Catherine Qualtrough
Name: Catherine Qualtrough
Age: 33
Location: Charlotte, NC
Occupation: Astrophysicist
Catherine Qualtrough remembers looking up at the Milky Way when she was a child walking to her grandparents’ house. The rural area where she grew up, near Hamilton, New Zealand, was untouched by light pollution at the time, so scoping a celestial view while on a stroll wasn’t an impossibility.
Catherine remembers the particular moment in her childhood where her love affair with astronomy and astrophysics began. There was a school project where she studied Halley’s Comet and its return to the skies. “I was so amazed that this giant glowing snowball was speeding through our solar system and had been for hundreds of years and that by merely looking up I could see this happening,” she recalls. For weeks she dragged her parents out of the house at 3AM to stare at the sky with binoculars. Her parents could tell that their daughter had found something she was passionate about, so they contacted a member of the local astronomical society. He invited ten-year-old Catherine to look through his homemade reflecting telescope. “Again, my parents were there shivering through the night while I stood on a box and got my first look at Saturn’s rings, Mars and Jupiter’s moons. I was sold. From then on I read Astronomy magazine every month and begged my parents incessantly for a telescope,” she says.
Her work eventually exported her to the United States, where she lives today. Catherine looks back on her path to the skies and is proud to have overcome the challenge of finding an occupation that is united with her love of space. “New Zealand’s economy just cannot support a lot of research in the areas I love,” she says. Her job in the U.S. exposes her to some amazing things, like traveling to see the world’s most innovative new telescopes and peering into the heart of the universe from the observatory. Her day-to-day work combines research and teaching with data processing, presenting results, research fund applications, and writing papers.
Catherine spends her time outside of the observatory playing piano, rowing, and volunteering at charity and outreach groups. “I aim to one day write a non-fiction book about astrophysics aimed at the non-expert. I’d also love to become more involved in scientific policy making,” she says.
For staying star struck and inspiring others to become interested in astronomy, Catherine Qualtrough is a very Cool Girl!
You can follow Catherine on Twitter @CatherineQ, and you can read her blog about astrophysics, space, outreach, and science in development at www.CatherineQ.com
Wow, I feel so identified 🙂 I’ve always loved astronomy but it wasn’t easy to study it here and I ended up following my artistic side… but I adore and will always love Astronomy! I will follow her blog~