NASA Women’s History Month Profile – Amy Mainzer04:33

Amy Mainzer is a research scientist at JPL. After obtaining her B.S. in physics at Stanford, she took a year off after graduation to work at Lockheed Martin, where she worked on the Spitzer Space Telescope. She was the principal investigator of a cryogenic camera called the Pointing Calibration and Reference Sensor (PCRS), which serves as the fine guidance sensor for Spitzer. She worked on Spitzer during graduate school in astronomy at Caltech. After receiving her M.S. at Caltech, she finished her Ph.D. at UCLA with Ian McLean. For her thesis, she built the First Light Camera for SOFIA and observed brown dwarfs with it. She received her Ph.D. in 2003 just before Spitzer’s launch. The PCRS was the first camera to see light on Spitzer and has been operating since 2003. She joined the WISE team and JPL in 2003. As the WISE deputy project scientist, she works to ensure that WISE meets its science requirements. She is also the principal investigator of a project to enhance WISE’s ability to find asteroids, known as NEOWISE.