A High Energy Life! My path through Chemistry, Astrophysics and Rocket Science and ….

My path through Chemistry, Astrophysics and Rocket Science into STEM Education with help from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Swift missions and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (https://universe.sonoma.edu/~lynnc/).

Lynn Cominsky is an award-winning Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Sonoma State University (SSU), where she has been on the faculty for over 35 years. She received a Ph.D. in Physics from MIT in 1981, and a B.S. magna cum laude in Physics from Brandeis University in 1975. Cominsky is an author on over 225 research papers in refereed journals. She was chair of the physics and astronomy department from 2004 to 2019; she briefly also chaired the department of chemistry from August 2005 to January 2007 and Fall semester 2018.

Cominsky is also a scientific co-investigator on the Fermi, Swift NuSTAR missions, and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. From 2012-2014, the SSU E/PO group developed an educator’s guide for the NuSTAR mission.
Cominsky’s group also led the Education and Public Outreach team for the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, launched on November 20, 2004. In 2003, Cominsky assumed the lead for the outreach effort for the US portion of the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite.