Stella S. R. Offner

Astrophysicist & Educator

Welcome!

I am a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. My research focuses on understanding how stars like our Sun form. I perform computer simulations of the turbulent birth environment of stars, and I use these to make predictions for what telescopes will observe: "synthetic observations." This work has broader implications for the evolution of galaxies and the initial conditions of planetary systems.

I am a core faculty member in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Science and Co-Director of the Center for Scientific Machine Learning. I am also a member of the Center for Planetary Systems Habitability  and the Machine Learning Laboratory.

Before joining the faculty at UT Austin, I was a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale, an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I received an NSF CAREER Award in 2017 and a Cottrell Scholar Award in 2018.

Interests:  Star formation and stellar feedback;  computational methods & hydrodynamics;  astrostatistics & machine learning;  astrochemistry.

CONTACT

The University of Texas at Austin

Astronomy Department

PMA 15.312A

2515 Speedway, Stop C1400

Austin, TX 78712-1205

soffner[at]astro[dot]as[dot]utexas[dot]edu


The University of Texas at Austin

Oden Institute for Computational Science & Engineering

POB 5.342

201 E. 24th St Stop C0200

Austin, TX 78712-1205