“I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin,” she recalled. “She looked down her nose at me and sneered, ‘What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?’ That was the sort of reception that I got most of the way,” she told the Voice of America.
Dr. Roman was born on May 16, 1925, in Nashville, the only child of Irwin Roman, a geophysicist, and Georgia (Smith) Roman, a music teacher. When she was three months old, the family left for Texas and Oklahoma, where her father advised oil companies on drilling possibilities.
The family moved to Reno when her father was named western regional chief for federal research into geophysics.
“In Reno, of course, the skies were very clear, a beautiful place to observe the sky, and we lived on the edge of the city at the time,” Dr. Roman recalled in a 1980 interview for the National Air and Space Museum. “We had very few lights. I started an astronomy club with the girls in the neighborhood. We learned the constellations, read astronomy. I just never lost my interest in it.”
The family later moved to Baltimore, where she attended high school. She received a degree in astronomy from Swarthmore College in 1946, obtained a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1949, then worked at its Yerkes Observatory as a researcher.
She later joined the United States Naval Research Laboratory, specializing in radio astronomy, and was recruited by NASA in 1959, a year after it was founded.
“The idea of coming in with an absolute clean slate to set up a program that I thought was likely to influence astronomy for 50 years was just a challenge that I couldn’t turn down,” she recalled in her National Air and Space Museum interview.
from Just News Update http://bit.ly/2GNzkkO
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