Stella Offner

Biography

Stella Offner is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at UT Austin and the Director of the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins. She received her PhD 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. 

Prof. Offner's research focuses on understanding how stars like the Sun form by combining numerical simulations, observations and observational modeling. She uses statistical techniques and machine learning to parse data and identify the physical characteristics of forming stars.