Nancy Roman

Nancy Grace Roman (May 16, 1925 – December 25, 2018) was an American astronomer who made important contributions to stellar classification and motions.

Roman and her parents later moved to Houston, Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, and then Nevada in 1935, when her father joined the Civil Service in geophysical research.

When she was about 12 years old, the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, when Irwin Roman was hired as Senior Geophysicist at the Baltimore office of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Roman considered her parents to be major influences in her interest in science.

When Roman was 11 years old, she formed an astronomy club, gathering with classmates once a week and learning about constellations from books.

Although discouraged by those around her, Roman knew by seventh grade that she would dedicate her life to astronomy.

She attended Western High School in Baltimore where she participated in an accelerated program, graduating in three years.

Roman attended Swarthmore College, intending to study astronomy.

The dean of women was not encouraging in this.

Roman said “if you insisted on majoring in science or engineering, she wouldn't have anything more to do with you”.

The dean referred her to the astronomy department, then chaired by Peter van de Kamp, who was initially discouraging, but did teach her astronomy.

She worked on the two student telescopes available there, which had been defunct.

Roman says that helped with “getting a feel for instruments and instrumentation and just having the fun of playing around with observing techniques.”

In her sophomore year, she began working at the Sproul Observatory processing astronomical photographic plates, inheriting Van de Kamp's ethos that since he had used “plates that were taken by his predecessors 50 years earlier," he felt obliged "to replace those with plates that his successors would use 50 years in the future”.

Van de Kamp taught Roman in a solo lecture course on astrometry, encouraging her to learn about professional astronomy through use of the astronomy library.

She graduated in February 1946, and van de Kamp suggested that she continue studies at the University of Chicago, which was rebuilding its astronomy department after World War II.

She started graduate school at the University of Chicago in March 1946.

Finding the classes easier than at Swarthmore, she approached three professors, Otto Struve, George van Biesbroeck, and William Wilson Morgan, asking each for an observational astronomy project to work on.

The first gave her a theory project, the second a data analysis project, and Morgan provided an observational project using a 12-inch telescope, most likely the refractor from the Kenwood Astrophysical Observatory .Although Morgan was initially dismissive of Roman, at one point not speaking to her for six months, he continued to support her research.

She received her Ph.D. in astronomy in 1949, having written a dissertation on the Ursa Major Moving Group.

After a two-month break at the Warner and Swasey Observatory, she was invited by Morgan to be his research associate at Yerkes Observatory.

She worked at Yerkes for six years, often traveling to the McDonald Observatory in Texas, which at the time was managed by the University of Chicago, and once to the David Dunlap Observatory in Toronto, supported by the Office of Naval Research.

The research position was not permanent, so Roman became an instructor and later, an assistant professor.

At Yerkes, her research focused on stellar spectroscopy, emphasizing F and G type stars and high-velocity stars.

Her work produced some of the most highly cited papers of the time, including, in 1950, three top-100 papers in a year with over 3,000 publications.

She was offered research positions at Wayne State University and the University of Southern California, but turned them down as she felt the institutions lacked sufficient astronomical instrumentation, an issue of great importance to her.

She traveled to Argonne National Laboratory to use their new astrometry device for measuring photographic plates, but was unable to convince Yerkes to acquire one.

She advocated for the purchase of a then-novel digital computer for data analysis in 1954, but was turned down by department chair Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who declared computers as unuseful for this purpose.

Roman eventually left her job at the university because of the paucity of tenured research positions available to women.

They had never had a woman on the academic staff.

Gerard Kuiper recommended to her a position at the Naval Research Laboratory in the new field of radio astronomy.

Roman conducted a survey of all naked-eye stars similar to the Sun and realized that they could be divided into two categories by chemical content and motion through the galaxy.

One of her discoveries was that stars made of hydrogen and helium move faster than stars composed of other heavier elements.

The first female executive at NASA, Roman served as NASA's first Chief of Astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, establishing her as one of the "visionary founders of the US civilian space program".

Roman created NASA's space astronomy program and is known to many as the "Mother of Hubble" for her foundational role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope.

Throughout her career, Roman was an active public speaker and educator, and an advocate for women in the sciences.

Years later, Roman remained involved with her alma mater, serving on the Swarthmore Board of Managers from 1980 to 1988.

In May 2020, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope would be named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in recognition of her enduring contributions to astronomy.

Nancy Grace Roman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to music teacher Georgia Frances Smith Roman and physicist/mathematician Irwin Roman.

Shortly after, her father took a job as a geophysicist for an oil company and the family moved to Oklahoma three months after Roman's birth.