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 has been working on a variety of
Chandra and Hubble projects to study
the effects of metallicty on the formation of X-ray binaries,
including a Cycle 11 Large Chandra Project to study
Ultra-Luminous X-ray Sources (ULX) in extremely metal poor 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) and the connection between ULX and Lyman Alpha
emission in blue compact dwarf galaxies.
Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) Activities
Andrea works in the Director's Office at the Chandra X-ray Center.
From 2010 to 2014 she was coordinator of the NASA-Einstein
Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and is currently responsible for
organizing the Chandra Peer Review.