer.
| Auteur | Hays, Kim |
| Fonction | Expat Profile |
Italian astrophysicist Marcella Carob spends a lot of time looking at tiny lights and even more time considering huge questions, like what galaxies are made of and how they came to exist. As one of a relatively small number of women in her field, she also thinks about ways of helping women scientists climb the academic career ladder.
Marcella Carollo is an associate professor of astrophysics at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. She has been a European Union Fellow at the Leiden Observatory in Holland, a Hubble Fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and an assistant professor at New York's Columbia University.
Today, she travels around the world acquiring data for her studies and presenting scientific papers. Her observations of distant galaxies depend on telescopes in Chile, Arizona, and Hawaii - and on the Hubble Space Telescope, which is in orbit. However, as a middle-class teenager in growing up twenty years ago in Sicily, Carollo wasn't allowed to travel back and forth to school alone. At 23 she finally managed to put a slop to being escorted to university every day, and at 24 she actually ate dinner alone with a young man.
"You simply can't imagine how restricted life was for women in Sicily then," she says. "And a woman in physics was a very odd creature. It wasn't until I was 27 that my work took me to Munich, and I got outside the tiny world of Palermo for the first time. That was when I realized that I had to escape."
"I decided to get my PhD in astrophysics at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat - but I didn't speak any German! I was determined, though, and somehow I managed to pass the required language exam. So it wasn't until 1991 that I finally found myself doing what I wanted to do. I was getting my PhD, working toward an academic career, and trying to answer immense, fascinating questions about the nature of the universe. I was very happy."
Excellent Timing
Carollo is still happy. Her enthusiasm for her profession is contagious. "This is such a wonderful time to be an astrophysicist," she explains. "With the advances in technology that are going on right now - more powerful telescopes, more powerful computers-we will be able to gather and analyze data that we have never before had access to."
She describes as an example a new telescope being built in the Atacama Desert in Chile, 5,000 meters above sea level, which will have 64 antennae. "Just one of those antennae will reveal more about our universe than any other similar telescope we have today - and we will be getting information from 64 of them! We're going to see much, much more of the universe than we've ever been able to see before, and the first data will be arriving in 2007. Things are going to be exciting. We have new experiments mapped out...
Pour continuer la lecture
SOLLICITEZ VOTRE ESSAICOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
