May Kaftan-Kassim

[3] American astronomers Nan Dieter-Conklin and Frank Drake were her classmates in astronomy at Harvard; they all finished in the same year, and all studied under Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.

[2] In 1968, she attended the United Nations Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), in Vienna, informally representing Iraq.

[5] While attending the annual URSI meeting in Washington D.C. in 1981, Kaftan-Kassim gave an oral history interview for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory archives.

[7][8] Kaftan-Kassim helped establish the astronomy program at the University of Baghdad, advising on texts and hiring.

[9] She returned to Baghdad in the mid-1970s to advise on the construction of Iraq's National Astronomical Observatory,[10] near Erbil,[11] and was a project manager there, before she lost her position in 1981 in a shifting political context.

An observatory on a mountain, against a blue sky and a white cloud.
Erbil Observatory, which Kaftan-Kassim helped launch in the 1970s.