Nia Imara

Nia Imara is an American astrophysicist, artist, and activist. Imara was involved in work that deals with galactic mass, star formation and detecting exoplanets. Imara was the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley and was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow in the Future Faculty Leaders program at Harvard University.
Early life and education.
Imara was born in East Oakland, Oakland, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her bachelor's degree from Kenyon College in 2003, majoring in mathematics and physics. While at Kenyon College, she competed on the college's swim team. She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for her postgraduate studies, and in 2010 she became the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics at University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation was on "The Formation and Evolution of Giant Molecular Clouds" and was supervised by Leo Blitz.
Career.
From 2014 to 2017, Imara was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow in the Future Faculty Leaders program at Harvard University. Her postdoctoral research focused on giant molecular clouds, the birth sites of stars, and the properties and cosmological effects of galactic and intergalactic dust. She used the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, to conduct her research.
In 2017, she was appointed as the John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow and the Harvard FAS Dean's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Imara works with the Banneker Institute at Harvard, and is a member of the Breakthrough Starshot research team. Her work investigates the structure and evolution of stellar nurseries in both the Milky Way Galaxy and other galaxies throughout the universe, and she has developed a model that connects galaxy mass, star formation rates and dust temperatures.
Together with Rosanne Di Stefano, Imara has proposed a method for detecting exoplanets in X-ray binary star systems.
In Fall 2020, Imara joined the faculty in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 
Art.
Imara is a self-taught painter whose primary medium is oil on canvas. From 2011 to 2014 she exhibited her work, along with the work of other artists local to the San Francisco Bay Area, at her gallery named "First Love" in Oakland, California.
In 2015 Imara presented an art exhibit titled "Lumiphilia" and began a multi-media project titled "Generation of Oakland: The People's Portrait", in her hometown of Oakland, California. The "Generation of Oakland" project used interviews and photographs to examine the impact of gentrification on Oakland residents and their families. These interviews with people affected by gentrification, accompanied by their photographs, are viewable online at GenerationOfOakland.com.
Activism.
Imara is an advocate for equity in STEM. She founded the Equity and Inclusion Journal Club at Harvard University in 2018 which was originally co-organized with Dr. Anna Pancoast. She has visited South Africa and Ghana to teach and advocate in programs designed to increase diversity in astronomy and other STEM areas.