A woman who is working at Nasa has spoken of how inspired she was by the appointment of Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock as her former university's chancellor. Dr Aderin-Pocock, who presents The Sky at Night, took on the role at the University of Leicester this month. Naomi Rowe-Gurney, 32, a former student at the university, said she had been inspired by Dr Aderin-Pocock's career. "I couldn't believe a black woman was on TV talking about space science," she said. Dr Rowe-Gurney, who is originally from Newbury in Hampshire, is on a two-year contract as a post-doctoral research scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington. She said she had been "in love" with space science from an early age after a school trip to the London Planetarium. "When I found out about space, I was about five years old," she said. "When I realised we're on just one planet out of many planets and rotating around a star, it all just, you know, kind of blew my tiny little mind. "Ever since then I was really interested in deep space and black holes in cosmology, before I moved into planetary science." She said that, as a black girl who loved science, coming across Dr Aderin-Pocock presenting the BBC's The Sky At Night had been "amazing". "It was really an inspiration to see her there, and then I got the chance to meet her as well, in Leicester, when she was filming one of her episodes and, like a proper nerd, I asked her to sign my calculator," she said. "I've still got it somewhere and I treasure it." She said she had also been inspired by friends and family members when she was growing up, including one of her aunts who had done a physics degree. "I had a lot of role models growing up," she said. "So that was a real key part in my success." She said that although she had found the US very diverse, Nasa itself was less so but she was being mentored by senior black... |