Curriculum Vitae

Download PDF
1P2PNPAll

Education

}2018 – 2024PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto
}2014 – 2018B.S. in Mathematical Physics and Astronomy, Case Western Reserve University

Professional Appointments

}2024 – 2027Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
}2024 –Visiting Researcher, Case Western Reserve University
}2021 –Coordinator (2025 – 2028), Strategic Planner (2025 – 2026) & Core Developer, Astropy

3 more not shown.

Grants & Fellowships

}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
}2022Astropy Cycle III: Cosmology in Astropy — USD 12,000
}2022Astropy Cycle III: Quantity 2.0 — USD 8,000
}2020 – 2023NSERC - CGS D, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada — CAD 105,000
}2019 – 2020NSERC - CGS M, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada — CAD 17,500

4 more not shown.

Awards

}2024ASA Astrostatistics Interest Group Student Paper Competition, FinalistTo Nathaniel Starkman
}2023IOP Publishing Top Cited Paper Award, North AmericaTo the Astropy Collaboration

15 more not shown.

Publications

All
}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
}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
}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
}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, 167
}2020An extended Pal 5 stream in Gaia DR2 — N. Starkman, J. Bovy, J. Webb. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

12 more not shown.

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.

19 more not shown.

Invited Talks

}2026Marche III: Big Bang, Big Stars, Big Computers
}2026EAS 26-S10
}2026CWRU Seminar
}2025TeVPA
}2025DARK seminar
}2025Texas A&M Seminar

8 more not shown.

Students Advised & Mentored

}2025 – 2026Amir Abdulgadir (Howard)Leadership Alliance SR-EIP and MIT Summer Research Program (2025)
}2024 – 2026Charlotte Myers (MIT) with Prof. Lina Necib (MIT)Barry Goldwater Scholarship (2026)
}2024 – 2026Sirui Wu (PhD student of Sarah Pearson, Copenhagen)

6 more not shown.

Professional Activities

Conferences Organized

}2026Astrophysics and Space Science in Marche III: Big Bang, Big Stars, Big Computers, SOC
}2025Division of Dynamical Astronomy #56, SOC
}2024JAXtronomy Workshop, SOC

7 more not shown.

Peer Review & Panels