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