Biosketch

Eliot Quataert is a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at UC Berkeley. He is an astrophysics theorist who works on a wide range of problems, including stars and black holes, plasma astrophysics, and how galaxies form. Quataert was born in Santa Monica, CA, lived for almost 12 years in Houston, TX, and spent his public high school years in Vestal, NY. He received his BS in Physics from MIT in 1995 and his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard in 1999. He was then a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2001.
Quataert has received a number of national awards for his research, including the Warner prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Sloan and Packard Fellowships, a Simons Investigator award from the Simons Foundation, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Quataert is also a highly regarded teacher and public lecturer, and is particularly proud of having received UC Berkeley’s Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Research Interests

Eliot Quataert is an astrophysics theorist whose research covers a wide range of topics, including stars, black holes, neutron stars, and how the Universe evolved from the Big Bang to have the remarkable diversity of galaxies we see today. His research typically applies fluid mechanics and plasma physics to understand phenomena in the Universe, drawing on everything from order of magnitude estimates to numerical simulations.

Membership Type

Member

Election Year

2020

Primary Section

Section 12: Astronomy

Secondary Section

Section 13: Physics