Catherine Asaro - Biography

Biography

Catherine Asaro was born in Oakland, California and grew up in El Cerrito, California. She has a Ph.D. in chemical physics and an A.M. in physics, both from Harvard University, and a B.S. with highest honors in chemistry from UCLA. She attended Kennedy High School in Richmond, California as part of the Richmond Voluntary Integration Plan.

When not writing and making appearances at conventions and signings, Asaro teaches math, physics, and chemistry. She has coached various nationally ranked teams with home, private, and public school students, in particular the Howard Area Homeschoolers and the Chesapeake team for national tournaments such as the American Regions Mathematics League (ARML). Her students have placed at the top levels in numerous national competitions, including the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) and the United States of America Mathematical Talent Search (USAMTS).

Asaro is a member of SIGMA, a think tank of speculative writers that advises the government as to future trends affecting national security. She is also a visiting professor in the Physics Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

A former ballet and jazz dancer, Catherine Asaro has performed with dance companies and in musicals on both coasts and in Ohio. She founded and served as artistic director and a principal dancer for two dance groups at Harvard: The Mainly Jazz Dance Company and the Harvard University Ballet. After she graduated, her undergraduate students took over Mainly Jazz and made it into a club at the college. She has completed two terms as president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) (2003–2005). Her husband is John Kendall Cannizzo, an astrophysicist at NASA. They have one daughter, a ballet dancer who studied maths at the University of Cambridge.

Catherine Asaro is the daughter of Frank Asaro, the nuclear chemist who discovered the iridium anomaly that led the team of Luis Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel to postulate that an asteroid collided with the Earth 65 million years ago and caused mass extinctions, including the demise of the dinosaurs.