Ann Merchant Boesgaard

Ann Merchant Boesgaard
Boesgaard in 1969
Nationality	American
Education	Mount Holyoke College, University of California, Berkeley
Awards	Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Smithsonian Fellow, Muhlmann Prize of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Scientific career
Fields	Astronomy
Institutions	University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Website	http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~boes/

Ann Merchant Boesgaard (March 21, 1939) is an astronomer and professor emerita who received the American Astronomical Society's highest award, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship in 2019. The minor planet 7804 Boesgaard was named after her.

Early Life

Ann Boesgaard grew up in Rochester, New York. After her father left when she was five, she and her sister, Carolyn Merchant, were raised by their mother, Elizabeth Barnes Merchant. To make ends meet, the family moved in with Ann's grandmother, Estelle Barnes Davis, and great-aunt, Aurelia Huntington. Elizabeth Merchant studied mathematics at Vassar College for two years before she was married, which enabled her to get a job in the accounting department at Eastman Kodak after the divorce to support her daughters. She taught Ann the constellations from a young age. and Ann's first Girl Scouts badge was in astronomy. Ann wanted to be an astronaut, but her gender, poor eyesight, and lack of test pilot experience made that dream impossible.

Education and Career

Boesgaard received her bachelor's degree magna cum laude in 1961 from Mount Holyoke College. She wrote her final thesis on solar rotation with Dr. Robert F. Howard from the University of Massachusetts. In the summer of 1961, she moved to California to work for Dr. Jesse Greenfield at CalTech before starting her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted her thesis research on lithium (Li) in red giants and supergiants with George Herbig. She graduated in 1966.

After graduating from UC Berkeley, Boesgaard applied for a post doctoral Carnegie Fellowship to work at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories in Southern California, but she was denied. Instead, she returned to work with Dr. Greenfield. In September 1966, she became the first woman to have a telescope assigned in her name at the Mount Wilson Observatory. The next year, in 1967, she moved to Hawai'i and became a professor of astronomy at the newly created Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She continued her own research while working with undergraduate and graduate researchers and the university.

Over the next several decades, Boesgaard broke gender barriers in her field and gained recognition and acclaim for her work. She was the first woman awarded a tenure-track faculty position in astronomy at the University of Hawai'i. In 1977, she became the first woman to be elected president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a post she held until 1979. She concurrently served on the American Astronomical Society Council from 1978-1981. In 1998, the minor planet 7804 Boesgaard was named after her, as proposed by Dutch astronomers C.J. van Houten and Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld.

Boesgaard retired from teaching in 2006 after her husband Hans suffered a heart attack. She retired fully and became professor emerita in 2009, although she continues to use the Keck telescope for observation. In 2020, she was elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society.

Research

Boesgaard's research at the University of Hawaii focused on the light element content - lithium, beryllium, and boron - of stars and the atmospheres of giant stars. She discovered that as galaxies age, the amount of heavy elements increases, thereby allowing astronomers to date stars based on their metal content.

Honors and Awards

• NATO Senior Science Fellow (1973)
• College de France Medal (1980)
• Honorary Doctor of Science degree, Mount Holyoke College (1981)
• Guggenheim Fellow (1986)
• Muhlmann Prize of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1990)
• Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (2019)
• American Astronomical Society Legacy Fellow (2020)

Personal Life

Boesgaard met her husband, Hans, an engineer who works on telescopes, while working at the Lick Observatory in Mount Hamilton, California, with George Herbig. The two rarely lived in the same place due to their jobs, so they had to look for ways to see each other during overlapping projects. They eventually settled together in Hawai'i.

Further reading

• Boesgaard, Ann M. Making Things Work. In The Sky Is For Everyone: Women Astronomers In Their Own Words. Virginia Trimble and David A. Weintraub, editors. Princeton, Princeton University Press [2022].
• Boesgaard, Ann M. One woman's journey. Mercury, v. 21, January/February 1992: 19–22, 37. illus., ports. QB1.M43, v. 21
• Boesgaard, Ann M. In Who's who in technology. 7th ed. Kimberly A. McGrath, editor. New York, Gale Research [1995] page 109. T39.W5 1995
• Morrison, Nancy D., and Andrew Fraknoi. The 1990 A.S.P. awards. The Muhlmann Prize to Ann Boesgaard. Mercury, v. 19, November/December 1990: pages 182–185. illus., port.QB1.M43, v. 19
• Parker, Barry. Ann Boesgaard. In his Stairway to the stars; the story of the world's largest observatory. Drawings by Lori Scoffield. New York, Plenum Press [1994] pages 278–282. port. QB82.U62M387 1994.

External links

• Faculty profile at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

 This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Library of Congress.