Director of NP3M

Brief Vita

• PhD, Physics, State University of New York at Stony Brook (2002)
• MA in Physics, State University of New York at Stony Brook (1999)
• BS in Physics, College Honors, Carnegie Mellon University (1997)
• Associate Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Physics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2020-present)
• Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Physics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2014-2020)
• Research Assistant Professor, Institute for Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, Seattle (2011-2014)
• Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University (2006-2011)
• Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory (2004-2006)
• Post-Doctoral Research Associate, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota (2002-2004)

Selected Honors

• Fellow of the American Physical Society (2022)
• Senior Research Award, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2019)
• NSF CAREER Award (2016)
• Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics, American Physical Society (2004)

Research Areas

Theoretical Nuclear Astrophysics

Group Website

My research group studies how neutron star observations can be used to understand how neutrons and protons interact and how nuclear physics plays a role in astrophysical objects and processes. Recently, we have

• determined how the equation of state and superfluid nature of dense matter is determined by neutron star observations,
• showed how tidal deformabilities are modified by strong phase transitions,
• and combined modern theoretical results on neutron matter and neutron star observations to make predictions for neutron star tidal deformabilities for LIGO.

Selected Recent Publications

INSPIRE Profile

• Hot and Dense Matter Equation of State Probability Distributions for Astrophysical Simulations
  Xingfu Du, Andrew W. Steiner, and Jeremy W. Holt
  arXiv.org
• Combining Electromagnetic and Gravitational-Wave Constraints on Neutron-Star Masses and Radii
  Mohammad Al-Mamun, Andrew W. Steiner, Joonas Nättilä, Jacob Lange, Richard O’Shaughnessy, Ingo Tews, Stefano Gandolfi, Craig Heinke, and Sophia Han
  Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 061101 – Published 12 February 2021
• Measuring Nuclear Matter Parameters with NICER and LIGO/Virgo
  Josef Zimmerman, Zack Carson, Kristen Schumacher, Andrew W. Steiner, and Kent Yagi
  arXiv.org
• Future Prospects for Constraining Nuclear Matter Parameters with Gravitational Waves
  Zack Carson, Andrew W. Steiner, and Kent Yagi
  Phys. Rev. D 100, 023012 – Published 24 July 2019
• From the Microscopic to the Macroscopic World: from Nucleons to Neutron Stars
  Volume 46, Number 10 – Published 27 August 2019
• Catching Element Formation in the Act. The Case for a New MeV Gamma-Ray Mission: Radionuclide Astronomy in the 2020s. A White Paper for the 2020 Decadal Survey
  Chris L. Fryer et al.
  arXiv.org
• Constraining Nuclear Matter Parameters with GW170817
  Zack Carson, Andrew W. Steiner, and Kent Yagi
  Phys. Rev. D 99, 043010 – Published 20 February 2019