Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin
Michelle Lynn Thaller
NASA astrophysicist and science communicator; born and raised in Waukesha
$183,500
Michelle Lynn Thaller is the Waukesha-raised NASA astrophysicist who became one of the country's most familiar explainers of deep space. Some kids wanted ponies; she wanted the sky. Her mother says there was never a time she was not pointing at stars. Carl Sagan's Cosmos arrived when she was about ten and never left her Waukesha South High School locker. Her father taught geography at the local college and drove her to Yerkes Observatory, home to the world's largest refracting telescope, and she haunted the Milwaukee Public Museum until it felt like a second house; her tenth birthday party was held there. She graduated from Waukesha South in 1988, studied astrophysics at Harvard, and earned a Ph.D. at Georgia State on colliding winds in massive binary stars. Spitzer education and outreach work at Caltech and JPL followed. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center she served as assistant director for science communication, tasked with helping four science divisions speak clearly to the public and to one another. She became a patient, funny presence on How the Universe Works, the rare NASA scientist who can make dark matter feel like a dinner-table story. The Waukesha claim is birth, childhood, and high school. She has told Milwaukee television crews that she still feels deep gratitude for growing up there, and she continues to call the town home in interviews.