Kate Meredith’s personal Big Bang came when she was asked to teach a high school class on astronomy. The experience blew open her picture of herself as an educator, reordered her internal universe, and created new worlds to explore.

Initially, the request to teach an astronomy class gave her pause. She’d taught earth science to teens for several years already in California and northern Wisconsin. But astronomy, as she saw it, was outside her purview.

“I knew the phases of the moon,” she laughs. “I could tell you a few of the constellations. But I was never one to stay up and look at the stars. I did earth science.”

That changed when one of her former science instructors, who’d become a cherished colleague in the middle school in Sturgeon Bay, WI, asked Kate a favor. He was building an observatory on the school property and wanted to see students at the high school using the facility. Would she be willing to teach the astronomy class at the high school for him and bring students to use the observatory?

With GLAS co-founder Deb Kaelbli at Yerkes Observatory

Kate agreed and began exploring her new subject. She studied with a retired professor from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She learned to use a telescope. And she began making frequent visits to the famous Yerkes Observatory on the shores of Lake Geneva in Williams Bay to attend professional development workshops. Founded in 1892 and owned by the University of Chicago Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Yerkes Observatory has been called “the birthplace of modern astrophysics.” Its giant refracting telescope, still the largest in the world and an extraordinary technological accomplishment at the time, has attracted three Nobel Laureates plus visits by Edwin Hubble (namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope) and Albert Einstein.

Yet what most impressed Kate was not the historic setting but the effect she saw astronomy having on her students.

“Astronomy can hook kids like nothing else,” she says. “It’s this amazing entry point. It connects so many areas—art, engineering, computer science, all these technical fields. And if someone comes in with a sense of ‘I don’t understand science’ or ‘I’m not good at this,’ astronomy is a beautiful place for overcoming those beliefs.”

Gradually Kate found herself getting more and more involved in the field. Astronomy became her focus—so much so that when the education director at Yerkes stepped down, Kate stepped in. She was an enthused, vibrant presence in an institution freighted with tradition. Then opportunity dimmed. In 2018, the University of Chicago announced that it was closing the observatory. Undaunted, Kate and her team decided to start a nonprofit and continue their educational programming as a new entity—GLAS, short for Geneva Lakes Astrophysics and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics). She is dedicated to continuing to advocate for change, wherever she is.

“A lot of the science fields have traditionally skewed toward men,” says Kate. “When I went to astronomy conferences 15 years ago, it was mostly white males in shirts with pocket protectors. Now you see lots more women and more people of color getting involved. And I think, as we’re seeing more diversity, we’re also seeing more creativity, more energy.”

Plus, there is yet another frontier in astronomy education that Kate wants to keep exploring—accessibility. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Kate and her team developed a program called IDATA, for Innovators Developing Accessible Tools for Astronomy. Now students with impaired vision can also investigate worlds beyond our own. Thanks to computers, it’s possible to interpret astronomical concepts as pure numbers—that is, as digital information. Such information can then be interpreted as physical shapes or sound. Far away galaxies become something we can listen to (not just look at through a telescope) and star brightness or distances become bumps on a graph that we can feel.

One thing Kate loved about the IDATA project was the number of girls who volunteered to get involved. “If you want more women in STEM careers,” she says, “give them work that makes a difference—where they can improve the quality of life. That’s what gets us interested. We don’t just want to solve an interesting technical problem. We want it to help someone.”

At the end of the day, Kate remains passionate about astronomy not just for itself but for the ride it’s given her and others to new worlds.

“Astronomy is like this gorgeous workbench full of wonderful tools,” she says. “And people get to pick up the tools and play with them and build their confidence. And then they get to go out in the world and do the thing they’re called to do to make a difference. Plus,” she laughs, “it’s fun. I mean, have you ever seen someone come out of an observatory depressed?”