Catherine Asaro, Ph.D. -- also Sci-Fi writer (Born Nov. 6, 1955)

from Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio):

Today (Nov. 6) is the birthday of sci-fi and fantasy novelist Catherine Asaro. She was born in Oakland, California, in 1955. She's the daughter of Frank Asaro, a nuclear chemist who discovered what's known as the "iridium anomaly," an unusually high level of iridium in one particular stratum of rock dating to the end of the Cretaceous Period. Iridium is otherwise quite rare on Earth, but it's common in meteorites, and this discovery led his team of scientists to hypothesize that an asteroid may have struck the Earth 65 million years ago and caused the mass extinction of -- among other organisms -- the dinosaurs.
Catherine Asaro is best known in science fiction circles for her series of novels and novellas, Saga of the Skolian Empire. She also holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in the field of chemical physics, and is a member of a think tank called SIGMA, which is made up of authors of speculative fiction who advise the government on future trends that may affect national security. She often introduces complex mathematical concepts in her fiction, based on her numerous research publications in that field. Sometimes she includes an essay in the back of the book that explains the concepts more fully, and in lay terms. Here's an example of how her mind works: "When I was making up the story for The Quantum Rose, I was also writing my doctorate, which used quantum scattering theory to give a coupled channel formalism for describing polyatomic photodissociation (such a catchy subject, soon to be a major movie ... or maybe not). I used to lie in bed at night, thinking about my work. The way I relaxed was to let stories evolve in my mind, so the story for The Quantum Rose evolved right along with my thesis work. Pretty soon I was associating characters in the book with quantum scattering processes. It was fun, like putting together a puzzle."