Priya Desai
UC Berkeley - Space Sciences Lab

I have been fascinated with the stars since my childhood and remember the night I decided to be an astronomer. I spent my childhood in a remote part of India where the night skies were very clear. Power outages were common and star gazing became a favorite activity. One such night I was sitting outside in the balcony and staring at the sky. My dad casually said to me “Do you realize that the nearest star to us is about 4 light years away –that means it has taken the light of that star 4 years to reach us!" He went on to say, "Most of the other stars are hundreds of light years away, which means that what you are seeing now is what they looked like hundreds of years ago. You are actually looking into the past!” I still remember trying to make sense what he said, it was so incredible to me think that I was actually looking back in time -and that the further out we could see; the further back in time we could see.

Sometime when I was 9 or 10, I had decided that I wanted to grow up and “study the stars” and read everything I could lay my hands on. I joined an astronomy club and  we would go for “star parties” where I learned to identify constellations, and watch the stars rise and set (like the sun). In grade school, my favorite subjects were Science and Geography. I graduated from University of Poona, India with a B.S. (honors) in Physics. I went on do my Masters also in Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Soon after that I met my future husband and we attended graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin.

Later, we moved to Boston and I started working at the Chandra X-Ray Center which is part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophyiscs in Cambridge, MA. I was part of the Emission Line Project (ELP) whose primary goal is to produce a catalog of observed spectral x-ray lines. I spent a lot of time studying spectra from stars similar to the sun. 

In August of 2007, my family decided to move to sunny California and now I work at Space Science Labs, Berkeley. I have two kids – (elementary and middle school) and enjoy talking science with school age kids. In addition, I also give talks, presentations and workshops at schools (http://starrystarrynite.com) and have been a member of Project Astro.

I also enjoy reading, painting, hiking , gardening and cooking!