Sarafina Nance

Sarafina El-Badry Nance is an Egyptian-American astrophysicist and science communicator. She was formerly a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and has now graduated. Instagram and LinkedIn

Early life and education Nance grew up in Austin, Texas. She has said that her St. Stephen's Episcopal School's high school physics teacher, Frank Mikan, encouraged her love of space science. There she used asteroseismology to understand stars that were about to undergo a supernova. She works with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Centre for Computational Cosmology to use supercomputers to build models of the explosions of supernovae in their final stages.

Career and research In March 2021, Nance was listed by Forbes magazine as one of 30 inspirational women as part of Women's History Month.

Science communication During the first year of her undergraduate degree Nance worked as an intern at the McDonald Observatory.

Nance is an activist for women's health. In her early 20s it was identified that she had inherited the BRCA2 gene from her father, which is known to be a predictor of breast cancer. Nance used a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to cover the cost of a double mastectomy, and her social media platform to advocate for early and frequent testing as well as preventive medicine. After searching for the best local surgeons, Nance identified Anne Peled, a Californian reconstructive surgeon who was also a survivor of breast cancer.

Nance's memoir Starstruck was published in 2023. The Betelgeuse Project II: asteroseismology