Virginia Trimble: A Scholar of the Past Guiding the Future

I have had the pleasure of working with Professor Virginia Trimble on a variety of projects over the past several years, getting to know her both as a mentor and as a person. Our first project together mapped the history of papers concerning Newton's gravitational constant to understand the difficulty of finding a more precise value, even with international collaboration. After publishing our results, we started another project, this time related to exploring diversity within the astrophysics community. We decided to look at the correlation of time from submission to acceptance of astronomical papers for men versus women lead authors. We found that on average, in the years 1998 and 2018, there was a 2-week difference in elapsed time from submission to acceptance for male versus female first authored papers. Working with Professor Trimble on different projects allowed me to explore the interdisciplinary nature of astrophysics and gave me the confidence and direction to explore my newfound research interests. Now, as a graduate student at Caltech, I am deeply appreciative of the immense support I've received throughout my academic journey from Professor Trimble. With her mentorship, I learned how to be an independent researcher, advocate for myself, and communicate my scientific interests.