Born: 8 December 1947, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Dr. Margaret Geller was 43 when she became a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, an honor often referred to as “genius” grants, in 1990. The same year, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As the Foundation describes, her “studies of the spatial distribution of galaxies give us a new understanding of the structure of the universe.” Born in 1947, Geller completed her Ph.D. at Princeton in 1975 and went on to become a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
In 1989, she published her paper “Mapping the Universe,” for which the American Association for the Advancement of Science awarded her its Newcomb-Cleveland Prize. As explained by the MacArthur Foundation,
Geller has led a comprehensive study of the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies in the nearby universe. She and her colleagues have provided convincing evidence of a heterogeneous galaxy distribution not previously predicted by cosmological theory; the pattern of clustering offers important clues regarding mechanisms of galaxy formation and the emergence of asymmetry in the early universe.
Wanting to reach a broader audience, Geller also made films to bring her work to the non-academic mainstream with films like Where the Galaxies Are (1991) and So Many Galaxies…So Little Time (1992). In addition to working on HectoMAP, a deeper map of the galaxy distribution, other research topics included analyzing the development of our galaxy and mapping the distribution of dark matter. Her accolades include:
the Helen Sawyer Hogg Lectureship of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (1993),
the Klopsteg Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers (1996),
the American Philosophical Society’s Magellanic Premium (2008),
the National Academy of Sciences’ James Craig Watson Medal (2010),
the American Astronomical Society’s Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (2010),
the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society (2012),
the Schwarzschild Medal of the Astronomische Gesellschaft (German Astronomical Society, 2014),
and six honorary degrees from various universities.