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After enjoying studies in the humanities when growing
up near Venice, Italy, Luciana Bianchi turned to
the field of science to pursue her interest in astronomy,
a choice she never regretted. She obtained a Ph.D.
in astronomy at the University
of Padua (Italy) with maxima cum laude honors
in 1978. Immediately after, she was granted a fellowship
at the International
Institute for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste,
Italy, to continue her study on observational signatures
of black holes. She took a position with the European
Space Agency, then returned to her home country
in Italy to accept a tenure position in 1983. Currently
Luciana Bianchi is a principal research scientist
in the Department
of Physics and Astronomy of the Johns Hopkins University.
Bianchi has conducted countless observing projects
with a variety of space instrumentation. Recently,
she uses mostly the Hubble
Space Telescope and FUSE,
but she is also involved in the next NASA UV space
mission that will perform the first sky survey in
the Ultraviolet (GALEX
- to be launched in May 2002). At the same time,
she used several ground-based telescopes (as well
as participated in developing and testing new instrumentation),
in Chile, Italy, Spain, Arizona and Hawaii, from
the classical old-fashioned telescopes to the current
Very Large
Telescope of ESO.
Most of the programs conducted by Bianchi are aimed
at the study of hot massive stars and their powerful
stellar winds, which play a major role in the evolution
of galaxies, and thus hold a key to unlock the history
of the universe. Thanks to the capabilities offered
by today's most powerful instruments, such as HST
and VLT, she is able to capture the secrets of these
stars in galaxies outside our own Milky Way, thus
in conditions different from our solar neighborhood.
She also serves in a number of international committees
and NASA panels.
Thanks to a tendency to ignore borders in the strive
to pursue her scientific goals, she had the privilege
of training outstanding young scientists from different
countries, and enjoyed the collaboration of astronomers
from around the world for many years, not an unusual
circumstance in this unusual job. Currently in her
group she has young people from the US, Italy, Spain
and Romania.
The most important and most rewarding position
yet that L.B. holds is that of mom. And - yes you
guessed it - she never gave up her interests in
arts and literature, as well as for music, biking
and more, which she shares with her daughter. In
her spare time, she shares her astronomy results
with the public and schools. If you visit the Maryland
Science Center in Baltimore, you can try and
make you own star and watch it evolve through its
lifecycle, or understand how a satellite works,
or become a spectroscopist - some of the ideas that
she provided for the museum's permanent "outer
space" exhibit.
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