Stella Offner

Stella Offner is a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in astrophysics and artificial intelligence. Offner's research focuses on understanding how stars like the Sun form by combining numerical simulations, observations, and observational modeling. She conducts computer simulations of the turbulent birth environments of stars and uses these to make predictions for telescope observations, known as synthetic observations. This work has broad implications for galaxy evolution and the initial conditions of planetary systems. Offner's research interests include star formation, stellar feedback, computational methods, hydrodynamics, astrostatistics, machine learning, and astrochemistry.

Offner earned bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematics from Wellesley College and completed a doctorate in physics at the University of California at Berkeley. She served as an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics prize postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and as a NASA Hubble prize postdoctoral fellow at Yale. Before joining the astronomy faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, she was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Offner has received several honors, including the NCU-Delta Young Astronomer Lectureship Award, the CNS Teaching Excellence Award, the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation, and an NSF CAREER Award. She was also selected as the recipient of the Peter O'Donnell Distinguished Researcher Award, which recognizes Oden Institute core faculty for a sustained record of distinguished research in computational engineering and sciences.

Among Offner's scientific contributions is her involvement with the "STARFORGE" project. STARFORGE, which stands for STAR FORmation in Gaseous Environments, is a numerical framework for 3D radiation magnetohydrodynamic simulations of star formation. It follows the formation, accretion, evolution, and dynamics of individual stars in massive giant molecular clouds, accounting for stellar feedback such as jets, radiative heating and momentum, stellar winds, and supernovae. The project has been featured in outlets including Phys.org and CNN. Offner has published research in leading journals, including a paper in "Nature Astronomy" on stellar action at a distance, titled "Turbulent action at a distance due to stellar feedback in magnetized clouds."

The University of Texas at Austin was selected to lead the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation. Offner serves as principal investigator and director of this institute, known as CosmicAI. The institute receives $20 million in funding, split between NSF and the Simons Foundation. CosmicAI researchers apply artificial intelligence to large datasets to advance understanding of dark matter, galaxies, star formation, and other cosmic phenomena. The institute spans eight departments and includes more than 17 faculty members in astronomy, computer science, statistics and data science, linguistics, information sciences, mathematics, mechanical engineering, and aerospace engineering.

Offner is also committed to public engagement and education. She appeared in Episode 1 of the BBC "Wonders of the Sun" series with Dara O'Briain and was a plenary speaker at the American Astronomical Society's AAS245 meeting. CosmicAI includes extensive education and outreach programs, ranging from initiatives to engage high school students with astronomy data to research training for undergraduates and graduate-level courses offered through an AI-astronomy certificate program. Through her research, leadership of CosmicAI, and dedication to training future scientists, Offner plays a significant role in the advancement of computational astrophysics and artificial intelligence in astronomy.