PROFILE
Gazing at the Sky for More Thrills Hashima Hasan played key role in launching of NASA’s Webb Space Telescope BY ZAFAR IQBAL
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What are the odds of a girl born in the newly formed Republic of India to become a program/discipline scientist at NASA?” asked Hashima Hasan as she reminisced about her early school days during a recent NASA podcast interview. The words of her sixth-grade teacher in Loreto Convent, Lucknow, that they could do anything if worked hard made a big impact on her. The all-girls educational institution established in 1872, had recently allowed girls to take STEM courses. Inspired by the scientific career of her great-uncle Dr. Husain Zaheer (director general, India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research [CSIR]) and later on by her aunt Dr. Najma Zaheer, a renowned biologist, she took up the challenge and became interested in science. Hasan says that her mother, a college graduate herself, had unwavering faith in her capabilities and encouraged her to pursue her ambitions. The inspiration to pursue space science was born when, in 1957, her grandmother gathered the entire family in 42
her backyard during the early dawn to watch Sputnik I pass by — a fascinating sight in the clear sky. She was starstruck! “When Sputnik was launched, it came out in the newspaper that you would be able to see it pass overhead at 5 in the morning. And my grandmother woke up everyone — the entire household — to see it. There was a big crowd in the backyard to watch Sputnik go by. “Then, Yuri Gagarin made a tour of India. He came to our city — Lucknow — and there was a reception for him. My mother got invitations for all of us to see the cosmonaut. We were just little kids. We ran right to the stage — there was no security then — and said hello to him. He gave us little booklets and autographs. It was a big inspiration for me. I remember just staring at that booklet he gave me. I kept it for years.” When NASA was formed, she eagerly followed every success and failure reported in the newspapers and clearly remembers the day that man landed on the Moon. Hasan completed a BS, securing fifth position at Lucknow University. She followed this up with an MS (physics) at Aligarh Muslim
ISLAMIC HORIZONS MARCH/APRIL 2022
University (AMU), where she secured first place and a gold medal. She started her doctoral MPhil program under the tutelage of the legendary AMU physics professor Dr. Zillur Rahman Khan, and took the bold step of applying for doctoral studies at Oxford University in 1973. Encouraged by Dr. Rais Ahmad (head, Department of Physics, AMU), she applied for and received a Commonwealth Scholarship and joined Oxford. Three years later, with a DPhil (theoretical nuclear physics) in hand, she returned to India as a postdoctoral scholar at Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). With scholars like astrophysicist Dr. J. V. Narlikar (emeritus professor, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics) — who, along with Sir Fred Hoyle, developed the conformal gravity Hoyle–Narlikar theory — and Dr. Obaid Siddiqi (founder-director, TIFR National Center for Biological Sciences; d.2013;), TIFR was a haven of intellectual thought. After two intense years at TIFR, she secured a faculty position in physics at the University of Poona, Pune. While there, as the only non-Marathi-speaking faculty member,
