by DENISE WOLFE

Imagine knowing at age 10 what your life’s passion would be. For most people, that kind of clarity comes much later, if it comes at all. For Jill Hackenberg, it arrived with astronomy. The wonder she felt looking up at the night sky as a child became a lifelong quest for knowledge, and it set the course for her career.

Like the galaxy that first captivated her, Hackenberg’s curiosity seems to have no edges. Whether she is traveling the globe, digging into research for a student or tracing her family tree, she is always exploring.

“About age 10, I discovered astronomy, and it became a true passion of mine,” Hackenberg said. 

That interest drew her to the University of Pittsburgh as an astrophysics major. Then came a reality check in the form of advanced math.  

“When the cold reality hit that I was not skilled enough in calculus and higher math for this major, I decided to change my direction to become a science librarian instead,” she said.

The switch was a perfect fit. An internship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute taught her “what real scientists need from the library during their daily work tasks,” and she landed a science librarian job at the University of Houston before she graduated.

As one of the youngest librarians there and one of the few with an email address, she was the natural choice to conduct a session on the internet and email. Using an overhead projector, she gave 120 academic librarians a three-hour lecture, an experience she calls one of the craziest of her career. 

“This was when the internet was just starting to gain ground in society and everyone was quite confused and unclear about what we were supposed to do with it,” she said.

Her love of space also led to two NASA job interviews, one at Johnson Space Center in Houston and one at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles. They showed her how different life on a NASA campus would be from academia. “I realized then that academia was more suited to who I am,” she said.

She came to the University at Buffalo to be closer to her parents in Pittsburgh and to work at a reference desk dedicated to science questions. Thirty years later, she works in Lockwood Library as a sciences librarian. “I really love the variety of questions I get from the students,” she said. 

She is especially proud of mentoring more than 50 library and information science students over the years, first at the reference desk and now through the chat service. “I really enjoy helping them be aware of the possibilities postgraduation and how to prepare for and navigate through the interview process,” she said.

That instinct for tracking down answers follows Hackenberg beyond her work answering reference questions. She began tracing her family tree in 2007 and has identified ancestors going back almost 300 years. DNA analysis has helped her find distant relatives in Australia and England, and paper research has revealed that she is related to a retired UB Libraries staff member. In 2024, she flew to London to meet a ninth cousin named Susan whose link to Hackenberg traces to a man in Germany about 250 years ago. “It was wonderful and surreal to connect,” she said.

Her curiosity about where people come from has a counterpart in the sky, and astronomy still shapes her travels. She has seen Halley’s Comet and more than a dozen lunar eclipses, in which Earth’s shadow falls across the moon and can turn it red. This past August, while vacationing on a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean off Spain, she watched her third total solar eclipse. She has also toured Scotland and Iceland, where “the beauty of nature in both of these places is extraordinary,” she said.

Planning those trips comes naturally to her, which hints at her backup career. If she weren’t a librarian, Hackenberg said, she might be a wellness coach, a chiropractor or a travel agent. “Arranging complicated logistics seems to be as natural as breathing to me,” she said.

Music is another outlet. Hackenberg has sung in choirs since she was young. As a college usher at a Pittsburgh performing arts hall, she saw about 30 touring acts, including Depeche Mode, Duran Duran and Kenny G. Promoted to the coveted front-of-stage post, she said, “I just wanted to be one of the crowd and look at the singer and dance along with everyone else.”

Whether answering a reference question, tracing a family tree or chasing an eclipse, Jill Hackenberg is still the 10-year-old looking up, curious about what comes next.