For more information about the total solar eclipse on April 8, including where to watch, start time and events happening around San Antonio, check out our guide.
For as long as she can remember, Angela Speck has gazed skyward and wondered what lies beyond our planet.
Speck, a professor of astrophysics and the chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UTSA, said she’s wanted to become an astronaut since she was 4 years old — and while she has yet to step foot onto a space flight, she’s continued to vigorously study the cosmos and their untold secrets.
In her quest for star-specked knowledge, the English-born professor has become a leading national eclipse expert, having first helped prepare the U.S. public and media for the total solar eclipse that took place in 2017 and now the April 8 total solar eclipse.
Over the last decade, Speck has stepped willingly into the role and claimed it as her own. With a full-arm sleeve tattoo of a solar eclipse on her right arm, bright pink hair and a collection of eclipse-themed T-shirts, some may think of Speck as San Antonio’s own eclipse-focused Ms. Frizzle.
Come Monday, Speck will be leading and narrating UTSA’s Total Solar Eclipse Campus Viewing Party, however for years leading up to tomorrow’s cosmic event Speck has served as an explanatory voice on eclipses across the nation.
While Monday’s total solar eclipse will be Speck’s fourth to witness, she told the San Antonio Report she’s very excited for the event because it’s amazing to see every time.
“I’m really excited to share this experience with our students,” Speck said.
Early life and education
Born in Yorkshire, a historic county in northern England, Speck recalled a pretty standard English childhood. The older of two daughters, Speck said she was often left to her own devices and was encouraged to explore her scientific interests from a young age.
Speck said she neither particularly enjoyed nor disliked grade school, although she joked it was a lot more like Hogwarts than people realize.
“We wore school uniforms, we had houses, we had competitions,” she said with a laugh. “I mean, there’s a reason all that exists in the Harry Potter universe.”
A member of Generation X, Speck remembered being amazed by the space flight missions of the early ’70s and ’80s, which she said inspired her from a young age.
“It wasn’t Apollo, but only just post-Apollo, so there was still a lot of excitement around doing space flights,” she said. “I remember watching the first space shuttle launch in ’81 — that was pretty cool.”
Following grade school, Speck decided she wanted to go to a university far from home. She drew a 200-mile circle around her small Yorkshire town and decided she would not apply to any colleges within the radius, she recalled.
Universities also work slightly differently in Britain, she noted. Applicants apply for a specific major — not just to get into the school, she explained. She applied to universities in London, Oxford and Scotland as an astrophysics major.
Speck landed on the Queen Mary University of London, where she graduated from with honors in 1992.
Following undergrad, Speck took a break from academics and went into industry for a few years, working for a company that makes air purifiers and even doing a stint in a popular Hells Angels pub.
Her time in the workforce was short-lived, and she entered graduate school through the Open University the following year to start pursuing her doctorate. It was here she met her husband, Alan Whittington.
“The Open University actually pioneered distance learning,” she said. “They opened in 1969 and, using the BBC, had shows on that were the lectures in the wee hours of the morning.”
The only students who came to campus were Ph.D. students such as she and her husband-to-be, she explained. Undergraduates and masters degree-seekers learned through distance learning, meaning the campus was relatively small.
Speck graduated with her Ph.D. in astronomy from University College London in 1998, with a dissertation that focused on the mineralogy of dust around evolved stars.
A blooming career
After her formal education, Speck pursued a post-doctoral position first at UCL and then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which pushed her and Whittington to move to the U.S. in 1999.
“Moving from Central London to Central Illinois was a bit of a culture shock,” she said with a laugh. “From a work point of view, it was great. From a social point of view, it was tough.”
In 2002, Speck and Whittington were offered positions at the University of Missouri, Whittington on tenure track and Speck as a visiting assistant professor. It’s here Speck climbed the academic ladder over 17 years, eventually going on to become a full-time professor of astrophysics, Mizzou’s director of astronomy, the chair of the Diversity Enhancement Committee for the Mizzou Faculty Council and a faculty fellow in Mizzou’s graduate school. During this time in Columbia, Missouri, Speck had her two sons, Xander and Hamish.
“We honestly thought that was where we would be for the rest of our lives,” she said. “And then the job at UTSA came up.”
Speck accepted the position as UTSA’s chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2019, noting she saw it as an exciting position where she would get to work with a large number of minority students — a personal interest for her.
“The idea of being able to make a difference in that environment was really appealing,” she said.
Becoming an ‘eclipse expert’
In her journey to becoming a higher education educator, Speck also became a well-renowned eclipse expert — an unintentional but agreeable side effect, she said, to her common position as an outreach coordinator while at Mizzou.
“When we arrived at Mizzou in 2002 it was 15 years ahead of the [2017 total solar] eclipse, and the local amateurs — there’s always a relationship between small university observatories and the local amateur astronomers — they were like, ‘So what are you gonna do about this eclipse?’ I’m like, ‘It’s 15 years away!’ but they already had T-shirts, and so it was already on my radar,” she recalled.
During her time at Mizzou, Speck embraced the role of becoming an eclipse educator. As early as 2012, Speck started pushing for her fellows at the American Astronomical Society to think about how it would prepare for the 2017 eclipse, she said.
“Then it comes to 2014, and they’re like, ‘OK, we’ll do this now — but since this is your last meeting as a council member, you can be the chair.’ And suddenly, I was chairing a new task force on solar eclipses.”
At this point, eclipse-related activities had started to ramp up in Columbia and at Mizzou, which was within the 2017 path of totality, Speck said. Asked how she became an eclipse expert, she points to this time frame.
“Between doing local interviews and talks … I also was starting to be asked to do stuff on the national stage, and it just kind of snowballed from there.”
A star-specked future
In her move to UTSA, Speck knew she would once again be getting a chance to be a local voice for the cosmos, since San Antonio was in the path of totality for the 2024 total solar eclipse.
But she was also tasked with a much more difficult charge — rebuilding UTSA’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, which she said was in turmoil at the time. Speck said she was eager for the challenge.
“I knew my job was to rebuild the department into something good,” she said. “To get people to trust each other again.”
Speck had only been in her new position for a few months when the pandemic struck, she said, which slowed her personal progression goals for the department. But she doesn’t feel discouraged, she added.
“I’m on my second term as chair — so the term’s usually three years as chair — and I think based on the feedback that I got after the first term, that I have achieved at least some of what I set out to do,” Speck said.
Speck said she also wants to continue helping make sure diversity and equity are increasingly important aspects of her department at UTSA.
“I’m trying to fix the department. I’m super busy,” she said. ” I do enjoy being in San Antonio. I enjoy the River Walk, I enjoy its missions and I enjoy being in a place that has a different sort of culture.”
