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

1. 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.  📜 📄
2. C. Myers, N. Starkman, L. Necib (2026). Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Modeling Galactic Gravitational Potentials. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. submitted.  💻 📄
3. 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.  📄 💻 📖
4. 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.  📄 🔨 🗄️
5. 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.  📄 🔨 🗄️

➡️ Full publication list on ADS.