Jean Creighton

Jean Creighton is the director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Manfred Olson Planetarium. She presents more than 300 presentations a year to inspire her audiences with the beauty of the night sky and the workings of the cosmos. She has traveled during her career: she obtained a B.Sc. in physics from the University of Athens (Greece), a master’s degree from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a Ph.D., in astrophysics from the University of Waterloo, Ontario.

She was fortunate enough to be involved in an infrared satellite called WIRE as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Since September 1999, she has been teaching astronomy at various levels at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and, in 2007, she became director of the UWM Manfred Olson Planetarium. In 2014, she was chosen by NASA to be one of the 24 Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors to fly on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA).