Dr. Stella Offner

Biography

Stella Offner is a Professor and Harrington Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Astronomy within the College of Natural Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding the formation of stars like the Sun by combining numerical simulations with observational modeling. She is particularly interested in applying statistical techniques and machine learning to parse data and identify the physical characteristics of forming stars. As a core faculty member of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering Science, she specifically contributes to the Center for Scientific Machine Learning and is a member of the Center for Planetary Systems Habitability Machine Learning Laboratory. Offner obtained her bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematics from Wellesley College in 2003 and completed her Ph.D. in physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. Following her doctoral studies, she was a postdoctoral fellow at both the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Yale University, where she also received the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Prize. She joined the astronomy faculty at UT Austin in 2017 after serving as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Research Interests

Awards