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Nasa’s Hubble Fellowship Program Welcomes 2025 Class of Astrophysics Scholars

The NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP) has announced the selection of 24 new fellows for its 2025 class. This prestigious program aims to nurture excellence and innovation among early-career astrophysicists by providing significant support for their research endeavors. With more than 650 candidates vying for the fellowships this year, the competition was intense. Successful fellows will receive support for up to three years at institutions across the United States.

Each selected fellow is categorized into one of three distinctive groups, each resonating with fundamental scientific inquiries that NASA is keen to address regarding the cosmos:

How does the universe work? – Einstein Fellows

How did we get here? – Hubble Fellows

Are we alone? – Sagan Fellows

Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, expressed enthusiasm about the newly selected fellows, stating, “The 2025 class of the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program is comprised of outstanding NASA Astrophysics researchers. This class of competitively-selected fellows will inspire future generations through the products of their research, and by sharing the results of that work with the public. Their efforts will help NASA continue its worldwide leadership in space-based astrophysics research.”

Below is the list of the 2025 awardees, including their host institutions and research focuses.

The 2025 NHFP Einstein Fellows are:

• Shi-Fan Chen, Columbia University – Galaxies, Shapes and Weak Lensing in the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure
• Nicolas Garavito Camargo, University of Maryland, College Park – Local Group Galaxies in Disequilibrium; Building New Frameworks to Constrain the Nature of Dark Matter
• Jason Hinkle, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign – Nuclear Transients in the Golden Era of Time-Domain Astronomy
• Itai Linial, New York University – Repeating Nuclear Transients – Probes of Supermassive Black Holes and Their Environments
• Kenzie Nimmo, Northwestern University – From Glimmering Jewels to Cosmic Ubiquity: Unraveling the Origins of FRBs
• Massimo Pascale, University of California, Los Angeles – The Universe Seen Through Strong Gravitational Lensing
• Elia Pizzati, Harvard University – The Missing Link: Connecting Black Hole Growth and Quasar Light Curves in the Young Universe
• Jillian Rastinejad, University of Maryland, College Park – Illuminating the Explosive Origins of the Heavy Elements
• Aaron Tohuvavohu, California Institute of Technology – Ultraviolet Space Telescopes for the new era of Time Domain and Multi-Messenger Astronomy

The 2025 NHFP Hubble Fellows are:

• Aliza Beverage, Carnegie Observatories – Revealing Massive Galaxies Formation Using Chemical Abundances
• Anna de Graaff, Harvard University – Early giants in context: How could galaxies in the first billion years grow so rapidly?
• Karia Dibert, California Institute of Technology – Superconducting on-chip spectrometers for high-redshift astrophysics and cosmology
• Emily Griffith, University of Colorado, Boulder – Beyond Mg and Fe: Exploring Detailed Nucleosynthetic Patterns
• Viraj Karambelkar, Columbia University – The Anthropology of Merging Stars
• Lindsey Kwok, Northwestern University – Determining the Astrophysical Origins of White-Dwarf Supernovae with JWST Infrared Spectroscopy
• Abigail Lee, University of California, Berkeley – AGB Stars in the Era of NIR Astronomy: New Probes of Cosmology and Galaxy Evolution
• Aaron Pearlman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Pinpointing the Origins of Fast Radio Bursts and Tracing Baryons in the Cosmic Web
• Dominick Rowan, University of California, Berkeley – Fundamental Stellar Parameters Across the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram
• Nicholas Rui, Princeton University – A seismic atlas of the stellar merger sky
• Nadine Soliman, Institute for Advanced Study – Micro Foundations, Macro Realities: Modeling the Multi-scale Physics Shaping Planets, Stars and Galaxies
• Bingjie Wang, Princeton University – Inference at the Edge of the Universe

The 2025 NHFP Sagan Fellows are:

• Kyle Franson, University of California, Santa Cruz – Mapping the Formation, Migration, and Thermal Evolution of Giant Planets with Direct Imaging and Astrometry
• Caprice Phillips, University of California, Santa Cruz – Aging in the Cosmos: JWST Insights into the Evolution of Brown Dwarf Atmospheres and Clouds
• Keming Zhang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Understanding the Origin and Abundance of Free-Floating Planets via Microlensing and Machine Learning

The newly selected fellows are featured in a photo montage showcasing their achievements and affiliations. The Einstein Fellows are represented in blue hexagons, the Hubble Fellows in red hexagons, and the Sagan Fellows in green hexagons.

An integral component of the NHFP is the annual Symposium, which serves as a platform for fellows to present their research findings, network with peers, and engage with the program’s scientific and administrative staff. The 2024 symposium took place at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute in Pasadena, California, covering a wide array of science topics, including exoplanets, gravitational waves, and cosmology. The event also featured non-science sessions focused on career development and mentorship skills.

The NHFP is managed by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore on behalf of NASA, in collaboration with several other prominent institutions including the Chandra X-ray Center, the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

For more information, including short biographies and images of the 2025 NHFP Fellows, please visit:
https://www.stsci.edu/stsci-research/fellowships/nasa-hubble-fellowship-program/2025-nhfp-fellows

Source
science.nasa.gov