Rate My Professor Mark Krumholz

Professor Mark Krumholz is a Professor and ARC Laureate Fellow in the Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the Australian National University. He earned an AB in physics with a certificate in applied mathematics from Princeton University in 1998, an MA in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000, and a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley in 2005 with a thesis on Computational Investigations of Star Formation. Krumholz held a Hubble Fellowship in Astrophysics at Princeton University from 2005 to 2008, served as Assistant Professor from 2008 to 2012 and Associate Professor from 2012 to 2015 in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and joined ANU as Full Professor in 2015. His research develops theoretical and computational models of star and galaxy formation, interstellar medium dynamics, cosmic rays, numerical methods in radiation magneto-hydrodynamics, and Bayesian statistics.

Krumholz is a world leader in the study of star formation and the interstellar medium, contributing fundamentally to understanding the physical mechanisms that control star formation rates in galaxies, stellar mass distributions, and star clustering patterns. These advances stem from techniques he pioneered in computational astrophysics. He has received the Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science (2024), ARC Laureate Fellowship (2023), Humboldt Research Award (2020), Anne Green Prize of the Astronomical Society of Australia (2019), ARC Future Fellowship (2018), Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society (2013), NSF Career Award (2010), and Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2009). Krumholz has published over 230 research outputs, including the textbook Star Formation (2017) and highly cited papers such as Star Formation in Atomic Gas (2012) and The Role of Magnetic Fields in Setting the Star Formation Rate (2019). He serves as principal investigator on projects examining cosmic rays in star-forming galaxies and galactic winds.