Curriculum Vitae

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Education

}2018 – 2024PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of TorontoNSERC CGS-D Fellow 2020–2023 · NSERC CGS-M Fellow 2019–2020Thesis: Charting Stellar Streams of the Milky WaySupervisors: Jo Bovy, Jeremy Webb
}2014 – 2018B.S. in Mathematical Physics and Astronomy, Case Western Reserve UniversitySumma Cum LaudeSupervisors: Stacy McGaugh

Professional Appointments

}2024 – 2027Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space ResearchBrinson Prize Fellowship (2024–2027)
}2024 –Visiting Researcher, Case Western Reserve UniversityDepartment of Physics
}2021 –Coordinator (2025 – 2028), Strategic Planner (2025 – 2026) & Core Developer, AstropyCoordination Committee (executive committee), 2025–2028Strategic Planning and Organizing Committee, 2025–2026Member, Core Developer Team; maintainer, Cosmology and UnitsFunding: Astropy Cycle III — Cosmology and Quantity 2.0Team awards: 2025 AAS Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize, the 2023 IOP Publishing Top Cited Paper Award and the 2022 ADASS Prize for an Outstanding Contribution to Astronomical Software

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Grants & Fellowships

}2026Pacific Postdoc Program, Visiting Fellow, Dark Universe Science Center, University of Washington; Simons InstituteA one-month fellowship at the Dark Universe Science Center at the University of Washington in Seattle, funded by the Dark Universe Science Center and the Simons Institute
}2026JWST GO 10246: Exploring the Accretion History and Halo of Giant Elliptical Cen A with Resolved Stars, Co-I
}2024Brinson Prize Fellowship, Postdoctoral Fellow, Brinson Foundation — USD 360,000“to support early-career astrophysicists and cosmologists who are committed to chasing bold ideas with creative, nimble, and innovative research."
}2022Astropy Cycle III: Cosmology in Astropy — USD 12,000USD 12,000 NASA ROSES and Moore Foundation funding to Astropy Lead: “Cosmology in Astropy"
}2022Astropy Cycle III: Quantity 2.0 — USD 8,000USD 8,000 NASA ROSES and Moore Foundation funding to Astropy Lead: “Quantity 2.0: unitful calculations beyond NumPy"
}2019 – 2024Junior Fellowship, Massey CollegeUniversity of Toronto's graduate college for those showing exceptional promise and engagement within academia and the world beyond it
}2018 – 2024University of Toronto Graduate Fellowship, University of Toronto — CAD 23,000–32,000 p.a.

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Awards

}2025AAS Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust PrizeTo the Astropy CollaborationTeam award, as a core developer and Coordination Committee member of Astropy
}2024ASA Astrostatistics Interest Group Student Paper Competition, FinalistTo Nathaniel StarkmanFinalist for Stream Members Only
}2023IOP Publishing Top Cited Paper Award, North AmericaTo the Astropy CollaborationTeam award, as an author of the v5.0 paper: top 1% most-cited in Astronomy and Astrophysics
}2022OSOTF HUDD Award at MasseyOntario Student Opportunity Trust Fund
}2022ADASS Prize for an Outstanding Contribution to Astronomical SoftwareTo the Astropy ProjectTeam award, as a core developer of Astropy

