Kim Weaver - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Weaver was born in Morgantown, West Virginia in April 1964. As a five year old girl she was impressed by pictures of planets and galaxies as well as the 300 foot antenna dish of the National Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. She also credits the Apollo 11 lunar mission as the inspiration to become a career scientist at NASA. She attended West Virginia University and completed a B.S.degree in physics in 1987. She then enrolled at the University of Maryland in 1988. It was there that she began as a student intern at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Kim graduated from the University of Maryland in 1990 with M.S. in Astronomy. She was accepted to the University of Maryland at College Park and graduated in 1993 with Ph.D. in astronomy. Her doctoral thesis was in complex broad-band x-ray spectra of Seyfert Galaxies hey. Weaver spent an additional two years as a postdoctoral research associate at Penn State and another two years as an associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University. In 1998, she returned to Goddard.'''