Meet Aomawa Shields, One of 26 Black Women Astrophysicists in America

• Aomawa Shields is one of 26 Black women astrophysicists in America.
• She’s long grappled with her two loves, acting and astronomy, spending 11 years acting before getting her Ph. D. in astrophysics.
• Shields said her acting experience helped her break free of the stereotypes she faced as a woman of color in science.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Dr. Aomawa Shields, an astronomer, astrobiologist, and associate professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine. She is just one of 26 Black women astrophysicists in America. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

My fascination with the sky came at a young age. I remember being younger than 10 years old and going to air shows for the Blue Angels, an aerial flight team at the Miramar Air Force Base in San Diego. My grandmother worked there as a civil servant, and we would go to these shows and see these blue-and-yellow planes.

I would look up at the sky and see these incredible designs they’d make with these planes. I was wowed by what I saw. That led me to start to look up at night. I’d see these tiny pinpoints of light — so many of them — and I began to think about what might be looking back at me. What was out there? How far out did it go?

I also found inspiration in movies I watched as a child. My family loved sci-fi movies and TV shows, and we’d sit around the TV and watch “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Eventually, I watched “Top Gun,” which was filmed at Miramar, and Kelly McGillis’ character Charlotte Blackwood was an astrophysicist. She seemed so stunning. I thought, “If astrophysicists can be like that, that’s what I want to be.”

It wasn’t until I watched the movie “Space Camp” when I was 12 that I started to make plans. It was about these kids that get accidentally launched into space. And I again thought, “That’s what I want to do.” Ever the student, I went to my set of World Book encyclopedias my mother had purchased, pulled out the volume labeled “A,” and looked up “astronomy” and “astronaut” and planned out my entire career trajectory.

I was torn between my dual passions of acting and astronomy

I also acted during my early years, even understudying for a professional production at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse. But I don’t think it had permeated into my consciousness that I could do that for a career. It didn’t have that stellar moment yet.

That came when I got into this prep school — which I largely went to for the observatory they had — and I ended up stumbling into an audition and getting cast in a play. I then did play after play, and it became, “Wow, I love both of these things.” It didn’t seem to be a problem back in high school.

Then it became time for me to choose where I’d go for college. I’d had MIT in the back of my mind for six or seven years. Even though I knew I loved acting, I was very stubborn: This was my path, so I was going to stick with it.

MIT was all-consuming. I spent all my time just on my coursework. I did join an acapella group called The Muses, and thought that was going to be enough. But acting was still there in my mind, and caught up to me in my second or third year, like, “Hey, it’s me! You forgot about me.” So I took acting classes while at MIT as well.

Again, when I got to the end of my time at MIT, I got the message: Choose between astronomy and acting. I applied to the top three acting graduate schools and a Ph. D. program in astrophysics. I didn’t get into the acting schools but got into the Ph. D. program, and took that as a sign. I was desperate to put my future in anyone else’s hands, looking for these signs. I never really thought, “What do I really want to do?”

I struggled as the only Black woman in my Ph. D. program

I was totally primed to take all of that inner conflict into the Ph. D. program. But it didn’t go away simply because I had made a choice. All it took was a little seed of doubt: I’d struggle a little bit in class, and I’d find myself thinking about acting, or what movies were playing.

I started taking acting classics while in grad school. I loved it — no one could tell me I wasn’t good at acting. They could tell me I wasn’t good at astrophysics, but they knew nothing about my acting world. I had some control over that.

There were also external factors I’d internalized: I was the only Black woman in my Ph. D. program. My mind made a story about that. I felt so much pressure to do well, to represent my community. When I had a white male professor who told me I should consider other career options, I took that as confirmation — a sign — that I didn’t belong. I started auditioning, and eventually moved out to Los Angeles and got an MFA in acting.

I think that seeming illusion of control came from the fact that I saw acting as so different from astronomy. It was as if my running to acting, though steeped in a genuine love and interest for that discipline, was running away from a feeling of fear, of not belonging, and of no control that I felt in the sciences.

How I’ve reconciled my two passions

For a long time, I judged the choice I’d made. It felt like I had run away when things got hard, and I didn’t like that. But even as I acted in plays and even hosted a science TV show, my astronomy dreams kept reappearing. I got a day job working for a space telescope called Spitzer, and started to go to astronomy talks again. I also didn’t like hearing about astrophysics discoveries on the news — I wanted to be the one in the labs, making those discoveries.

All the roads were pointing back to a Ph. D. I surrendered to it, and, at 34 years old, applied to a program at the University of Washington.

That time around, I did things differently: I sought out community, like mentorships for Black and brown students and a mental health group for women of color. I ended up finding wonderful mentors who helped me realize my theater background wasn’t something I had to sweep under the rug, but was instead my superpower. 

In acting school, I felt like my identity and uniqueness was valued; they wanted me to share and talk about my feelings and specific background. In science, it’s more objective, with no questions about who I am. But I found that I was able to reconcile both parts in grad school, finding a commonality in the storytelling aspects of both acting and astronomy.

It also released me from the fear of the stereotypes that had informed me as a woman of color in science. This is why our presence is absolutely critical, and why I started Rising Stargirls to encourage other young women of color interested in the universe.

We need a diversity of backgrounds and views. Look at what people were able to achieve with only a fraction of representation of our country at the table. What can we achieve with the full representation of our country at the table? Literally, the sky is not the limit.