Stella Koch Ocker
astrophysicist (she/her/hers)
I grew up in San Anselmo, CA before attending Oberlin College, where
I received my BA with High Honors in Physics in 2018. Recently I received a Ph.D. from the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University,
where I worked with Prof. Jim Cordes and Dr. Shami Chatterjee, along with collaborators in the Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav)
and on the Voyager Interstellar Mission, studying radio wave propagation through the interstellar and circumgalactic media of the Milky Way and other galaxies.
I am currently a Brinson Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech and Carnegie Observatories.
Click here to see my CV
Click here to see my ADS record
Research Highlights
Lead Author
- Pulsar Scintillation through Thick and Thin: Bow Shocks, Bubbles, and the Broader Interstellar Medium. Under review at MNRAS.
- Scattering Variability Detected from the Circumsource Medium of FRB 20190520B. MNRAS (2023)
- Heliosphere Meets Interstellar Medium, in a Galactic Context. White paper submitted to the National Academies Heliophysics 2024 Decadal Survey (2022)
- Radio Scattering Horizons for Galactic and Extragalactic Transients. ApJ (2022)
- The Large Dispersion and Scattering of FRB 20190520B are Dominated by the Host Galaxy. ApJ (2022)
- An In Situ Study of Turbulence Near Stellar Bow Shocks. ApJ (2021)
- Persistent Plasma Waves in Interstellar Space Detected By Voyager 1. Nature Astronomy (2021)
- Constraining Galaxy Halos from the Dispersion and Scattering of Fast Radio Bursts and Pulsars. ApJ (2021)
- Electron Density Structure of the Local Galactic Disk. ApJ (2020)
Contributing Author
- The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational Wave Background. ApJL (2023)
- The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Observations and Timing of 68 Millisecond Pulsars. ApJL (2023)
- The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Detector Characterization and Noise Budget. ApJL (2023)
- The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Search for Signals from New Physics. ApJL (2023)
- Magnetic Field Reversal in the Turbulent Environment Around a Repeating Fast Radio Burst. Science (2023)
- A Scintillation Arc Survey of 22 Pulsars with Low to Moderate Dispersion Measures. ApJ (2022)
- A Repeating Fast Radio Burst Associated with a Compact Persistent Radio Source. Nature (2022)
- Redshift Estimation and Constraints on Intergalactic and Interstellar Media from Dispersion and Scattering of Fast Radio Bursts. ApJ (2022)
- The Frequency Dependence of Scintillation Arc Thickness in Pulsar B1133+16. ApJ (2019)