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Publications

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}2026Potamides: Mapping Dark Matter Halo Shapes from Stellar Stream Tracks in the Local Universe — S. Wu‡, N. Starkman, S. Pearson, J. Nibauer, et al. The Astrophysical Journal 1010, 120
}2026Potamides: JAX tools for curvature-based inference from stellar streams — S. Wu‡, N. Starkman, J. Nibauer, S. Pearson. Journal of Open Source Software 11, 10712
}2026When Streams Curve Away: a Test of Dark Matter from Extragalactic Stellar Stream Populations — N. Starkman, J. Nibauer, S. Pearson, S. Wu‡, et al. The Astrophysical Journalsubmitted
}2026Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1): The geometry of dark matter halos from extragalactic streams — N. Starkman, J. Nibauer, S. Pearson, S. Wu‡, et al. Astronomy & Astrophysicssubmitted
}2026Reconstructing Galactic Gravitational Potentials from Stellar Kinematics with Physics-Informed Neural Networks — C. Myers†, N. Starkman, L. Necib. The Astrophysical Journalsubmitted
}2026Galactic Amnesia: The Information Washout of the Milky Way Merger History — L. Necib, D. Folsom, E. Y. Davies, N. Starkman, et al.submitted
}2026phasecurvefit: A High-Performance JAX Framework for Phase-Space Walks with Pluggable Metrics and Strategies — N. Starkman, J. Nibauer. Journal of Open Source SoftwaresubmittedAccepted by pyOpenSci; submitted to JOSS
}2025Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Modeling Galactic Gravitational Potentials — C. Myers†, N. Starkman, L. Necib. NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences
}2025StreamSculptor: Hamiltonian Perturbation Theory for Stellar Streams in Flexible Potentials with Differentiable Simulations — J. Nibauer, …, N. Starkman, et al. The Astrophysical Journal 983, 68
}2025unxt: A Python package for unit-aware computing with JAX — N. Starkman, A. M. Price-Whelan, J. Nibauer. Journal of Open Source Software 10, 7771
}2025Stream Members Only: Data-Driven Characterization of Stellar Streams with Mixture Density Networks — N. Starkman, J. Nibauer, J. Bovy, J. Webb, et al. The Astrophysical Journal 980, 253
}2024Angular Correlations of Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum Distortions from Photon Diffusion — N. Starkman, G. Starkman, A. Kosowsky. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 529, 2274–2288
}2023The Future of Astronomical Data Infrastructure: Meeting Report — M. R. Blanton, …, N. Starkman, et al.
}2023On the fast track: Rapid construction of stellar stream paths — N. Starkman, J. Bovy, J. Webb, D. Calvetti, et al. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 522, 5022–5036
}2022The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package — A. M. Price-Whelan, P. L. Lim, N. Earl, N. Starkman, et al. The Astrophysical Journal 935, 167Co-wrote the Highlighted Feature Development, New and Planned Features, Precision, Accuracy & Reproducibility, and Performance sections
}2020Straight Lightning as a Signature of Macroscopic Dark Matter — N. Starkman, H. Winch, J. S. Sidhu, G. Starkman. Physical Review D 103, 063024
}2020An extended Pal 5 stream in Gaia DR2 — N. Starkman, J. Bovy, J. Webb. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
}2018A constant characteristic volume density of dark matter haloes from SPARC rotation curve fits — P. Li, F. Lelli, S. S. McGaugh, N. Starkman, et al. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
}2018A new algorithm to quantify maximum discs in galaxies — N. Starkman, F. Lelli, S. S. McGaugh, J. Schombert. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 480, 2292–2301

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Software Development

All
}
Astropy
The Astropy logo: a white spiral on an orange-to-red oval.

Core developer · Coordination Committee · Strategic Planning

Astronomy in Python

The community core package for astronomy in Python. The collaboration received the 2025 AAS Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize, a 2023 IOP Publishing Top Cited Paper Award and the 2022 ADASS software prize.

}
galax
The galax logo, the GalacticDynamics mark: a painted spiral galaxy with a glowing core on a dark disk, circled by a dark ring, between a teal < and a purple > code bracket.

lead developer

Galactic dynamics in JAX

Galactic dynamics in JAX: gravitational potentials, orbit integration, mock stellar streams, and action-angle coordinates, all differentiable and GPU-ready.

}
plum

maintainer

Multiple dispatch in Python

Multiple dispatch for Python, close to Julia's, driven by type annotations and powered by Beartype.

}
coordinax
The coordinax logo: a ruler crossed with a green arrow on a blue square.

lead developer

Coordinates in JAX

Coordinates in JAX: points, vectors, and reference frames, with differentiable, unit-aware transformations between coordinate systems.

}
unxt
The unxt logo: a ruler crossed with a green pencil on a blue square.

lead developer

Units in JAX

Unit-aware computing in JAX, with a Quantity familiar to astropy.units users that passes through jit, vmap, grad, and existing JAX code.

}
quax
The quax logo: a black rubber duck, Material Design Icons' duck.

maintainer

Multiple dispatch in JAX

Multiple dispatch over array types in JAX, so custom arrays (sparse, structured, or carrying units) run through existing JAX programs.

}
potamides
The potamides logo: a capital Phi, for the gravitational potential, its ring a stream of stars shaded teal into purple with three arrows a side pointing in, on a dark rounded square.

co-lead developer

Constrain gravitational potentials from stellar stream curvature

Infers galaxy mass distributions from the projected shapes of stellar streams, fitting their tracks with splines and comparing the tracks' curvature to a potential's accelerations.

