Associate Professor of Physics Aileen O'Donoghue keeps an eye on the sky, and helps others to do the same. As an astronomy professor, occasional North Country Public Radio contributor and author of the "Mountain Skies" column in the Adirondack Mountain Club's magazine, she's sharing the enthusiasm she found for the first time as a community college student.

"Though I had always loved nature and jumped at every chance to go to the mountains near my Colorado home, I found science classes in school terribly boring," she says. "They didn't teach me about what I saw outside; they made me memorize phyla." Then, in college, "Suddenly, science was about the universe I loved." Or, as she put it more succinctly, "Shazaam!"

O'Donoghue earned her undergraduate degree at Fort Lewis College and her master's and Ph.D. at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. At St. Lawrence, O'Donoghue teaches astronomy, global climate and other physics courses, keeping in mind her own early reaction to the subject matter. "I'm always trying to figure out how to get the ideas across," she says. "As a one-time science-phobe, I still struggle to get others past their phobias."

In addition, O'Donoghue has also been a visiting scientist with the Vatican Observatory Research Group and a visiting associate professor of astronomy at Cornell University, and she serves on the board of directors of the Adirondack Public Observatory.