It all started with Halley’s Comet.
Emily Levesque was a toddler in 1986, the last time the famous comet was visible to the naked eye. One night, her family kept her up late to try and spot it above their home in East Taunton, Massachusetts.
“I was fussy and tired until they pointed up,” Levesque recalled, “and then all of a sudden I just went, ‘Whoa’.”
Levesque’s career interests followed a trend after that.
“People would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would say, ‘Well, I’m going to be a ballerina or an astronomer,’ or ‘I’m going to be a firefighter or an astronomer,’ or ‘a violinist or an astronomer’,” she said.
Levesque’s childhood infatuation stuck. Today she is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington who studies “big and weird stars.” She’s authored two textbooks on stellar evolution and red supergiant stars, as well as two general-interest books on astronomy. And in 2027, she will become the next editor-in-chief of the American Astronomical Society’s portfolio of academic journals, making her the first woman to serve at the helm of six of astronomy’s busiest and most prestigious research outlets.
“I published my very first research paper in The Astrophysical Journal more than 20 years ago as an undergrad,” Levesque said. “The AAS Journals have played such an enormous role in the history of astronomy and in so many of our careers, and my predecessors have established an incredibly high standard of care and commitment in how the journals are run. I’m excited and honored to become the next steward of that legacy.”
Levesque became interested in stars as a child, and she carried her enthusiasm through to a degree in physics from MIT. Her first research project there brought her to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she studied red supergiants — a star so large that one would engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter if it were placed where our sun is.
“I got really interested in these huge, unstable stars — they die explosive, spectacular deaths as supernovae, and leave behind mysterious things like black holes,” Levesque said. “We tend to think of stars as just big round balls of gas. But when you look closer, they turn into these brain-bending objects that stretch our ability to comprehend the universe.”
From MIT, Levesque hopscotched to a doctoral program at the University of Hawaii, a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado, Boulder and then, in 2015, an appointment at the UW. Along the way, her taste in stars has only gotten stranger: At the UW she studies hypothesized oddities called Thorne-Żytkow objects (TZOs), which are red supergiants with neutron stars for cores. While in Colorado, Levesque and collaborators published what they argued was the first evidence of a TZO in the wild. Today, much of her work at the UW is dedicated to finding more possible TZOs and understanding how they might form — though their existence still isn’t a sure thing.
“We could absolutely be wrong,” Levesque said. “Other researchers have published papers since our initial discovery arguing that TZOs couldn’t possibly be stable, or that the star we found wasn’t actually a TZO. Still others have published papers saying, ‘We looked closer at your candidate and we think it really is a TZO.’ So it’s a subject of debate, which I think is great. If we made a mistake, I desperately want someone to find it.”
Levesque has been involved with the American Astronomical Society Journals for 10 years. She’s currently serving as a science editor, which entails running the journals’ peer review process, matching submissions with reviewers and shepherding drafts through to publication.
“Getting involved with the journals has been a great way to support the astronomy community on a large scale,” Levesque said. “The AAS Journals are such a great resource in our field, so working with them is really impactful. Plus, it helps me keep tabs on the latest science.”
The editor-in-chief role, though, is a much larger proposition.
“It’s a big job,” Levesque said. “It is essentially a full-time position. But I like the idea of getting to devote so much of my time and attention to this.”
When she officially steps into the role next fall, Levesque will navigate a critical and chaotic moment for academic research and publishing. She sees twin challenges ahead for the journals: remaining solvent in the dicey landscape of federal funding, and managing a firehose of paper submissions unleashed with the help of artificial intelligence.
“We’re certainly seeing lots of papers that are auto-generated junk,” Levesque said. “But there’s also a huge uptick in people simply being able to do research faster or to write down their research faster. We’re figuring out how to manage the influx of papers and deciding what constitutes appropriate use of AI.”
Levesque betrays no intimidation about juggling her faculty position with the new leadership role at the journal. She’s letting friends and family be overwhelmed on her behalf.
“When I tell people that I’m moving into this role, there’s sort of this look of like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re going to be dealing with funding disasters and AI is going to upend everything, isn’t this terrifying?’” Levesque laughed. “In this landscape, the AAS Journals are more important than ever. It’s never been easier to generate and share information, but it’s also never been harder to trust information. Publishing is a crucial part of how our field shares trustworthy science, so for me it’s worth the effort.”
For more information, contact Levesque at emsque@uw.edu.