}
phasecurvefit
The phasecurvefit logo: noisy points along a self-crossing looped curve, coloured by their fitted order from red through yellow to blue, with the learned mean path drawn as a black line.

lead developer

Paths through phase space

Orders samples along a curve in phase space and fits a smooth track through them, using velocities as well as positions so curves that cross or fold back stay on the right strand.

}
galactoPINNs
Orbits of a test particle in a Milky Way–LMC system, integrated in the true potential, a near-true analytic model, and three neural-network models. The most complete neural-network models track the true orbit almost exactly, while the near-true analytic model drifts away from it.

co-developer

Physics-informed neural networks for galactic potentials

Physics-informed residual neural networks augmenting analytic baseline models that learn time-dependent galactic gravitational potentials from position + acceleration data, built on JAX.

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Invited Talks

}2026Marche III: Big Bang, Big Stars, Big Computers“Energy Structures of Extragalactic Stellar Streams Reveal Dark Matter Halos”
}2026EAS 26-S10“The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams”
}2026CWRU Seminar“Computationally Unscrambling EGGS (Extra-Galactic Gravity from Streams)”
}2025TeVPA“The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams”
}2025DARK seminar“The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams”
}2025Texas A&M Seminar“The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams”
}2025CCA Software seminar“unxt, coordinax, and software development in JAX”
}2025Princeton Thunch Seminar“Euclid: The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams”
}2025DARK seminar“Bayesian models for detecting streams in LSST data”
}2024CWRU Seminar“Stream Members Only: Data-Driven Characterization of Stellar Streams for Inference on the Galactic Potential”
}2023CITA Seminar“Astropy Cosmology: the Present and the Expanding Future”
}2022Oxford Physics Colloquium“Straight Lightning as a Signature of Macroscopic Dark Matter”Invited Colloquium Talk

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Presentations

}2026New Frontiers in Cosmology (Talk)“Energy Structures of Extragalactic Stellar Streams Reveal Dark Matter Halos”
}2026Near Field Cosmology in the Era of Big Data (Talk)“Energy Structures of Extragalactic Stellar Streams Reveal Dark Matter Halos”
}2026DARK Seminar (Talk)“Energy Structures of Extragalactic Stellar Streams Reveal Dark Matter Halos”
}2026York Seminar (Talk)“Euclid: The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams”
}2025IAUS 403 (Talk)“Euclid: The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams”
}2025Cosmology 2025 (Talk)“Euclid: The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams”
}2025MKI Journal Club (Talk)“Euclid: The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams”
}2025DDA #56 (Poster)“Extra-Galactic Gravity using Streams (EGGS) from Euclid's Zoo(niverse)”
}2025Euclid LU-SWG (Talk)“Extra-Galactic Gravity using Streams (EGGS) from Euclid's Zoo(niverse)”
}2024ASA: Astrostatistics Interest Group Paper Competition (accepted, not attended)“Stream Members Only: Data-Driven Characterization of Stellar Streams”
}2024Streams 24: The theory edition (Talk)“From JAX to Galax, a new generation of stellar stream tools”Using ML to select stellar stream members
}2024Division on Dynamical Astronomy #55 (Talk)“Stream Members Only: Data-Driven Characterization of Stellar Streams”
}2024Globular Clusters and Their Tidal Tails (Talk)“Stream Members Only: Data-Driven Characterization of Stellar Streams”
}2023DESC sprint week
}2023IAUS379: Dynamical Masses of Local Group Galaxies (Poster)“Stellar Stream Track Reconstruction, with Errors”
}2023AAS 2023 (Talk)“Astropy Tutorials on Units & Constants”
}2022CATS-2022 (Workshop)“Streams22: A workshop for assembling a Community Atlas of Tidal Streams”

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Professional Activities

Conferences Organized

}2026Astropy 2026 Conference, Coordination Committee and Strategic Planning CommitteeModerated online discussion and helped moderate the AI sessions
}2026Astrophysics and Space Science in Marche III: Big Bang, Big Stars, Big Computers, SOC
}2026Gaia Hackathon, LOC
}2025Astropy Coordination Meeting, SOC
}2025Division of Dynamical Astronomy #56, SOC
}2025Gaia Hackathon, LOC
}2024JAXtronomy Workshop, SOC

