Blakesley Burkhart

Blakesley Burkhart is an astrophysicist. She is the winner of the 2017 Robert J. Trumpler Award awarded by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, which recognizes a Ph.D. thesis that is "particularly significant to astronomy." She also is the winner of the 2019 Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy and the 2022 winner of The American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award. The awards both cited her work on magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, and for developing innovative techniques for comparing observable astronomical phenomena with theoretical models.

Career
Burkhart completed her Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2014. Her dissertation explores "connections between theoretical, numerical, and observational understanding of [magnetohydrodynamic turbulence] as it applies to the neutral, ionized, and molecular interstellar medium." She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. She has made contributions to many other fields outside of plasma turbulence, including star formation, the intergalactic medium, globular cluster formation, and UV space telescope design. She worked with Mark R. Krumholz and others to develop a unified model of disc galaxies, working to explain why disc galaxies have a lower rate of star formation than is predicted by other models. In August 2018, she became an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics. She has been working as an assistant professor at Rutgers University in the department of Physics and Astronomy since September 2019.

She was the host of the 5 Minute Astronomy podcast from 89.9FM WORT in Madison.

Selected lecture videos

 * "The Photon Underproduction Crisis Solved: The Effect of AGN Feedback on the Low Redshift Lyman-alpha Forest", Institute for Theory and Computation, February 8, 2018
 * Dr. Burkhart lecturing on “Galaxies as Star-Forming Engines: Simulating the Turbulent Birth of Stars”, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard, October 14, 2016

Awards received

 * Jansky Award, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Department of Astronomy, 2011
 * NASA's Wisconsin Space Grant Fellowship, 2013-14
 * Robert J. Trumpler Award, 2017
 * Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy, 2019
 * Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, 2020
 * Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, 2021
 * Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, 2022