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French astronomer Adeleine Caulet
was born in Versailles, and grew up near Paris and
in Reims. At the young age of 13, inspired both
by the Apollo moon landings and by an interest in
amateur telescope making, she had already decided
to become an observational astronomer. Following
studies at Paris and Marseille, including a thesis
on ionized gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud, she
continued her education in the U.S. She first worked
on extragalactic astronomy with Gerard and Antoinette
de Vaucouleurs at the University of Texas, and then
moved on to the University of Chicago, where she
obtained her Ph.D. in astronomy in 1989 with a thesis
on quasar absorption line systems.
Postdoctoral work followed at the University of
Alabama, and then at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
At Goddard she developed ground-based telescope
instrumentation, as well as working with the team
that built the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph
(STIS), now installed into the Hubble Space Telescope.
In 1991, she returned to Europe to work with the
European Space Agency (ESA) in Munich as an Instrument
Scientist for HST. Since 1997, Adeleine has been
a visiting scientist in several U.S. research centers,
including the Space Telescope Science Institute
and the University of Illinois.
She particularly enjoys travelling to and observing
at ground-based observatories around the world,
especially at favorite sites like Kitt Peak in Arizona,
and La Silla in Chile. She has a wide variety of
research interests, and likes to change her areas
of concentration regularly. In addition to her instrumentation
work, her research background includes studies of
the interstellar gas and star formation; structure
of emission nebulae like the Lagoon Nebula and the
Carina Nebula; absorption lines in quasars; and
compact dwarf galaxies.
When she is not doing astronomy, Adeleine likes
to travel and back-pack in various exotic locales,
including Antarctica, the deserts of Chile, and
the volcanic regions of Hawaii.
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