Rebecca Elson

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Rebecca Anne Elson (1960 — May 1999) was a Canadian-British astronomer and writer.

Born in Montréal, Québec, and as a teenager Elson often traveled Canada with her father as he performed field research as a zoologist. She earned a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College, a master's degree from the University of British Columbia, and attended Cambridge University where she received a Ph.D. in astronomy. Elson held research positions at Princeton University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and taught creative writing at Harvard, before returning to Cambridge to accept a position she would hold for the remainder of her life. Her research centered on globular clusters, dark matter, galaxies, and cosmology.

Elson was diagnosed with brain cancer in her early thirties. With treatment, it went into remission, and in 1996 married Angelo di Cintio, an Italian artist. However, the cancer returned soon thereafter. Elson died of the disease in Cambridge in May 1999, at the age of 39.

A volume of wide-ranging poetry and essays she wrote from her teens until shortly before her death was published posthumously as A Responsibility to Awe: Poems in 2001 in the United Kingdom, and in 2002 in the United States. The works were selected by di Cintio, and a friend and fellow poet, Anne Berkeley, from a much larger body of unpublished efforts. Some of the works refer to vast concepts of physics and astronomy, often in unexpectedly abstract or playful ways, to reflect aspects of human experience. Others reflect profound joy with life or poignant observations of her impending early death. the collection was selected as one of the best books of the year by The Economist ^[1]. The reviewer for the British newspaper The Independent called it "a wise and haunting volume, which I can't recommend too warmly."^{[citation needed]}

Elson also published 52 scientific research papers in her short career.