[Original article is behind a paywall.]
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Holley-Bockelmann, 55, previously held a chaired professorship at Vanderbilt University, The New York Times reported. The newspaper described her as a leading expert on gravitational waves and a top adviser to NASA.
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She dreamed of becoming an astronomer before she knew the word for it. Nobody in her house growing up had finished college. She’d never met a scientist. But she made herself into a theoretical astrophysicist, a leading expert on gravitational waves, a top adviser to NASA, and a chaired professor at Vanderbilt. She helped begin a new graduate program for astronomers and raised millions in federal money to recruit American scientists with backgrounds as unlikely as her own, only to watch that pipeline be dismantled piece by piece.
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Holley-Bockelmann grew up in Montana, United States. No one in her household had finished college, and she had never met a scientist before she became one.
Her new office in a space lab in Leiden in the Netherlands is a small room with whitewashed walls and empty drawers. A handwritten note taped to the desk reads, “We are thrilled to welcome one of America’s great scientists.”
A colleague stopped by the doorway and said the office might not look impressive. “It’s perfect,” Holley-Bockelmann said. “After these last few years, I’m just so grateful to be here.”
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This will be the hardest thing for America to recover from. For 80 years, generations, people with vision and drive the world over knew they could go to America and make their dreams come true. And they did. They saved, they worked, they reaped the rewards of their labor to advance themselves and their loved ones, and America prospered because of the work they’d done. And largely because of this, America was a leader in so many fields. Now, people don’t believe that. Some fear for their lives if they try to live or work there. Others just fear for their life’s work being dismantled. And so the cream of the crop leaves, or just doesn’t come in the first place. And the advantage America had begins to disappear while other countries benefit. And some Americans will be surprised when their country, which they have isolated from other nations and cultures, begins to stagnate, and that advantage disappears. And they’ll wonder how it happened.
Won’t happen because
Obsiously /s