Prof. Amiel Sternberg appointed External Scientific Member of the MPE
Professor Sternberg has been a longstanding colleague, friend and collaborator at MPE. He was a postdoc in the IR-Submm group at the end of the 1980s and since becoming faculty at Tel Aviv University, has collaborated with IR-group scientists through the support of several Minerva GIF grants, and two large, 5-year DFG DIP grants on galaxy evolution.
For many years, he has co-led an active and very productive collaboration between MPE and the broader Israeli astrophysics community, at Tel-Aviv and Hebrew Universities, at the Weizmann Institute and the Haifa Technion. This resulted not only in many scientific papers (on the ISO-SWS and Herschel-PACS ESA missions, on the Galactic Center and on high-redshift galaxies), but also in a lively exchange of postdocs and senior scientists of the institutions involved.
Sternberg is Yuval-Ne’eman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Tel Aviv University (TAU) in Israel, where he is a faculty member in the astronomy department, and serves as director of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler TAU-Harvard/ITC Astronomy Program. He received his BA in Astronomy & Astrophysics from Harvard College in 1980 and graduated with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1986. As research scientist he joined the Flatiron Institute in 2017, whose mission is to advance scientific research through computational methods, including data analysis, modelling and simulation.
The theoretical astrophysicist Sternberg is working in fields ranging from galaxy evolution, cosmic structure, black holes and active galaxies, to the intergalactic and interstellar medium, star formation, astrochemistry and plasma astrophysics, dynamics, spectroscopy and radiative transfer, computational methods and theory of fundamental processes – many of which are overlapping with research topics at MPE. On 5 December, he has been appointed permanent Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society (MPG) and External Scientific Member at the MPE, where he was working already as Senior Associate Scientist.