Curriculum Vitae

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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
}2021 –Coordinator, Strategic Planner & Core Developer, Astropy

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Grants & Fellowships

}2024Brinson Prize Fellowship — USD 360,000
}2022Astropy Cycle III Funding Grant — USD 12,000
}2022Astropy Cycle III Funding Grants — USD 8,000
}2020 – 2023NSERC - CGS D — CAD 105,000
}2019 – 2020NSERC - CGS M — CAD 17,500
}2018 – 2024University of Toronto Graduate Fellowship — CAD 23,000–32,000 p.a.

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Awards

}2025AAS Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust PrizeTo the Astropy Collaboration
}2014 – 2018Case Western Reserve University Merit Scholarship

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Publications

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}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 Softwaresubmitted
}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

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Software Development

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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.

Paths through phase space

Fit a curve through phase-space points — streams, orbits, trajectories.

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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

A JAX package that fits stream tracks with splines and compares their curvature directly to a potential's accelerations. Co-led with Sirui Wu.

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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

Orbit integration, potentials and stream generation — GPU-accelerated and fully differentiable.

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

lead developer

Coordinates in JAX

Vectors, frames and transformations — differentiable, and unit-aware via unxt.

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

lead developer

Units in JAX

Unit-aware quantities that survive jit, grad and vmap.

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

maintainer

Multiple dispatch in JAX

Custom array-ish types that work with JAX primitives — the substrate the rest of the stack builds on.

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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.

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Invited Talks

}2026Marche III: Big Bang, Big Stars, Big Computers (Jesi)
}2026EAS 26-S10 (Lausanne)
}2026CWRU Seminar (Cleveland)
}2025TevPA (Valencia)
}2025DARK seminar (Copenhagen)
}2025Texas A&M Seminar (Texas)
}2025CCA Software seminar (NYC)
}2025Princeton Thunch Seminar (Princeton)

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Mentoring

}2026Reem Hamraz Google Summer of Code for Astropy
}2025 – 2026Amir Abdul (Howard)
}2024 – 2026Charlotte Myers (MIT) with Prof. Lina Necib (MIT)

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Peer Review