Rachael Beaton
Board Member, 2022
Dr. Rachael Beaton is an Assistant Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and an Associate Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on determining the fundamental properties of the Universe through our understanding of stars and stellar populations in the local Universe. At STScI, Dr. Beaton is a part of the Science Operations Center for the Nancy G. Roman Space Telescope. She received her Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of Virginia (UVa), where she was a Jefferson Scholars Foundation Graduate Fellow. Her dissertation received the Robert C. Trumpler Award from the ASP in 2016 and the All-University Teaching Award for her work in observational astronomy courses. While at UVa, she was a founding member of the "Dark Skies, Bright Kids" program. She founded a program that provided research project mentoring for high-school students at the Central Virginia Governor's School for Science and Technology.
After earning her Ph.D., Dr. Beaton worked for three years as a postdoc at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science before starting a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Carnegie-Princeton Fellowship at Princeton University. Dr. Beaton served as the co-Chair of the Science Working Group for the Apache Point Galactic Evolution Experiment in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-IV from 2017 to 2021 and as co-Chair of the Committee on INclusiveness in SDSS- IV from 2019 to 2022. Dr. Beaton is the chair of the Stars Science Interest Group within the Cosmic Origins Program Analysis Group for NASA. She serves on the NASA ExtraGalactic Database User's Committee.
