Background
Rebecca Elson was born on January 2, 1960, in Montreal, Canada. She was the daughter of John Albert and Jeanne Bridgman Elson. She had an older sister, Sally.
Northampton, MA 01063, United States
In 1980 Rebecca Elson received a bachelor's degree from Smith College.
St Andrews KY16 9AJ, United Kingdom
Rebecca Elson attended the University of St Andrews.
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada
In 1982 Rebecca Elson obtained a Master of Science degree from the University of British Columbia.
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom
In 1986 Rebecca Elson gained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge.
(A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book...)
A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. "Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination," she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.
https://www.amazon.com/Responsibility-Awe-Rebecca-Elson/dp/1784106550/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=A+Responsibility+to+Awe&qid=1598536172&s=books&sr=1-1
2001
Rebecca Elson was born on January 2, 1960, in Montreal, Canada. She was the daughter of John Albert and Jeanne Bridgman Elson. She had an older sister, Sally.
In 1980 Rebecca Elson received a bachelor's degree from Smith College. She attended St. Andrews University. In 1982 Elson obtained a Master of Science degree from the University of British Columbia. In 1986 she gained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Cambridge University.
Rebecca Elson received a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, expecting to work on the first data from the Hubble Space Telescope which was due for launch that year. The Challenger explosion deferred those plans, although she continued to pursue her cluster research by obtaining extensive observations of the globular cluster system in the Large Magellanic Cloud using telescopes in Australia.
During her first year at the Institute, at age 26, she co-authored a definitive article on star clusters for the Annual Reviews in Astronomy and Astrophysics. In 1989, she was the youngest astronomer to serve on a committee of the United States National Academy of Sciences decennial review of the field. That same year, she became a Fellow of the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University, an interdisciplinary center for women scholars.
She returned to Cambridge in 1991 as a member of the research staff of the Institute of Astronomy. Her research in astronomy, which she conducted until her death in 1999, focused on star clusters and stellar populations. Elson’s first poem was published in 1987, and a book of her poetry, A Responsibility to Awe, was published after her death. It also contains portions of her laboratory notes from her work at the Institute of Astronomy and an essay Elson wrote in 1998 titled From Stones to Stars, which describes the development of her interest in science since she was a child. The poems included in A Responsibility to Awe are about astronomy, family, children, cancer, and more.
Her last published poem before her death, "Antidotes to Fear of Death", described giving herself to astronomy, as she had all her life, but ended with her old sense of awe at mortality on earth: "every skull a chrysalis" left behind by bright wings.
(A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book...)
2001Rebecca Elson was a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society and Royal Astronomical Society.
Elson's genuineness and humor made an instant impression. She formed close friendships wherever astronomy or poetry took her, and she had a gift for maintaining them over many years despite geographical distance.
Rebecca Elson loved playing her mandolin, conversing in three languages at once, creating meals. She climbed mountains on three continents, notably surviving an Andean blizzard above 16,000 feet.
Physical Characteristics: Rebecca Elson was twenty-nine when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Quotes from others about the person
"She was both a successful astronomer and a fine poet, as her remarkable book, which brings together both her science and her art, makes clear."
In 1996 Rebecca Elson married Angelo di Cintio, an artist from Italy. The union was a happy one.