Elizabeth Naluminsa

Executive Committee Member

Elizabeth Naluminsa is a postdoctoral fellow on the astronomy operations team of the Southern African Large Telescope. She obtained her Phd researching on the gravitational instability of disk galaxies from the University of Cape Town in 2019. She is originally from Uganda and is Uganda’s  first female astronomer. Her research field is extragalactic star-formation, while her interests and expertise spread to astronomical instrumentation, software development, pipeline building, science engagement/outreach and teaching. With a passion for education and people, her personal mission has always been to “make science attainable, penetrable and relatable to everyone”.

Following an undergraduate degree in physics and education (physics major), she joined the National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme in 2011 for her honours and masters degrees at the University of Cape Town after which she undertook her doctoral research under the South African SARChI bursary of the NRF. Post graduation, she returned to Uganda and worked as a lecturer at Kyambogo University Uganda while doing astronomy outreach to secondary schools, with resources support from the IAU Office of Astronomy for Development and the SALT Collateral Benefits programme. She held the first ever astronomy exhibition at Kyambogo university in 2020. She is at present involve in ongoing efforts by the Space Technology Agency Uganda to take astronomy to schools in the refugee settlements of Uganda, and documenting the indigenous astronomy knowledge of the refugee communities for posterity.