Stanford Woosley

Stan Woosley was born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1944. While he doesn’t remember a time that he wasn’t interested in science, he particularly credits watching the early-morning television program “Continental Classroom” during his high-school years (as well as reading an accompanying college-level textbook) for giving him “the bug for chemistry.” He soon converted an empty storage shed, adjoining the apartment building where he lived with his mother and stepfather, into a chemical lab. There he enjoyed conducting experiments that produced “things that flashed and exploded, to be truthful”—a hobby indicative of “an early interest in supernovae, I suppose.” One afternoon he came home from school to discover that the shed had burned down. While his chemicals might not have been the cause of the fire (“To this day, I think it was an electrical short”), and while Woosley continued to study chemistry in college, he found that his focus had shifted, metaphorically, from the workbench to the blackboard—from experiments to theory.

Woosley received a B.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Rice University in 1966 and 1971, respectively. His PhD adviser was Don Clayton, a former student of Nobel Laureate Willy Fowler. From 1972 to 1975 Woosley was a postdoc at the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology where he worked with Fowler himself on the nuclear physics underlying element production in stars. From 1974 to 2012 Woosley was a consultant at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. where he interacted regularly with experts in radiation transport and hydrodynamics, especially Tom Weaver. With these experts he cowrote the KEPLER code used in much of his work on supernovae. Since 1975 he has been a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was Chairman of the Department from 1989 to 2003. 

Among the many recognitions that Woosley has received for his work are fellowships in the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2005 he received both the H. A. Bethe Prize in Nuclear Astrophysics from the American Physical Society and the Bruno Rossi Prize in High Energy Astrophysics from the American Astronomical Society. From 1995 to 1997 he was an Alexander von Humboldt Award recipient. In 2019 he was selected for the inaugural class of American Astronomical Society Fellows.