Heidi Newberg, Ph.D.

Heidi Jo Newberg is an astrophysicist who is best known for her discovery of streams of stars in the Milky Way halo. In addition, she was a founding member of the Supernova Cosmology project that discovered dark energy, made significant contributions to the operations design and software systems used to analyze data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), led the proposal for the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Evolution (SEGUE), founded and operates MilkyWay@home, a PetaFLOPS-scale volunteer super-computing platform that is being used to optimize models of the Milky Way, led the US participation in the Chinese LAMOST project – a national key project of China, discovered disequilibrium in the Milky Way’s disk, and was named a NASA NIAC fellow for her proposal for a primary objective grating space telescope that could potentially detect Earth 2.0. Prof.

Newberg earned a B.S. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1987 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. She was a postdoc and Associate Scientist at Fermilab before joining the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She shared the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2007) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2015) for her contributions to the discovery of dark energy. She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 “for her contributions to our understanding of the structure of the Milky Way galaxy and the Universe and for the development of software and hardware infrastructure for measuring and extracting meaningful information from large astronomical survey data sets.” She was a 2014 Thompson-Reuters Highly Cited Researcher, and was listed as #59 on Discovery Magazine list of 100 top science stories of 2015. She was also named a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Fellow in 2023.