Nia Imara

Nia Imara is an American astrophysicist and artist. Imara was involved in work that deals with galactic mass, star formation and detecting exoplanets. Imara was the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley.[1]

Nia Imara
Born
East Oakland, Oakland, California
Alma materKenyon College
University of California, Berkeley
Known forScience and art
Scientific career
InstitutionsHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
ThesisThe Formation and Evolution of Giant Molecular Clouds (2010)
Doctoral advisorLeo Blitz
Websiteniaimara.com

Early life and education

Imara was born in East Oakland, Oakland, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.[2] She attended Kenyon College for her bachelor's degree, majoring in mathematics and physics.[2] She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for her postgraduate studies, and in 2010 she became the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics at University of California, Berkeley.[2] Her dissertation was on The Formation and Evolution of Giant Molecular Clouds and was supervised by Leo Blitz.[3]

Career

Imara was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow (2014 - 2017) on the Future Faculty Leaders program at Harvard University. In 2017, she was appointed as the John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow and the Harvard FAS Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.[4] Imara works with the Banneker Institute at Harvard, and is a member of the Breakthrough Starshot research team.[5][6] She has developed a model that connects galaxy mass, star formation rates and dust temperatures.[7]

Together with Roseanne Di Stefano, Imara has proposed a method for detecting exoplanets in X-ray binary star systems.[8]

Art and activism

Imara is also an artist whose primary medium is oil on canvas.[9] In 2014, she opened her own gallery, First Love.[10]

In 2015 she held a series of exhibitions in Oakland called Generation of Oakland: The People's Portrait, looking at the impact of gentrification on Oakland resident's families.[1][9][11] From 2016 to 2019, these interviews with and photographs of the people affected by gentrification were online at GenerationOfOakland.com.[12][13]

Imara is an advocate for equity in STEM. She founded the Equity and Inclusion Journal Club at Harvard University in 2018 which was originally co-organized with Dr. Anna Pancoast.[14] She has visited South Africa[15] and Ghana[16] to teach and advocate in programs designed to increase diversity in astronomy and other STEM areas.[15][16]

gollark: ubq323.website doesn't work on that?!
gollark: The Chrome build for our experimental 128-bit computers with their 741EB of RAM somehow manages to go into swap.
gollark: Nominally, yes.
gollark: *Is* the majority of badness in browsers due to mildly bigger JS code? I do not think this is true.
gollark: You wrote "redirect to arbitrary the".

References
  1. Burt, Cecily (November 4, 2015). "Oakland: Help record your experience with gentrification". The Mercury News. Oakland, CA: Bay Area News Group. Archived from the original on May 3, 2019. Retrieved May 3, 2019.
  2. Kumamoto, Akira Olivia (November 16, 2015). "Nia Imara sheds light on Oakland through art". Oakland North. UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Retrieved May 3, 2019.
  3. Imara, Nia (2010). The Formation and Evolution of Giant Molecular Clouds (Thesis). UC Berkeley.
  4. "John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellows (JHDSF) Program: Current Fellows". President and Fellows of Harvard College. Retrieved May 2, 2018.
  5. Sokol, Joshua (August 23, 2016). "Why the Universe Needs More Black and Latino Astronomers". Smithsonian. Retrieved May 3, 2019.
  6. "Breakthrough Initiatives". breakthroughinitiatives.org. Retrieved May 2, 2018.
  7. Imara, Nia; Loeb, Abraham; Johnson, Benjamin D.; Conroy, Charlie; Behroozi, Peter (February 8, 2018). "A Model Connecting Galaxy Masses, Star Formation Rates, and Dust Temperatures Across Cosmic Time". The Astrophysical Journal. 854 (1): 36. arXiv:1801.01499. Bibcode:2018ApJ...854...36I. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aaa3f0. ISSN 1538-4357.
  8. Kohler, Susanna (2018-07-20). "Searching for exoplanets around X-ray binaries". AAS Nova. American Astronomical Society. Retrieved 2019-05-03.
  9. Voynovskaya, Nastia (November 11, 2015). "Nia Imara Captures the Faces of Oakland's Housing Crisis". Arts & Culture. East Bay Express. Retrieved May 3, 2019.
  10. Ali, Nancy Alima (May 21, 2015). "May 21st: On Being an Artist and Astronomer". 365 Days of Astronomy. Planetary Science Institute. Retrieved May 3, 2019.
  11. "Oakland artist and astronomer to highlight impacts of gentrification". The Mercury News. East Oakland, CA: Bay Area News Group. November 6, 2015. Archived from the original on May 3, 2019. Retrieved May 3, 2019.
  12. Piaña, Rayanne. "'Generation of Oakland' Documents Impacts of Displacement Through Touching Interviews". East Bay Express. Retrieved 4 May 2019.
  13. "GENERATION OF OAKLAND". Archived from the original on 2019-01-24. Retrieved 4 May 2019.
  14. "The Equity and Inclusion Journal Club". President and Fellows of Harvard College. Retrieved May 3, 2019.
  15. National Research Council, Policy and Global Affairs, Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine, Committee on Advancing Institutional Transformation for Minority Women in Academia (2013). Seeking Solutions: Maximizing American Talent by Advancing Women of Color in Academia: Summary of a Conference. National Academies Press. ISBN 9780309295949. Retrieved 5 May 2019.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  16. Appah, Samuel Obeng (9 February 2019). "Year of Return: Ghana begins celebration of Black History Month with launch". VoyagesAfriq. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
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