Kim Weaver got interested in science as a young child in West Virginia. The skies were pitch black at night and all of the stars were crisp and bright. She loved looking up at them and wondering what else was out there and decided that was what she wanted to do when she grew up! Now an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, she is also the author of a new book “The Violent Universe: Joyrides Through the X-Ray Cosmos”. After getting her Ph.D. in high energy astrophysics from the University of Maryland, she moved to Penn State University and then to Johns Hopkins University. In 1996, Dr. Weaver won a NASA Presidential Early Career Award to pursue research in extragalactic astronomy. Two years later she came to Goddard to work on the Constellation-X mission, part of NASA’s Beyond Einstein program. In addition to serving as the Deputy Project Scientist for Constellation-X, she has been the Program Scientist for the Spitzer Space Telescope. She very much enjoys speaking about science and the opportunity to communicate the excitement of space astronomy.