Aomawa Shields, PhD, author portrait
© Steven Meckler

Aomawa Shields, PhD

Aomawa Shields is an astronomer, an astrobiologist, the Clare Boothe Luce Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, and a classically-trained actor. She was named a 2015 TED Fellow and is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a NASA Habitable Worlds program grant, among others. She is the founder and director of Rising Stargirls, a program dedicated to encouraging girls of all colors and backgrounds to learn, explore, and discover the universe using theater, writing, and visual art. She lives with her husband and daughter in South­ern California.
Life on Other Planets

Books

Life on Other Planets

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2024-25

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2024-25 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 340 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2024-25. We will continue to update this

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2025 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2025! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about science, technology, history, student success, the environment, public health, and current events, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through the pages,

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