Star explosions in space is a fiery passion for Sanjana Curtis. As a nuclear astrophysicist and active science communicator on TikTok, BlueSky, YouTube, and Scientific American, she loves to share their origin stories, from the chemical elements inside to supernova and kilonova light curve predictions.
After graduating with her Ph.D in Physics at North Carolina State University and working in postdoc positions at University of Amsterdam and at the University of Chicago, she moved to University of California Berkeley thanks to the National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellowship to follow her dreams researching and teaching about stars.
In 2024, she won the Schmidt award for Excellence in Science Communications by the National Academies for her outstanding research and communication in how elements we know today were formed in explosive phenomena of stars and mergers.
“We are delighted to welcome Dr. Sanjana Curtis to the Department of Physics. We are all, quite literally, made of stardust, and Sanjana’s research captures the imagination by revealing how the cosmos forges the elements that make up our world," said Interim Department of Physics Head Ethan Minot. "She is a leader in the theoretical study of these processes — work that is propelled by new data emerging from the era of multi-messenger astrophysics and still rich with profound, unanswered questions. Her expertise is a perfect complement to the department’s exciting strengths in gravitational-wave astrophysics, and she will further expand OSU’s leadership in this rapidly advancing field.”
To reach even more people online, Curtis published several high-quality stories with Scientific American about how some of the world’s most famous art began with star dust and how star collisions form elements we know today.
Now an assistant professor of physics at Oregon State, she is mentoring the next generation of scientists in the classroom and beyond. By leading the Transients, Abundances and Reactions in Astrophysics (TARA) research group, they are able to computationally study the elemental and electromagnetic signatures of explosive stars and mergers.
