Bio

Donahue grew up on a farm near Inland, Nebraska, a town of about 60 people. She attended St Cecilia's, a Catholic school with an enrollment of about 200 students, in Hastings, Nebraska. Her undergraduate physics S.B. degree is from MIT (1985) and her astrophysics Ph.D. is from the University of Colorado, Boulder (1990). She met her husband Mark Voit, who is also an astronomer, in graduate school. Her post-doctoral research in observational astronomy was completed at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in Pasadena, California and at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. STScI later hired her as a staff astronomer in 1995 working on astrophysics research and on data archiving for the Hubble Space Telescope and the development of the James Webb Space Telescope. In 2003, she moved to Michigan State University and re-entered academic life as a professor in the MSU Physics and Astronomy Department, in East Lansing, Michigan. She and Mark Voit have three adult children, Michaela, Sebastian, and Angela.