Bea Gallardo-Lacourt
Early Life
Bea Gallardo-Lacourt was born in Santiago, Chile. She grew up in a busy city and loved science from a young age. She liked to ask questions about how the world worked.
When she was in secondary school, she spent her free time in a physics lab at the University of Santiago. She also went to a physics summer school at the University of Chile. These experiences helped her learn how real science is done.
Year born: Late 1980s
Research Areas: Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
Koppillil Radhakrishnan
Early Life
Koppillil was born in 1949 in Kerala, India. He grew up in a small coastal town and liked science and maths from a young age. He also enjoyed music and dance with his family supporting these interests.
Year born: 1949
Research Areas: Electrical Engineering and Space Research
Bambang Hidayat
Early Life
Bambang Hidayat was born in 1934 in Kudus, Indonesia. He was the oldest of 8 children. He loved the night sky from a young age. He liked to look at stars. He wondered what "shooting stars" were. A book about solar eclipses made him love space even more.
Year born: 1934
Research Areas: Astronomy
"In the performing arts, you must have a prima donna -- in science, you need a prime thinker."
Padma Yanamandra-Fisher
Early Life
Padma grew up in India. She loved space and science even as a child. She'd look at the night sky with her parents, and her dad would tell her stories about the stars they could see. Padma wondered what other cultures might say about those same stars. Would their stories be different to the ones she heard? It made her curious about the sky above.
Research Areas: Comets, Planetary Atmospheres, Planetary Rings, Polarization of light in the Solar System
"One of the wonderful things about science is that it is open and available to anybody."
Mazlan Othman
Early Life
Mazlan Othman was born in Malaysia in 1951. She was very good at maths in school. This led her down a science path. She was set on doing physics. Othman earned her PhD at the University of Otago in astrophysics in 1981. She was the first woman to do this since it was founded in 1869.
Career Highlights
Othman joined the Prime Minister's Department in 1990. She set up and was head of the planetarium division. This then became the space science division in 1993. She became a professor of astrophysics at UKM in 1994.
Year born: 1951
Research Areas: Astrophysics
Mishaal Ashemimry
Early Life
Mishaal Ashemimry was born in the US in 1984. She spent a few years of her early life in Saudi. It was here that her interest in space began. At age 6, she felt inspired while gazing at the stars in the Unaizah desert. To feed her curiosity, she decided to learn how to build rockets so she could go to space one day.
Ashemimry has two bachelor's degrees. One is in aerospace engineering, and the other is in applied maths. She has also earned her master's in aerospace engineering. NASA has funded her research.
Year born: 1984
Research Areas: Aerodynamics
"Failure is the seed from which success grows."
Jasmin Moghbeli
Early Life
Jasmin Moghbeli was born in 1983 in Bad Nauheim, West Germany. Her parents were born and raised in Iran. Moghbeli went to high school in New York. After this, she earned her bachelor's in aerospace engineering at MIT.
She then went on to do her master's degree in aerospace engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in California. Following this, Moghbeli graduated from the US Naval Test Pilot School in Maryland. Moghbeli speaks Persian and English and learned Russian as part of her astronaut training.
Year born: 1983
Research Areas: Flight testing and Spaceflight
Maram Kaire
Early Life
Maram Kaire was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1978. Since he was 12, he has been interested in astronomy. He read books about space and even built a telescope at the age of 14! At the time, astronomy was not popular in Senegal.
There weren't many jobs or courses in the field. His parents did not want him to study space, so he chose computer science instead. Later, he moved to France to study Systems and Network Engineering. After that, he returned to Senegal to inspire his country's interest in space.
Year born: 1978
Research Areas: Space missions coordination, asteroids, and education
"Space is open for everyone; it belongs to everyone."
Joyful Mdhluli
Early Life
Joyful Mdhluli grew up in Mpumalanga, South Africa. She is proud to be the first person in her family to attend university. Joyful earned her Bachelor's, Master's and PhD degrees from the University of Witwatersrand.
At first, she wasn't sure if she wanted to become a physicist. But, during her Master's studies, she realised that a career in physics would help her reach her full potential.
Year born: 1992
Research Areas: Astronomy for Mental Health, Experimental Physics, Particle Physics, Material Science
Víctor Manuel Blanco
Early Life
Víctor Manuel Blanco was born in Guyana on March 10th, 1918. He took an interest in astronomy from a young age. He built a telescope in his backyard and even named his pigs after asteroids!
At first, he was studying to become a doctor, but after taking an astronomy course, he realised he wanted to be an astronomer.
Year born: 1918
Research Areas: Stellar populations