From Honors Student to Research Scientist

Akeson Reflects on SPHEREx Mission Goals and Her Time on the Honors Program Advisory Board

By Riley Dunn

Dozens of people line up, shoulder to shoulder, each smiling as they come together for a picture, a memento of the work they’ve completed together. Rachel Akeson is among them, a senior research scientist at the California Institute of Technology who has just overseen the launch of SPHEREx, NASA’s latest astronomy mission that seeks to provide the first ever all-sky spectral survey. 

This monumental achievement was shaped by years of hard work and collaboration. For Akeson, her own journey also started at the University of Iowa, which she attended as an honors student. 

As a UI student majoring in Physics and Astronomy, Akeson (91BS) thought of the Honors Program as a way of joining a group that was diverse, including people with a multitude of different career goals. 

Now Akeson works as a senior research scientist and IPAC deputy director at Caltech, where she earned her Ph.D. in Astronomy. She also serves as a member of the Honors Program Advisory Board, which she first joined during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Akeson and the other board members work together as advocates for the program to help build connections among students and alumni, while also enhancing the undergraduate honors experience. 

“When I joined the board there were two or three people in Washington, DC, and Lana Zak was in New York. So, they were looking for people from the West Coast and they were looking for people with STEM careers,” Akeson said. “I got an email from Judy Lewis saying — this is the board. Would I be interested? And then we had a little chat and now I go to two meetings a year, plus some smaller discussions.” 

Through her time on the board, Akeson has heard from other UI alumni who work across a variety of careers — from

 journalists to physicians to educators. One aspect she has found interesting is glimpsing the evolution of the honors program over the years through the lives and experiences of those she works with. 

It was this evolution that also excited her when she visited the UI’s campus for a board meeting in October 2025. The trip to Iowa marked the first time Akeson had been here in several years and she was excited to see the changes the university had gone through since her time there. 

“Judy graduated in ‘68, so her experience is very different from my experience, which is very different from the set of people who graduated in the 2000s and a lot of those changes were in how the Honors Program has changed between them,” Akeson said. “Getting the [Blank Honors Center] building was a really big change. And also a much more professional staff and having these honors-required classes and seminars. That wasn't a thing.” 

While her flight to Iowa served to reacquaint Akeson with her alma mater, it also gave her a platform to introduce curious students to NASA’s SPHEREx Science Data Center, where she works as the task lead. 

During her discussion in Van Allen Hall, Akeson presented early results from SPHEREx, which is currently undergoing a mission to conduct four all-sky surveys over a period of just over two years.

“We're just coming up to doing one pass of the whole sky, so basically looking at every point on the sky at once, but in all of these 102 different wavelengths,” Akeson said. 

“After the talk, some students who were doing a project on M31 came up and were like, “Oh, can we look at M31?” And so we did that.” Akeson related. 

M31 refers to the Andromeda Galaxy, which is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. “We found some nice images of M31 and that's kind of a big thing,” she said. 

Students and scientists interested in following the mission’s progress can follow along on the SPHEREx website which includes an archive of data the team has collected so far. 

“It's a sort of sense of shared purpose. Everyone working on SPHEREx is working toward building this thing so we can make it work,” Akeson said. 

That sense of shared purpose is the intersection between science and honors. Before becoming a research scientist at Caltech and earning her Ph.D., Akeson was a UI honors student and continues to support the university, while also reshaping science and charting the sky.