“When I used to say I wanted to be a cosmologist, people would ask, ‘Oh, you want to go to beauty school?’” recalls Johanna Teske (BS physics ’08). These days, Teske’s impressive work in astrophysics makes it hard to mistake her aspirations.
Teske has always wanted to study the stars, but a string of prestigious undergraduate internships shifted her sights from the theoretical world of cosmology to the more observation-based field of astrophysics. During her sophomore year, she completed her first internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where she worked on modeling photon orbits around black holes. While there, Teske had the opportunity to attend seminars on a wide variety of astronomical topics, from missions to the outer solar system to exploding stars. “There were so many subdisciplines that my eyes were opened to,” she says. “It made me see what was out there.”
The following year, Teske interned at the Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket, a small island 30 miles off the Massachusetts coast and home to America’s first female astronomer. It was an ideal place to observe the skies. “You walk out there and see the brilliant moon and vast expanse of stars and it is absolutely breathtaking,” she recalls. Through her research on the chemical elements in recently “deceased” stars,
Teske gained “a better picture of what it meant to be a real astrophysicist.”
Last summer, Teske collected and analyzed data on galaxy interactions at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In January, she presented her independent research at the 211th annual American Astronomical Society Meeting in Austin, Texas.
Although she has nearly completed her undergraduate work, Teske continues to pursue learning experiences. She currently interns at the Carnegie Institute of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, where she is characterizing the composition of gas around young stars and searching for signatures of forming planets. Supported by grants from the physics and math departments, the honors program, and the CAS dean’s office, she plans to attend the International Astronomical Union’s symposium on organic matter in space at the University of Hong Kong in February.
Teske has also begun looking for a PhD program that is “as interdisciplinary as possible, with strong geology, chemistry, and geochemistry components.” She explains, “The field of astrophysics is at a point where these disciplines have to join forces to enable us to discover more and make conclusions about the history of the solar system, the characteristics of other solar systems, and the possibility of life on those other planets.”
Sally L. Smith, a professor in the School of Education, Teaching, and Health since 1976 and the director of the MA in special education, died December 1, 2007. Smith founded the Lab School of Washington in 1967 and developed a highly individualized, arts-based methodology for educating learning-disabled students. Honored with the university’s Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Research, and Other Professional Contributions, she also received the LDA award from the Learning Disabilities Association of America—the highest honor in the field.
Smith had a penchant for quotations of all sorts. In her honor, Smith’s
master’s students closed their final exams with some thoughts about
her, a few of which follow:
“With all the splashes of color, you made our world bright. By showing
us the way to stand tall, you brought us delight. Sally, you led the way from
darkness to light.”
—Payal Arora
“As a mother of a child with learning disabilities, Sally Smith took
her struggles to a global level. She unabashedly formed a school, wrote several
books, served as dean of a college, and became a professor and authority
in her field. She did not remain silent, but rather changed the world with
her ingenuity and won over the hearts of children and the minds of politicians
and academics. All while wearing purple.”
—Annie Boelte
“When I first stepped into Sally’s office, I was immediately
struck by how it was completely unlike any office I had ever been in. She
herself seemed as though she could have been one of the bright, colorful
works of art on the wall. She brought out the brightness in others. My students
always perked up when they saw her, as did I.”
—Meghan Pennington
“Sally made everyone feel exceptionally special. She saw right to
the core of you—right to your personhood. She was a bright, colorful,
joyful individual. She instantly brought sunshine into a room.”
—Kimberly Palombo
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