Heather Preston is a grant-supported NASA astronomy co-Investigator and is Instructor of Astronomy for two collegiate Distance Education programs. She was an Operations Astronomer for the Hubble Space Telescope for five years, and was instructor of physics at the US Air Force Academy until relocating to the Seattle area in late 2007.

Specializing in asteroseismology, gas dynamics and computational fluid dynamics, Preston is a research astronomer for Eureka Scientific and co-investigator for the Spitzer Sace Telescope, studying P-mode oscillations in the Hyades. She is also a paid researcher for NASA ADP, working on the discovery and characterization of Variable B Stars using the WIRE Database, and a paid researcher for the Kepler Mission. Her work has appeared in more than 50 publications including The Astronomical Journal, The Astrophysical Journal, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society.

Blowing Bubbles in Space: The Birth and Death of Practically Everything (Astronomical)

As Heather's talk and collection of images will show, the Universe is a turbulent place filled with interactions large and small, and quite a few of these astronomical interactions can be visualized and numerically modeled as bubbles of one sort or another being blown from one medium into another by the birth and death processes of astronomical objects on size scales ranging from planetary through stellar and galactic.

Heather's Mensa interview: Revolution in Cosmology

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