[2][3] She was an athletic teen; her height (over six feet) was an advantage in her field event, the standing broad jump.

[5] She attended Vassar College, where she majored in physics and took astronomy courses from Caroline Furness and Maud Makemson.

Locanthi taught at Mills College in Oakland for a year, accessing Lick Observatory and the University of California, and earned a master's degree.

She was awarded a Lick Observatory Fellowship in 1936,[7] and completed her dissertation on the spectrum of the red supergiant star Antares in 1937.

She worked as a researcher at Princeton University in 1940, assisting Henry Norris Russell to study ionized europium.

[10][6] During World War II, she was involved in a rocket project at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and at Ray Control Company in Pasadena.