Past Events

Back in 2020, my life was heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic as a new mother and an early career scientist –– lost childcare, dropped productivity, disconnection from colleagues, and a tough job market. While rebuilding my research and life routines in the next 2 years, I couldn’t stop wondering: how were others in my field affected by the pandemic –– am I alone? Together with Vanessa Böhm, then a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and a fellow computational cosmologist, we set off to answer this question using public data from ADS. We studied the history of publishing rates in astronomy by gender and country, and the impact of the pandemic on those rates. In this informal talk, I will present our key findings. I also hope to connect with the audience and understand the individual journeys behind the statistics we saw. The detailed analysis and results can be found in this Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01830-9