Rate My Professor Tom Abel

Tom Abel is Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics and of Physics at Stanford University, with appointments in the Department of Physics and at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. His research explores cosmic history through ab initio supercomputer calculations, demonstrating from first principles that the earliest luminous objects were very massive stars. He has developed novel numerical algorithms, including adaptive-mesh-refinement simulations spanning over 14 orders of magnitude in length and time scales, to study the formation of the first stars and galaxies and their subsequent influence. Abel has pioneered methods for simulating collisionless fluids such as dark matter, as well as astrophysical and terrestrial plasmas, and has created bespoke summary statistics for spatial clustering using fast nearest neighbor searches. His recent efforts focus on digital twins of astronomical objects and the universe, leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence through the Center for Decoding the Universe.

Abel earned a master’s degree from the University of Regensburg in 1998 and a Ph.D. from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in 1999. His career includes postdoctoral positions at the Harvard College Observatory and the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, as well as faculty roles at Pennsylvania State University before joining Stanford. He served as Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology from 2013 to 2018. Among his honors are election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2014, the Lagrange Prize in 2011, and the NSF Career Award from 2003 to 2008. He has held editorial roles, including as Associate Editor of the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, and has organized numerous scientific workshops and symposia on topics such as the first stars and high-performance computing.