Nancy Roman

Nancy Grace Roman, an American astronomer, advanced the understanding of stellar classification and stellar motions. As NASA’s first female executive, she became the agency’s first chief of astronomy during the 1960s and 1970s, a role that placed her among the “visionary founders of the US civilian space program.” She built NASA’s space astronomy program from the ground up and earned the nickname “Mother of Hubble” for her essential work in conceiving the Hubble Space Telescope. Roman also devoted herself to public speaking, education, and supporting women in science throughout her life.

Roman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to a music teacher mother and a physicist/mathematician father. Three months after her birth, her father took a geophysicist job with an oil company, moving the family to Oklahoma. They later relocated to Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, and Nevada before settling in Baltimore, Maryland, when her father became Senior Geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Baltimore office. Roman credited her parents as major influences on her scientific interests. At age 11, she started an astronomy club, meeting weekly with classmates to learn constellations from books. Despite discouragement from others, she decided by seventh grade to pursue astronomy. She graduated in three years from Western High School in Baltimore after completing an accelerated program.

Roman entered Swarthmore College intending to study astronomy. The dean of women was unsupportive, telling Roman that insisting on a science or engineering major meant the dean would have nothing more to do with her. The dean directed her to the astronomy department, chaired by Peter van de Kamp, who was initially discouraging but still taught her. Roman worked on two defunct student telescopes, which she said helped her gain a feel for instruments and observing techniques. During her sophomore year, she began processing astronomical photographic plates at Sproul Observatory, inheriting van de Kamp’s view that since he had used plates taken 50 years earlier, he owed future astronomers plates they could use 50 years later. Van de Kamp taught her a solo lecture course on astrometry and encouraged her to learn professional astronomy through the library. She graduated in February 1946, and van de Kamp suggested she continue at the University of Chicago, which was rebuilding its astronomy department after World War II. Roman later served on Swarthmore’s Board of Managers from 1980 to 1988.

Roman started graduate school at the University of Chicago in March 1946. Finding classes easier than at Swarthmore, she approached three professors—Otto Struve, George van Biesbroeck, and William Wilson Morgan—asking each for an observational project. Struve gave her a theory project, van Biesbroeck a data analysis project, and Morgan an observational project using a 12-inch telescope, likely the Kenwood Astrophysical Observatory refractor. Though Morgan initially dismissed her, once not speaking to her for six months, he continued supporting her research. She earned her Ph.D. in astronomy in 1949 with a dissertation on the Ursa Major Moving Group. After a two-month break at Warner and Swasey Observatory, Morgan invited her to be his research associate at Yerkes Observatory. She worked there for six years, traveling frequently to McDonald Observatory in Texas and once to David Dunlap Observatory in Toronto, with support from the Office of Naval Research. The research position was not permanent, so she became an instructor and later an assistant professor. Her research at Yerkes focused on stellar spectroscopy of F and G type stars and high-velocity stars. Her work produced some of the most-cited papers of the time, including three top-100 papers in 1950 with over 3,000 citations. She turned down research positions at Wayne State University and the University of Southern California because they lacked sufficient astronomical instrumentation. She visited Argonne National Laboratory to use a new astrometry device for measuring photographic plates but could not convince Yerkes to buy one. In 1954, she advocated for purchasing a digital computer for data analysis, but department chair Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar rejected the idea, saying computers were not useful for that purpose. Roman left the university due to the scarcity of tenured research positions for women—the university had never appointed a woman to its academic staff. Gerard Kuiper recommended a position at the Naval Research Laboratory in the new field of radio astronomy.

In her professional research, Roman conducted a survey of all naked-eye stars similar to the Sun and discovered they could be divided into two categories based on chemical content and motion through space. In May 2020, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope would be renamed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to honor her enduring contributions to astronomy.