Future Astronomer Reaches for Stars

Though she’d never flown in an airplane before, Shazrene S. Mohamed ’04 had one destination in mind when she left Zimbabwe and headed for Harvard in September 2000: outer space.

She planned to study astronomy, go on to work for NASA and eventually become the first African astronaut in space.

Now, as a Rhodes Scholarship recipient, Mohamed is one step closer to making her dream a reality. She will head to Oxford this fall to pursue a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

Though many of her interests have remained the same, Mohamed says she’s changed quite a bit from her first days at Harvard.

“I had never used a computer before. My first Expos paper was a disaster,” she recalls with a smile. “I accidentally deleted it and ended up in tears in my preceptor’s office.”

She credits her thesis advisor, Willson Professor of Astronomy Patrick Thaddeus, with helping her adjust to life in America and find an academic niche.

“I never at all felt like I was a lab rat,” she says, pointing to the numerous opportunities she had to engage in significant research projects early on in her undergraduate career.

Last year, Mohamed, a math and astronomy concentrator, received the Leo Goldberg prize for the best astrophysics junior thesis.

“I spotted her immediately as being lively and intelligent and asking good questions,” says Thaddeus, who first met Mohamed in one of his seminars. “She is one of the most impressive students in overall terms I’ve ever had. She’s just a gem.”

When she wasn’t doing laboratory research herself, working as a dorm crew captain, or dancing in the Gumboots dance troupe, Mohamed was eager to share her love of astronomy. An active member of Student Astronomers at Harvard-Radcliffe (STAHR), Mohamed taught classes for Harvard students and affiliates on how to use the 10-inch refractor telescope housed in the Loomis-Michael Observatory on top of the Science Center.

“Harvard students are so spoiled and so lucky to have their own telescope,” she says. “This year was really great. I saw a lot of planets.”

After four years of life at Harvard, Mohamed has realized that the lens of a telescope may be as close as she ever gets to examining a planet’s surface.

She would have to become an American citizen in order to be an astronaut for NASA, which Mohamed says is an unlikely prospect. And though she also studied Russian here with the hope of joining the Russian space program, their citizenship criteria will likely also keep her from entering outer space.

But after her extensive laboratory work here, Mohamed says her desire to become an astronaut has dwindled. “With the money that they spend on that, they could do so much [more laboratory research],” she says.

Though she has only returned to Zimbabwe twice since her freshman year, Mohamed says she hopes to retire in her home country.

“I would like to grow old there,” she says. “I tell my friends, you fix the government, and then I will come and start a space program.”

But Mohamed is quick to point out that her country’s problems far outweigh the need for space exploration.

“If you have six million people starving, you don’t really need a space program,” she says, explaining that she also took pre-med courses when she began her studies at Harvard in the hope that she could return home to help.

Though the prospects of developing a Zimbabwean space program in the near future may be dim, Mohamed doesn’t have to think twice about what she’d do if she did become an astronaut.

“As a serious scientist, of course I would do experiments,” she says with a chuckle. “Otherwise I’d just be floating around. I’d like to go bounce on a planet or two. A lot of my friends say I should write their names on the moon.”

—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@post.harvard.edu