Sarah
Gallagher is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and
Astronomyat the
University of Western
Ontario. Prior to that, she was an Assistant Research Astronomer
at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2006, she
completed a
Spitzer Postdoctoral Fellowshipentitled Understanding
Quasar Outflows: Evolution or Orientation? Her research focuses
on investigating the nature of winds from luminous quasars (accreting
supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies) using
observatories covering the infrared to the X-ray, including two of
NASA's Great Observatories, Spitzerand Chandra. Gallagher received
her Ph.D. in Astronomy and
Astrophysicsfrom Penn Statewhere she was also a member of the Chandra ACIS Instrument
team. Her thesis, entitled The View through the Wind: X-ray
Observations of Broad Absorption Line Quasars, incorporated X-ray
data from three observatories: ROSAT,ASCA,and Chandra. Gallagher spent a year at MITworking with the Chandra
X-ray gratings
groupbefore going to UCLA in 2003. Before graduate school, she
was an undergraduate at Yale
Universityand a Physics teacher for two years at the Holderness Schoolwhere she also
coached soccer, ran a girls' dormitory, and led winter camping trips.