Dra. Julieta Fierro (Mexico)

Dra. Julieta Fierro, "the Carl Sagan of Mexico", is a professor, Institute of Astronomy, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), and one of the world's foremost communicators of astronomy. Her graduate degree was in astronomy, and she teaches regularly at UNAM, and has carried out research on interstellar matter. Her contributions to Spanish-language science education and outreach are prodigious – over 40 books, directorship of a major science centre Universum in Mexico City (and consultant to other science centres), numerous radio and TV series, programs and appearances, and countless public lectures, including one to 100,000 schoolchildren in a stadium! She works extensively with schoolteachers and students, giving workshops, developing resources, and writing books and articles for young people. She is constantly innovating; most recently, she has collaborated with a dance company to present astronomy through that medium. Her public presentations are legendary – highly kinetic and engaging. But unlike some public figures, she radiates a warm and generous personality. She has served nationally as President of the Mexican Academy of Professors of Natural Science, and the Mexican Society of Science Museums, and internationally as President of the International Astronomical Union's Commission on Astronomy Education and Development. Her many national and international awards include honorary doctorates, the Klumpke-Roberts Prize of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the prestigious UNESCO Kalinga Prize for promoting public understanding of science, and membership in Mexico's Academia de la Lengua -- an honour usually reserved for scholars in the humanities.

Citation prepared by Dr. Percy from information adapted from Dr. Fierro's UNAM Web site.

  Dr. Wendy Freedman (USA)

Dr. Freedman (born July 17, 1957) is easy to perceive as a successor to Allan Sandage in the field of cosmology. She had a disagreement of some standing with Sandage about what the eventual determination of the Hubble Constant would be. Sandage said it would be close to 50, Gerard de Vaucouleurs said it would be 100, and Freedman's eventual solution of close to 75 was supported by Hubble Space Telescope Cepheid data.

Freedman's studies up to her Ph.D. were at the University of Toronto. In 1980 she was the first woman astronomer to do an observing run with the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope. She also did visiting work during her studies at Mont-Mégantic, Las Campanas (UTSO and Dupont) and Kitt Peak (Mayall). The early-1980s work involved CCDs, although some follow-up work involved plate scanning. She received an Amelia Earhart Fellowship from Zonta International in 1981. She married fellow U of T astronomer Barry Madore in 1985, after a post-doctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena. Soon after, she was the first woman on permanent staff at Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. She is now the John & Marion Sullivan University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

Freedman is often interviewed about the Hubble Constant and cosmology in general. As the director of Carnegie Observatories she was also the chair of the Giant Magellan Observatory organization, which plans to build a compound telescope of seven 8.5-metre mirrors on Cerro Las Campanas (By the end of 2021 the sixth mirror segment had been cast.)

Her first RASC lecture was to the Toronto Centre on 23 October 1981 on the subject of Evolution of Galaxies. Her first contribution to JRASC was in 1982. She gave a joint lecture at the Royal Canadian Institute and RASC Toronto Centre on 24 Jan 1993, 'Measuring the Size and Expansion Rate of the Universe'. She was the Helen Sawyer Hogg Lecturer at the 2000 General Assembly in Winnipeg, speaking about the Age and Size of the Universe. From 2005 to 2007 she was the honorary president of the RASC Toronto Centre.

  Dr. P.J.E. Peebles (USA)

Dr. Phillip James ("Jim") Edwin Peebles is a native of Winnipeg and a graduate of the University of Manitoba (B.Sc. in physics, 1958). He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1962, and currently is a professor of physics at Princeton. In the mid-1960s, he and his colleagues predicted that thermal electromagnetic radiation from the very early Universe should be detectable by radio telescopes, that this radiation should be isotropic, and that it should have the spectrum of a black body only a few degrees above absolute zero. Coincidentally, about the same time (in 1965), Penzias and Wilson of the Bell Telephone Laboratories accidentally discovered this radiation. Dr. Peebles has investigated characteristics of the radiation and the clustering of galaxies. He has calculated the universal abundances of helium and other light elements, demonstrating agreement between Big Bang theory and observation. His two books on physical cosmology had a significant impact in convincing physicists that the time had come to study cosmology as a respectable branch of physics. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982.

Professor Peebles was the joint recipient of the The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019, "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos", with one half awarded to him "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology", and the other half going jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star". Professor Peebles' Cosmology’s Century: An Inside History of Our Modern Understanding of the Universe is scheduled to appear later in that year.

  Dr. Sara Seager (Canada)

Professor Sara Seager was born and grew up in Toronto, Canada. Among her first memories is a trip to a “star party” with her father, to see the moon through a telescope—spectacular! Professor Seager graduated from Jarvis Collegiate Institute, and studied at the University of Toronto. After graduating with a B.Sc. in the Math and Physics Specialist Program at the U of T, Seager attended the Ph.D. program in Astronomy at Harvard.

Dr. Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT. Her science research focuses on theory, computation, and data analysis of exoplanets. Her research has introduced many new ideas to the field of exoplanet characterization, including work that led to the first detection of an exoplanet atmosphere. Professor Seager's space instrumentation group is focusing on "ExoplanetSat," a 3U CubeSat capable of high-precision pointing, with the science goal of detecting small transiting exoplanets orbiting bright, sun-like stars. The prototype is intended to be the first of a planned fleet of nanosatellites, aimed to demonstrate the graduated growth of a constellation as a new paradigm for space science missions. In addition to being the PI of ExoplanetSat, Professor Seager is co-leading CommCube, a platform to demonstrate novel small satellite space communication technology, and is involved in the MIT-Harvard REXIS instrument on NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.
Before joining MIT in 2007, Professor Seager spent four years on the senior research staff at the Carnegie Institution of Washington preceded by three years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her Ph.D. is from Harvard University. Professor Seager is on the advisory board for Planetary Resources and the Rosalind Franklin Society. Professor Seager is the 2012 recipient of the the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, the 2007 recipient of the American Astronomical s Helen B. Warner Prize, and is an AAAS Fellow. She has been recognized in the media by Popular Science Magazine's Fifth Annual Brilliant Ten in 2006, Discover Magazine's "Best 20 under 40" in 2008, Nature's Top Ten in 2011, and Time Magazine's 25 Most Influential in Space in 2012.