Attending an all-girls school encouraged Maura McLaughlin, PhD, an astronomy professor at West Virginia University, to pursue a career in science.

“I think it’s a big part of why I’m a scientist today,” Dr. McLaughlin told Upper School students, faculty and staff during the Anne Sophie Laumont ’99 Lecture. “I think being at an all-girls school really let me have the freedom to think about doing whatever I wanted to do.”

 

In high school, Dr. McLaughlin said she was interested in a variety of things—from the oboe to science fiction to veterinary medicine. However, reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes in her junior year changed her life and jumpstarted her passion in astronomy. At Penn State, Dr. McLaughlin took her first astronomy class and asked her professor if she could help with research; she ended up spending a summer researching pulsars—dense, rotating stars—in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

 

This led Dr. McLaughlin to get her PhD in astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University, then she continued her postdoc research at Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom. Around a decade ago, she was hired at West Virginia University where she helped build a robust astronomy program alongside her husband. 

 

Dr. McLaughlin’s research revolves around neutron stars and their environments through radio, X-ray and gamma-ray observations. The stars she studies have run out of fuel and collapsed, creating an explosion called a supernova. The core of the star compresses and becomes a solid ball of neutrons, which Dr. McLaughlin compared to around the size of New York City. Pulsars have a mass of greater the sun, rotate very rapidly—up to 700 hertz—and emit beams of emission most often detected at radio wavelengths.

 

Pulsars’ rotation periods are extremely consistent, so astronomers know that if there are changes to the rotation periods, that means that massive objects have distorted space time and created gravitational waves. Dr. McLaughlin uses the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, as well as the telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to study around 60 pulsars and find correlated curvatures between the two telescopes due to colliding galaxies—a detection she estimates they will find in the next five years or so. (LIGO observed gravitational waves for the first time in 2015.) This research is not just happening here in the United States; there are telescopes and teams around the world working to collect data on pulsars and gravitational wave astronomy.

 

One thing Dr. McLaughlin said she is passionate about is getting students abroad to do research on gravitational waves and pulsars, and she encouraged Spence students who are interested in science to talk to her about this opportunity. She emphasized that learning new languages and cultures are important because of the global nature of the work.

 

“This is the way science is going,” Dr. McLaughlin said. “Everything is heading toward these larger, international collaborations.”

 

She also said that students don’t have to wait until they are in college to participate in this research. Over 2,000 high school students from 18 states have participated in pulsar searching with the Pulsar Search Collaboratory with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and those students have helped discover seven new pulsars.

 

Dr. McLaughlin shared some career advice with the Spence students, including that there is room for all types of people in science.

 

“I think when I was in high school, I thought in order to do science, you needed to be like Albert Einstein,” Dr. McLaughlin said. “You needed to have brilliant thoughts all the time, and you needed to be interested in nothing else but science, and that is not true. If you like science and you have a passion for it, you can do it. We need people who are creative, who are good writers, good communicators. We need all types of people in science.”

 

She also stressed that being a scientist doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your life. Dr. McLaughlin has a husband and three kids, she still plays the oboe and she enjoys the flexibility of having a job that is not strictly 9-5. Her last piece of advice was that each student should create her own definition of success. She didn’t think she would be using a telescope in West Virginia when she was a high school student in the Philadelphia suburbs, but that’s where she has landed.

 

“Be open to opportunities as they come along,” she advised.

 

In her introduction of Dr. McLaughlin, Head of School Bodie Brizendine talked about how this lecture honored Anne Sophie Laumont ’99, a young woman Brizendine described as extraordinary.

 

“I never knew Sophie, but I know from her classmates and family that she was a vibrant, extraordinary young woman who had a gift for the written word and passion for knowledge,” Brizendine said. “Sophie’s courageous spirit and her broad embrace of life and learning still remain inspirations for us all.”