Citizenship United States | ||
Thesis In Like a Lamb, Out Like a Lion: Probing the Disk-Jet Connection in Fermi Gamma-Ray Bright Blazars Known for Yale University's first African-American woman to earn a Master's in Astrophysics | ||
Jedidah C. Isler, Ph.D., is an astrophysicist and STEM advocate, and the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Yale University. She has written award-winning studies on blazars and examines the jet streams emanating from them.
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Early life
Isler spent her childhood admiring the stars from her home. It wasn't until she was 12 years old that she discovered the industry of astronomy itself. It was then that Isler sought to study science professionally.
Isler's father left the family shortly before she left for college, sparking financial turmoil that threatened to cut her studies short.
Education
Isler graduated Magna cum Laude with a Bachelor's of Science in Physics at Norfolk State University's Dozoretz National Institute for Math and Applied Sciences (DNIMAS). From there, she became one of the first three student members of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master's-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program, a program designed to increase the number of women and under-represented minorities with advanced STEM degrees. She earned an M.A. in Physics from Fisk University.
She moved on to Yale, where she earned an M.S. in Physics, and later became the first African-American woman in history to earn a Ph.D in astronomy. In 2015, Isler gave a talk on intersectionality in STEM industries and education, noting that:
"...according to Dr. Jamie Alexander's archive of African-American women in physics, only 18 black women in the United States had ever earned a Ph.D. in a physics-related discipline, and that the first black woman to graduate with a Ph.D. in an astronomy-related field did so just one year before my birth."
She was often the only African-American in her classes, and endured years of backhanded comments. In an NPR interview, Isler recalled an exchange with her classmates during her first year at Yale.
"So there are plates everywhere," she recalls. Everyone seemed full and content. "And all of a sudden, this kid in my class hands me a pile of his dirty plates" — the student is a white male — "he just kind of hands them to me and says, 'Here, now go and do what you're really here to do.'"
In 2014, Isler published her doctoral dissertation, In Like a Lamb, Out Like a Lion: Probing the Disk-Jet Connection in Fermi Gamma-Ray Bright Blazars, which earned the Roger Doxsey Dissertation Prize from the American Astronomical Society.
Blazar research
Since July 2015, Isler has served as a Vanderbilt University National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Astronomy and Astrophysics. This fellowship is funded for three years, "enabling her to research blazars and better understand the jets they shoot out nearly at the speed of light".