Rate My Professor Stephen Eikenberry

Stephen Eikenberry is a Professor of Applied Optics in the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) and a Professor of Physics at the University of Central Florida, positions he has held since 2021. He is also a Courtesy Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of Florida. Eikenberry earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University in 1997 under Dr. Giovanni Fazio, an M.A. in Astronomy from Harvard in 1994, and dual S.B. degrees in Physics and Literature from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. His career includes serving as Professor of Astronomy (2003–2021) and Graduate Professor of Physics (2012–2021) at the University of Florida, where he also held University of Florida Research Foundation Professorships (2009–2012 and 2017–2020) and the Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professorship (2008). Earlier roles encompass tenured Associate Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University (2002–2003), Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Cornell (1998–2002), and Sherman H. Fairchild Postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Physics at the California Institute of Technology (1997–1998).

Eikenberry's research interests include astrophotonics and its applications in astrophysics, biomedical imaging, atmospheric LIDAR, space imaging, space communications, gravitational wave physics and electromagnetic counterpart searches, microquasars and relativistic jets in black hole systems, accreting X-ray binaries, pulsars, magnetars, isolated neutron stars, and advanced astronomical instrumentation, particularly optical and infrared instruments for large telescopes. He co-founded the CREOL Astrophotonics program at UCF. Major awards include co-winner of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, Gruber Prize for Cosmology, and UK Royal Astronomical Society Team Achievement Award as part of the LIGO Science Consortium; NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (2000–2005); 2020 Undergraduate Teacher of the Year, University of Florida College of Liberal Arts & Sciences; and NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program Fellowship (1994–1997). Key publications feature “Observation of Gravitational Waves from Two Neutron Star-Black Hole Coalescences” (Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2021), “GW190521: A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of 150 M⊙” (Physical Review Letters, 2020), and “2023 Astrophotonics Roadmap: pathways to realizing multi-functional integrated astrophotonic instruments” (Journal of Physics: Photonics, 2023). Eikenberry has contributed to committees such as CREOL Promotion and Tenure, LIGO Council (2019–2020), and various faculty search and instrumentation oversight panels.