Cover Hillary Diane Andales on growing up in Leyte, finding her place in science and building more opportunities for Filipino talent at home (Photo: courtesy of Hillary Diane Andales)
Hillary Diane Andales on growing up in Leyte, finding her place in science and building more opportunities for Filipino talent at home (Photo: courtesy of Hillary Diane Andales)
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Aspiring astrophysicist and science communicator Hillary Diane Andales reflects on opportunity, belonging and what it will take to build a stronger scientific community in the Philippines
Hillary Diane Andales does not see her journey from Abuyog, Leyte to institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Chicago as a simple story of talent and hard work. The further she went, the more she noticed how much opportunity can depend on what comes before you.
Speaking about her childhood, Andales describes growing up in a low-income family that placed a high value on education. Her grandparents were farmers and workers, while her parents, both university graduates, filled their small home with second-hand books despite having limited resources. Her father, who studied chemistry, talked to her about science. Her mother encouraged her to think about her goals.
That upbringing also gave Andales an understanding of life that she says she still carries with her today: there is a much wider range of experiences in the world than the one she grew up knowing.
Now a PhD student in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, she finds herself in academic spaces that can sometimes feel very far removed from that reality. Problems such as poverty can become abstract topics of research when discussed inside elite institutions. She knows them differently.
At MIT, she began noticing another gap. Many of the people around her had parents with PhDs. In Abuyog, she did not even know what a PhD was. She had not grown up around scientists or people who had gone through the kinds of academic paths that eventually brought her to MIT.
Her own entry into that world came through the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, which she won at 18.
“It’s kind of like a generational project,” she says of getting into a place like MIT. “It’s not something that you do yourself. It’s something that’s done. It’s an ongoing project that ends with you, but starts with your ancestors.”
Andales believes academic achievement can look individual from the outside, but access often has a much longer history behind it: parents who know what opportunities exist, families who can afford education, mentors who know how to navigate institutions and communities where certain careers already feel imaginable. She happened to find another route in.
Her experience has made her particularly conscious of what happens to people who have the ability but not the same access. She has met Filipino students who are exceptionally capable yet lack the opportunities to develop that talent at home. Leaving the country, she points out, requires several kinds of luck to line up. And that’s the equation she wants to change.
“I hope to help build a homegrown, like kind of a way to build our own talent at home, so that they don’t have to go outside of the country to do this,” she says.
Science as a responsibility
Above Hillary Diane Andales on science, education and opportunity (Photo: courtesy of Hillary Diane Andales)
Hillary Diane Andales on science, education and opportunity (Photo: courtesy of Hillary Diane Andales)
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Before winning the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, science was largely a personal interest for Andales. Afterwards, being known for science communication came with a sense that she had to keep showing up for it. She became more conscious of checking sources, following scientific developments and maintaining the credibility expected of someone speaking publicly about science.
There are days when she questions whether she wants to remain a scientist. She sometimes wonders whether stepping away would feel like betraying the path she had built for herself.
Yet science communication remains meaningful to her because it offers a way to share something she finds genuinely exciting: the wonder of understanding how the world works, and the possibility that scientific knowledge can save lives.
Andales experienced Typhoon Yolanda when she was still young, and only later began thinking about how scientific information could have affected the disaster’s toll. She points to research suggesting that better communication about storm surges could have prevented deaths. The Covid-19 pandemic made the stakes even clearer.
The lesson, she says, is not that everyone needs to memorise scientific facts. What matters is learning how science works. Gather the data. Make the best decision you can. Accept that you might be wrong. Change your mind when new evidence comes in.
That way of thinking is particularly important in the Philippines, where disasters and climate-related risks demand decisions based on evidence rather than instinct or misinformation.
“Everyone needs to understand the mindset of science,” she says. “Not everyone needs to understand the facts, really, but everyone needs to understand the mindset and how we arrive at the facts.”
Rethinking who belongs in science
Andales has also had to figure out what it means to belong in science herself.
At MIT, she became involved with women in physics after feeling out of place in a field where most of her classmates were men. She later became president of the Society of Physics Students, with a broader goal of making the department more welcoming to undergraduates, first-year students and international students.
Some of her own experiences were more revealing. As an undergraduate, Andales deliberately stopped wearing makeup because she worried that looking too feminine would make people think she cared more about her appearance than physics.
The insecurity may have surfaced in a physics classroom, but the idea behind it extends far beyond science: women are often expected to manage how they look, speak and present themselves before their abilities are even considered.
Andales eventually stopped making that trade-off. A woman should not have to look less feminine to be taken seriously, she argues, nor should there be a particular way of being a woman that qualifies someone as intelligent, capable or authoritative.
Her point is not that women should learn to fit more comfortably into traditionally male spaces. It is that there should not be a prescribed way to look like a scientist in the first place.
“You can be any type of woman in science,” she says.
That thinking extends to her view of academic communities more broadly. When she has doubted herself, particularly during the pressure of exams and research, she has relied on communities of Filipino women and other women in science who understand what she is going through. Older mentors have given her perspective, while peers remind her that the struggles she encounters are shared.
Making science make sense
Above Hillary Diane Andales reflects on her path from Leyte to astrophysics (Photo: Courtesy of Hillary Diane Andales)
Hillary Diane Andales reflects on her path from Leyte to astrophysics (Photo: Courtesy of Hillary Diane Andales)
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Andales is equally critical of how young people are introduced to science.
She remembers an education that leaned heavily on memorisation: names, numbers, parts of systems and definitions, often without enough attention to the larger picture. Learning the names of the parts of the cardiovascular system, she argues, is much less useful than understanding how the heart and brain interact, how discoveries about the body were made and what those connections mean for health.
When she speaks to students now, she tries to begin with stories and bigger questions instead.
The reactions tell her something. Students often tell her they had never realised science could be exciting.
She thinks every student should have a teacher who makes that discovery possible.
The stakes go beyond making science classes more interesting. Understanding how disease spreads, how vaccines work or why disasters happen can affect decisions that have real consequences. Science literacy, in her view, is not simply about producing future scientists. It is part of giving people the tools to understand the world they live in.
Her own research takes those questions much further back in time.
Andales studies the history of the Milky Way through its oldest stars, describing herself as a “galactic archaeologist”. She is interested in questions that remain unanswered, including how heavy elements such as gold and platinum were created and what the universe’s first stars were actually like.
The stars closest to us can act as clues to what came before. The Sun, around 4.5 billion years old, was itself born from material left behind by earlier stars. Yet the earliest stars remain difficult to study directly.
There is something fitting about the questions she chooses to pursue. Much of Andales’ work is about looking backwards to understand how something came to exist, whether that means a galaxy, a scientific career or the opportunities available to a young Filipino student.
Her own path began in a small community in Leyte and took her into some of the world’s most competitive academic spaces. The ambition now is to make the journey less dependent on leaving home.
The next generation, she believes, should not have to get lucky in quite the same way she did.
Syrah is Tatler Philippines’ Power & Purpose editor, where she spotlights extraordinary journeys shaping the Philippines and Asia. She covers business, innovation, impact, and culture—chasing the people, ideas and forces shaping how we live and think today.
