She watched the Apollo moonflights as a teenager, and later the close-up pictures of the giant planets and their satellites, from flyby missions. Amazed by the accuracy with which humans on Earth could calculate the flight paths of spacecraft, steering them safely to an orbit millions of miles away, she decided to study physics and astronomy. After undergraduate training in applied mathematics at Cambridge University, she went into astronomy as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Her interests focus on the many ways that gravity can act to produce the observed patterns of stars in galaxies. Her hobbies include cooking, quibbling, falling over in ballet class, and staring blankly into the middle distance.
Scientists strive to discover simple rules which underlie complex natural phenomena.
For example, when making a model of some complex object a scientist may make some pretty extreme assumptions. For example, when asked to find the force of gravity produced by a complicated object like a galaxy, astronomers will usually start by assuming that it acts like a sphere, which in this and many other cases allows one to make approximate first solutions to complicated problems. Since Wisconsin is well known to have a large population of dairy cows, it is not too surprising that the University of Wisconsin astronomers and astrophyscists selected this picture of a spherical cow made by Ingrid Kallick as their symbol for a recent national meeting of astronomers in Madison.