Michele Dougherty became interested in outer space when she was ten years old, when her father built a 10-inch telescope through which she saw the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.[8] Dougherty was educated at the
University of Natal where she was awarded a
PhD in 1989 for research on
wave-particle interactions in
dispersive and
anisotropic media.[9]
Research
Dougherty left South Africa for a fellowship in Germany, working on applied mathematics, before moving to Imperial College London in 1991.[8] She was appointed a Professor of Space Physics in 2004 and teaches undergraduates alongside her research.[10] She is Head of the
Department of Physics at
Imperial College London.[11]
Dougherty is the Principal Investigator for two major space missions; the NASA
Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn and the ESA
JUICE spacecraft that will orbit Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede.[12]
Dougherty is distinguished by the
Royal Society "for her scientific leadership of the international
NASA-ESA-
ASICassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons".[15] As Principal Investigator of the operation, data collection and analysis of observations from the magnetic field instrument on board the Cassini spacecraft, she strongly contributed to improve our understanding of Saturn and the
Moons of Saturn.[16][17][18][19][20][21] Dougherty cites the flybys of Saturn's moons as a highlight of her career; convincing the NASA spacecraft team to make a closer than usual approach “I watched the data coming back with my heart in my mouth because if we had messed up no one would have ever believed me again!".[22]
Before working on the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, Dougherty was involved in the magnetometer team for the Jupiter analysis of the
Ulysses mission. She was also Guest Investigator on the NASA Jupiter System Data Analysis Program as part of the
Galileo uncrewed spacecraft.[23]
She regularly delivers public lectures and appears on national media.[24][25][26][27] She was one of the guest scientists interviewed on
Jim Al-Khalili's The Life Scientific.[28]
Awards and honours
In 2007, Dougherty won the
Chree Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics for "her contributions to the field of planetary magnetic fields and atmospheres and their interactions with the solar wind".[29]
Dougherty won the 2008
Hughes Medal[30] of the
Royal Society "for innovative use of magnetic field data that led to discovery of an atmosphere around one of
Saturn's moons and the way it revolutionised our view of the role of planetary moons in the
Solar System". She was the second woman ever to receive such an accolade, 102 years after Hertha Ayrton in 1906.[31]
Dougherty was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012[4] and was recognized by the UK
Science Council as one of the 100 top UK living scientists.[32] She was awarded a prestigious Royal Society Research Professorship in 2014.[12]
The Cassini mission into deep space has sent back some wonderful colour images of Saturn. It's witnessed raging storms, flown between its enigmatic rings and revealed seven new moons. And, thanks in no small part to Professor Michele Dougherty - it's made some astonishing discoveries.
^Cutler, Jack (2014). The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability on the Kronian magnetopause (PhD thesis). Imperial College London.
hdl:
10044/1/41877.
^Went, Daniel Robert (2011). Magnetic field and plasma in Saturn's near space environment (PhD thesis). Imperial College London.
hdl:
10044/1/9066.
OCLC930625731.
^Arridge, C. S.; Eastwood, J. P.; Jackman, C. M.; Poh, G.-K.; Slavin, J. A.; Thomsen, M. F.; André, N.; Jia, X.; Kidder, A.; Lamy, L.; Radioti, A.; Reisenfeld, D. B.; Sergis, N.; Volwerk, M.; Walsh, A. P.; Zarka, P.; Coates, A. J.; Dougherty, M. K. (2015). "Cassini in situ observations of long-duration magnetic reconnection in Saturn's magnetotail". Nature Physics. 12 (3): 268–271.
arXiv:1512.06980.
Bibcode:
2016NatPh..12..268A.
doi:
10.1038/nphys3565.
S2CID56103180.