Paths through phase space
Fit a curve through phase-space points — streams, orbits, trajectories.
Curriculum Vitae
Download PDFEducation
}2018 – 2024PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of TorontoNSERC CGS-D Fellow 2020–2023. NSERC CGS-M Fellow 2019–2020.Thesis: Charting Stellar Streams of the Milky WaySupervisors: Jo Bovy, Jeremy Webb
}2014 – 2018B.S. in Mathematical Physics and Astronomy, Case Western Reserve UniversitySumma Cum Laude.Supervisors: Stacy McGaugh
Professional Appointments
}2024 – 2027Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space ResearchBrinson Prize Fellowship (2024–2027).
}2021 –Coordinator (2025 – 2028), Strategic Planner (2025 – 2026) & Core Developer, AstropyCoordination Committee (executive committee), 2025–2028.Strategic Planning and Organizing Committee, 2025–2026.Member, Core Developer Team; lead maintainer for Cosmology, co-maintainer of Units.Funding: Astropy Cycle III — Cosmology and Quantity 2.0.Team 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 at the University of WashingtonA 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.
}2024Brinson Prize Fellowship — 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 Funding Grant — USD 12,000USD 12,000 NASA ROSES and Moore Foundation funding to Astropy Lead: “Cosmology in Astropy"
}2022Astropy Cycle III Funding Grants — USD 8,000USD 8,000 NASA ROSES and Moore Foundation funding to Astropy Lead: “Quantity 2.0: unitful calculations beyond NumPy"
}2019 –Massey Junior FellowUniversity of Toronto's graduate college for those showing exceptional promise and engagement within academia and the world beyond it.
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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.
}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.
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Publications
All}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.submitted
}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. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societysubmitted
}2026Galactic Amnesia: The Information Washout of the Milky Way Merger History — L. Necib, D. Folsom, E. Y. Davies, N. Starkman, et al.submitted
}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 Journalaccepted
}2026phasecurvefit: A High-Performance JAX Framework for Phase-Space Walks with Pluggable Metrics and Strategies — N. Starkman, J. Nibauer. Journal of Open Source SoftwaresubmittedSubmitted to JOSS and pyOpenSci.
}2025Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Modeling Galactic Gravitational Potentials — C. Myers†, N. Starkman, L. Necib. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
}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
}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
}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, J. S. Sidhu, H. Winch, 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
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Software Development
All
co-lead developer
Constrain gravitational potentials from stellar stream curvature
A JAX package that fits stream tracks with splines and compares their curvature directly to a potential's accelerations. Co-led with Sirui Wu.
lead developer
Galactic dynamics in JAX
Orbit integration, potentials and stream generation — GPU-accelerated and fully differentiable.
maintainer
Multiple dispatch in Python
Multiple dispatch for Python, with type-hint-driven method resolution — the dispatch layer under quax and unxt.
lead developer
Coordinates in JAX
Vectors, frames and transformations — differentiable, and unit-aware via unxt.
lead developer
Units in JAX
Unit-aware quantities that survive jit, grad and vmap.
maintainer
Multiple dispatch in JAX
Custom array-ish types that work with JAX primitives — the substrate the rest of the stack builds on.
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.
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Invited Talks
}2026Marche III: Big Bang, Big Stars, Big Computers (Jesi)Energy Structures of Extragalactic Stellar Streams Reveal Dark Matter Halos
}2026CWRU Seminar (Cleveland)Computationally Unscrambling EGGS (Extra-Galactic Gravity from Streams)
}2025Princeton Thunch Seminar (Princeton)Euclid: The Geometry of Dark Matter Halos from Extragalactic Streams
}2024CWRU SeminarStream Members Only: Data-Driven Characterization of Stellar Streams for Inference on the Galactic Potential
}2022Oxford Physics ColloquiumStraight 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
}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
}2023IAUS379: Dynamical Masses of Local Group Galaxies (Poster)Stellar Stream Track Reconstruction, with Errors
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Conferences
}2026Astropy 2026 ConferenceRole: Coordination Committee and Strategic Planning Committee; moderated online discussion and helped moderate the AI sessions.
}2022Astropy Core Developer Conference (Talk)The future of interoperability with Python's Protocols Role: Core developer, maintainer for Astropy Cosmology and Units
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Mentoring
}2025 – 2026Amir Abdul (Howard)Baryon Modeling in External Galaxies with Stellar StreamsLeadership Alliance National Symposium, July 23–25, 20252025 NSBP-NSHP Joint Annual Conference, November 19–23, 20252026 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 PotentialsNeurIPS Paper
}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 – 2020Lead Observer: AST101-325, University of TorontoRole: Trained and liaised with TAs and students in all courses using the campus telescope facilities.
}2019 – 2024TA, AST 201: Stars and Galaxies, University of TorontoRole: Designed and ran weekly course tutorial sections, created exam questions, proctored exams, and graded course projects.2019, 2021–2024.
}2018 – 2023TA, AST 101: The Sun and its Neighbours, University of TorontoRole: Designed and ran weekly course tutorial sections, planetarium shows, & observing nights; created exam questions, proctored exams, and graded course projects.2018, 2021–2023.
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Peer Review
- Journals — Astronomy & Astrophysics · The Astrophysical Journal · European Physical Journal C · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society · Journal of Open Source Software (commensurability: a Python package for classifying astronomical orbits based on their toroid volume)
- Panels — National Science Foundation project funding panel
Professional Service
}2019 –MasseyScope Committee MemberOrganizing astronomy outreach with a focus on underprivileged communities
}2019 – 2020Sigma Nu Alumni Advisory BoardRole: Member of the Sustainability and Chapter Operations committees
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Outreach
}2019 – 2021AstroTours Telescope OrganizerOrganizer for all telescope outreach in Dunlap's public event
}2019 – 2022Massey Telescopes Outreach CoordinatorOrganizing committee member for astronomy outreach and appreciation at Massey College
}2018 – 2019AstroTours Planetarium PresenterRegular planetarium show designer and presenter for Dunlap's AstroTours public outreach
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