V. Ashley Villar

Victoria Ashley Villar is an astrophysicist. She studies the death of stars and their by-products. Villar is an assistant professor at Harvard University.

Early life and education
Villar attended high school at Vero Beach High School in Florida. She received her Bachelor of Science in Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a minor in mathematics in 2014, and continued her Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard University in 2020.

During Villar's undergraduate year, she wrote her senior thesis on asteroseismology with the assistance of professors John Johnson and Josh Winn. Villar was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University after earning her PhD from Harvard University.

Career

 * Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University (2023 - Present)
 * Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State (2021-2023) where she was the inaugural Mercedes Richards Career Development Professor.
 * Simons Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute (2020-2021)
 * U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2020)

Awards and honors
Villar has received many awards, prizes, and honors over the span of her career. Her awards include:
 * APS Minority Scholarship (2010-2014)
 * MIT Joel Matthew Orloff Award (2014)
 * MIT Albert G. Hill Prize (2014)
 * Harvard James Mills Peirce Fellowship (2014)
 * National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2014-2017)
 * Harvard Merit/ Graduate Society Research Fellowship (2018)
 * MIT/Stanford Rising Star Physics (2019)
 * Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2019-2020)
 * Cell 100 Inspiring Hispanic/Latinx Scientists in America (2020)
 * Forbes 30 Under 30 (Science Category) (2022)