Prof Patricia Whitelock is an astronomer at SAAO and an honorary professor in the astronomy department at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on the late stages of stellar evolution, Galactic structure, and the stellar content of nearby galaxies. She has taken a special interest in how pulsating red giants can be used as distance indicators, helping to establish the distances of various galaxies and to study the structure of our own. She is a former director of SAAO and former president of the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP); in 2018 she was awarded the SAIP de Beers Gold Medal. She is an honorary fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. She is also on the International Astronomical Union Executive Committee’s Working Groups on “Global Coordination of Ground and Space Astrophysics” and on “Women in Astronomy.
View profile for Patricia Whitelock in: Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), (2019). Legends of South African Science II. [Online] Available at: DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/assaf.2018/0036
