Brief Vita

• Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2023 – present)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California Berkeley (2019-2022)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, North Carolina State University (2017-2019)
• PhD, Physics, California Institute of Technology (2018)
• MA, Physics, California Institute of Technology (2016)
• BA, Astronomy-Physics, University of Virginia (2012)

Selected Honors

• UT Society of Physics Students Teacher of the Year Award (2024)
• NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020-2022)
• N3AS Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-2020)
• Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship (2016-2017)
• DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (2012-2016)

Theoretical Astrophysics

My group studies the behavior of neutrinos in astrophysical explosions in order to understand what observations of core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers can tell us about the behavior of matter in conditions impossible to recreate in a laboratory. Specifically, neutrinos are so abundant in these environments that, although trillions pass through each of us every second, they interact with each other in a strongly nonlinear manner. How these neutrinos interact with the exploding material determines what explosions look like, what objects they leave behind, and how they enrich the evolving universe with elements. Neutrinos are the most elusive particle in the standard model, and how they behave in these exotic environments could betray their fundamental nature.

Selected Publications

1. Fast flavor instability in hypermassive neutron star disk outflows. R Fernández, S Richers, N Mulyk, S Fahlman. Phys. Rev. D (2022)
2. Neutrino fast flavor instability in three dimensions. S Richers, D Willcox, N Ford. Phys. Rev. D (2021)
3. Neutrino quantum kinetics in compact objects. S. Richers, G. McLaughlin, J. Kneller, A. Vlasenko. Phys. Rev. D (2019)
4. Equation of state effects on gravitational waves from rotating core collapse. S Richers, CD Ott, E Abdikamalov, E O’Connor, C Sullivan. Phys. Rev. D (2017)
5. Magnetorotational core-collapse supernovae in three dimensions. P Mösta, S Richers, CD Ott, R Haas, AL Piro, K Boydstun, E Abdikamalov, Christian Reisswig, Erik Schnetter. Astrophys. J. Letters (2014)

Please see my Google scholar profile for a complete list of publications.