Nia Imara

Imara was born in East Oakland, Oakland, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.[2] She attended Kenyon College for her bachelor's degree, majoring in mathematics and physics.[2] She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for her postgraduate studies, and in 2010 she became the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics at University of California, Berkeley.[2] Her dissertation was on The Formation and Evolution of Giant Molecular Clouds and was supervised by Leo Blitz.[3]

Imara was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow on the Future Faculty Leaders program at Harvard University.[4][5] In 2017 she was appointed a John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.[6] She has developed a model that connects galaxy mass, star formation rates and dust temperatures.[7]

Together with Roseanne Di Stefano, Imara has proposed a method for detecting exoplanets in X-ray binary star systems.[8]

Imara is also an artist whose primary medium is oil on canvas.[9] In 2014, she opened her own gallery, First Love.[10]

In 2015 she held a series of exhibitions in Oakland called Generation of Oakland: The People's Portrait, looking at the impact of gentrification on Oakland resident's families.[1][9][11] From 2016 to 2019, these interviews with and photographs of the people affected by gentrification were online at GenerationOfOakland.com.[12][13]

She is an advocate for equity in STEM, co-founding the Equity and Inclusion Journal Club at Harvard University.[14] She has visited South Africa[15] and Ghana[16] to teach and advocate in programs designed to increase diversity in astronomy and other STEM areas.[15][16]

• Official website