Ghanaian woman makes academic breakthrough

The mystery of how galaxies came into being has been explained in the academic thesis of a Ghanaian science brain.

Dr Jacqueline Antwi-Danso, a physicist, provided valuable insight into understanding how early galaxies came into being in her post-doctorial thesis which has since gone viral.

She is an old student of the Aburi Girls SHS (ABUGISS) and the daughter of Prof Vladimir Antwi-Danso, the Dean of Academic Affairs of the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College. 

Study

Her study tackled one of astronomy’s biggest challenges in finding the earliest distant quenched galaxies in the universe.

“We want to find galaxies that contain the first generations of stars and then model their observations with galaxy formation models to infer their physical properties and star formation histories.

“We’re excited to see where the results lead and to compare those observations with current theoretical predictions for these distant massive galaxies,” she told the Black Research Network of University of Toronoto.

Dr Antwi-Danso is an NSERC Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the David A. Dunlap Department for Astronomy and Astrophysics of the University of Toronto.

Profile

She proceeded on a scholarship to the Texas Christian University to read Physics, where she demonstrated rare academic feats.

Her intelligence was energised by an insatiable quest for more knowledge such that she obtained all As in every subject.

She was, therefore, asked to enrol in the PhD programme straight away but along the way she obtained a Masters degree.

Dr Antwi-Danso published erudite articles even before defending her PhD dissertation at age 28 and got offers from British, US and Canadian universities.

She chose the Toronto University in Canada where she is an Assistant Professor of Physics. 

She also earned a Banting scholarship award to undertake post-doctoral research after which she came out with the rare academic breakthrough in Physics - how the early galaxies came into being.