Upcoming Event: NSF-Simons CosmicAI Hybrid Seminar Series

Welcome & 2026 Director’s Report: NSF-Simons CosmicAI through Year 2 and Beyond

Dr. Stella Offner, Curtis T. Vaughan Jr. Centennial Chair in Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin and CosmicAI PI & Director

Abstract

This seminar is intended both for the CosmicAI community and for anyone interested in learning more about CosmicAI. I will review the CosmicAI Institute vision, mission and core research areas. I will reflect on our accomplishments during the past two years and discuss how CosmicAI research is advancing AI methods and working to transform how astronomers analyze data, observe the universe, and accelerate workflows. I will describe our community initiatives and AI educational programs. In closing, I will reflect on our year three plans and discuss opportunities to join the CosmicAI mission.

Biography

Stella Offner is a Professor of Astronomy at UT Austin and the Director of the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley. She was a NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale. Her research focuses on understanding how stars like the Sun form by combining high-performance computing simulations, observations and statistical modeling. A core focus of her work aims to develop methods to effectively use AI/ML to analyze astronomy data, predict properties that cannot be directly observed, and accelerate numerical models.