Kinney graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison with honors in 1975.  She studied at the Neils Bohr Institute in Denmark for several years and proceeded to earn a doctorate in astrophysics from New York University in 1984. Shortly thereafter she joined the Space Telescope Science Institute as a research associate, an instrument specialist on the Hubble telescope's Faint Object Spectrograph.

Dr. Anne Kinney is now the Director of NASAs Astronomy and Physics Division.  She also runs the Origins Program, managing a number of major space astronomy missions including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Microwave Anisotropy Mission.  The Origins program seeks to answer the age old questions of humanity: "Where did we come from?" and "Are we alone?" 

Kinney has written 75 scientific papers, including one on an atlas of galaxy spectra taken in ultraviolet light.  The paper was produced at a time when astronomers didn't have a good overall picture of how galaxies looked in the ultraviolet spectrum.  Kinney's data are important to understand the populations of stars in the galaxies and eventually to comprehend the relationship between galaxies of different types.

More cool Anne Kinney stuff: