VERA C. RUBIN

Vera C. Rubin (b. 1928 in Philadelphia) is Senior Fellow at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. degree at Vassar College (1948), her Master's at Cornell University (1951), and her Ph.D. at Georgetown University (1954). She stayed on at Georgetown University until 1965, when she moved to the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. She is most famous for her results, in the 1970s, indicating that most of our Universe is dark matter. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1981), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1982), the American Philosophical Society (1995), and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (1996). She received the U.S. National Medal of Science (1993); the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (London) (1996 — the second woman; Caroline Herschel was the first in 1828); the Weizmann Women and Science Award (1996), the Peter Gruber International Cosmology Prize (2002), the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (2003), and the Watson Medal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2004). She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, from Harvard, Yale, and Smith College, among others. We recorded our conversation in her office at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism on May 16, 2000. There was a follow-up to our conversation in writing in May, 2004.