Sitting among a diverse and venerable group of Americans from every walk of life on the dais in the East Room of the White House on May 3 was lesbian and NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, awaiting her turn to be honored by President Joe Biden who would bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, on her.
Rigby, an astronomer who grew up in Delaware, is the chief scientist of the world’s most powerful telescope who alongside her team operating NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, studies every phase in the history of the universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of the solar system.
A member of Penn State’s Class of 2000, Rigby graduated with a bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy. She also holds a master’s degree and a PhD in astronomy from at the University of Arizona. Her work as the senior project scientist for NASA’s Webb Telescope includes studies on how galaxies evolve over cosmic time and she has published more than 140 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Rigby was named to Nature.com’s 2022 list of 10 individuals who shaped science and to the BBC’s list of 100 inspiring and influential women in the same year. Rigby had postdoctoral fellowships at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., before landing her job at Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2013 Rigby was awarded the Robert H. Goddard Award for Exceptional Achievement for Science.
A founding member of the American Astronomical Society’s Working Group on LGBTQ Equality in January 2012, now called the Committee for Sexual Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy, Rigby serves as its Board Liaison until her term expires this June.
The lesbian astrophysicist in an interview for SGMA’s website spoke about her experiences including coming out:
“I’ve been out since 2000. My story’s simple — I fell in love with a fellow grad student in the department. It was a close-knit department, so hiding would have been ludicrous. Nor did I want to hide the best thing in my life! So, we were out as grad students. I certainly heard people say awful homophobic things at work there. They weren’t directed at me, and they weren’t said by people with power over me. If I recall, I was much less afraid of homophobic discrimination at work, than I was afraid of the two-body problem, and the lack of support we would receive as a same-sex couple in astronomy. That fear turned out to be justified. I’ve seen numerous different-sex couples get a wide range of support in solving the two-body problem, which was never offered to us,” she told the interviewer.
She reflected on American astronaut and physicist Sally Ride, her childhood role model who had an impact on her career:
“One of my biggest role models when I was young was Dr. Sally Ride. A few years ago, on her deathbed, Dr. Ride chose to write in her obituary that her life partner had been a woman. Dr. Ride was the most influential woman scientist when I was growing up — the person that made me say, “I want to do THAT when I grow up.” It was because of her that I realized that astrophysics was a profession, that physics was a subject girls could study, that NASA needed astrophysicists. So I’m so … amused, I suppose, that Sally Ride was this influence on my life’s path, at a time when I was completely unaware that it was even possible to *be gay* — and at the same time, she was gay, in love, and deeply closeted to keep her job.”
The interviewer noted that “for some women being gay is a cause for concern at the work place. Some say they were unsure about how to turn their sexual orientation into a positive aspect of their work persona.” Then asked Rigby what is your view on this?
“My experience is that absolutely I am a *better* astronomer because I’m queer. For a few reasons. First, I see things different than my colleagues. On mission work, as we weigh a decision, my first thought is always the community impact: ‘If we do things this way, who benefits, and who gets left out in the cold?’ Will this policy create inclusion, or marginalization? I think about science in terms of community-building. What team do we need to tackle a given science problem, with skills that are different from mine? Absolutely I think that way because I’m an outsider, because I’ve been marginalized. And because community-building is central to LGBTQ culture,” she said.
Editor’s note: You can read Rigby’s complete SGMA interview here: (Link)
Married to Dr. Andrea Leistra, Rigby, her wife and their young child reside in Maryland not far from her workplace at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Washington and when not studying the universe is often found on the neighboring Chesapeake Bay wind boarding, a favored pastime.
Also honored in the ceremony Friday were a former U.S. vice president, a civil rights worker and martyr, two former Cabinet secretaries — one a former U.S. secretary of state, a speech writer for the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an Olympian and gold medalist, and one of the most powerful woman political leaders and the speaker emeritus of the U.S. House of Representatives, among others, and LGBTQ advocate Judy Shepard.
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