A Starfleet scientist and instructor who explains temporal mechanics in the second season of Star Trek: Prodigy, voiced by and named after the franchise's real science adviser, astrophysicist Erin Macdonald.
Dr. Erin Macdonald is a Starfleet scientist and teacher who appears in the second season of Prodigy as an authority on time travel. The character is an in-joke: she shares her name and voice with Dr. Erin Macdonald, the astrophysicist who has worked as science consultant on the Star Trek series of the 2020s.
She features in Temporal Mechanics 101, an episode named after the Starfleet Academy course. The Protostar crew are stranded in the past with Chakotay while Gwyn, back aboard Voyager-A, begins to slip out of phase with time because history has been altered. The young crew turn to recorded instruction from Macdonald to grasp what has gone wrong and how a message might be passed across the decades.
The lesson gives a tidy summary of the paradox that drives the season, in which the cadets' own attempt to save Chakotay threatens to stop the Protostar ever reaching Tars Lamora.