Roman was born on May 16, 1925 in Nashville, Tennessee. Her mother, Georgia Smith Roman, was a music teacher and her father, Irwin Roman, was a geophysicist. As a child, Roman and her family moved from Nashville to Oklahoma, Texas, New Jersey, and Michigan as Irwin pursued a career in the growing field of geology-driven prospecting.

Roman cited both of her parents’ interest in the natural world—and her time beneath the clear night skies of Reno, Nevada—as an inspiration for her early interest in astronomy. Fueled by a fascination for the stars, she began her own astronomy club with a group of neighborhood girls when she was 11 years old. Though she knew she wanted to be an astronomer by the