Introduction
Doris Daou (born 1964) is a Lebanese-born astronomer from Canada who works for NASA in education and public outreach. She is Associate Director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and the program contact for NASA's "Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx)".
Early life and education
Daou's family fled war-ravaged Lebanon when she was a child, and settled in Canada. Daou was educated at the Université de Montréal in Quebec, where she studied the atmospheric parameters of variable stars.
Career
She then moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States, where she spent nine years working on the Hubble Space Telescope. She transferred to the team preparing to launch the Spitzer Space Telescope, where she worked in education and public outreach.
She has worked as an outreach and education specialist at Ames Research Center and for NASA's grant programs.
Daou is an astronomer at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. She is the creator and producer of the Ask an Astronomer video podcast. She continues to publish in science journals.
In 2008, she co-authored Touch the Invisible Sky, which is a book written in Braille.
Selected publications
Daou, D. et al. (1990) Spectroscopic studies and atmospheric parameters of pulsating da white-dwarf (zz-ceti) stars, Astrophys. J. 364(1), 242-250. DOI: 10.1086/169407