Colleen Wilson-Hodge first became interested in astronomy in the third grade when she saw images of Jupiter from the Voyager spacecraft. She enjoyed looking at craters on the moon with her Dad and her small backyard telescope. In high school she wrote to Carl Sagan about careers in astronomy. He advised her to major in physics and math as an undergraduate rather than astronomy because those degrees were more versatile. She graduated with bachelor’s degrees in physics and math in 1992 from the University of Arkansas. While still an undergraduate, she began working for NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. She completed her Ph.D. in 1999 at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
In 2005, she began to work on the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), testing flight software and hardware. Fermi launched in 2008 and continues to provide exciting data. In 2016 she became the Fermi GBM Principal Investigator, leading the project team. In 2018 she and her team were named as winners of the Bruno Rossi Prize for "for the discovery of Gamma-rays coincident with a neutron-star merger gravitational wave event. This confirmed that short gamma-ray bursts are produced by binary neutron-star mergers and enabled a global multi-wavelength follow-up campaign."
When she is not doing astrophysics, Colleen loves to be outdoors, often running, hiking, or skiing. She ran a 100 mile race in September of 2017.