Stella Ocker

Stella Ocker studies the diffuse gas between stars and galaxies, the interstellar and intergalactic media that fuel galaxy and star formation. She works to map the distribution of cosmic gas extending all the way from the solar neighborhood to distant galaxies. As a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, Ocker was a Guest Investigator on the Voyager Interstellar Mission, where she discovered a new plasma wave signature that has enabled high-resolution density mapping of the very local interstellar medium. She has also used distant radio sources, including neutron stars and fast radio bursts, to probe cosmic gas in a wide range of astrophysical environments. As a Carnegie-Caltech Brinson Postdoctoral Fellow in Observational Cosmology, Ocker synthesizes state-of-the-art optical and radio surveys, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V and the Deep Synoptic Array, to build a distance ladder for using fast radio bursts as probes of the universe’s large-scale structure. Ocker also continues to be a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, which uses pulsar timing to search for gravitational waves from supermassive black holes.