Karen Masters

Masters was born in Birmingham and attended King Edward VI College, Nuneaton.[1] She completed a BSc in Physics at the University of Oxford in 2000.[2] She received a PhD in Astronomy from Cornell University in 2005, entitled "Galaxy flows in and around the Local Supercluster", under the supervision of Martha Haynes and Riccardo Giovanelli.[3]

In 2005 Masters moved to Harvard University to work as a postdoctoral researcher with John Huchra on a project to make the most complete map of the local Universe.[4] Masters "unveiled the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created"[5] in 2011 at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The map was created using data from the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey.

She moved to the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in October 2008.[1] She was appointed the Gruber Foundation IAU Fellow in 2008.[6] In 2010 Masters was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, for a project entitled "Do bars kill spiral galaxies?".[7] She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2014 and Associate Professor in 2015.[8] She has been working on extragalactic astronomy, and in 2018 was appointed as Associate Professor at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.[9]

Masters is the Project Spokesperson for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.[10]

Masters coordinates the research scientists for Galaxy Zoo, a crowd-sourced galaxy classification project.[2] She has appeared on the BBC Sky At Night.[11]

She coordinated the She's An Astronomer page for Galaxy Zoo, collating the stories of women from astronomy.[12] In 2014 Masters won the Women of the Future Award for Science.[13][14] That year she was listed as one of the BBC's top 100 women.[15]