Few people, if any, contemplate stars—celestial or cinematic—the way Aomawa Shields does.
An astronomer and astrobiologist, Shields explores the potential habitability of planets beyond our solar system. But she is also a classically trained actor—and that’s helped shape her professional trajectory in unexpected ways.
Today, Shields is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, where she oversees a research team that uses computer models to explore conditions on exoplanets, or planets that revolve around stars other than the sun. But while searching for life many light-years away is her day job, creative endeavors round out her purpose on Earth.
In 2023 Shields published a memoir, Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe. She has started an influential educational program that encourages young girls to explore space, given a hugely popular TED Talk about how we’ll find life on other planets, and won a string of prestigious academic awards, honors, and grants. She also plays the violin, cooks, practices yoga, and is a mom. And as what she calls a “rest leader”—a professional proponent of slowing down—Shields has somehow managed the seemingly impossible: She makes time.
Her unorthodox path began on the screen, in the realm of make-believe.
“I wanted to become an astronaut. That dream started very early in my life, at the age of 12, after seeing a movie that dramatized kids getting launched into space,” she says, referring to SpaceCamp, an ’80s kids’ comedy about an accidental space shuttle flight.
The next bit of cinematic inspiration cemented her interest.
“Charlotte Blackwood was an astrophysicist, and she was very glamorous, too,” Shields says, smiling at how she was captivated by the heroine in Top Gun. “There’s an iconic scene where she’s walking down the aisle between Tom Cruise and other pilot trainees, and she just kind of whips off her glasses and just looks like such a badass.”
A high-achieving student while growing up in California, Canada, and Massachusetts, Shields made her way to Phillips Exeter Academy, in large part drawn by its state-of-the-art astronomical observatory. Once there, she got pulled into acting in a serious way. “Enter a new dream,” she says.
Throughout high school her astronomy and acting aspirations “kind of danced beside each other,” Shields remembers. “But I held firm to the first one and went to MIT because I understood that it’s the best science school in the country. I learned that at the age of 12—that’s where I’m going to go.”
At MIT, Shields struggled academically at first and took refuge in the creative arts. She was chosen to participate in the Burchard Scholars Program, whose monthly dinner seminars bring faculty members together with students who excel in the arts, social sciences, and humanities. She sang in the a cappella group the Muses and performed in lots of plays. At the end of her senior year, she found herself wondering: “Do I go to grad school in acting or astronomy?”
“There were a lot of these things that seemed to be aligning—that were telling me: Go back and get that PhD.”
The latter won out, but not for long. Shields headed to a graduate program in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “During that year, I had a white male professor tell me to consider other career options, and that was hard to hear,” she says. She remembers thinking, “I’m going to the other dream because clearly someone’s telling me that I don’t belong here. Maybe they’re right.”
So she applied to UCLA, where she got an MFA in acting, leaving astronomy for more than a decade. But then, when Shields was working odd jobs to supplement her acting gigs, a mentor from her undergraduate years encouraged her to look on a Caltech-operated job website. She saw an opening for a help desk operator at the Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared telescope that is particularly adept at viewing the formation of young stars—and it only required a bachelor’s degree. “I’d refer the harder questions to the PhDs,” she says. “But by taking that job, I got to go to astronomy talks again … This field of exoplanets had just exploded during the time I’d been away.”
Shields had some success in acting, including a part in a film called Nine Lives, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. But a big break—and then heartbreak—came after she was cast as the host of the show Wired Science, only to lose the job when the producers decided to change presenters. It was a “devastating moment,” she says.
Soon after, she emailed the astrophysicist and science communications luminary Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom she’d been introduced to over email by an astronomer working with the Spitzer Space Telescope, and relayed what had happened. He replied that he’d seen her in the pilot and told her that “without a PhD you don’t have that street cred if you want to do science television,” she recalls. Meanwhile, she had applied to NASA’s astronaut candidate program but didn’t make it past the first level. (She did, however, get to play an astronaut in a recent Toyota ad.) “There were a lot of these things that seemed to be aligning—that were telling me: Go back and get that PhD,” she says. So she did, earning her doctorate in astronomy and astrobiology in 2014 from the University of Washington.
Astrobiology, Shields explains, is a relatively new field that studies the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe: “It’s about how life got started on Earth.”
Astrobiologists might focus on the habitability of planets, or on methods for exploring life on other planets, or on liquids other than water that could support life. It’s a highly interdisciplinary field. “There are astronomers that are looking for these planets and are using their particular field of expertise to answer that question: Are we alone?” Shields explains. Some of them are “also chemists and biologists and oceanographers and geologists who tackle these questions from their own lens and specific area of expertise,” she says. “That’s why I love it. As an astrobiologist, we don’t have to get 15 PhDs. We get to collaborate with people in different departments who lend their own expertise … on those science questions.”
Shields is trying to answer a question sparked by the night sky—one that’s deeply personal yet universal in both the astronomical and the colloquial sense. “Ever since I was a little girl, I would look up at the sky and wonder what was out there,” she says. “It comes from a sense of wonder for me. I still have that feeling when I look up at the night sky and I see these little pinpoints of light. I wonder: Is there anyone looking back at me? … How far does space go?”
There are, she explains, 100 billion stars in our galaxy, most orbited by at least one planet, and over 100 billion galaxies beyond ours. That’s about 1022 stars in the universe. The likelihood that only Earth was able to produce life “I think is pretty low,” Shields says.
“I’m looking for planetary environments that could be conducive to life beyond Earth,” she says. “And my team does that largely using climate models. These are the same kinds of models that can predict climate and weather on Earth.”
Shields plugs information gathered by observational astronomers into such models, along with different potential combinations of other, unknown variables—like the type of light a planet receives from its host star, the composition of its atmosphere and surface, and certain orbital information. “There’s only so much that you can really tell about a planet from the telescope information that you get,” she explains. “We can explore that parameter space with climate models and say: Okay, if it has this surface composition, this is what the temperature would be like on this planet. If it has this atmospheric composition, this type of orbit, this is what the climate would be like, and this is how habitable it would be across its surface.”
Since the early 1990s, astronomers have discovered 6,000 exoplanets. Shields says those in Earth’s size range—in which she’s most interested—number in the hundreds. A smaller subset of those are orbiting in what’s called the “habitable zone” of their star, creating warm enough conditions to maintain water in liquid form—the key to life. So far, as many as 100 or so planets that fall into that category have been identified, but the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, could find even more potentially habitable planets by detecting “biosignatures” suggesting a biological presence, such as particular gases in their atmospheres or glints that might be reflections of water on the planetary surface.
Being able to detect more of these sorts of signals, Shields says, is the next “big mission” in astronomy.
Today, in her academic work, her mind hurtles to the farthest reaches of the universe. But in her precious hours outside of academia, she has learned to be still. When her work schedule started to overwhelm her, Shields’s health began to suffer. Then she discovered the practice of yoga nidra—an ancient form of meditation in which practitioners are guided into a deeply restful “yogic sleep.” Shields read the book Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Ambitious Women, which claims that 20 or 30 minutes of yoga nidra “feels like three hours of sleep in your body,” she says. “And as the mother of a young child, I was like: Okay, sign me up!”
Last year she trained with Karen Brody, author of Daring to Rest: Reclaim Your Power with Yoga Nidra Rest Meditation, and became a certified facilitator. “It’s been important to me to share it broadly and to really try to do my part to introduce the culture of academia, in particular, to this notion of resting as a daily practice,” she says. Now she’s at work on a book about her attempt to moderate—to resist the temptation to take on too much. She has learned to decline invitations and put firm boundaries between her work and personal life.
Shields has realized that her seemingly disparate interests in astronomy and acting don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Combining them makes her a more effective educator.
On a weekday in August, an ayurvedic soup simmers on her kitchen stove. A music stand occupies the corner of a room where she sometimes picks up her violin and plays fiddle tunes. (Her parents, both professional musicians, derived her name from a chant of vowel sounds they made up.) She mentions the poem “swim | women of color”by Nayyirah Waheed and recites it in a soft, rich voice. Part of it goes: “This structure counts on your inability to say no. mean no. they take no from our first breath. go back and return it to your mouth. your heart. your light.”
“I need to graciously let go or say no—make room for someone else to say yes,” Shields says. “That allows me to have more spaciousness in my schedule, because one thing I’ve discovered is that women of color, as we proceed up the academic ladder, the requests just exponentially increase, and so saying no is not simply an important skill—it’s a survival skill.”
Along the way, Shields has come to realize that her seemingly disparate interests in astronomy and acting don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, combining them—and sharing her passion for both—makes her a more effective educator. Her training as an actor helps her craft lectures that keep students engaged and animates her presentations, including her TED Talk, in a way that resonates with nonscientists.
Shields is also tapping into her love of acting to inspire the next generation of scientists who will help answer astronomy’s big questions. As part of a postdoctoral fellowship through the National Science Foundation, she was asked to design an educational outreach component. “I was like: Is there a scenario in which I could use acting to teach astronomy?” she says. “And I looked it up. There was precedent for that. Astronomy education journals had shown that when you involve girls in creative arts—theater, writing—and you incorporate that into astronomy education, you increase girls’ confidence in both asking and answering questions.”
The finding resonated with her own experience. After all, it was acting—which she turned to when her professor discouraged her from studying astronomy—that gave her the confidence to pursue astronomy again. “I looked at acting as this outlet, this safe space,” she says. “Nobody could tell me that I was wrong as an actor.”
With that in mind, Shields launched Rising Stargirls, which holds workshops using the creative arts to teach astronomy to middle-school-aged girls of all backgrounds. She and her colleagues have since published a study showing that girls who attended the program reported being more excited to take science classes and were more likely to believe they could do well in science.
“We want them to know that who they are is inherently pivotal and critical to their study and practice of astronomy,” Shields says. “The sciences are incredibly creative, and they get to bring that creative imagination and creative inspiration they find through the arts into learning about the universe.”
That same exchange has played out in Shields’s life, but it’s only recently that she’s come to see similarities between her roles as an astronomer and an actor. “They’re both about story,” she says.
Actors have to convey the arc or evolution of a story through the lives of their characters. “Stars, planets—they have lives, too,” Shields says. “They have births, they have evolution, and they die. It’s my job as a scientist to unveil the story—to discover the story of whether there’s life elsewhere.”
About The Author
