Making Space: Pioneering Women in Aerospace
August 25, 2020, via Zoom webinar The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment’s ratification. To acknowledge this important anniversary, physicist Emily Martin from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and Allison Devers, a writer and rare book dealer specializing in women authors, explore the history of women in aviation and also discuss their own groundbreaking careers. The speakers: Dr. Emily Martin is a research physical scientist in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies. Emily’s research interests are in planetary surface processes and tectonic deformation across our solar system, especially the icy bodies of the outer solar system. Developing a better understanding of how planetary surfaces deformed tells us about their histories and what they have experienced. Of particular interest is the evolution of subsurface oceans on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and other icy satellites. Many of these moons had or have liquid water oceans under their brittle water-ice lithospheres making them prime targets for understanding the habitable potential of the outer solar system. Much of Emily’s work relies on images taken by the Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecrafts. Emily received her BA in physics from Wheaton College in 2006, where she first began exploring the icy satellites. She subsequently obtained her MS from Northwestern University in Earth and planetary science in 2009, and her PhD in geological sciences from the University of Idaho in 2014. A. N. Devers is a writer, arts journalist and critic, and rare book dealer based in London (specializing in women authors, she has worked with LHL frequently). Her first book, Train, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. The International Contributing Editor of A Public Space, she has written for The New Yorker, New Republic, Lapham’s Quarterly, Lenny, Los Angeles Times, Longreads, The Paris Review, Prospect, Salon, Slate, Fine Books, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
