Extragalactic astrophysicist Sabrina Stierwalt, assistant professor of physics at Occidental College, has been awarded a 2025 Cottrell Scholar Award for her ongoing study of small galaxies.
The Cottrell Scholar Award program recognizes teacher-scholars in chemistry, physics, and astronomy for the quality and innovation of their research. The $120,000 award will support Stierwalt’s exploration of galaxy formation, which uses a novel search technique, the multi-wavelength survey, to find small groups of isolated galaxies and study their evolution before they merge into larger galaxies.
As a Cottrell Scholar, Stierwalt will also incorporate community-based, experiential learning into her introductory physics courses. Partnering with organizations throughout Los Angeles, Stierwalt’s students will connect physics with real-world issues, including analysis of the energy, electricity, and infrastructure needs of different communities in the face of climate change.
In her general research, Stierwalt examines nearby, interacting galaxies to understand how stars and galaxies formed throughout the universe's history. She draws on data from space-based telescopes like Hubble, Spitzer, and XMM-Newton, as well as from ground-based telescopes such as ALMA, the VLA, and Magellan. In 2019, she was awarded a multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct the first systematic study of the gas dynamics and star formation in interacting dwarf galaxies, smaller galaxies which are the building blocks of more massive ones like the Milky Way.
