Congratulations to Harvard Astronomy professor Ashley Villar, who has been awarded a 2024 Packard Fellowship!
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation announced today the 2024 class of Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering, who will each receive $875,000 over five years to pursue their research. This year’s class of Fellows are pushing the boundaries of science and innovation in their fields of study, from advances in detecting and treating serious diseases, to understanding how species react to changing climates, to energy-efficient electronics.
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Dr. Villar’s research lies at the intersection of astrophysics and statistical machine learning. The next decade promises a Big Data revolution in astrophysics. Ashley uses observational studies of the Cosmos to understand how stars die via collisions and explosions. Stellar death enriches our universe with the next generation of heavy elements. Ashley explores “when” and “where” these elements are formed. To do so, she develop novel physics-informed, interpretable and flexible data-driven algorithms to analyze samples of millions of stellar deaths.
Professor Villar received her B.S. in Physics from MIT in 2014 and her Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard University in 2020. She was formerly a Simons Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University (2020-2021) and a faculty member at Penn State University (2021-2023), before joining the Harvard Astronomy faculty in 2023.