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Conferences Attended

}2023The Future of Astrophysical Data Infrastructure

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Professional & Software Talks

}2024Globular Clusters and Their Tidal Tails (Talk)“From JAX to Galax”
}2023Astropy Conference (Talk)“An Interoperable Future with Astropy”
}2022Astropy Core Developer Conference (Talk), Maintainer, Cosmology and Units“The future of interoperability with Python's Protocols”

Peer Review & Panels

Service & Committees

}2022 – 2023Massey House CommitteeJunior Fellow governance committee at Massey college
}2019 – 2020Sigma Nu Alumni Advisory Board, MemberSustainability and Chapter Operations committees
}2018 –Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA)

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Students Advised & Mentored

}2026Reem Hamraz Google Summer of Code for AstropyHardening Astropy’s core stability
}2026 –Zihan (Billy) Liu (Cornell)Stellar stream detection in Rubin LSST data
}2026Pablo Mercader-Perez (MIT) with Prof. Lina Necib (MIT)Local dark matter density from pulsar accelerations with physics-informed neural fields
}2025 – 2026Amir Abdulgadir (Howard)Baryon Modeling in External Galaxies with Stellar StreamsLeadership Alliance SR-EIP and MIT Summer Research Program (2025)Leadership Alliance National Symposium, July 23–25 (2025)2025 NSBP-NSHP Joint Annual Conference, November 19–23 (2025)Constraining Dark Matter in External Galaxies Using Stellar Streams — 2026 APS Global Physics Summit, March 14–20 (2026)
}2025 – 2026Taisiia Karasova (MIT) with Prof. Lina Necib (MIT)Machine Learning Galaxy intrinsic sizes
}2024 – 2026Charlotte Myers (MIT) with Prof. Lina Necib (MIT)Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Modeling Galactic Gravitational PotentialsFirst-author papers: a NeurIPS workshop paper and a paper submitted to The Astrophysical JournalBarry Goldwater Scholarship (2026)
}2024 – 2026Sirui Wu (PhD student of Sarah Pearson, Copenhagen)Dark matter halo shapes from stellar stream curvatureFirst-author papers: in The Astrophysical Journal and in the Journal of Open Source Software
}2023 – 2025Connor McKeigan (Astronomy, UofT) with Prof. Ting Li (UofT)Undergraduate thesis project: “Characterizing the stellar streams of S5”
}2019 – 2022Massey Tutoring ProgramVolunteer math and physics tutor to prospective first-generation college students2019, 2020 and 2022

Teaching

}2019 – 2020AST101-325, Lead Observer, University of TorontoTrained and liaised with TAs and students in all courses using the campus telescope facilities
}2019 – 2024AST 201: Stars and Galaxies, TA, University of TorontoDesigned and ran weekly course tutorial sections, created exam questions, proctored exams, and graded course projects2019, 2021–2024
}2018 – 2023AST 101: The Sun and its Neighbours, TA, University of TorontoDesigned and ran weekly course tutorial sections, planetarium shows, & observing nights; created exam questions, proctored exams, and graded course projects2018, 2021–2023

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Outreach

}2026Public Talk in Jesi, Italy
}2021Origins Science Scholars Lecture SeriesScience of Origins: Dark Matter and the Milky Way
}2019 – 2021AstroTours Telescopes, OrganizerOrganizer for all telescope outreach in Dunlap's public event
}2019 – 2024MasseyScope, Outreach Coordinator (2019–2022), Committee Member (2019–2024)Organizing astronomy outreach with a focus on underprivileged communitiesCo-hosted the 2020 Massey Telescope Public Talk Series and gave a talk in it on Ojibwe (First Nation) constellations
}2019Planet Party Toronto, Volunteer
}2018 – 2020Astronomy on Tap Toronto, Volunteer
}2018 – 2019AstroTours Planetarium, PresenterRegular planetarium show designer and presenter for Dunlap's AstroTours public outreach
}2018 – 2021AstroTours Toronto, Outreach Volunteer

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Media

}2023The Hunt for Dark Matter: The Universe's Mysterious Gravitational GlueFeatured in article on various strategies to detect dark matter, including the method from my paper
}2021The Search for the Elusive, Completely Straight Lightning BoltInterviewed for feature article about my paper

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