I couldn’t have become an astronomer alone

I couldn’t have become an astronomer alone

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Brenda Namumba, who showed her doctorate, had not turned from teaching in a high school to become an astronomer without granting and encouragement she received. Credit: Brenda Namumba

Radio in Africa

In 2005, when South Africa and its partner countries in Africa submitted a proposal to host the largest radio telescope in the world, which is called the SKA, the continent had five tools for Radio, all based in South Africa. That year, the country began a targeted program to develop human capital to develop the talents needed to build, operate and use radio telescopes, which collect radio signals emitted from heavenly things. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of its founding this year, the government, funded by the government, established 5 job chair positions and more than 1,370 scholarships for university studies, masters, doctorate and post-PhD-at a total cost of about 500 million Rand (28 million US dollars).

Now, SKA is under construction. It will have more than 100,000 tree -like antennas in Australia and about 200 dish antennas in South Africa. South Africa owns many radio telescopes, and there are hundreds of sponsors and Radiostrongy students in African universities and institutions.

nature’The S Careers team spoke to officials and scientists working to enhance the ability of radiation in Africa, partly through the Astronomy Observatory in South Africa. In the last short series of articles achieved in the growth of discipline on the continent, Brenda Namumba, who was the first woman to obtain a doctorate in astronomical physics in Zambia, talks about how networks build her career.

I only discovered astronomy in 2009, as a university student studying physics, when she encountered an international conference on space science and astronomy at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. This was the first time that I heard about young people who study space science and astronomy at the level of master’s or doctorate. At that time, I did not meet anyone from Zambia as a master’s degree in physics.

At the meeting, I interacted with well -known scientists and graduate students, who told me about their research and what they wanted to do in the future. We continued to contact and helped some of them apply for scholarships and explain how to write a personal statement.

“I did not know that someone could follow astronomy as a profession.”

The conference made me decided to continue my studies, and I applied for many scholarships while working as a teacher of physics and mathematics at high school. Ultimately, in 2012, I was accepted in the South African astronomical physics and space science program as a university student at the University of Cape Town (UCT). This scholarship program, which was established in 2003, has supported more than 300 Honours Megree and more than 140 master’s candidates.

Various astronomy

The program presented me to the idea that astronomers can benefit from a group of electromagnetic wavelengths. In 2012, there was a lot of talk about the exciting science that would happen with SKA. This was the year in which the telescope was divided between South Africa and Australia. South Africa built the Kat-7-DISH radio telescope, which was the test of the Meerkat 64-DISH, which will eventually form part of SKA. I wanted to be at the forefront of answering some of the interesting questions that make these radio tools be treated.

One topic in particular caught my attention. During my honor, I took a course in astronomy outside the external in which the lecturer (who later became a doctorate supervisor) spoke about dwarfs. At that time, they were not explored in great detail with visual telescopes because they are faded and difficult to discover, and the situation was worse in radio wavelengths. But the new generation of tools, such as the Kat-7, was more suitable for exploring its structure and characteristics to understand the development of Galaxy. The South African Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) funded a master’s degree at the University of Kawazolo Natal in Derban in 2013, and the doctorate took place in UCT in 2015, then the first post -PhD at the University of Rhodes in McKandra from 2019 to 2022.

Network power

Sarao gave me this great opportunity, and it was not only about my academic qualifications. I managed to attend conferences all over the world, which gave me a different mentality related to how people are researching, as well as confidence in presenting my work. For example, at the Sarao Postgraduate conference and postdocateal Research Conference, the organizers, who direct the SARAO employees and university researchers around South Africa, direct us to how to present our work and interact with colleagues and experts.

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