I am a computational astrophysicist researching dark matter — what it is, and how it shapes galaxies — mostly by using stellar streams to constrain their gravitational potentials, in the Milky Way and far beyond it with large-scale surveys.
When a star cluster is torn apart by its host galaxy, the debris can trace a long, thin stream. Properties of the stream — its path, shape, width, etc — are all sensitive to properties of the host, including its dark matter. I develop and apply novel methods to study these streams and learn about the dark matter; I also build much of the software powering these methods and analyses. I am also a core developer of Astropy, helping to power all of astronomy.
✉️ starkman [at] mit [dot] edu | 🌐 nstarkman.space
Publications | 
arXiv | 
Zenodo | 
ORCID 0000-0003-3954-3291 | 🎓 Google Scholar | 🐙 GitHub
📄 paper · 🔨 paper repo · 💻 code · 📖 docs · 🗄️ data
- 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. 📜 📄
- N. Starkman (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, A. Kosowsky, G. Starkman (2024). Angular Correlations of Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum Distortions from Photon Diffusion. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 529, 2274. 📄 🔨 🗄️
- N. Starkman, J. Bovy, J. Webb, D. Calvetti, et al. (2023). On the fast track: Rapid construction of stellar stream paths. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 522, 5022. 📄 🔨 💻 📖 🗄️
➡️ Full publication list on ADS.
Click to expand: the rest of the ecosystem.
- cosmology.api: A standard interface for cosmology libraries 💻 📖 🗄️
- dataclassish: dataclasses, for everything 💻
- diffraxtra: Extras for Diffrax 💻
- galactic_dynamics_interoperability: Interoperability between galactic dynamics libraries 💻
- is_annotated: Check whether a type hint is Annotated 💻
- jaxmore: There's more to JAX 💻
- macro_lightning: Constrain macroscopic dark matter with lightning 💻 📖 🗄️
- mvgkde: Multivariate Gaussian KDE 💻
- oncequinox: Singletons for Equinox 💻
- optional_dependencies: Construct checks for optional dependencies 💻
- phasecurvefit: Paths through phase space 💻
- plotting_backends: Dispatch over plotting backends 💻
- quax-blocks: Building blocks for quax classes 💻
- quaxed: Pre-quaxed libraries 💻
- trackstream: Stellar stream tracks 💻
- xmmutablemap: An immutable mapping, JAX-compatible 💻
- zeroth: Efficiently get the index-0 element of any iterable 💻