—By Adam Eshleman
Printed on the pages of Mercedes Richards' high school yearbook, a friend's parting sentiment reads: "Mad Mercy! Her ambition is to obtain a Ph.D. in Astronomy!" Like only a few of her classmates back in Kingston, Jamaica, Richards, now professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, loved looking up at the skies. "I made a decision 'round about 6th grade or so that I wanted to be an astronomer," she declares.
Having set her sights on the stars at such a young age, Richards has since become one. After academic stops at the University of Virginia and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, she joined the Penn State faculty in 2001. In 2008, in recognition of her record of international accomplishment, she was awarded Jamaica's highest academic honor, the Musgrave Gold Medal. "Mad Mercy" has come a long way, but it hasn't always been easy. "The road I have traveled has not been smooth," she says. "There have been some obstacles."
A Star is Born
"The stars in Jamaica are really, really beautiful," Richards remembers. "My father and I would just sit outside and talk about life and philosophy under the canopy of the skies. More than anything else I wanted to understand what was going on. Why do stars shine?"
Richards credits her father—a police detective—for bestowing on her the skills of observation and deduction, and she is grateful to her mother—an accountant—for instilling in her the importance of precision in her work. While raising her in a suburb of Kingston, her father often took her to a nearby botanical garden shortly after dawn. In the early morning quiet, father and daughter sat in awe of the nature around them ("It was like being in a place of worship"), and her father taught her to identify the nuanced varieties of plant species.
Today, Richards uses that same set of skills to examine the stars. "What I do is definitely detective work," she explains. "Astronomers want to know what happened. We look for evidence. We have to piece it all together like forensic scientists of the sky."
