Virginia Trimble is a native Californian and graduate of Hollywood High School, UCLA (BA astronomy & physics), Caltech (MS, PhD astronomy), and Cambridge University. Her current interests include structure and evolution of planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe, and of the communities of scientists who study them, though her technical research is a little more narrowly focussed on white dwarfs, supernovae, statistics of binary stars, and productivity and impact of observational facilities.

After 30 years of oscillating at 31.7 nHz between the University of Maryland and U. California, Irvine, she is now permanently at the latter (and indeed recently bought her first large box of shredded wheat), though still haunting airports in connection with committees, advisory panels, and offices in American Astronomical Society, American Physical Society, International Union of Pure & Applied Physics, International Astronomical Union, and so forth.

Yes, she was in Prague for the "Pluto vote," but didn't actually get to vote, because she was skippering the team of students who ran up and down the aisles of the auditorium counting the votes (yellow squares of cardboard held on high - we are a very traditional organization, not given to secret ballots).

At last count, something like 500 published paper, book chapters, articles, etc. carried Trimble's name as one of the authors, and she had given a comparable number of talks at conferences, colleges, community groups, and such over the past 40 years.s.

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