Isabel Hawkins

Isabel Hawkins (she/her/ella) grew up in Córdoba, Argentina, where the beauty of the night sky and a childhood visit to the Planetario charted the course of her career as an astronomer and science educator. Reaching for the stars, Isabel came to the United States as an American Field Service exchange student when she was sixteen. In 1981, she received a BS in physics from UC Riverside, where she was asked to join Phi Beta Kappa. Subsequently, she obtained an MS and a PhD in astrophysics from UCLA. Before joining the Exploratorium in 2009, she spent 20 years as an astrophysics researcher and science educator at the University of California, Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory. Isabel’s work at the Exploratorium is focused on NASA, NSF, and museum-funded efforts related to Latinx audience engagement, such as Solar Eclipse, GENIAL: Generating Engagement and New Initiatives for All Latinos, and Cambio, a professional development approach for building Latinx-focused cultural competence in museums. Through cultural astronomy, she fosters science pluralism by making visible The Cultural Roots of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), a research synthesis effort that has been funded by the NSF. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific bestowed on her the prestigious Klumpke-Roberts Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy, an honor that she shares with fellow awardees Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Julieta Fierro, and Tim Ferris, among others. Isabel is also a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution, a volunteer coordinator for the YAKANAL, Indigenous Youth Cultural Exchange program, and a 2018 to 2022 Fulbright US Global Scholar. Her interests include salsa and bachata dancing, yoga, drawing Maya classic period glyphs, and the study of native languages