Andrea Prestwich was born in Bristol, England in 1962 and has been
interested in astronomy since she was about 5 years old. In 1984 she
graduated from Queen Mary College, London, with a degree in
physics. She completed her PhD in Astrophysics at Imperial College
London in 1989, then accepted a post-doctoral position as a NRC
Resident Research Associate at NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center. In
1991 she moved to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory where she
is a Staff Scientist at the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Andrea lives in Massachusetts with husband Steve Saar (also an
astronomer) and twins Christopher and Katie.
Research
Andrea's PhD thesis (with advisor Bob Joseph) was titled
"Extra-galactic Infra Red Spectrocopy" and included some of the first
measurements of near infrared line emission from external galaxies.
Later as a postdoc at NASA-MSFC she worked on low mass star formation
in cluster cooling flows.
Since the launch of Chandra, Andrea's research has focussed on
understanding X-ray souces in starburst and star forming galaxies.
She has worked on X-ray source classification, understanding the relation
between X-ray emission and star formation activity and Ultra-Luminous
X-ray sources (ULXs). In Chandra Cycle 2 (2000) she was PI
on a Large Project to study the discrete
X-ray source population in spiral
galaxies. More recently, she is PI on Chandra projects to study
the X-ray source population in the ring galaxy NGC 922 and search for
ULX in Extremely Metal Poor Spiral Galaxies. She is also involved
in studies investigating the links between High Mass X-ray Binary
formation and star clusters (with collaborators Rupali Chandar and
Blagoy Rangelov).
Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) Activities
Andrea works in the Director's Office at the Chandra X-ray Center.
She is responsible for maintaining the CXC science website and the CXC HelpDesk. She's also technical
editor of Chandra proposal preparation material (e.g. the Proposer's
Observatory Guide and sometimes responds to Target of Opportunity
requests.