There she began working on RR Lyrae variable stars on weekends with Harlow Shapley and Bertil Lindblad at the Harvard College Observatory.
[6] Fairfield was an assistant professor in astronomy when she attended the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) Third General Assembly in Leiden in the Netherlands in 1928.
[4] Her assigned reception committee astronomer was a young graduate student, Bart Bok, ten years her junior; he proposed to her at the end of the conference.
[6] Within fourteen months, Bok had broken off his thesis studies at Groningen with Piet van Rhijn and moved across the Atlantic to Harvard on the invitation of Shapley, its director.
[8] Evidently so, after meeting Bok in 1928, Fairfield's professional trajectory was initially influenced by household/child-caring responsibilities and her husband's career choices, both in terms of its substance and geographical location.
Fairfield and her husband welcomed their son, John, in 1930 and a daughter, Joyce, in 1933 coinciding with pivotal moments in Bok's career progression at Harvard.
During their time in various Massachusetts locales, Fairfield juggled her role as a college tutor while Bok ascended as a university professor, often working twice the amount of weeks she did in a year.
Once her children reached high school age, Fairfield found more opportunities to focus on her astronomical pursuits, albeit with lingering disparities in domestic responsibilities.
Despite this, Fairfield contributed significantly to astronomical research, initially focusing on comets and star motion in the 1920s before transitioning to mapping new regions of the Milky Way alongside her husband.
[10] Their main work together was a definitive undergraduate textbook and popular science book, The Milky Way, described as "one of the most successful astronomical texts ever written", which had five editions following its initial publication in 1941, and was translated into many languages.
Priscilla suffered a stroke in 1972; her health declined in the following years, and Bok resigned his position as vice-president of the IAU in 1974 and dedicated himself to her care.
[17] The Australian National University awards the Priscilla Fairfield Bok Prize to a female third-year science student each year.