Personal Stories
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue19 1–31 August 2021
It probably comes as no surprise to hear that I was born in the USA – Georgia, in fact. When I was born my parents were young, poor students in Atlanta, struggling to make ends meet. My mother went back into her classes at the Atlanta College of Art shortly after my birth and I spent my formative years in and out of art studios. When I was five my family moved from Atlanta to Portland, Oregon arriving on the day that Mt St Helens erupted. We saw the eruption from the airplane and landed into a landscape of grey ash. My mother was pretty sure that she had landed in hell. Portland of the 1980’s was a great place to grow up. I took a liking to baseball when I was 7 and played Little League until I was 13. I was the only girl on most of my teams and after one slightly difficult year my dad volunteered to be one of the coaches, which definitely kept the boys in line. I have extremely fond memories of being the only girl, in a supportive environment, which probably prepared me for this career.
I was always keen on maths. My mom used to give me math workbooks to keep me occupied while she was in the art studio working on her Masters degree. I have a particularly strong memory of doing long division on the fogged-up windows of our Datsun 510 car on a rainy (it was always rainy!) winter day. I loved every aspect of maths except until I got to high school and we had to do proofs. I never could understand the point of “proving” something that someone else had already proved. Shortly thereafter I took physics and realised that I could apply all that math and my world opened up!
But physics wasn’t my only academic love. I attended a public high school in Portland with an International Studies focus where I had been learning and loving French. My first international trip was to France on a high school exchange program for a month when I was 16. With interests in Physics, French, and International Studies I approached the end of high school with no strong sense of what I wanted to study at University. I decided to apply to various of the US Liberal Arts Colleges, where I knew I could pursue any area of interest. I opted to go to Oberlin College primarily because they offered me the largest scholarship package. I tripped my way through my early University years before landing squarely in physics as the only woman in the major.
During my final year at Oberlin I was offered the opportunity to come with one of my professors, Dan Stinebring, to Australia during his sabbatical at CSIRO in Sydney. I declined due to financial pressure but my parents managed to magic-up some money and I spent 6 months doing research on pulsar scintillation at CSIRO and Sydney Uni. It was amazing! I was totally hooked on astronomy research and decided to apply for PhD programs including at the University of Minnesota, which was the institute of another visiting professor, John Dickey. I also applied to the big-name Universities, but I am terrible at exams and my Graduate Record Exam (GRE) score killed my chances. I was even told by the graduate selection panel at one famous US University (which shall not be named) that women have a lot of trouble getting into their program because they tend to score lower on the GRE.
I did go to the University of Minnesota for my PhD and it turns out that exam scores and research performance are not necessarily correlated. I finished my PhD two years ahead of schedule (taking 4 yrs instead of the average 6). I applied for two postdocs, got them both and migrated to Australia with my cat for a 3-yr Bolton Fellowship at CSIRO in Sydney. I ended up staying at CSIRO for the next 13 years. I settled into life in Sydney, got a long-anticipated dog, married another astronomer, and gave birth to our daughter Madeleine in 2009. Once I became a parent the Sydney life lost a lot of its charm and I was very pleased to move to Canberra in 2015 to take up my current position as a Professor at ANU. We moved here with 1 cat, 1 dog and about 10,000 worms from our backyard worm farm. We love Canberra life for the proximity to nature and have expanded our family to include 4 hens and another few thousand worms, all living happily together in Turner.
Naomi McClure-Griffiths
