Keivan Guadalupe Stassun

Candidate for General Councillor

Biographical Summary

Keivan Guadalupe Stassun works in the area of observational astrophysics, with a focus on the formation of stars, brown dwarfs (failed stars), and exoplanets. He received A.B. degrees in physics and in astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994, and the Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2000. Stassun then served as assistant director of the NSF-funded GK-12 program at UW-Madison, connecting STEM graduate students with public K-12 schools both to enhance K-12 science teaching and to provide leadership development for STEM graduate students. He then served for two years as a NASA Hubble Space Telescope postdoctoral research fellow before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2003.

A recipient of a CAREER award from NSF and a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation, Stassun's research on the birth of stars and exoplanetary systems has appeared in the journal Nature, has been featured on NPR's Earth & Sky, and has been published in more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles.

In 2007, the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-intensive Astrophysics (VIDA) was launched as a $2M pilot program in astro-informatics, with Stassun as its first director. He serves as chair of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey exoplanet science team, is a member of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope executive committee, and in 2010 served as a member of the National Research Council's Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The Stassun research group includes six postdoctoral associates, eleven graduate students, and numerous undergraduate interns, supported by more than $12M in research and training grants. Now an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt, Stassun is also adjunct professor of physics at Fisk University (a Historically Black University also in Nashville), and serves as co-director of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-PhD Bridge Program.

Since 2004, the Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge Program has attracted 42 students, 37 of them underrepresented minorities (all US citizens), 60% female, with a retention rate of 92%. The first Ph.D. to a Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge student was awarded in 2009, just 5 years after the program's inception. In 2011, Vanderbilt will achieve the distinction of becoming the top research university to award the Ph.D. to underrepresented minorities in physics, astronomy, and materials science. Already, Fisk has become the top producer of Black U.S. recipients of the master's degree in physics, and one of the top ten producers of physics M.A. degrees overall. The Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge Program is supported by institutional funds from Vanderbilt and Fisk, as well as extramural grants from NSF, NASA, and DOE totaling $29M. The Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge Program's design principles, strategies, and implementation tools have been published in the Journal of Geosciences Education and in the American Journal of Physics. Stassun was recognized in 2009 by the Fletcher Foundation for "contributions advancing the spirit of Brown v. Board".

From 2003 to 2008, Stassun served as chair of the American Astronomical Society's Committee on the Status of Minorities. He has served on the Astronomy & Astrophysics Advisory Committee (a Congressional FACA committee), and presently serves on the advisory board for the NSF-funded Institute for Broadening Participation and on the Workforce and Diversity Committee of the Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy. In 2010, Stassun was invited to give expert testimony on "broadening participation in STEM" to the US House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology.

Candidate's Statement
Physicists love a tough problem. My work in astrophysics seeks to address two long-standing order-of-magnitude problems.

Currently our ability to determine the basic physical properties of a newly formed star—and therefore of newly formed planets orbiting that star—is limited by systematic uncertainties in star formation models which can predict stellar masses and ages that differ from empirical mass and age measurements by a factor of 10. I work with large surveys, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, to make direct measurements of the fundamental physical properties of stars, with which to refine theoretical models of star formation and stellar evolution.  At the same time, I work to substantially increase the number of underrepresented minorities who earn the PhD in physics and astronomy.

Currently these groups comprise about 30% of the US population, yet receive only about 3% of the PhDs awarded; a discrepancy of a factor of 10.

Of the two, the latter problem has so far proven to be more intractable.

The APS and its membership are engaged in efforts to enable progress on both of these fronts. Large-scale, data-intensive, multi-national collaborative projects are becoming the norm for many areas of physics. These ambitious 'big data' science projects require commensurately big instruments and big computation to pull off, and that means our field must enable 'big diversity'—ever stronger linkages with, and on-ramps for, individuals from non-traditional backgrounds including allied fields of engineering and computational sciences. This in turn presents opportunities for broadening our engagement of those currently underrepresented in our field. It also presents new challenges for adequately training young scientists for data-intensive science. The APS has launched a Minority Bridge Program that seeks to double the number of underrepresented minorities earning physics PhDs, in part by tapping into these non-traditional physics education pathways.

This is an important time for laying the foundations—both technological and human—for the future of our field.

  Back to Election Homepage