Anne Barbara Underhill


Anne Barbara Underhill FRSC was a Canadian astrophysicist. She is most widely known for her work on early-type stars and was considered one of the world's leading experts in the field. During her lifetime she received many awards or her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics.

Early life

Underhill grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was the only girl of five children born to European immigrants Irene Anna and Frederic Clare Underhill. She was awarded the Lieutenant Governor's medal in high school for her outstanding school performance. She was close with her twin brother and three younger brothers, and helped to raise them following the death of her mother when she was 18. In 1944 her twin brother was killed in World War II.

Education

Underhill graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1942 with a BA Hons in chemistry. She continued her education at the University and received a master's degree in physics and mathematics in 1944. After graduating with her MA she received a substantial scholarship from the Canadian Federation of University Women which enabled her to enroll at the University of Toronto, however she left after a year because the University's astrophysics program was considered weak at that time. She went on to receive her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948 under the supervision of famous astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Her thesis topic was multi-layered stellar atmospheres and contained the first model for this phenomenon.

Work

From 1948 to 1949 she held an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Copenhagen Observatory. In 1949, Underhill accepted a position as a research scientist at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, in Victoria, where she worked until 1962. During this time she was a visiting professor at both Harvard and Princeton universities. While at Princeton she used their computing facilities to write software to model stellar atmospheres. At the DOA she encountered sexism from her male PhD colleagues who limited her responsibilities while giving more to less qualified male coworkers.
In 1962 she unexpectedly received a letter of offer from the Utrecht University in the Netherlands for the position of full professor in astrophysics. She was reluctant to leave Canada so the decision to take the job was not an easy one despite the mistreatment she had experienced by her colleagues. At the Utrecht University she lectured at the graduate level and published The Early Type Stars. In 1970, she received a job offer arrived from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center where she worked until her retirement 15 years later.