Thumbs up to Google for marking Annie Jump Cannon’s 151st birthday with today’s Google Doodle! I was honored to be this year’s recipient of the AAS award given annually in her honor – head over to the AAS award website to see the full list of excellent female astronomers that have been recognized over the years.

Along with the other 2014 AAS prize winners I’ll be giving a plenary talk at the 225th AAS meeting in Seattle, WA in just a few weeks. My talk, titled “New Frontiers in Stellar Astrophysics: Massive Stars As Cosmological Tools”, will discuss the exciting research being done in stellar astronomy right now. Some of this work is amazingly similar to what Annie Jump Cannon was doing over 100 years ago, and it’s also laying important groundwork for the incredible new telescopes that will be making discoveries in the coming century! (for those attending the meeting, the talk will be in the main ballroom on Tuesday morning at 11:40am)

I’m also looking forward to hearing the other plenary talks and just generally diving into the heap of exciting research that’s always presented at AAS. I’ll be joining many of my fellow astronomers in Tweeting the meeting while I’m there – follow me at @emsque and use the #aas225 hashtag to keep up with all the meeting news!