Megan Donahue

Megan Donahue

Megan Donahue is an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, working as a research astronomer and as an archive scientist for the Multiwavelength Archive at Space Telescope (MAST). Her research is mainly on clusters of galaxies: their contents - dark matter, hot gas, galaxies, active galactic nuclei - and what they tell us about the contents of the universe and how galaxies form and evolve. She grew up on a farm in Nebraska and received a bachelor's degree in physics from MIT, where she began her research career as an X-ray astronomer.

She has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado, for a thesis on theory and optical observations of intergalactic and intracluster gas. That thesis won the 1993 Trumpler Award from the Astronomical Society for the Pacific for an outstanding astrophysics doctoral dissertation in North America. She continued post-doctoral research in optical and X-ray observations as a Carnegie Fellow at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California and later as an STScI Institute Fellow at Space Telescope.

In the fall of 2003, she will join the physics and astronomy department at Michigan State University as a professor. Megan is a co-author of a popular introductory astronomy textbook "The Cosmic Perspective", published by Addison Wesley Longman. Megan is married to Mark Voit, who is also a frequent collaborator of hers on many projects, not the least of which include raising three children, Michaela, Sebastian, and Angela. Between the births of Sebastian (1997) and Angela (2002), Megan ran the Pittsburgh and the Boston Marathons, and hopes to complete another one in 2004.