May Kaftan-Kassim

May Arif Kaftan came from a "fairly conventional, very religious Muslim family," by her own account. Her father was a government official.[1] She attended the University of Manchester as an undergraduate and graduate student, on a scholarship for Iraqi students in the sciences.[2] She completed her doctoral studies in astronomy at Radcliffe College in 1958, with a dissertation titled A study of neutral hydrogen in a region in Cygnus.[3] American astronomers Nan Dieter-Conklin and Frank Drake were her classmates in astronomy at Harvard; they all finished in the same year, and all studied under Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.[4]

Kaftan-Kassim worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, from 1964 to 1966.[2] In 1968, she attended the United Nations Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), in Vienna, informally representing Iraq.[2] She was on staff at the Dudley Observatory at the State University of New York at Albany in the early 1970s.[5] While attending the annual URSI meeting in Washington D.C. in 1981, Kaftan-Kassim gave an oral history interview for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory archives.[6] She was a visiting professor of astronomy at Agnes Scott College, 1983–1984.[7][8]

Erbil Observatory, which Kaftan-Kassim helped launch in the 1970s.

Kaftan-Kassim helped establish the astronomy program at the University of Baghdad, advising on texts and hiring.[9] She returned to Baghdad in the mid-1970s to advise on the construction of Iraq's National Astronomical Observatory,[10] near Erbil,[11] and was a project manager there, before she lost her position in 1981 in a shifting political context.[2] "I came back with the understanding that it would be six months here, six months there," she explained to an American newspaper in 1979, "but there is so much to do I can't go back to the States."[1] She spent some time doing research at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in the Soviet Union.[12] She did, eventually, return to the United States to live.[13] The American Astronomical Society listed her as a member for over 60 years in 2017.[14]

Research publications by Kaftan-Kassim included "Measurements of the 1.9 cm Thermal Radio Emission from Mercury" (Nature 1967),[15] "A Survey of High-Frequency Radio Radiation from Planetary Nebulae" (Astrophysical Journal 1969),[16] "High Frequency Radio Observations of the Stephan's Quintet Region" (Nature 1975),[17] "Extinction and Radio Structure of IC 2149" (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 1977),[18] and "A Radio Continuum Survey of Isolated Pairs of Galaxies" (Astronomical Journal 1978).[19]

Kaftan married pediatrician Sami El-Sheikh Kassim; they separated in the 1970s.[1] Their son Namir E. Kassim was born in Baghdad; he also became a radio astronomer in the United States.[20] May Kaftan-Kassim died in 2020.[21]

• May A. Kaftan's IAU listing, updated 2020.