Physics and astronomy professor Megan Donahue was elected president of the American Astronomical Society, or AAS, the largest professional organization in North America for astronomers. The election concluded on Feb. 2. While preparing for her duties as president, she still participates in student research at MSU.
“One of the big jobs of the president is to be the face of the American Astronomical Society to other organizations, including Congress and congressional committees,” Donahue said.
Other duties include lobbying for science in Congress, running nation-wide meetings and the national astronomy publications, but she has hopes to establish other focuses as well.
“One thing I would like to do is to make sure that the enterprise that’s doing science in this country remains healthy,” Donahue said. “There’s a lot more attention now to the problem of diversity in the sciences, there’s the issue of women in science and there’s also the even more severe issue of minorities in science.”
Being a member of the AAS and having been elected to office prior made her eligible to run for the presidency.
Donahue has also written a textbook and currently serves as a professor by running a research group with two graduate students, waiting for pending proposals for funding from the National Science Foundation.
“Right now, we’re on the track of a pretty exciting idea we’ve been exploring for the last couple years about how supermassive black holes interact with their environment,” Donahue said, “So one of my goals is to collect more accurate data about the gravitating massive of, not the black holes themselves, but the galaxies.”
Second-year graduate students Rachel Salmon and Dana Koeppe are working on a project with Donahue regarding the analysis of galaxy clusters called Archive of Chandra Cluster Entropy Profile Tables, or ACCEPT 2.
“Our end goal once we’ve completed that analysis is to post them on a database so that other people can use the analysis that we’ve done to help form their own research on galaxy clusters,” Salmon said.
Now that Donahue is so closely connected to one of the largest groups of astronomers in the world, Salmon and Koeppe said they believe this will enhance the astronomical research being done at MSU by groups such as theirs.
“I think it really helped get other people who might not have originally considered MSU to look at it a little bit more closely because we do have a really great program,” Koeppe said. “Having someone so well connected in the astronomy community is good to get our program looked at.”
Before taking the presidency, Donahue will first spend a year as the president-elect, but will continue to aid in student research at MSU with her leadership.
“Her connection in the astronomy world is definitely a good reason to work with her,” Salmon said. “But she’s also a very good adviser in terms of directing our research and helping us become better astronomers and developing us into people who can become better astrophysicists.”
