On August 5th, 1947, France Anne-Dominic Córdova was born in Paris to an Irish mother and Mexican-American father who was Chief of the Cooperative for American Remittance to Europe (CARE) Program stationed in France before settling in West Covina, California. She received her bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Stanford University, where she conducted anthropological fieldwork in a Zapotec Indian pueblo in Oaxaca, Mexico. While working as a writer for the Los Angeles Times, the historic moon landing in 1969 inspired France to continue her education, but in her passion for astronomy.
In 1979, France A. Córdova received her PhD in Physics from California Institute of Technology for her work on the X-ray observations of Dwarf Novae. She continued this work as a staff scientist at the Space Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before being recruited in 1989 by Pennsylvania State University to head the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. In 1993 she became the first and youngest woman to hold the position of chief scientist for NASA where she focused on x-ray and gamma-ray sources. After leaving NASA in 1996, she became Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of California Santa Barbara before accepting a position as the first latina Chancellor at the University of California Riverside in 2002. While at UC Riverside, she initiated the development of their School of Medicine. After five years at UC Riverside, France made the jump to Indiana as Purdue University’s first woman president, where she saw the establishment of the College of Health and Human Sciences and the Global Policy Research Institute.
In 2014, President Barack Obama assigned Dr. France A. Córdova as Director of the National Science Foundation, where she stayed until her retirement in 2020.
Sources:
- https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/astrophysicist-france-cordova-to-deliver-luskin-lecture-for-thought-leadership
- https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/sacbee/name/frederick-cordova-obituary?id=21983729
- https://researchinsociety.org/award/france-cordova/
- https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/france-cordova-understanding-the-nature-of-things/
- https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/832/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20220621132641/https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/1993/93-162.txt
- https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-11-me-medschool11-story.html
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.13496
