I am a computational astrophysicist studying dark matter: what it is, and how it is distributed in galaxies. I measure it mostly with stellar streams, in the Milky Way and, with large surveys, in thousands of galaxies beyond it.
When a star cluster or dwarf galaxy is pulled apart by its host galaxy, its stars spread out into a long, thin stream. The stream’s path, width and density depend on the host’s gravitational field, including its dark matter. I develop statistical and machine-learning methods to find streams, model them and infer that field, and I write much of the open-source software these analyses run on. I am also a core developer of Astropy, the community Python library for astronomy, where I lead the cosmology module and serve on the Coordination Committee.
✉️ starkman [at] mit [dot] edu | 🌐 nstarkman.space
Publications | 
arXiv | 
Zenodo | 
ORCID 0000-0003-3954-3291 | 🎓 Google Scholar | 🐙 GitHub
📄 paper · 🔨 paper repo · 💻 code · 📖 docs · 🗄️ data
- N. Starkman, J. Nibauer, S. Pearson, S. Wu, et al. (2026). When Streams Curve Away: a Test of Dark Matter from Extragalactic Stellar Stream Populations. The Astrophysical Journal. submitted. 🔗 🔗 📄
- Euclid Collaboration, N. Starkman, J. Nibauer, S. Pearson, S. Wu, et al. (2026). Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1): The geometry of dark matter halos from extragalactic streams. Astronomy & Astrophysics. submitted. 📜 📄
- C. Myers, N. Starkman, L. Necib (2026). Reconstructing Galactic Gravitational Potentials from Stellar Kinematics with Physics-Informed Neural Networks. The Astrophysical Journal. submitted. 💻 📄
- N. Starkman, A. M. Price-Whelan, J. Nibauer (2025). unxt: A Python package for unit-aware computing with JAX. Journal of Open Source Software 10, 7771. 📄 💻 📖 📄
- N. Starkman, J. Nibauer, J. Bovy, J. Webb, et al. (2025). Stream Members Only: Data-Driven Characterization of Stellar Streams with Mixture Density Networks. The Astrophysical Journal 980, 253. 📄 🔗 🗄️ 📄
- N. Starkman, G. Starkman, A. Kosowsky (2024). Angular Correlations of Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum Distortions from Photon Diffusion. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 529, 2274–2288. 📄 🔗 🗄️ 📄
➡️ Full publication list on ADS.
