Stephen Thorsett
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Stephen Erik Thorsett (b. December 3, 1964 in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American professor and astronomer. His research interests include radio pulsars and gamma ray bursts. He is best known for measurements of the masses of neutron stars and for the use of binary pulsars to test the theory of general relativity. In 2004, with collaborators Ingrid Stairs and Zaven Arzoumanian, he made the first measurement of gravitational spin-orbit coupling in a binary system [1]. He helped discover the oldest known extrasolar planet and was the first to suggest that a nearby gamma ray burst might cause a mass extinction event.
Thorsett is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has been appointed dean of the Division of Physical and Biological Sciences, effective July 1, 2006 [2]. Currently he is working with his Ph.D. student Bülent Kızıltan on high energy astrophysics, particularly on the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) and pulsars.
He received a B.A. in mathematics from Carleton College in 1987 and an M.A. (1989) and Ph.D. (1991) in physics from Princeton University. He was a Robert A. Millikan Research Fellow in physics at Caltech and an assistant professor of physics at Princeton before joining UCSC in 1999. He received the Ernest F. Fullam Award of the Dudley Observatory in 1994, and was named an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 1997. With graduate school classmates Nathan Newbury, Michael J. Newman, John Ruhl, and Suzanne Staggs he is the author of the textbook Princeton Problems in Physics (Princeton University Press, 1991), ISBN 0691024499.
