Dr. Megan Donahue is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University. Her current research is mainly about using X-ray, infrared, UV, and visible light to study clusters of galaxies: their contents — hot gas, dark matter, active galactic nuclei, galaxies — and what they reveal about the contents of the universe and how galaxies evolve and form.

Dr. Donahue grew up on a farm in Nebraska and received an S.B. in physics from MIT, where she began her research career as an X-ray astronomer. She has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Colorado. Her Ph.D. thesis on theory and optical observations of intergalactic and intracluster gas won the 1993 Trumpler Award from the Astronomical Society for the Pacific for an outstanding astrophysics doctoral dissertation in the United States. She continued postdoctoral research as a Carnegie Fellow at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, and later as an STScI Fellow at Space Telescope.

She was a staff astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute until 2003, when she joined the MSU faculty. Dr. Donahue is married to Mark Voit, and they collaborate on many projects, including this textbook and the raising of their children, Sebastian, Michaela, and Angela. These days, she orienteers, runs trails, and plays piano and bass guitar whenever her children allow it.