Alison Coil

Education and career

Coil was an undergraduate at Princeton University, studying both philosophy and astrophysics there. Forced to make a choice between the two, after a year of astronomy research at Harvard University, she chose astrophysics, and continued her graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, including doctoral research studying galaxies and the early universe with the W. M. Keck Observatory. Her dissertation, The middle-aged universe: Results from high-z supernovae and the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey, was supervised by Marc Davis.

After postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona, she became a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego in 2008. She became dean for equity, diversity, and inclusion in the university's School of Physical Sciences in 2018. When the university formed a new Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2023, she became its inaugural chair.