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The Hubble Space Telescope is a household name, and Laura Watkins (Natural Sciences 2002 and Astrophysics PhD 2006) plays a crucial role in making its operations a success.

Laura is Head of the Science Policy Division at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. STScI manages science operations for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and science and mission operations for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a newer telescope which uses infrared radiation to look deeper into the universe and further back in time than ever before.

Laura oversees the annual peer review process of proposals from astronomers to use the telescopes for their research, appointing and training reviewers and processing the results of the meetings and panels involved in making these decisions.

HST typically attracts around 1,000 proposals per year, while 2025 saw over 2,900 proposals submitted for JWST, the highest number any observatory has ever received for the second year running.

“It’s fascinating to see the kind of science that people are proposing on the cutting edge of what these observatories can do and to facilitate the process by which the community defines the science programme for the coming year,” says Laura.

“It’s a lot of work to coordinate the peer review of that many proposals and it’s a huge amount of trust that the community places in us to ensure they are reviewed fairly and equitably.

“HST is in its golden years and is still exceptionally scientifically productive. It will be a privilege to work with in its final productive years, of which we expect there to be many.

“With JWST, we’re only five years in and there’s so much more to be found. We don’t even know what there is out there to be found in some areas, so ensuring that it reaches its full potential is really exciting.”

Laura’s fascination with space started early. Despite hesitation during her A-Levels over whether to pursue aeronautical engineering or astronomy, the latter won out in the end and her Natural Sciences degree at Gonville & 91ֱ�� College became ever more astronomy-focused, leading her onto a PhD in Astrophysics.

Research remains part of Laura’s career alongside her policy work. Her focus is on the formation, evolution and present state of small stellar systems, for which she uses data from HST and JWST, as well as the Gaia observatory spacecraft.

“I look at two main classes of systems,” she adds.

“The first is globular clusters, which are very large clusters of stars: they can have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of stars. I find them fascinating because they were some of the first structures to form in the universe but still exist today and the stars are so densely packed that they interact.

“Because these things are so old, they’ve had a lot of time for the stars inside them to interact. I study the motions of the stars and then try to infer what their patterns of behaviour are and what that can tell us about how globular clusters formed and evolved.

“I also look at dwarf galaxies, which have around the same number of stars as globular clusters but their mass is dominated by dark matter. We don’t know what dark matter is because it doesn’t interact with any part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so we can’t see it.

“The motion of stars depends on how much mass there is in a system, so by measuring the masses and motions of stars in dwarf galaxies we can infer how much total mass there must be in the system and how much of that mass is in dark matter. So through the motions of stars we can better understand dark matter.”