IT was a book filled with distant galaxies that first sparked Lisa Kewley’s interest in the stars.

Having stumbled across it in a bookshop one day as a young girl, she found herself unable to look away from the pages of spiraling celestial megastructures photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Years later, as an astrophysicist, she’d use the Hubble Telescope in her own research to identify a galaxy 9.3 billion light years from Earth.

“We’re fortunate in astronomy that when we look at these distant galaxies we actually are looking back in time,” says Prof Kewley, director of the ASTRO-3D ARC Centre of Excellence at ANU’s Mt Stromlo Observatory.

“Like in archaeology where we try to understand how humans evolved on this earth, in astronomy, we’re following that further back in time to understand how the atoms that make us formed and evolved.”

The ANU professor made history in March with her appointment as the first female director of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in the US. There, she’ll lead 800 staff in eight scientific divisions across nine major scientific facilities and institutes.

“It is an honour to become director of the CfA,” she says.

“I plan to bring people together from across these different areas to answer some of astronomy’s biggest questions.”

What is the universe made of? What do black holes look like? Does life exist outside of the solar system? These are all questions the Center for Astrophysics wants to answer.

Prof Kewley found herself drawn to those same questions in South Australia, where she grew up.

“I had a physics teacher who loved astronomy. He used to bring me articles from science magazines about black holes, wormholes and all sorts of exciting things and that really triggered my lifelong interest,” she says.

“He took us on an astronomy camp where we tracked the moons of Jupiter over the course of the week and the movement of the constellations.”

In year 11, she made a trip to Canberra with the National Youth Science Forum in 1991 where she first visited the Mt Stromlo Observatory, a place she would return to for her PhD after studying her undergrad at Adelaide University.

Following her PhD, she went on to do a decade of research in the US, developing a specialty in galaxy formation and evolution.

“When we’re talking about a galaxy 9.3 billion light years away, the light actually takes that long to reach us so we are looking back at the galaxy as it was that long ago,” she says.

To see across these unfathomable distances, astronomers use a technique called gravitational lensing, a concept first introduced by Albert Einstein.

“It’s a miraculous phenomenon that happens in the universe due to gravity,” says Prof Kewley.

“If you have something that’s so massive in the universe, like a whole cluster of galaxies or a supermassive black hole inside a galaxy called a quasar, these objects are so massive they bend light and its effectively making a telescope or a magnifying glass that is of an entire galaxy or galaxies across.

“We can look back to about a tenth of the age of the universe, about 13 billion years, a little bit before that even.

“We’re hoping that with the James Webb Telescope that’s just launched we’ll be able to look a little bit further, back when the first galaxies were formed in the universe.”

Despite her groundbreaking work, Prof Kewley almost didn’t pursue her aspirations.

While studying at Mt Stromlo, she says there was only one female astronomer with a permanent job in all of Australia.

“I honestly thought I wouldn’t get a permanent job either. I had a back-up plan to leave,” she says.

“I was okay with that because I just thought that’s what happened.”

It inspired her to pursue greater female representation in the field.

“You have to move around a lot and two careers in a relationship make the profession difficult to juggle. Sometimes it’s the women who give up their careers as a result,” she says.

“Another one is a lack of role models. If you don’t see many women receiving recognition for their work or reaching leadership positions then you’re left likely to feel like you can’t be yourself.”

As director of the ASTRO-3D, Prof Kewley introduced a series of initiatives that has now seen half of the centre’s staff and student body made up of women.

“Now that we’ve reached that goal, we know how to do it, so it’s something I’m planning on bringing to the US as well,” she says.

“I think the barriers to women in the field are lower than they used to be, but there are still serious reforms needed to retain and promote talented junior female academics into senior positions.”

She encourages any young girl, or boy, out there who may look at the stars and be inspired like she once was, to “just go for it”.

“It’s a fantastic time to be starting out as a student and getting involved in astronomy and science in general,” she says.

“There’s amazing discoveries to be made.”